Douglas, Nelson - Cat in a Flamingo Fedora

Domingo opened the huge front door and Temple skipped over the fallen private-dancer flyers into the perfectly preserved white-leather interior. Settling in the backseat with Verina was like being one of two dice in a coffin. They would have to shout to speak from their distant sides of the wide bench seat.

Domingo took the front passenger seat, pulling a flamingo fedora from the glove compartment, along with a pair of flamingo-bearing sunglasses.

Temple had to smile. A man who was not afraid to look ridiculous was hard to come by. Max came to mind.

"One last look at our figurehead--will she not look splendid with a nest of flamingos in her hair?--and then we go have lunch."

Temple turned to her seatmate, still feeling very Shirley. "I'm Temple Barr, the PR woman.

We haven't met, but I've read so much about you--"

"Then we don't need to meet now," the woman snapped. "The driver is called Martin."

Just like the artist is called Domingo? Temple wondered. Is that what artists really did: call things by names of their own choosing? She wondered what Domingo would call her.

Evidently this artist believed in going from the ridiculous to the sublime: the pink Cadillac pulled into the entrance to the Mirage, its high, coppery glass curve of rooms sparkling like a Hoover Dam of fool's gold.

The party of three, Domingo and the two women, threaded through the tropical entryway teeming with trees and flowers, until Domingo stopped.

"I love this!" Again the shirt sleeved arms cast net wide and drew in a small school of tourist attention. "Embalmed palms. Yes!" he announced to the dazed onlookers. "These trees are real, and not real. Mummified. Preserved. Quite dead, but looking eminently alive. Like you! Boo!"

He laughed as they scattered like little red hens fleeing a falling sky. He was the Sky, with his eye that took in everything, his flailing arms that took in so much and shut out so many.

"Is he always like this?" Temple couldn't help asking Verina.

"Genius is always like this. Domingo . . . sometimes he is other ways." Her tone was knowing, almost bitter.

Temple was not sure she was equipped to deal with genius, not with her cotton-pique pale yellow pantsuit and her black-and-yellow Charles Jourdan pumps and black-patent tote bag. Not with Shirley Temple taking over inside and twirling a little curl in the middle of her forehead. The trouble with Shirley was that she was always, unlike genius, predictable. Always good. Never horrid. Temple had a feeling that only someone with a capacity for being horrid could stand being around genius for very long.

Domingo led the expedition, describing the process of preserving palm trees in a loud, museum-guide voice. Actually, it wasn't a museum-guide voice. Such guides always spoke in hushed, inaudible tones that made one nudge one's neighbors to get closer and hear. Domingo's tone was that of a carnival barker whose overriding emotion was contempt for what he hawked and those who bought it.

"Fade-proof, fire-retardant," Domingo announced. "Fiberglass beneath. Preserved leaves, preserved bark. Pasted and glued and wired back together like a bionic tree. No water, no bugs, no growth. Wouldn't people be superior if so reconstructed? What do you say, Verina?"

She said nothing, merely walked behind the artist like an Arab wife in chador, her long dark hair hiding the expression on her face.

"And you!" he barked. "What do you think?"

Temple jumped at the sudden shout. Then she guessed that she was "you!"

"I prefer my people--and trees--organically grown, even if they are a bit messy to take care of."

Domingo laughed, swinging his flamingo sunglasses from one forefinger, and walked on.

They passed the hotel fish tanks and lobby, the casino and restaurant, making for the elevators.

In silence the trio rocketed up in the elevator to the top of the copper tower. Not far down the hotel hallway, Verina unlocked a door and stepped aside to let Domingo enter the quietly luxurious penthouse suite first. Here was no sunken black marble Jacuzzi off the living room, no mirrors and naked statues, that passed for luxe at some of the older Vegas hotels.

Domingo held up his bare wrist and grinned mischievously at Temple. "You look so much better without your sunglasses on. Room service is sending up lunch at twelve-thirty." He squinted at his wrist, laughed and disappeared through the sliding glass doors to the patio.

Temple checked her own, very visible watch. Eleven-forty-five. That meant forty-five uncomfortable minutes wondering what Domingo would do next and what on earth she could say to the chicly hostile woman beside her.

Verina solved both problems.

"He wants to be alone. People . . . tire him. You'll want to see the plans."

Temple couldn't argue with any of that, so she followed Verina into an adjoining room. Once a bedroom, its usual furniture had been pushed to the walls, with the bed replaced by a pair of banquet tables bare of tablecloths.

Instead they were covered with stand-up cardboard cutouts of miniature flamingos, dozens and dozens of them. Several Las Vegas landmarks were also represented. The Luxor's pyramid rose like a shark fin from the foaming sea of flamingos. Leo the MGM Lion was surrounded by the creatures. The Camelot's fairy-tale towers sported flamingo guards; even its wizard now wore a flamingo-pink robe.

Something sparkling caught Temple's eyes: Dorothy's ruby-red slippers redone in flamingo-pink sequins.

She turned to Verina. "You're not going to change Dorothy's shoes in the MGM Grand vignette?"

"He is. We're negotiating with the management. He also wants to decorate the artificial lawn surrounding the Oz figures with the artistically placed lawn-ornament flamingos."

"They will go for this?"

"The huge corporations that own such major attractions are noticeably lacking a sense of--"

"Humor," Temple finished, nodding sympathetically.

Verina looked daggers at her, daggers dripping flamingo-pink blood, no less. Maybe she had pinkeye.

"I was going to say, a sense of artistic license, of the absurd and the profound, which, as Domingo says in his lectures, often occupy the same sacred ground."

"Domingo lectures, formally?"

"Domingo speaks to prestigious groups: think tanks, university presidents, gove rnmental bodies. He believes that art should be public, that it should have scope and thrust, that it should inform every corner of our culture, pathetic as it is."

Temple nodded. That's what Shirley would have done.

"I'll just study this architectural model, then, until lunchtime," she said. "That should give me a better grasp of the project's scale and purpose."

"Oh, I doubt that. You can't be expected to grasp the artistic aspects of the installation. All we ask is that you inform us of the personalities involved at each of the project manifestations. I really don't think that we need you, but Domingo insisted on someone local to run interference." She lowered her sunglasses for the first time to let Temple see her ice-blue eyes. "I hope you're good at it."

Then she left, shutting the door so silently that not even the turning knob clicked audibly as it slid into place.

Temple sighed and wandered toward the floor-to-ceiling windows covered with vertical blinds. Through the thin fence of the edgewise slats, Las Vegas was laid out far below like a body on a dissecting table. From this height she could see the straight spine of the Strip, the vertebrae of cross streets.

On second thought, the city was more of a Gulliver stretched upon the sand while millions of Lilliputians thronged like parasites over its roads and sidewalks and identifying marks. Here she stood on the mole of the Mirage, there lay the bruise of Bally's and there the curving vein of the monorail running to the MGM Grand. Arteries, veins, bruises and also birthmarks, such as the vast construction site for New York-New York.