by Daniel Quinn
David laughed and shook his head in embarrassment.
A sudden flush mottled Pablo’s face, and for a moment a scrollwork of paler lines stood out on his features like the normally hidden scars of some old operation; then he smiled and waved away David’s recalcitrance.
“Ah, there’s no greater bore than one who becomes importunate over a gift. Isn’t that so?” He neatly finished his drink and arose. “It has been a pleasure making your acquaintance, David. And yours, of course, Mademoiselle Petal.” Without waiting for a reply, he nodded once and strode out of the room.
“Wow,” David said.
“A con man,” Michelle stated.
“Why do you say that?”
“He has the style. ‘A touch of my mother’ indeed. He knew who you were when he came in. He was here looking for you.”
“You really think so? I don’t see that he got anything out of it.”
Michelle shook her head slowly, in amazed disgust. “I didn’t say he was a pickpocket, for God’s sake. Meeting you is just step one.”
“Ah well. They say you can’t cheat an honest man.”
“Huh. And they say love makes the world go ’round.”
The phone at the bedside was ringing insistently, and David fought his way up to consciousness to silence it. He took the receiver off the hook and glanced at his watch. It was four-thirty, and he’d been asleep for less than two hours.
“Hello,” he groaned.
“This is Pablo. Is the girl there with you?”
“What?”
“Is the girl there with you?”
David looked across the bed, where Michelle was sleeping heavily. “Yes, she’s with me.”
“Then go to the phone in the living room. We must talk, and there’s no need to disturb her.”
David frowned. “Talk about what?”
“Please, David. It’s important.”
“Okay. Hold on.” David rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and went into the living room, closing the bedroom door behind him and picking up the phone. “All right,” he said.
“How much did you lose?”
“What?”
“How much did you lose at the tables before you went to bed?”
David blinked groggily. On returning to the hotel, Michelle had wanted to play blackjack, and he had gallantly bought her a hundred dollars worth of chips. After a few hands, she complained that it made her nervous to have him just sitting there to watch, so he bought a stack for himself and listened dutifully as she explained the rudiments of play.
The cocktail waitress kept them supplied with drinks as they worked their way through their chips. They spent a while at the crap table, but David couldn’t make head or tail of the betting and refused to take the dice himself. After that, she tried to drag him back to the roulette tables, but, with other plans in mind, he balked.
“Indulge me,” she said with a coaxing smile. “And I’ll indulge you.”
They spent perhaps an hour at it, David becoming a little drunk but sticking doggedly to the even-money bets while Michelle played the corners.
“Not much,” David said in answer to Pablo’s question.
“Five thousand?”
“No, not that much.”
“Two thousand?”
“Well … maybe.”
“David, David. Don’t you understand yet what they’re doing to you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“They mean to keep you there until you give them back their money.”
“Give them back their money?”
“Across the tables, of course. Naturally they want it. That’s why they’ve installed you in their finest suite. That’s why they’ve given you the lovely Petal. To keep you there until you’ve returned their money.”
David paused, thinking. “I can’t believe it’s that important.”
“Oh, it’s important, David. It’s not just the money, though that’s the greatest part of it. It’s a matter of prestige—almost of honor. They’ve suffered a humiliating loss—and if you take your winnings away, it will be doubly humiliating. But if you give it back, then they will be made well. Don’t you see? You just weren’t drunk enough tonight. Petal will be vastly more persuasive tomorrow. In addition to her usual fee, she’s down for fifteen percent of what they recover; she originally demanded a third, but of course that was just a ploy. If they have to, they’ll literally prop you up at a table until you’ve disgorged what you’ve taken. Then Petal will kiss you goodbye, and you’ll be informed that someone else requires your suite.”
David sighed bitterly. “Yes, I see. I’ve been incredibly stupid.”
“Just a bit naive.”
“I appreciate the warning, Pablo.”
“Don’t just be warned. Leave. Leave now. I believe there’s an exit directly to the parking lot. If you use that, you won’t have to go through the lobby.”
