by Chris Ewan
I noticed that I was fussing with Masters’ wristwatch, smoothing my fingers over the pitted face. I tucked my hands under my armpits to break the habit.
‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Speak to me.’
I moved across to the spare recliner and sat on it sideways. I propped my elbow on my knee and shaded my eyes with my hand. My host swivelled his head until I could see two tiny images of myself in the lenses of his sunglasses. A white marble stallion appeared to be vaulting my left ear.
The sensation of having him consider me from behind the glasses was unsettling, and for some unknown reason, I was just dumb enough to ponder whether he ran casting couch sessions with wannabe showgirls that began in a similar fashion.
‘Tell me how you know Josh. The truth.’
Talk about your starter for ten. Yes, I’ve heard it said that honesty is the best policy, and I suppose that’s absolutely right – if you’re a complete bonehead. But there was no way I could tell Maurice the truth if I wanted him to trust me. The only way I might mean anything to him was if he believed I was somehow important to Josh. Josh was clearly important to him, and I needed to close the circle.
At the same time, Maurice didn’t strike me as the type of individual who made his living through entirely legal means. To the outside world he functioned as a show producer, but I had a pretty thorough appreciation for the value of a good cover profession. Maurice hadn’t flinched when I’d told him what I liked to get up to in my less-than-law-abiding moments, so it seemed fair to assume that he had a somewhat relaxed sense of right and wrong.
‘The truth is we worked a scam together.’
‘Casino scam?’
‘There were three of us, plus the croupier. It was a roulette wheeze.’
‘Sounds kind of smalltime.’
‘We were starting out with something simple,’ I replied, meanwhile thinking that if he pictured Masters’ take in those terms, he definitely wouldn’t be impressed with the perilous state of my finances. ‘Getting to know one another, before moving on to something more serious.’
‘Huh. And this more serious work – was that riding on you, or Josh?’
Christ, what exactly had Josh been up to? Mixing writing with thievery was one thing, but combining high-profile stage magic with a criminal career seemed mighty ambitious.
‘Er, it was his job.’
‘Yeah, doing what?’
‘He didn’t say exactly.’ I let the words hang in the air while I thought about where to take things next. On balance, I couldn’t see any harm in adding, ‘I got the impression you were involved.’
‘You did, huh?’
‘He mentioned your name.’
‘But no details.’
‘I was all set to hear them when he pulled his disappearing act.’
His eyebrows scaled his forehead. ‘So you figured you’d break into his hotel room.’
‘Well now, you can’t blame me for that. Your circus freaks had the same idea.’
Maurice set his milk down and reached for his lip piercing, pinching the silver ring between his fingers. I began to suspect it was a recent addition to his face – something he was still getting used to. His tongue must have been getting used to it as well. That would explain the slight lisp.
‘I still don’t buy him gifting you his watch.’
I let my shoulders fall. ‘I stole it. When I broke into his room.’
‘Just like that.’
I thought back to the croupier who’d been involved in Josh’s roulette fix.
‘He never paid me my share of the roulette take. When he ran, I figured he owed me.’
‘You speak to Caitlin about it?’
‘Caitlin?’
‘Yeah, Caitlin. His assistant.’
‘The redhead, you mean?’
‘That’s her.’
‘No. I was beginning to think she must have run away with him too.’
Maurice shook his head. ‘Wipe that. She’d never leave Vegas.’
‘No?’
‘Girl needs to perform. You catch her act?’
‘A little. She seems good.’
He threw up his hands, as though I’d just uttered the understatement of the century. ‘Girl has stadium talent. Word is she’s been working on something new – something folks here would go nuts over. Kind of act I could build an entire show around at the Atlantis.’
Not any more he couldn’t.
‘So why don’t you?’ I asked. ‘With Josh gone, she’ll be looking for work.’
Maurice jerked his head back, as though stunned by the suggestion.
‘She’ll never leave the Fifty-Fifty. Leastways, not while her asshole brothers still own the joint.’
