Outside, Curtis climbs into the first idling taxi. It’s another Fortune Cab, black and white and magenta, and Curtis wonders if it’ll be the same cabbie who took him to the lake this morning. But when he sits down and sees the eyes in the rearview mirror, they’re Saad’s. Saad? Curtis says.
I’m sorry?
It’s not Saad: this guy is younger, less relaxed, not Arabic. Bangladeshi, maybe. But the white hair is the same, and the wrinkles. Can you take me to the Quicksilver, please? Curtis says.
In Henderson?
No, Curtis says. In the hills east of here, the edge of the valley. It’s a new place. A few blocks off North Hollywood, above the Mormon Tem—
Yes, the guy says. Now I know. Thank you.
He makes good time to the freeway and Lake Mead Boulevard, using the same route Saad took. He doesn’t try to make conversation, and Curtis appreciates that. In the fast-failing light, Curtis opens The Mirror Thief one last time, wanting to read a little more before Stanley takes it back. Curtis isn’t thrilled about how things have gone out here, but he figures at this point he ought to be satisfied. He’s not satisfied, though. Not even close. Maybe once he sees Stanley he will be.
Be secret, Crivano! This poisoned world,
blown out like an egg, hides nothing.
No cross for you, no Campo de’ Fiori—
be not covetous of such monuments,
sad fictions of kingdoms deferred. Nothing
here is saved, nothing worthy of saving.
Evaporation is your legacy,
your ecstasy, your escape. All matter
is mere shadow, swept over dark glass.
Your moment, Crivano, is done: a bubble
hung in history’s slow amber, a seed
in silica suspended, then fed back
to the furnace. Burn, thief of images,
on the amnesic sea!
As Curtis reads, he tries to imagine finding the book the way Stanley found it, to guess what strange pull it could have exerted on a fifteen-year-old Brooklyn kid with a dead father and a crazy mother and a fifth-grade education. Curtis can’t fathom it. He thinks of his dad’s stories about growing up in Shaw in the Fifties, then of his own fifteenth year — what it felt like, what went on in his head — but he can barely recall, and the memories suggest no new route into the book. Instead Curtis just winds up thinking about Jay Leno: how friendly and cheerful he seemed. How that friendliness and cheer seemed to close him off like a stone wall, and how that wall could have been hiding anything. Or nothing. He thinks about the conventioneers performing for each other in the hotel lobby, and of the cocktail waitresses performing for the well-heeled grinds in the Oculus Lounge. He thinks about the bartender at New York with the Staten Island accent, and about Saad—you do this rap for all your fares? — and about Argos’s blanked-out features, shifting in the hot light off the lake surface. He thinks of himself in high school, practicing his game-face in his grandparents’ bathroom mirror. Trying to be convincing. Trying to convince himself.
Every substance, Hermes says,
must fashion its own reasons.
Even now, oligarchy’s thugs
unmuzzled stalk Rialto’s corridors.
To hide what can’t be seen, Crivano,
install it in plain sight, everywhere.
Invisible commonplace! Machine
for unseeing! Submerge your name,
weighted with your past. Wall-hung,
neglected, the moon-skin lies in ambush.
And then, one unexpected day, you meet
the stranger you have always been.
A couple of UNLV co-eds dressed as leprechauns are stationed between the Quicksilver’s riverstone columns; they grin and wave as Curtis’s cab pulls up, bend to pin plastic shamrocks to the cardigans of wheelchair-bound gamblers. Curtis pays his cabbie, steps onto the rubbery sidewalk. At the valley’s opposite edge, Mount Charleston is a blue shadow on the purple dusk. The setting sun lights its snowcap like a brand.
Welcome to the Quicksilver! one of the leprechauns says. Need some luck?
No thanks, Curtis says. I’m not playing tonight.
The PA in the lobby has swapped its New Age flutes and rainsticks for New Age bodhráns and uilleann pipes. The kid behind the counter wears a green plastic bowler hat, keeps himself busy by adding links to a six-foot paperclip chain. Hello, Curtis says. I’m Curtis Stone. Walter Kagami is holding a room for me.
The kid hands over a keycard in a small paper envelope. Top floor, he says. First door on the right. It’s a suite.
The elevators are on the far side of the gaming floor. There’s not much traffic at the tables or the slots, but what traffic there is moves awfully slowly, and Curtis doesn’t feel like navigating it. He tracks the right-hand wall to the bow windows that overlook the sunken courtyard, then follows them across the length of the casino. Lights are coming on below: in the palmtrees, under the recirculating fountain and the waterfall. The guineafowl that he saw last time are not to be found — gone wherever they go at night — but a peacock has climbed atop one of the stone picnic tables, and as Curtis passes, he spreads and shakes his tailfeathers into an oscillating iridescent screen.
When Curtis reaches the corner he immediately tenses, feeling a bad closeness, something wrong, but it’s already too late: a heavy plastic coinpail bumps his ribs and a smooth voice murmurs in his ear. You ain’t wearing anything green, my man, it says. Somebody’s liable to pinch you.
Curtis jerks to a halt. Albedo shoves the pail against his side again; something in it is heavy and solid. Keep on marching, my brother, Albedo says.
A flood of adrenaline sweeps through Curtis’s limbs into his groin; he shudders with the need to piss. Takes a deep trembling breath, lets it out. Walks on.
Albedo came up on Curtis’s left, from slightly behind: exactly the spot where Curtis’s nose blocks his peripheral vision. He knows about Curtis’s eye; Damon must have told him. When Curtis first met him in the Hard Rock the other night, Albedo kept leaning back in his chair: he was testing Curtis, feeling out the limits of his sight. This has been the plan all along. Albedo knows that Stanley’s on his way.
There’s no surveillance by the windows, probably. Cameras watch the elevators for sure — but when he and Albedo reach the elevators, Albedo falls back, giving Curtis plenty of room. Even if Kagami is watching, he won’t see anything.
Curtis doesn’t press the callbutton. He hopes Albedo will talk to him — ordering him to do it, giving himself away — but Albedo just moves past him and presses it himself. A car opens at once, empty, and they step into it. Don’t talk to me, Albedo whispers as he crosses the threshold.
There’s a small lens behind the tinted glass of the instrument panel; maybe a mic somewhere, too. They rise to the top floor, the sixth, in sullen silence, sunset streaming through the glass at their backs. Curtis studies Albedo closely. Albedo doesn’t meet his gaze. He has a cool dead-eyed aspect like some guys get when they’re drunk, but Curtis doesn’t think he’s drunk. He wears a bright-green T-shirt under his motorcycle jacket. His boots and bluejeans are dusty, snarled with burrs and what look like tiny pricklypear needles. Through the frayed fabric at Albedo’s knees Curtis glimpses bloody skin. The handle on the coinpail is stretched slightly by whatever weight it contains, and a plastic bag spread over the top hides its contents. The big hand that holds the pail is raw, scored all over by scrapes and scratches. FIGHT ME — I’M IRISH! Albedo’s T-shirt says.