“Are you saying I’m in some danger?”
“No, no. I suggest that only to avoid a scene. If they let it be known—or even rumored—that winning at the El Moreno is an invitation to mayhem, they’d be ruined. The danger is one of seduction only, not violence.”
“Yes, I see. I feel like a complete idiot.”
“Don’t lose heart, David. There are indeed times when one should trust blindly, just as there are times when one should not. Wisdom consists in being able to tell the one from the other.”
“Yes. Thanks again, Pablo.”
“It’s nothing, David. Fare well.”
Michelle never stirred as David dressed and packed. Before he left, he paused at the bedside and gazed down at her regretfully. Then he smiled, remembering that, in her own way, she’d warned him about her.
I’m just something in your mind.
Fremont Street south led him out of Las Vegas, becoming highway 93, which he followed to Boulder City, across Hoover Dam, and down to Kingman, Arizona, where he met the dawn and Interstate 40 East.
CHAPTER 33
Taos was a disappointment. He’d vaguely (and absurdly, he saw now) expected to find crumbling adobe houses, donkeys, men in sombreros, women shaping tortillas beside open fires, and a tavern patronized by a few seedy-looking Anglo artists and writers waiting for D.H. Lawrence to join them for sherry. Whatever fascination the place had held for Lawrence had been long ago swallowed up in curio shops, sleek adobe shopping centers, fast food joints, and used car lots. He’d also imagined it as a village clinging to the side of a mountain; instead, it was a small city pooled at the bottom of a bowl within the Rocky Mountains.
Driving up from Santa Fe past the wineries, roadside fruit stands, and taxidermy shops, he’d been surprised to learn that the lively turquoise-colored stream occasionally in view of the highway was the Rio Grande. He’d been tempted to get out and pay it a closer visit, but discarded the idea; after a disagreeable experience with the law in Gallup, he felt exposed and vulnerable, and wanted to get off the highway as soon as possible.
After exploring the old-town section for an hour alongside the tourists, he headed back the way he’d come and checked into a resort hotel just south of town; with the skiers gone for the season, he had it to himself. Although his room was spartan compared to the El Moreno Presidential Suite, its view of Wheeler Peak, still mantled in snow, made a refreshing change from the tawdry carnival of Fremont Street.
Feeling at loose ends, he changed into jeans and went back into town, where he bought some casual shirts and a couple of lightweight sweaters, some elegant boots, and a hand-woven poncho. The ensemble pleased him—and would have astounded his associates in Runnell, Indiana. Then he stopped in for a drink at the pleasantly dim old bar of La Dona de Taos. He wasn’t exactly killing time; he was trying to take his mind off the almost unbearable tingle of excitement that was building in his stomach.
Then, though it was only five-thirty, he went back to his hotel and had dinner. Finally it was dusk, and he had to restrain himself from breaking into a run as he headed for
the Corvette. As he drove south toward a promising-looking road he’d spotted on the way in, he reflected that he was becoming addicted to the scary exhilaration of being lost in the mountains.
After an hour he was certainly lost. The road had begun as quite a civilized affair, winding through an area of widely separated cabins, A-frames, and mobile homes. But, after following a couple of branches that tended upward, he seemed to leave the habited world behind; only an occasional rough track leading to the right or left indicated that the road served any purpose at all.
The moon rose at eleven; it was only a day or two off full, and shed enough light on the countryside to read by. Coming over a crest, he saw a car pulled to the side of the road below. Dark green or black, with the sleek, sinister lines of a Ferrari, it looked bizarre on this road, where speeds above thirty rattled your teeth. Slowing down beside it, he decided it was black—made even blacker by black glass windows all round. Behind the one on the driver’s side there was a movement of white, and he pulled up and got out. For a few moments he thought he must have been mistaken, since there was no reaction to his arrival from within the car, but then the window came down and he was face to face with a Turkish princess.
