The Mirror Thief(15)
Saad is still on the phone, becoming more animated, shuffling in bits of English and French: orange alert, Air Canada, maison de passe, Flamingo Road, dépanneur, oh my god, the Aladdin, une ville lumière, he’s a shithead, forget about him. An F-15 passes directly overhead; Curtis can’t see it, but he knows the sound of the engines. They’re due south of the airbase now, nearing the northeastern edge of the valley. Ranks of white stucco houses topped with orange mission-tiles perch on the foothills ahead, crowding the borders of the government land.
Curtis is wondering if Saad is distracted, if maybe they’ve missed their turn, when they veer onto a sidestreet just past a Terrible Herbst gas station on the corner of North Hollywood Boulevard. The neighborhood is getting anonymous, purely residential; the houses are bigger, newer, farther apart, and suddenly there are none to be seen at all, only steep gated driveways sprouting off the road. The taxi’s transmission downshifts as they climb past cleared gravel pits and an old cement plant, winding slowly through slumps and dry washes and mounds of talus stanched by gabions. Then they crest a rise on a sickening turn and the entire valley is arrayed before them: a sea of roofs and palmtrees, the Strip towers flanked by the Luxor and the Stratosphere, the snows of Mount Charleston in the distance, white blotches hung in midair, the mountain itself vanished in the afternoon haze.
A flashing traffic signal comes into view—a two-lane road with a wide shoulder, cars towing fiberglass boats—but Saad hangs a sharp left before they get there, into a fresh and narrow roadcut marked by a blond limestone sign: QUICKSILVER CASINO & RESORT. The parking area is modest, crescent-shaped, following the curve of the hillside; it’s at maybe a quarter capacity, with Cadillacs and Town Cars and the odd Lexus or Mercedes clustered near the top. Wheelchair ramps stretch downhill like exposed roots, and the handicapped spaces are all full.
They bypass the parking lot and roll up to the entrance: a massive oak portico held aloft by thick columns of smooth riverstone orbs. A little pack of bluehaired white ladies is waiting in the shade, bingo bags and plastic coinpails dangling from their folded hands. A green-and-white placard by the entrance says FIND YOUR POT O’ GOLD AT QUICKSILVER! ST. PATRICK’S DAY IS MARCH 17TH.
Saad is ending his call. We have arrived, my friend, he says. This place will be lucky for you, I think.
It’s farther out than I thought, Curtis says, digging some of Damon’s cash from his wallet.
There is nothing farther. Government land, and then the lake. That is all.
I didn’t think you could build up here.
Saad shrugs. What can you pay? he says. Who is your friend? You can do what you want.
Curtis hands the folded bills over the seat and Saad takes them with practiced ease, watching Curtis in the rearview mirror. Smiling conspiratorially with his eyes. As if they share some secret knowledge about the world.
Curtis opens his door, steps out, leans back in. Hey, Saad, he says. You got a business card?
11
He glances at the card as the cab is pulling away: SAAD ABOUGREISHA, it says, and a phone number.
The sidewalk beneath Curtis’s feet, which had looked like mortared flagstones from inside the car, is really some kind of springy padding composited from shredded rubber; it gives a little under his weight. He rocks back and forth on his heels, testing the surface, thinking of the deck of the physical therapy room at the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, where he first met Danielle.
A boxy shuttlebus sporting the Quicksilver logo—a jazzed-up Indian pictograph of a raven in flight: gaping beak, gleaming reflective eye—pulls into the space Saad vacated. A group of old people exits the bus with the help of a pair of minders, young kids with big smiles and loud voices. The ones standing under the portico wait patiently to board. Curtis watches all this for a while, not sure what he’s looking for. Then he turns and walks to the entrance.
The Quicksilver is high-class for a neighborhood joint: small, rustic, more country club than bingo parlor or shopping mall. The building looks like an Anasazi cliffpalace reworked by Frank Lloyd Wright: lots of exposed beams and slender limestone blocks. The whole thing’s built around an old quarry or open-pit mine, now converted into a sunken courtyard with a pond and a waterfall and a recirculating fountain in the middle. Through the bow window behind the gaming pit Curtis can see madrones and junipers, pergolas twined with wisteria and passionflower, the towering blooms of a couple of century-plants. A halfdozen plump guineafowl peck at the rubber sidewalks, and aside from them the courtyard is deserted.
Kagami is running late, stuck in a meeting, so Curtis gets a cup of grapefruit juice and plays a little blackjack to pass the time. The dealers are fresh-faced, easygoing, slow with the cards. Most of the action is at the machines and in the large bingo room; there are only four tables. Curtis’s sole companion is an elderly gentleman wearing a silk neckerchief and an oxygen mask. There’s a separate area for high rollers behind the bar, dim and sunken, and it’s busier than Curtis would have expected for a joint this far out of town. The players down there look like whales: East Asian heavyweights, the kind of guys who keep casinos in business. From time to time their cheers and shouts rise over the new-age flute music on the PA. Somebody like Stanley Glass could walk in and tear this place apart inside of an hour, Curtis thinks. Which is probably why the owners hired somebody like Walter Kagami as the manager.
Saad’s prediction is coming true: Curtis is up by nearly four hundred dollars when he feels a gentle hand on his shoulder. Mister Stone? Mister Kagami’s very sorry for the delay. If you’d like to wait in his office, he’ll meet you there in a few minutes.