Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

On the last trip, they were moving in a pack through one of the big casinos — Caesars, or maybe the Trop, scaring civilians, razzing flyboys from Nellis — when Curtis felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to find Stanley there. Stanley looked thin, even gaunt, but still dialed in tight; he was lithe and strong in Curtis’s awkward embrace. When Curtis asked what brought him to town, Stanley just gave him a funny grin that could’ve meant do you have to ask? could’ve meant you’d never guess . They talked for a minute about Curtis’s dad, about the Corps, about people they both knew back East, and then the conversation turned a corner and Curtis, maybe three-quarters drunk, found himself unable to keep up. Stanley was telling a story about a hand of blackjack he’d played at the Barbary Coast — about something that happened during it, or something it made him think of — and then about an English magician named Flood, and a famous trick he did in which unrelated objects moved in ghostly parallel, as if linked by invisible threads. Curtis kept expecting Stanley to explain how the trick was done, or to connect it back to the blackjack game, but he never did, and suddenly he was silent, watching Curtis, waiting for a response.

Now, sitting in the booth at the Gold Spike, sponging spilt yolk with folded-over toast, Curtis is shaken by the memory: it cools his blood, stifles his appetite. It’s hard to say why. Partly it bothers him that he could fail so completely to understand a man he’s known his whole life. But that’s not it, or not entirely. Something else is poisoning the recollection: a nightmare feeling, irrational and uncanny. A sense of menace hidden in plain sight. The presence of an impostor. As if it wasn’t really Stanley that Curtis met in the casino that night. Or, worse, that it was Curtis who was off, who wasn’t really himself.

At the time, of course, he didn’t feel any of this: it was just an awkward moment. He and Stanley stood there; Curtis looked down, shuffled his feet. Then Damon walked up, and Curtis introduced them.

And that was it: the first time the two of them met. It seemed like such a small thing then. Like nothing. Now Curtis can barely track what has followed from it.

The rest of that night is a drunken blur in his memory, but he retains one last lucid image: Damon sitting at a $25 table, bright-eyed and focused, smirking at his cards as Stanley hovered behind him, a hand on his shoulder, whispering into the shaven base of his skull.

So in a way, Curtis figures, all of this is his own fault.

The dayshift comes on at noon, and Curtis begins walking down Fremont, from the ElCo to the Plaza, stopping at every casino along the way. He talks to croupiers and dealers, waitresses and bartenders, floor people, security guards, and every pit boss or casino host whose ear he can bend. In each case he tailors his story to his audience, mostly blowing variations on I’m looking for a friend, he’s staying somewhere in town, I’m hoping to throw some action his way . Everybody gets Curtis’s cell number, and he drops a few double sawbucks where he thinks they might do some good. A couple of people say they’ve seen Stanley in the last week or so. Everyone over the age of forty seems to recognize his name.

Curtis was nervous at first about operating in the open, laying such thick spoor, but he’s over that now. If he’s not visible, then this isn’t going to work, not in what little time he’s got. He’s never been wired for cloak-and-dagger shit anyhow, which by now Damon should know. Sneaking around, in Curtis’s view, generally amounts to time-wasting; better to just say what you want, then own whatever comes with wanting it. If Damon has a problem with that approach, he could have called somebody else. Out here Curtis has done nothing wrong, has nothing to hide from. Not yet, anyway.

At each place he stops, he makes the same clockwise circuit of the tables, scanning the crowd for Stanley’s bald head, his narrow shoulders, his beaked nose. He comes up empty every time, but always feels like there’s something he’s not seeing. He’s rusty, and still doesn’t trust his eye.

He leaves Main Street Station with two rolls of quarters in his pocket and catches the trolley to the Stratosphere. Starting his long trek south. He’s making better time, zeroing in on the right people: pit bosses with ten-dollar haircuts, middle-aged bartenders, valets who look him in the eye. Damon’s cash is going fast, but Curtis feels like he’s buying something with it now.

Nobody’s asked him any tough questions, but he runs through his story anyway, rehearsing made-up dialogue as he’s passing between casinos, crossing the boulevard. Thinking back to ten days ago, South Philly, Damon in a booth at the Penrose Diner. Swirling the dregs of his third coffee, brown parabola lapping the bone-white rim. I’m not asking you to lie. Just keep it simple. If anybody presses you, you just tell ’em you’re collecting on a marker. That’s the truth, right? Yellow hair trimmed to a uniform half-inch, longer than Curtis had ever seen it. Beige houndstooth suit wrinkled like it’d been slept in, though Damon clearly hadn’t slept in days. The trick is to have layers. See? You give up a little, they think they got the whole picture . Dark eyes watery but alert, like greased ballbearings. One obsidian cufflink in his black poplin sleeve, a few raveled threads where its mate was torn out. It’s fine to drop my name if you think that’ll help. Nobody’s gonna know what happened in Atlantic City. Or, if they do know, they won’t make any connections . A new mobile phone atop an unmarked #10 envelope. An e-ticket printout inside — UA 2123 dep PHL 07:00 arr LAS 09:36 03/13/2003—wrapped around three packs of hundred-dollar traveler’s checks. What you tell your wife is your business. Look, this is not dangerous. Nobody’s breaking any laws. You find him, and you call me. You do it no later than twelve a.m. next Tuesday night. It’s that simple .

Curtis watched Damon’s Audi pull out of the lot and disappear up the onramp toward the Whitman Bridge. He finished his slice of apple pie along with the chocolate napoleon that Damon had barely touched, ordered himself another coffee, and sat not reading his newspaper until nearly rush hour, when he walked back to the subway. The next morning he awoke at four with Danielle’s alarm, listened as she dressed and left for work, and lay sleepless and staring at the sky through the miniblinds as it went from black to red to yellow to white. Then he rose and cleaned up and caught the bus down to Collingdale, where he bought the gun.

South of Fashion Show Mall the casinos are bigger, busier now that it’s later in the day, and everything takes longer. By eight o’clock he’s past the airport, leapfrogging places that seem unlikely, feeding quarters to the southbound trolley as it carries him from block to block to block. He stops at the buffet at the Tropicana to load up on prime rib and peeled shrimp by the glow of heatlamps and coral-reef aquariums, then sits for an hour above the deserted pool and watches the reflections of palmtrees nod in the wind-purled water. Once his food has settled, he humps it east to the Hôtel San Rémo, west to the Orleans, south to the Luxor and Mandalay Bay.

On the long ride back to his own hotel he nods off for a second, then jolts awake, his heart skittering. Outside the streaked bus windows the city seems different, alive in a way that it wasn’t before. There’s steady foot traffic along the boulevard, laughing and shouting and acting out, and the street is full of high-end rental cars, windows down, stereos rattling. Stretch limousines idle at curbside, sly and circumspect, while the sidewalk procession slides backlit across their mute black windshields. Time seems to pass in a hurry. Curtis thinks of bad places he’s been, of nights he’s spent along razor-taped perimeters, eyeing burning wells and distant winks of small-arms fire. Very different from this. But the same nervous thrill, the same sense of something gathered just beyond the lights, waiting for a signal to move. For the first time in a long while Curtis feels as if he’s in the world again — the real world, inhuman and unconstructed — where he can be anybody, or nobody, and where anything is possible.