He didn’t know what made him think of a Turkish princess (since he’d never seen one); in fact, he rather doubted that Turks had skin as white as hers. Perhaps it was the long, aquiline nose, the aggressive cheekbones, the dark brown hair with fierce copper highlights. Or perhaps it was the bored, almost disdainful way she was looking at him, a cigarette dangling casually from one hand. She apparently didn’t feel the encounter merited any comment from her.
“I wondered,” David said, “if you needed some help.”
“Some, yes,” she drawled, making David feel unaccountably foolish. “This car is so damned delicate, I’d be better off with a Honda. I think it’s something in the fuel line. I was driving along and it just started gasping and died.”
“I’d offer to look under the hood, but it would just be play-acting. Half the engine could be missing and I wouldn’t know it. But I’ll be happy to give you a lift.”
“That would be nice,” she said without interest. She stubbed out her cigarette, rolled up the window, and slid out of the low seat with a practiced grace, giving David a view of a figure not quite as flashy as Michelle’s but one that would leave no Turkish prince in any doubt that he’d found a woman in a million. He estimated that she was in her early thirties, an inch shorter than he, and so used to service and affluence that she took them for granted. She was formally dressed—for New Mexico—in a loosely-belted cream-colored dress that looked like raw silk.
She settled into the Corvette with a sigh and turned her face to the window.
“Straight ahead?” David inquired politely.
She looked at him as if he’d said something strange. “Yes. Straight ahead.”
She didn’t even give the Ferrari a backward glance as they pulled away.
“How far is it?”
“Oh, miles and miles,” she said vaguely, turning back to the window.
She didn’t speak again for half an hour, which David translated into almost fifteen miles. Then she gestured up to the right to an array of lights that looked like the windows of a greenhouse set into the hillside. “It’s up there.”
David wasn’t surprised when, after twisting upward for half a mile, the road dead-ended in her driveway. From what he could see of it, the house was huge, complex, and ultramodern in design. The lighted windows he’d glimpsed from the road below angled off to the right; the rest of the house seemed to go on climbing to the crest of the hill. He was, however, a little surprised when the woman got out of the car and breezed into the house without a word of thanks or even a nod of acknowledgment. He was turning the car around to head back when she reappeared, stopped him with an angry glare, and said, “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
David laughed. “Well, I guess I thought I was going back to my hotel.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Did you think I was going to send you away without even saying thanks? I’m not famous for my manners, but I’m not that bad.”
“Well … I wasn’t sure.”
“Oh, turn off the stupid engine and come inside.”
Without waiting for a reply, she marched back into the house and sang out, “Marianne! I’m back!”
When he walked in, David at first took the entry hall to be the living room—in fact he would have been delighted to have it as a living room. Entirely lit by recessed spotlights, its walls were jacketed in some dark brushed metal that dully reflected a jungle of plants. At one side, breaking through the wild tangle and looking entirely at home, was a large Chinese cabinet in lacquered red; David had the feeling that it and the Ming horse surmounting it would have been welcome in any museum collection. At the back, rising out of the welter and partly obscured by it, loomed a massive and rather menacing headless torso in wood and bronze.
The living room—or as he later learned to call it, the lower living room—staggered him, the vastness of its sophisticated barbarism reducing the entry hall to a mere closet. In the overall dimness, a single column of light compelled the eye to the centerpiece of the room, an enormous pre-Columbian stone head that David would have sworn couldn’t possibly be found in any private collection; it stood in its own private jungle, eyes placidly closed, inexhaustibly radiating its ancient, mysterious power.
The rest of the room was in the same scale, with several groupings of long white sofas gathered around sleek low tables on which three or four couples could have danced comfortably. Above them, the air was peopled with giant human figures that seemed to be toppling, charging, swooping from the ceiling sixteen feet away. Some of them were swimming into or out of the metal-clad walls: a grotesque assemblage of emerging or departing limbs, torsos, heads. As if it were in danger of seeming cramped, the whole awesome space was visually doubled in a mirrored back wall. He wasn’t searching for a name for the place, but one came unbidden to mind: Troll House.
