Tim Weaver - Vanished

‘Wow. That’s incredible, Lee. Congratulations.’

‘Right place, right time, I guess.’

‘Or you’re just really good at it.’

He shrugged. ‘I can’t believe it’s you. Here .’

‘I know.’

‘So what are you doing in Vegas?’

‘You remember I wanted to be a journalist?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, that did work out.’

‘Fantastic. Are you working now?’

‘Yeah.’ I looked around me. ‘Well, I’m working tomorrow.’

‘You live here?’

‘No. I’m just down from LA for the night.’

‘Doing what?’

I tapped the front page of the Sun . ‘Writing about money.’

‘Are you a correspondent or something?’

‘Just until the elections are over next year, and then I head back to London. The paper’s pretty excited about the idea of Obama, which is why I’m out here so early.’

‘Anyone’s better than Bush, right?’

‘I guess we’ll see next year.’

‘How come you’re based on the West Coast?’

‘I was based in DC last time I was out, but this time I’m here for much longer. So I’m spending six months in LA, to cover the build-up from Cailfornia, and then I move to DC to cover the last six months from Capitol Hill.’ I nodded at the Sun again. ‘Thing is, at the moment, it’s still early days, so there’s nothing to tell. Which is why I’m down here trying to justify my existence.’

‘Not a bad place to come for a night.’

‘Noisy.’

He laughed. ‘Yeah, I guess it is.’

We ordered more beers and sat at the bar and talked, covering the nineteen years since we’d left home. I’d grown up on a farm, in the hills surrounding our village, but when I headed to London and it dawned on my parents that I wasn’t going to be taking over the running of it any time soon, they started winding it down and paying into a cottage.

‘And then Mum died.’

Lee gave a solemn nod of the head.

I shrugged. ‘It was pretty much all downhill from there: I helped Dad get the farm sold and moved him into the village, but he could never really handle it on his own.’

‘When did he die?’

‘Almost two years back.’

I hadn’t been back home since.

The conversation moved on and got brighter, Lee telling me how his parents now lived in Torquay, how his sister was a teacher, how he was still single and loving it, even if his mum wanted him to settle down. ‘They flew out earlier in the year, and Mum basically asked me once a day for three weeks when I was going to get married.’ He rolled his eyes and then asked, ‘So how long have you been married to Diane?’ He was busy polishing off his fifth bottle of beer, so I forgave him the slip-up. We were both a little worse for wear: him – two bottles ahead of me – on alcohol, me on a lack of sleep.

‘Derryn.’

‘Damn.’ He laughed. ‘Sorry. Derryn.’

The bar was quieter now, all the men he’d been drinking with earlier off in the casino somewhere. ‘It’ll be thirteen years this year.’

‘Wow.’

‘Yeah, it’s been good.’

He nodded. ‘I admire you, man.’ He nodded a second time and then sank the rest of his beer. ‘And now I’ve got to use the can.’

He rocked from side to side slightly as he shifted away from the bar, and patted me gently on the shoulder as he passed. Then he headed to the toilets.

And I never saw him again.

A couple of minutes later, after picking up where I’d left off with the Las Vegas Sun , I looked up in the direction Lee had gone and saw a man standing next to me at the bar. I hadn’t seen him approach. His body was facing the bar but his head was turned towards the paper, reading one of the stories on the front page. A second later he glanced at me and realized he’d been caught out. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Sorry. That’s incredibly rude of me.’

He was English.

I looked over his shoulder, in the direction of the toilets. No sign of Lee. When my eyes fell on the man again, his head had tilted – like a bird – as if he was studying me.

I pushed the paper towards him. ‘Here.’

‘That’s really good of you,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’

‘No problem.’

He smiled. ‘You’re English.’

‘Yeah. Looks like we both are.’

He was in his late forties, thin and wiry, with a tan and a smooth, hairless face. As he smiled, I could see he’d had his teeth done. They had an unnatural sheen that you could only get away with on the West Coast. He perched himself on the edge of one of the stools, still smiling. He was dressed smartly: pale blue open-necked shirt, black jacket, denims, black leather shoes polished to a shine. His hair was slicked back from his forehead and glistened under the lights. ‘Are you out here with work or something?’

‘Just for a couple of days.’

‘Ah, I didn’t think you looked like a whale.’

‘Whale’ was what casinos termed the world’s biggest gamblers.

‘You wouldn’t be sitting here for a start.’

‘If I was a whale?’

‘Right. You’d be living off your complimentaries – your free flight and free suite and free food from the restaurant – not drinking alone in the bar at the foyer.’ He seemed to realize what he’d just said. ‘Wait, I didn’t mean that how it sounded. Sorry.’

‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘I mean, I’m one to talk, right? I’m here too.’ He laughed briefly, then flipped the newspaper closed. ‘Do you know how much casinos pay in comps to the high rollers?’

He leaned in towards me.

‘Any idea?’

‘Wouldn’t have a clue.’

‘Anywhere between 3,000 and 5,000 dollars. But do you know how much the high rollers will lose at the tables?’ He lowered his voice, like he was imparting some ancient secret. ‘ Twice that much . No one beats the house. High rollers come in here with their credit lines, and their casino-paid hotel rooms and five-star meals, thinking they’re going to defy the odds, that the casino’s losing out. But every game here – every game in every single casino in the city – is designed to give the house a mathematical advantage.’

The man shifted from side to side, one hand pressed against the stool between us, the other flat to the marble of the bar. He was missing nails on the first two fingers of his one hand, like they’d been torn off. ‘You know what they call that?’ he asked quietly.

‘Call what?’

‘The mathematical advantage?’

I glanced over the man’s shoulder. Still no sign of Lee. It must have been five or six minutes since he’d left. The man moved in even closer when he didn’t get a response, his fingers inches from mine. I glanced down at his missing nails, then back up at him.

‘It’s called “the edge”,’ he said.

He stayed like that for a moment and then, finally, moved his hand off the stool and on to the marble, as if signalling for service. At the other end of the bar, the barman started to come over but then the man made eye contact with him – a tiny, fractional swivel of the head – and the barman stopped immediately, as if he’d been hit by a truck. When I looked back at the man, something had changed in him – something subtle – and a ripple of alarm passed through me.

We stayed like that for a moment, the ding, ding, ding of the slots ringing around us, then I slid off the stool, pulled a couple of $10 bills out and left them on the counter for the barman. I turned back to the man. He was about five inches shorter than me, but it didn’t make me feel any easier around him. He was still standing in the same position, body turned to the bar, hands flat in front of him, head turned towards me.