The Mirror Thief

by Martin Seay

  The marker for ten grand wasn’t a favor, Veronica says. It was to cover expenses while Stanley was putting the team together.

  Curtis blinks. Shit, he says.

  Stanley and I did all the legwork, but Damon helped with recruitment. He also brought in most of the money. Nobody but Stanley was supposed to know that Damon was involved, but of course Stanley told me, just in case anything happened.

  Veronica’s tone is flat and tired, precise but unrehearsed. Listening, Curtis gets a quivery rollercoaster feeling; his pulse shifts into lower gear. He hadn’t expected this, but he’s not really surprised by it, either. It fits.

  There were a dozen of us, Veronica says. Working in two teams. Big casinos have gotten good at spotting teams, but with us they never had a chance. We were like amoebas oozing through the tables. Transparent. Whenever a pit boss would start getting wise, we’d change shape. The bosses knew something was up, but every time they’d pin one of us down, they’d just create an opening someplace else. Pushing on a balloon. On top of that, the bankroll Damon put together was enormous. I personally started the day with two hundred grand in a Betsey Johnson bag. And I was one of the lightweights.

  Hold up, Curtis says. You’re telling me Damon helped put this team together. Why did he think it’d be a good idea to hit his own place? That makes no sense to me.

  We didn’t hit the Spectacular.

  Curtis shakes his head to clear it. But the Point lost more money than—

  Listen to me. We didn’t make a dime off the Point. They knew we were coming, and they immediately shut us down. They had security all over us from the moment we stepped through the door. Every time a count would go up they’d lower the table limit, drop the minimum to bring in the grinds. Every time we’d ID a weak dealer he’d disappear. It was like playing tick-tack-toe: it was obvious we were gonna spend the whole night fighting to break even. We left after an hour. The shift boss was waiting for us at the exit, handing us these cheap-ass gift baskets full of shampoo and lotion and shit. Big grin on his face. Better luck next time, assholes.

  But—

  Just listen. That was the agreement we had with Damon. Get it? We’d make the Point our last stop, we’d go in, and we’d get cut off at the knees. Damon would show up to work earlier in the day with screen-capture photos of all of us, he’d give a we-happy-few-we-band-of-brothers speech to his security detail, and he’d be a hero. Immediate induction into the casino-management hall of fame. The Spectacular: The One They Couldn’t Break! You see the picture? Remember, Stanley and I were the only ones who knew Damon was in on the deal. The rest of the team was bouncing around the tables with steam coming out of their ears, trying to figure out how we got burned so fast. Not a lot of acting was required.

  Veronica, Curtis says, the Spectacular got slaughtered at the tables that night.

  Not by us.

  Well, then what the hell happened?

  She shrugs theatrically. Last I heard from AC, she says, management at the Point’s brought in the cops. You know as well as I do how casinos like to avoid doing that, so they must be pretty sure they’ve got a serious problem on the inside. How is Damon explaining all this?

  I couldn’t tell you. Whatever he’s saying, he’s not saying it to me.

  When the last time you talked to him?

  Not since I left Philly. Damon’s not real big on using the phone. He likes to keep in touch by fax. Which is funny, because he’s about as dyslexic as they come. Can’t spell worth a damn.

  Curtis’s forehead is starting to ache from furrowing his brow. He pushes his glasses down his nose to massage his temples, trying to loosen himself up. Even if it was an inside job, he says, somebody on your team had to have known about it. It must’ve been coordinated. You said your team was in the Point for an hour before you gave up. Can you account for everybody during that time? Do you know where everybody was?

  She takes a long while to answer. He’s given up on her, is trying to come up with another way of asking the question, when she finally speaks.

  The team was divided into two groups, she says. I led one. The other group was led by a guy who calls himself Graham Argos. He isn’t somebody I knew beforehand, and I don’t think Stanley knew him well, either. But he was good, really good. One of these MIT hotshots, or so he said. Excellent counter, great actor. Totally nondescript. I had five or six conversations with him—long conversations, one on one—and I’m still not sure I could pick him out of a lineup. He looked a little different each time I saw him.

  Veronica glances at Curtis’s face, but her eyes don’t quite focus, and he can tell she’s seeing somebody else, remembering. Maybe fifteen minutes after we walked into the Point, she says, Graham disappeared. We didn’t see him again until we got back to our suite at Resorts to split the take. He met us there. He told us some story about how Spectacular security was up in his face, making threats, and how he got scared and left. I didn’t believe it at the time. I just figured he’d given up early on making any money and didn’t feel like waiting around for the rest of us. Now I’m not so sure.

  Are you still in touch with him? Have you talked to him lately?

  No, she says. I haven’t. But you have.

  The Whistler. The guy with the teeth.

  Veronica nods. He’s got some caps that he wears sometimes, she says. Dental veneers, I guess they’re called. So don’t lean too hard on the gap as a way to spot him.

