The dragon moved like a cat on the prowl, sensuously, slowly, sensing its prey nearby.
The yellow eyes inside the cave followed the dragon’s every move. It began to hiss again, a dangerous sound that reverberated off the cavern walls.
Then it moved. Slowly ft slithered from its hiding place and emerged, an enormous two-headed snake, its sinuous muscles sheathed in blood-red skin, the nostrils flat and piglike in its ugly snouts, its forked tongues flicking from two moist mouths as it slid up through the rocks seeking a vantage place high in the grim landscape.
It moved with chilling grace towards its adversary, eyeing the dragon through glistening black beads.
It began to coil, its thirty-foot body curling into a tight spiral. Then it struck, the vicious twin heads streaking from between the rocks, swooping down, its mouth yawning malevolently, then snapping shut, the fangs sinking deep into the neck of the dragon.
The dragon screamed in outrage and pain, twisted its head, and spat an inferno that engulfed the hissing serpent. The viper’s body surged forward, wrapping itself around the neck of the dragon while one of its two heads snapped back and struck again. The dragon’s shriek joined the hissing of the serpent. The two unearthly creatures were locked in a nightmare embrace.
High above them, from a soundproof booth overlooking the primeval battle, his face shimmering in the red glow of the flames below, DeLaroza looked like a vision from hell. The eerie reflection sutured his features with fleeting scars. His eyes flashed with joy and he clapped his hands together. He was, in that instant, an incarnation of the devil.
‘Incredible, absolutely incredible I’ he cried out. ‘Nikos, you have outdone yourself.’
Seated beside him in front of a large electronic control board, the creator of the scene smiled. His name was Nikos Arcurius, a wiry little man, trim yet powerfully built, his biceps hard and veined, his black hair frosted white at the sideburns, his brown eyes twinkling with the rush of achievement.
The dragon and the snake, coiling, hissing, spitting fire, fought on.
‘Enough,’ DeLaroza said. ‘Save the climax until Monday night.’
Arcurius leaned over the control board and pressed buttons, twirled dials, and the two mammoth creatures slipped apart. The snake retreated back to its cave and the dragon, like a regal legend come to life, stalked back to its hiding place among the rocks.
‘It is a masterpiece,’ DeLaroza said with awe. He laid his hand on the shoulder of his collaborator. Arcurius leaned back in his chair and surveyed the atrium and then nodded. It was true; it was a masterpiece.
Arcurius was Greek. Abandoned by his parents, he had grown up a street thief and pickpocket. When he was thirteen his quick hands had earned him a two-year sentence in Da Krivotros, a dismal island prison known as The Boxes because of the rows of solitary cells where even the slightest infraction of prison rules resulted in weeks in squalid isolation.
Thrown in with hardened criminals, Arcurius had earned their respect by putting his nimble fingers to a new use, carving puppets in the prison shop. He earned cigarette money and other favours from the prisoners by putting on Sunday shows in the visitors’ compound for the wives and children of other prisoners. He was back on the street by the time he was sixteen, first joining a travelling circus, then trying to make a living as a puppeteer in Athens, but by the time he was twenty he was on the run again, fleeing from one country to the next, always with the law snapping at his ankles.
The salvation of Nikos Arcurius came when he signed on as a crewman on a steamer going from Marseille to New York to escape the local gendarmes. In New York his fortunes finally changed. Starting as an apprentice, he moved up quickly to become one of Broadway’s most innovative set designers and while still in his twenties Arcurius was lured to Hollywood. There, on the vast sound stages of the big studios, his imagination flourished.
And it was there that he had met a visitor from Hong Kong. Victor DeLaroza was drawn to him not only by his enormous talent but by the candour with which he spoke of his early life.
‘These fingers,’ he once told DeLaroza, wiggling all ten in the air, ‘belong to the second best pickpocket in Athens. The best one was never caught.’
DeLaroza quickly realized that Arcurius’s real genius lay not only in design but in production as well. He put Arcurius to work developing a new concept for toys and together they had revolutionized the industry. The Greek had an uncanny ability for breathing life into DeLaroza’s wildest fantasies, designing and building toys of remarkable realism. Small transistor cards hidden inside dolls whose skin felt almost real caused eyes to blink, mouths to open and close, and activated tape loops through which the lifelike creations spoke simple sentences. His animals were marvels of innovative miniaturization. One, a small horse, performed four different gaits, its ingenious insides set in motion simply by the snap of a finger.
DeLaroza’s exhaustive marketing skills had turned Arcurius into a household word and his creations, called Arcurius, into the most popular toys in the world, several of them so remarkable that even though mass-produced, they had already become collector’s items.
Then DeLaroza had conceived an idea so exciting, so challenging, that be and Arcurius bad devoted five years to designing it, another four to building it, and spent more than ten million dollars on the project.
Now, the result of their combined genius sprawled below them. It was to be the instrument by which DeLaroza would emerge from his self-imposed world of secrecy.
Now, with Corrigon out of the way — and tonight, Domino — DeLaroza felt secure at last. Publicity releases would now begin revealing his contributions for the first time. Now he felt he could face cameras for the first time, unafraid.
Now he himself would introduce the world to his grandest accomplishment.
Pachinko!
The most outrageous, the most breathtaking, the most stunning madness of all.
Pachinko!
The ultimate playground.
In the heart of the glass tower DeLaroza had gutted six floors and replaced them with a towering atrium that began five storeys above the ground. it was encircled by a narrow, eight-foot balcony from which spectators could view Pachinko as if they were standing on a precipice looking down on it. Behind them the city of Atlanta could be seen, sprawling out behind floor-to-ceiling windows.
The panorama was staggering. Within the great space, nearly the size of four football fields, DeLaroza and Arcurius had recreated their own version of Hong Kong. A bustling, vibrant, ebullient amusement park and bazaar, as startling as it was ambitious, had been built in the middle of a skyscraper.
The journey to Pachinko! began on the first floor where an imported Chinese arch led to four bullet-shaped glass elevators that travelled up the exterior of the building. The arch was guarded on either side by two ten-foot temple dogs, their red tongues curling humorously beneath gleaming, dangerous eyes. A blazing Art Deco sign over the arch announced Pachinko! always with the exclamation point. A booth in front of the gate converted American dollars into reproductions of Hong Kong dollars, the medium of exchange for special attractions in the complex. One elevator lifted spectators who simply wanted to observe the spectacle to the special balcony where, for another dollar, they could watch the revellers below. Four other elevators opened on the eleventh floor, the entrance to Pachinko!, where two ancient stone posts imported from Macao stood on either side of a long, rambling stairway that led to the main floor, six storeys below. The stairway was a replica of Hong Kong’s bustling Ladder Street, a narrow confined alley teeming with shops, cubbyholes and snack-food stalls, and intersected by several other avenues.