Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

Not since I left Philly. Damon’s not real big on using the phone. He likes to keep in touch by fax. Which is funny, because he’s about as dyslexic as they come. Can’t spell worth a damn.

Curtis’s forehead is starting to ache from furrowing his brow. He pushes his glasses down his nose to massage his temples, trying to loosen himself up. Even if it was an inside job, he says, somebody on your team had to have known about it. It must’ve been coordinated. You said your team was in the Point for an hour before you gave up. Can you account for everybody during that time? Do you know where everybody was?

She takes a long while to answer. He’s given up on her, is trying to come up with another way of asking the question, when she finally speaks.

The team was divided into two groups, she says. I led one. The other group was led by a guy who calls himself Graham Argos. He isn’t somebody I knew beforehand, and I don’t think Stanley knew him well, either. But he was good, really good. One of these MIT hotshots, or so he said. Excellent counter, great actor. Totally nondescript. I had five or six conversations with him — long conversations, one on one — and I’m still not sure I could pick him out of a lineup. He looked a little different each time I saw him.

Veronica glances at Curtis’s face, but her eyes don’t quite focus, and he can tell she’s seeing somebody else, remembering. Maybe fifteen minutes after we walked into the Point, she says, Graham disappeared. We didn’t see him again until we got back to our suite at Resorts to split the take. He met us there. He told us some story about how Spectacular security was up in his face, making threats, and how he got scared and left. I didn’t believe it at the time. I just figured he’d given up early on making any money and didn’t feel like waiting around for the rest of us. Now I’m not so sure.

Are you still in touch with him? Have you talked to him lately?

No, she says. I haven’t. But you have.

The Whistler. The guy with the teeth.

Veronica nods. He’s got some caps that he wears sometimes, she says. Dental veneers, I guess they’re called. So don’t lean too hard on the gap as a way to spot him.

Curtis’s mind is clicking, rolling over like the board at 30th Street Station, sorting through everything the guy — Argos — said on the phone last night. The same phrases keep shuffling to the top: I know what happened in AC. Lay the fuck off me. I’m the guy you’re really looking for . Veronica, Curtis asks, if you and Stanley didn’t know Argos beforehand, how did you get partnered up with him?

She’s smiling as she replies, but her voice is angry, brittle. Damon spotted Graham at the Point maybe six months ago, she says. Graham was working with a weak partner. That’s the only reason Damon burned him. He could tell Graham was good. Instead of running him out, Damon put him on the payroll as a position player. And then one night, a few months later, Damon asked Stanley if he’d be into putting together a blackjack team. For old times’ sake. Because he’d met this kid — you can guess the rest.

Fuck, Curtis says.

He’s reaching way back now, through years of memories. Damon at Leonard Wood, at Twentynine Palms. Things he did and said coming back in snatches. The expression on his face at certain moments. The way he always seemed to stand a little apart, winding everybody up, watching them run themselves down. Patterns are forming that Curtis has never noticed before, or never wanted to.

Curtis, Veronica says. Seriously. You should go home.

And at this point that’s pretty much what Curtis wants to do. His nose tickles, his face grows hot, and he’s blindsided by a memory, something he hasn’t thought of in twenty years or more: a trip he took to the shore with his dad and Stanley and some gambler friends. Curtis couldn’t have been more than six or seven. Somebody told him a story about pirate treasure; he found a corroded can, picked out a spot on the beach, and spent the afternoon slinging sand while everyone else horsed around in the surf. When his hole got hip-deep he ran to show Stanley, but by the time they made it back, it had filled with seawater. Knock it off with the whining, kid. This is no good. You gotta find a map. Take it from me, kid: a story is not the same as a map . Curtis has no map. After all these years, he still hasn’t learned. Tell him the right story and he’ll start digging.

He blinks, looks up. They’re coming to the end of the fake sky. He thinks of the gun on his belt, of the wedding ring locked up topside, of Albedo cruising the Strip in his big black car. He’s been lucky. There are worse ways this could have gone.

But he’s still not quite finished. Where was Stanley? he asks.

Huh?

While your team was in the Spectacular. Where was he?

She looks confused for a second. He was back at the hotel, she says. At Resorts. Graham and I ran the team in the field. Stanley was with us at the beginning, at the first couple of places we hit, but that’s all. He got too tired.

She grimaces, then looks away, pretending to check out a mannequin in a shop window. Stanley doesn’t get around like he used to, she says. To function in a team like ours, you have to move quickly. Stanley can’t.

He’s pretty sick, isn’t he?

I don’t know. He won’t see doctors. I kept telling him to go. I kept saying that I was just going to call a fucking ambulance. I guess I should have. And now—

Her voice is steady, but she’s still looking away. Her hands are balled into fists. The fake sky is falling away behind them. Ahead, the living statue stands in its marble circle, a daub of pure white, a lone candle in the gloom.

I think maybe he’s just bored, Veronica says. He wants a challenge that’s worthy of him. He’s afraid he’s wasted his one real gift.

He nods, half-listening, distracted by what he’s still puzzling through. Then he notices her scowl.

I don’t mean gambling, she says. I mean looking.

She’s quiet for a second. Do you know Frank Stella? she asks.

He’s a gambler?

He’s a painter. A post-painterly abstractionist. I heard a story once about Frank Stella from one of my professors. Stella thought that Ted Williams — the Hall of Fame hitter for the Red Sox? — he thought Ted Williams was the greatest living American. He thought Ted Williams was a genius because Williams could see faster than anybody else alive. He could count the stitches on a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball as it was coming across the plate. Frank Stella would have loved Stanley Glass. For Stanley, vision is action. It’s a pure, discarnate thing. The swing and the hit aren’t even necessary. The look itself is the home run.

They’re back in the Great Hall. Veronica’s eyes are aimed at the ceiling: the fleshy queen and her allegorical court, afloat above awed onlookers. Armored horsemen on rearing stallions. Heralds and angels blowing trumpets. A winged lion statue. Gray cumulous hung between white spiral columns. Curtis walks quietly beside her, following her eyes, half-aware of the big painting. Thinking instead of a trick Stanley used to do: Curtis’s dad would throw a deck of cards across the room— let’s play fifty-two pickup —and Stanley would collect them, naming every facedown card before he turned it over.

They’re on the escalators now. Down below sunlight blazes orange through the doors of the Doge’s Palace. The Ace Hardware guys have thinned out; the hallway is less crowded. A masked mattacino is performing there, comparing his flexed biceps with a security officer’s.

Veronica is still looking up. Veronese, she says, pointing. Did that dude have some balls, or what? Check out that forced perspective. Look how beefy those guys at the bottom are. I’ll bet when they unveiled the real one in the Hall of the Great Council people were afraid to stand under it. Have you ever seen it?