Oh, terrific. That really did cap it all. Because assuming my ears weren’t deceiving me, it sounded as if the extravagantly talented Caitlin, whose buoyant cadaver you may just remember my bumbling across and abandoning in the early stages of this particular tale, was none other than the close blood relation of the terrible twins who were lately threatening to kill me. Could that really be right? I didn’t have an awful lot to go on, other than Maurice’s say-so. Although, now I came to think of it, the girl’s flame-red hair wasn’t all that far removed from the fair ginger locks of the Fisher Twins.
Hmm, so that was hearsay and genetics going against me, and just wilful denial on my side. Still, it’s refreshing to know that things can always get worse, and the revelation didn’t change my reasons for being there. I needed Maurice to tell me something that might give me the vaguest hope of contacting Josh, or failing that, raising close to one hundred and forty thousand dollars in cash.
‘Was I right?’ I asked. ‘About you being involved in Josh’s other job?’
Maurice nudged his sunglasses up on the bridge of his nose. ‘Maybe you should move on. Quit asking questions.’
I lowered my eyes and contemplated his bare feet. His toenails were painted a luscious black. I wondered if perhaps he split the cost of varnish with his silent housekeeper with the lime-green toes.
‘I need a lot of money,’ I told him. ‘Quickly.’
‘Is that right? And you figured your take would cover what you need?’
‘I wouldn’t have been wasting my time otherwise.’
‘And Josh was cool with that?’
I let go of a lungful of dry morning air. ‘We didn’t get into specifics. Hell, he hadn’t even told me what the job entailed. But he knew my reputation. He knew the kind of fee I’d have expected.’
‘So you’re good at what you do?’
It seemed wise to ignore the more recent entries on my resumé.
‘I’m very good.’
‘Tell me about it.’
I looked at him as though he’d scrawled a tough algebra problem on a nearby blackboard.
‘Come on, is it locks?’ he asked. ‘Josh was good with locks. You’ve seen his handcuff act, and the crate escape in his show, right?’
‘Locks are my speciality.’
‘Safes?’
‘I’m pretty handy with those too.’
‘Alarm systems? Movement sensors?’
‘It depends how advanced we’re getting.’ I raised a hand. ‘Listen, I’m sorry, but it’s beginning to feel as if I’m in therapy here. I seem to be the one doing all the sharing. I appreciate you talking to me, I really do, but if you can’t help me out, I might as well leave.’
I stood to do just that, and looked down over Maurice.
He worried his lip piercing some more, weighing my words. I was beginning to think I’d screwed up, that maybe I’d pushed things too far, but just as I was about to turn and make my way back through the house, he tugged his robe together and found his feet.
‘What’s up with your hand?’ he asked, and grabbed my forearm, turning my palm upwards so that he could study my taped fingers. ‘You trap it in a vault, or is this a memento from the Fisher Twins?’
‘Basketball,’ I told him.
He dropped my hand, alon
g with the corners of his mouth, stepped back and assessed me from head to toe. I guess it’s fair to say that he wasn’t looking at somebody who appeared capable of pulling off a slam dunk.
‘No shit?’
‘I caught the ball wrong. But don’t worry, I can still work.’ I circled my index finger and thumb, snapping them together like a crab’s claw.
‘If you say so.’ He ran a hand over his shaved scalp. ‘Listen, why don’t you come on inside? Let’s talk some more.’
TWENTY-THREE
So much for talking. Maurice had me wait in the white living room while he placed a telephone call elsewhere in the house. There wasn’t anything other than white to look at. I had no television or magazines to distract me from my thoughts, and since my thoughts were mostly unwelcome, it didn’t help my nerves a great deal.
After sitting and playing with my thumbs for a time, I turned my attention to the wristwatch I’d stolen. I was impressed that Maurice had spotted it, but then again, it was fairly distinctive. It was smaller than a modern wristwatch, though not as small as a woman’s timepiece.
