“Yeah, it’s somethin’, ain’t it? Thank Mr. Trump for that, haha.” Vanya never seemed to talk without laughing. He was both fat and beaky, like some strange cross between Jabba the Hutt and a bald eagle. I’d said so once, while Vassily and I played chess at Mariya’s. He laughed so hard then that he’d choked his milk tea over the chessboard.
I tuned out as Vanya began to extol the virtues of the place to Vassily on our way inside, breathing in a cloud of cold artificial perfume from the threshold. I surveyed the high ceilings and the narrowing entries to the main gaming floor, where the endless tinny ringing of the slot machines danced like Pop Rocks on my tongue. Vanya could coo all he wanted over the German crystal chandeliers, but all I saw was artifice. My eyes picked out the slightly uneven joins in the carpet, the chips and variances in the thin marble cladding. The whole thing was a confidence trick. Under the thin veneer of luxury was a well-greased, artfully constructed scam. The only authentic features were the hundreds of cameras that dotted the ceiling and walls. Every single one was able to zoom in on our faces, and the people behind them? They were a button away from dispatching the police, who would no doubt be delighted to find Vassily—a convicted felon put away for tax evasion and suspected money laundering—shaking hands with George Laguetta.
I also took some time to watch the bouncers. There were lots of them: patrolling, chatting, standing around, boredly loitering by banks of machines. I had a rough mental approximation of their procedures and personas. A minority of the guys who did security at places like this one were real hardcases, former club bouncers, ex-cops, and veteran soldiers who treated the gig like a retirement resort. The rest were mall cops at best, men and women who’d done two weeks of training and hoped they never got into anything the other guys couldn’t handle. They did a whole lot of customer service, while the old soldiers trounced the troublemakers. Straggling behind Vassily, I idly played out various scenarios in my mind, from the most extreme ones where someone ended up shooting someone else, through to the mildest, where one or more of my party was asked to leave for being too drunk. In all scenarios, I concluded that resistance would lead to disaster. There were too many guards here. The cameras would be linked to a communications center, and every single bouncer could converge on the same location within a few minutes. I hoped the Laguettas were as steady as gossip made them out to be.
Lev fell back, and before I knew it, he was walking close to my other elbow, his mouth lifted in a secret smile. “How are things going, Alexi? We haven’t had a chance to catch up since you fell down the stairs.”
He had to know about the attempted hit today. I considered asking him about Vincent. My hand tightened on Crina’s forearm. “Things are certainly going, Avtoritet. It’s been an exciting few days, but I’m… confident things will settle down.”
“Excellent,” he replied. “Have you made any progress?”
My stress ratcheted up another notch. “Of course. I’ll talk with you later.”
Mikhail had fallen into line with him like a ghost, Katerina chattering to Vanya from his other arm. For a moment, I was reminded of Carmine’s hounds.
“Chet,” I said to Kutkha, mentally. “That’s the word I want to master. The barrier. Some kind of energy shield.”
“It isn’t the word so much as the intent, my Ruach,” Kutkha replied. His presence was a low rustling of feathers and dark, cold water. “Master the intent. Use the word to gain mastery.”
Chet. I tried to focus on the meaning of the word as we walked, but there was too much distraction. The machines, the lights, the murmuring crowds, the heat of the gaming floor, the pistol tapping my ribs under my suit’s jacket. Call me paranoid, but I couldn’t help but think about Nacari’s face being ripped off. Just like his brother’s.
“Are you all right?” Crina said, keeping her voice low.
“Can’t you smell it?” Her voice shook me out of my reverie. We were passing the slot machines with their scattered patrons. One here, one there—old men and women gambling their pensions, hookers on their breaks trying to win the next hit of crack. “The whole building smells like desperation.”
“Mein Gott,” she said and huffed. “Tell me about it.”
That wasn’t all that was troubling me. Vassily had barely said a word to anyone, though he was examining his surroundings with interest. I nudged Crina’s elbow and pointed at a figure tiled into the ceiling. “You see that image of the woman and the five-pointed star? That’s an embedded invocation to one of the faces of Venus, Lakshmi. This whole room is enchanted.”
“Lakshmi? The Indian goddess of money?” She squinted up at it. “That seems quite blatant. What’s it for?”
“Luck,” I said. “But luck for the casino, not the patrons.”
Lev was our ticket to the Chairman Club, where we’d be laundering Nic’s money in irregular quantities, buying chips one, three, seven thousand at a time, and then changing them back in. We had to take an elevator up to get there. The Club was screened off into semi-private smaller rooms for poker, blackjack, roulette, and baccarat. It had a restaurant and gaming table service, lounges, a bar, a nightclub. The reception to the gaming area was a seashell-shaped hall with a marble desk and a mirrored ceiling strung with sharp crystal decorations. If the flimsy-looking bolts ever gave way, the stylish receptionist would look like an elegantly dressed possum kebob. She flashed a magazine-perfect smile at our group, and if she was concerned about working under an armory’s worth of dangling swords, it didn’t show. “Good evening, Mr. Moskalysk. A pleasure to see you.”
“And you, Yulia. You are as lovely as dream, as always,” he replied in heavily accented English. It was the first time I’d heard Lev speak English in years. He already had his wallet in his hand and discreetly showed her the black card and his ID inside. “Do you happen to know if the Mr. Laguetta is waiting for us yet?”
“Yes, sir. He’s already checked in to the Salon Privé,” Julia said. She didn’t even have to check her logbook.
“Ah, kharosho, excellent. Then please arrange for us one bottle of Coche-Dury Meursault, and one of eighty-four Dom Perignon Rosé?” Lev’s English was thick, but his French was perfect.
“Of course.” The woman replied as if the bottles of wine Lev had just ordered weren’t worth more than her entire week’s paycheck. “Anything else?”
“No, no, is all I could ask for from such a beautiful woman. Thank you.” Lev smiled gracefully, polished polite as he split from the desk and led the way forward.
Mikhail tracked Julia wolfishly on the way past, and Vanya whispered something into Vassily’s ear that made him laugh. I was the one who looked back to see the smile gone in an unguarded moment while Julia wrote her reminders on a well-used jotter. The brief exchange, in all of its formal artificiality, left me strangely cold on the trip upstairs.
“Someone walk over your grave, soldier?” Vassily’s low voice disrupted my reverie.
I hadn’t even noticed him, but he had fallen in by my elbow just outside the elevator while the others walked ahead. Crina was talking about something at Sirens with Katerina, just ahead of us.
“It doesn’t feel very real,” I replied uncomfortably. I wasn’t certain Vassily understood, but I wanted him to. “This place.”
There was a thoughtful pause between us. I glanced over and found Vassily looking off into the distance.
He nodded. “Yeah… I know what you mean.”