While David struggled to take it all in, his passenger was going through her mail. She finished, tossed it carelessly onto a cabinet that was a twin of the one in the entry hall, and said, “I’m Andrea, by the way.”
David introduced himself.
“Drinks, Marianne. Please,” she said as a girl in jeans entered from behind the giant head. In her early twenties, she was a perfect contrast to Andrea—dark-complected, petite, boyishly slender, with long black hair tied back in a pony tail. She sent her eyes questioningly to David and, when he said bourbon, turned without a word and left.
“So,” Andrea said, “who is David Kennesey?” He was considering his reply to this unanswerable question when she announced she was going to change her clothes and headed for a suspended stairway that soared up dramatically just in front of the mirrored back wall. As she began to ascend, she paused and looked at him impatiently.
“Well? You can’t talk to me if you won’t keep up with me.”
David followed. One of the floating figures eerily turned to him as he drew alongside it, its hand outstretched as if begging for release from its airy limbo.
The second story appeared to be dedicated to bedrooms. The stairs continued to a third, but David followed Andrea to the end of a broad hallway and into a room that was nearly human in scale, being only about thirty feet square with a twelve-foot ceiling. Two-thirds of it was furnished as a living room, the other third being a sleeping area inside someone’s fantasy of an Arab tent—countless layers of gauzy silk supported by slender, gaily-colored twisted columns, piles of goatskin rugs, mounds of fat pillows. The room ended in a wall of glass through which David could see a terrace built out onto the roof of the living room below and, beyond that, the distant lights of Taos.
“So,” Andrea said again, “you were going to tell me about David Kennesey.”
He turned from the windows just as Andrea pulled her dress up over her head. She tossed it into a closet and reached up
behind her to undo her bra. As she shrugged out of it, she looked at him and said, “You’re not one of those nontalkers, are you?”
“No,” he said, but it came out a croak and he had to pause to clear his throat. “I’m a great one for talking. But the question is a little … unmanageable just at the moment. I’m in a state of … flux. Very much in a state of flux.”
He knew he was gibbering but he didn’t know why. There was nothing seductive about what Andrea was doing. She might as well have been undressing in front of a pet tortoise, but he was immensely relieved when she pulled on jeans and a sweater and Marianne simultaneously arrived with a tray laden with bottles, ice, and glasses.
“That goddamned car died on me again,” Andrea told her. “Mr. Kennesey rescued me. David, meet Marianne.” The girl shook his hand, gravely appraising him with round, dark eyes.
“Call those people in the morning—the ones who fixed it last time—and get somebody out to tow it into town.”
“Okay. I’ll need cash for the tow truck.”
“Right.” Andrea walked decisively toward an art deco lady’s writing table David was leaning against, and he moved aside to let her open the single long drawer under the top. He goggled at its contents: neatly stacked and banded packets of new fifty dollar bills. She picked up one, slid a dozen or so bills out, and handed them to Marianne. Then, as she was returning the packet to the drawer, she looked up and, noticing David’s interest, asked: “Would you like some of this? I’ve got plenty.”
Startled, he backed away from the table. “No, no. No, thanks,” he said quickly, as if she were offering him a collection of pornographic pictures.
She shrugged, shut the drawer, and told Marianne she’d see her in the morning. Then she led David over to a sofa and curled up at one end while David made their drinks.
“So,” she said, “you’re a man of mystery.”
“Hardly that,” he said with a laugh. “Just a simple runaway.”
“Ah. And what are you running away from?”
Thinking about it, David was surprised to find how much there was to be run away from and had a sudden urge to catalog it all. “To begin with, a wife and son back in Indiana—not to mention a career. Yesterday I received a ninety-day jail sentence for illegal possession of a gun—but they suspended it, so I guess I’m not running away from that. There are some folks in Las Vegas who weren’t too happy to see me leave with sixty-odd thousand dollars of their money. The Corvette is stolen, but I don’t think the owner would like to see me back, because of some dead bodies and a marijuana operation. But then I wouldn’t much care to go back.”