I slipped the watch from my wrist and wound the mechanism backwards until I felt resistance, and then I raised it to my ear and listened to it tick. The second hand seemed to be moving again, sweeping past the black roman numerals on the pearlescent dial. I checked the time on my digital watch and set the wristwatch to match. Then I buffed the face on my shirt and slipped it back on. Messing with the watch was probably a bad idea. It just reminded me of how much time I was losing.
Another ten minutes went by before I heard engine noise outside the house, followed by the soft percussion of car doors closing. Footsteps and a two-tone doorbell beckoned Maurice back to the room. He was still wearing his white silk robe and pyjama pants, not to mention his wrap-around sunglasses. True, it was light and airy inside his home, but it wasn’t that light.
He opened the door and the identity of his guests left me suitably underwhelmed – Kojar the lofty trapeze artist and his gap-toothed, knee-high pal.
‘This guy,’ the diminutive one squeaked, and pointed a stubbed finger at me. ‘Yeah, we seen him all right.’
He had on the same bright yellow sneakers and crumpled jeans as he’d worn the previous night. His T-shirt was black again, but it featured a different rock motif – a human skull with flames burning through the eye-sockets. He cupped his chin and tapped his yellow sneaker against the floor.
‘So you’re a housebreaker, huh, guy?’ he piped.
‘I prefer “gentleman thief”.’
‘And last night, that wasn’t your room?’
‘My, you do catch on quick.’
Kojar rested a plate-sized hand on his miniature friend, as if to hold him back. ‘You find Josh?’ he asked, in his stilted Euro-English.
‘I’m still looking for him.’
His companion crossed his stubby arms. ‘Yeah, how come?’
‘I’ve been through all this with Maurice,’ I said. ‘And I’m pretty sure he must have told you some of it on the telephone.’
‘Maybe I wanna hear it myself.’
‘Likely as not you do. What’s your name, anyway?’
His eyes darkened beneath his uni-brow, but he didn’t answer me.
‘Christ, his name’s Salvatore,’ Maurice cut in. ‘Sal to you and me. He’s from New Jersey. And this here is Kojar. He’s from Croatia.’
Kojar squared his shoulders and lifted his chin, as though he was standing on the top step of a medal platform waiting to hear his national anthem. He had on a blue tracksuit with white piping along the arms and legs, and he wore flip-flops on his huge feet. His big toe alone was enough to intimidate me.
I looked at Maurice. More accurately, I looked at his blackened sunglasses.
‘You said you wanted to talk.’
‘In my office.’
I followed the three of them along a white hallway into a smaller white room. There was a white gloss desk positioned in front of a circular window that looked out over the corner of the pool. The walls were hung with framed show posters, including the advertisement I’d seen for the revue of the Fate of Atlantis.
The three men gathered around a glass table in the middle of the room. In the centre of the table was a white cardboard model of a building complex – the kind of thing an architect might put together to give a client a better understanding of how a project could turn out. The complex was made up of three separate tower blocks, joined together by a much lower building that appeared to be around three storeys in height. Surrounding the base of the complex were a number of white cardboard trees, a line of miniature white cars and a scattering of tiny white people.
To my right, Sal was on tiptoes, pressing his nose close to the structure. I thought about giving him a boost onto the table in case he wanted to stomp around the cardboard world like he was Godzilla.
‘So, er, what is this?’ I asked.
Maurice raised his hands and flipped his sunglasses up to rest on his scalp. It was the first time I’d seen his eyes. They were blue-green in colour and strikingly alert, like the eyes of a jungle predator.
He watched me closely for quite some time, and I began to wonder if perhaps the cardboard model was about to split in two so that a dummy missile could emerge from a concealed silo in one of the towers. And sure, while it wouldn’t have completely shocked me to learn that Maurice was the owner of a snow-white feline, I somehow didn’t picture him as a megalomaniac with a cunning plan for world domination.
‘So what, is this the model for a new casino?’
Maurice eyed me with suspicion, as though I’d made an impossible leap of logic.
‘Well, is it?’
He held my gaze for a few beats more, as if he was debating whether to share one of the foremost secrets of the ages. Then he waved his hands above the model in a circular fashion, as though summoning a mystic force.