  Curtis’s mind is clicking, rolling over like the board at 30th Street Station, sorting through everything the guy—Argos—said on the phone last night. The same phrases keep shuffling to the top: I know what happened in AC. Lay the fuck off me. I’m the guy you’re really looking for. Veronica, Curtis asks, if you and Stanley didn’t know Argos beforehand, how did you get partnered up with him?

  She’s smiling as she replies, but her voice is angry, brittle. Damon spotted Graham at the Point maybe six months ago, she says. Graham was working with a weak partner. That’s the only reason Damon burned him. He could tell Graham was good. Instead of running him out, Damon put him on the payroll as a position player. And then one night, a few months later, Damon asked Stanley if he’d be into putting together a blackjack team. For old times’ sake. Because he’d met this kid—you can guess the rest.

  Fuck, Curtis says.

  He’s reaching way back now, through years of memories. Damon at Leonard Wood, at Twentynine Palms. Things he did and said coming back in snatches. The expression on his face at certain moments. The way he always seemed to stand a little apart, winding everybody up, watching them run themselves down. Patterns are forming that Curtis has never noticed before, or never wanted to.

  Curtis, Veronica says. Seriously. You should go home.

  And at this point that’s pretty much what Curtis wants to do. His nose tickles, his face grows hot, and he’s blindsided by a memory, something he hasn’t thought of in twenty years or more: a trip he took to the shore with his dad and Stanley and some gambler friends. Curtis couldn’t have been more than six or seven. Somebody told him a story about pirate treasure; he found a corroded can, picked out a spot on the beach, and spent the afternoon slinging sand while everyone else horsed around in the surf. When his hole got hip-deep he ran to show Stanley, but by the time they made it back, it had filled with seawater. Knock it off with the whining, kid. This is no good. You gotta find a map. Take it from me, kid: a story is not the same as a map. Curtis has no map. After all these years, he still hasn’t learned. Tell him the right story and he’ll start digging.

  He blinks, looks up. They’re coming to the end of the fake sky. He thinks of the gun on his belt, of the wedding ring locked up topside, of Albedo cruising the Strip in his big black car. He’s been lucky. There are worse ways this could have gone.

  But he’s still not quite finished. Where was Stanley? he asks.

  Huh?

  While your team was in the Spectacular. Where was he?

  She looks confused for a second. He was back at t
he hotel, she says. At Resorts. Graham and I ran the team in the field. Stanley was with us at the beginning, at the first couple of places we hit, but that’s all. He got too tired.

  She grimaces, then looks away, pretending to check out a mannequin in a shop window. Stanley doesn’t get around like he used to, she says. To function in a team like ours, you have to move quickly. Stanley can’t.

  He’s pretty sick, isn’t he?

  I don’t know. He won’t see doctors. I kept telling him to go. I kept saying that I was just going to call a fucking ambulance. I guess I should have. And now—

  Her voice is steady, but she’s still looking away. Her hands are balled into fists. The fake sky is falling away behind them. Ahead, the living statue stands in its marble circle, a daub of pure white, a lone candle in the gloom.

  I think maybe he’s just bored, Veronica says. He wants a challenge that’s worthy of him. He’s afraid he’s wasted his one real gift.

  He nods, half-listening, distracted by what he’s still puzzling through. Then he notices her scowl.

  I don’t mean gambling, she says. I mean looking.

  She’s quiet for a second. Do you know Frank Stella? she asks.

  He’s a gambler?

  He’s a painter. A post-painterly abstractionist. I heard a story once about Frank Stella from one of my professors. Stella thought that Ted Williams—the Hall of Fame hitter for the Red Sox?—he thought Ted Williams was the greatest living American. He thought Ted Williams was a genius because Williams could see faster than anybody else alive. He could count the stitches on a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball as it was coming across the plate. Frank Stella would have loved Stanley Glass. For Stanley, vision is action. It’s a pure, discarnate thing. The swing and the hit aren’t even necessary. The look itself is the home run.

  They’re back in the Great Hall. Veronica’s eyes are aimed at the ceiling: the fleshy queen and her allegorical court, afloat above awed onlookers. Armored horsemen on rearing stallions. Heralds and angels blowing trumpets. A winged lion statue. Gray cumulous hung between white spiral columns. Curtis walks quietly beside her, following her eyes, half-aware of the big painting. Thinking instead of a trick Stanley used to do: Curtis’s dad would throw a deck of cards across the room—let’s play fifty-two pickup—and Stanley would collect them, naming every facedown card before he turned it over.

  They’re on the escalators now. Down below sunlight blazes orange through the doors of the Doge’s Palace. The Ace Hardware guys have thinned out; the hallway is less crowded. A masked mattacino is performing there, comparing his flexed biceps with a security officer’s.

  Veronica is still looking up. Veronese, she says, pointing. Did that dude have some balls, or what? Check out that forced perspective. Look how beefy those guys at the bottom are. I’ll bet when they unveiled the real one in the Hall of the Great Council people were afraid to stand under it. Have you ever seen it?

  The real one? Curtis says. I think so, yeah. Couple of years back, when I was on leave in Italy. Does Stanley still talk about going over there?

  Just about all the time, yeah.

  Why doesn’t he? Short of funds?

