The Mirror Thief(98)

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 f*cking 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?

The real one? Curtis says. I think so, yeah. Couple of years back, when I was on leave in Italy. Does Stanley still talk about going over there?

Just about all the time, yeah.

Why doesn’t he? Short of funds?

No. Money is never an issue with him. He just never had a passport.

Veronica steps off the escalator and moves fast toward the exit. Curtis follows her, not sure where she’s going. The mattacino spots her as she walks by, doffing his feathered cap—Come sta, bella?—and she sidesteps him without breaking stride, flips him off without bothering to look at him. A second later she’s out the door.

Curtis catches up with her against the railing of the outdoor canal. The sun is sliding toward the mountains—big and soft, a yolk on a tilted frypan—and the sky is a yellow muddle interrupted by pink flares of contrails. She’s chewing on a thumbnail, arms crossed tight on her chest. Looking at the moored gondolas without really seeing them. Jesus, I f*cking hate those guys, she says. People in masks creep me out.

Curtis frowns, then grins, studying her profile. Except when it’s you wearing one, he says. Then it’s okay. I got that right?

She nods. Used to be, she says, when I was a kid, I’d wear a mask the whole week of Halloween. I’d never take it off, not even in the bathtub. My mom would bring home these blue gel-masks from the spa where she worked, and I’d sleep in ’em. It was the only way I could sleep. Otherwise I’d just lie there all night. Wondering how I could ever be sure that anybody was anybody. Or that I was myself, even. My poor mom had me in counseling like you would not believe. I probably took the MMPI six times before I so much as heard of the SAT.

Curtis leans on the rail to Veronica’s left, looking down at the water. A guy with a net on a long aluminum pole is fishing trash off the surface, sweeping it back and forth. He looks like a gondolier without a boat.

Veronica shifts her weight, moves closer. She must have showered abovedecks before she cleared out this morning: she smells like the hotel soap. What about you? she says. What were you for Halloween, back in the day?