‘This is Magic Land.’
Oh boy. Just as I thought things couldn’t get any weirder . . .
‘Magic Land?’
‘The name, it may change,’ Kojar offered, with a pragmatic heft of his shoulders.
‘Huh. So your big secret is that you want to build a casino with a magic theme. Which I guess is where this all ties in with Josh.’
Maurice withdrew a slim white baton from the sleeve of his robe. He pointed it towards the rear quarter of the squat central building.
‘Magic Land is a casino entirely dedicated to the art of magic. It will house a museum devoted to the greatest illusionists of all time.’ He moved the pointer to the opposite side of the structure, where a circular appendage seemed to bulge out like a white cardboard hernia. ‘It has a state-of-the-art, two-thousand-seat auditorium. The magician who headlines at this theatre, in this casino, will have the greatest magic show of all time.’
Maurice raised his baton in the air and pressed it against his lip ring. He gazed at me hawkishly, as though I couldn’t possibly fail to comprehend the significance of it all.
‘Right. But what are you saying exactly? Did Masters run away because he didn’t want the Fisher Twins to know he was planning to quit?’
Sal thumped his fist down onto the glass table. ‘Enough with the questions. Just let Maurice explain.’
‘I’m trying, believe me.’
Maurice tapped his baton against his lip piercing. He wanted to be careful. The move had all the makings of a nasty accident.
‘You’ve heard of juice, right?’
‘Fruit juice?’
He exhaled and closed his eyes. ‘In Vegas,’ he began, in a studied tone, ‘if you have juice, you have influence. Juice is power.’
‘Oh, okay.’
‘The guys who made this town, they brought the juice. Guys like Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Benny Binion. Serious guys.’
I think he meant mobster guys. I was tempted to ask if I should take notes and if there was likely to be a mid-term exam, but somehow I sensed that now wasn’t the time.
&
nbsp; ‘If you want to build a new casino in Vegas,’ Maurice went on, ‘you need juice.’
‘And a heck of a lot of money, I’m guessing.’
‘Money, sure. But plenty of people want to invest in Vegas. Finding money is the easy part.’
Kojar and Sal nodded along. Funny. Getting hold of cash wasn’t proving that easy for me.
‘And the hard part?’
‘Clearance. To build a Strip casino from scratch in this town, a major casino like Magic Land, requires a whole lot of clearance.’
‘And to get clearance you need juice?’
‘That’s the deal.’
‘So how do you get this juice?’
‘There are ways,’ Sal cut in.
‘I may need a little more detail than that.’
Maurice knocked his baton against the edge of the table. ‘The traditional route? You need to be part of a network. People you can rely on, folks you can call on. Maybe you need some muscle. You’ll always need green.’ He shrugged. ‘Have all of that behind you, and you have a reputation. You have juice.’
‘You’re talking about the Mafia.’
The three men flinched, and Kojar shot an instinctive look out through the circular window, as if he feared that a mob sharpshooter with a sniper rifle and a listening device was on the other side of the pool.
Maurice waved a hand at me. ‘Cool it on that talk.’
‘Why? Is saying the “M” word in Vegas like mentioning the title of The Scottish Play in a theatre?’
Maurice looked at me blankly. Evidently, he’d never produced a Shakespearian tragedy.
‘We don’t talk about it no more,’ Sal explained. ‘We’re trying to make Vegas a respectable town.’
‘Tell that to the Fisher Twins. They threatened to have me killed.’
Maurice nodded. ‘They have the juice to do that.’
‘Well, how did they get it? They don’t look like gangsters. Even the guys dressed as gangsters in their casino don’t look like gangsters.’
‘That’s what we wanted to talk to you about.’
I was all set to hear more when we were interrupted by a strange buzzing noise, accompanied by an odd little ditty. The tune sounded electronic, like the chirping of some deranged, robotic bird. I frowned in confusion, but the noise grew steadily louder, the chirruping repeating itself over and over. Then I realised that everyone was staring in my direction, and shortly afterwards it occurred to me that the noise was coming from my back pocket.