  No. Money is never an issue with him. He just never had a passport.

  Veronica steps off the escalator and moves fast toward the exit. Curtis follows her, not sure where she’s going. The mattacino spots her as she walks by, doffing his feathered cap—Come sta, bella?—and she sidesteps him without breaking stride, flips him off without bothering to look at him. A second later she’s out the door.

  Curtis catches up with her against the railing of the outdoor canal. The sun is sliding toward the mountains—big and soft, a yolk on a tilted frypan—and the sky is a yellow muddle interrupted by pink flares of contrails. She’s chewing on a thumbnail, arms crossed tight on her chest. Looking at the moored gondolas without really seeing them. Jesus, I fucking hate those guys, she says. People in masks creep me out.

  Curtis frowns, then grins, studying her profile. Except when it’s you wearing one, he says. Then it’s okay. I got that right?

  She nods. Used to be, she says, when I was a kid, I’d wear a mask the whole week of Halloween. I’d never take it off, not even in the bathtub. My mom would bring home these blue gel-masks from the spa where she worked, and I’d sleep in ’em. It was the only way I could sleep. Otherwise I’d just lie there all night. Wondering how I could ever be sure that anybody was anybody. Or that I was myself, even. My poor mom had me in counseling like you would not believe. I probably took the MMPI six times before I so much as heard of the SAT.

  Curtis leans on the rail to Veronica’s left, looking down at the water. A guy with a net on a long aluminum pole is fishing trash off the surface, sweeping it back and forth. He looks like a gondolier without a boat.

  Veronica shifts her weight, moves closer. She must have showered abovedecks before she cleared out this morning: she smells like the hotel soap. What about you? she says. What were you for Halloween, back in the day?

  Curtis doesn’t look at her. My grandparents were Jehovah’s Witnesses, he says. I never got to do all that much for Halloween.

  But as he says it, he’s remembering a party he went to once in Springfield with some of the guys from Leonard Wood. Black shades. The charcoal suit he wore to his grandmother’s funeral. A piece of coiled handset cord snaking from his ear to his jacket. Damon was there too, in a regimental tailcoat and a bicorn hat, no telling where he found them. Stupid, the things we want. Stupid to want anything.

  What are you gonna do now? Curtis says.

  Right now? I’m gonna hit some tables. Get paid. My bankroll’s getting—

  Not right now. I mean in general.

  She fakes a laugh, tosses her hair. Honestly? she says. I have no idea. How ’bout you?

  He smiles softly. I was hoping Damon would get me on with security at the Spectacular, he says. But that’s starting to look pretty unlikely.

  You still in the Marines?

  I retired in January. Got my twenty, got out.

  Twenty years? she says. Christ. What did you do?

  In the Corps? I was an MP. Military policeman.

  No shit?

  No shit.

  Wow, she says. So you’re not just playing around with this detective business.

  Curtis laughs, shakes his head. I didn’t really do anything like that in the Corps, he says. I was more about security. Guard duty. Stuff like that.

  She’s looking at him again, sizing him up. You were a security guard for twenty years? she says.

  Base security, rear-area security on the battlefield, processing prisoners of war. I did other stuff, too. But security’s what I liked.

  That’s some pretty glamorous shit, Curtis.

  Curtis just smiles, lets that pass. Below, the canal-cleaner has caught a bunch of red carnations; they drip over the edge of his broad flat net.

  What did you like about it? Veronica says.

  Curtis thinks about that. He opens his mouth a couple of times to answer, closes it again. I like getting in the way of stuff, he says after a while. I guess I just like being in the way.

  She laughs, shakes her head. That’s it? she says.

  Basically, yeah.

  That’s bullshit.

  Curtis sighs, straightens up, sighs again. Back in ’81, he says, when Reagan got shot, I was about two miles away, in high school, at football practice. They pulled us all off the field. And then they kept showing it on TV. You remember that?

  I was in—let me think—third grade.

  That guy Tim McCarthy, Curtis says. The Secret Service agent, the one who caught the fourth bullet. He jumped right in front of it. I remember it just blew my mind that somebody could do that.

  She’s giving him a strange look. Skeptical. He can see it at the edge of his vision. He’s not sure why he’s telling her this. He keeps his eyes trained on the water.

  You played football in high school? Veronica says.

  I did. I was on
the offensive line.

  You were not.

  I was. I was a guard.

  You went to high school in D.C., right?

  Dunbar, all four years.

  She’s studying him closely. How tall are you, Curtis? she says. If you don’t mind my asking?

  I don’t mind. I’m five-seven.

  Five-seven. And the other kids were—

  All about eleven feet tall, yeah.

  That cracks her up. Okay, she says. Cool. And after you got out of the hospital? After all the gnarly physical therapy? What did you do then?

  Curtis laughs too. I went to college, he says. For about a minute. Then I went into the Marine Corps.

  They’re quiet for a while. She looks to the right, past the façade of the Ca’ d’Oro, toward the clocktower—twenty-four-hour dial, gold zodiac loop—and the pulsing readerboard above it. She shifts her weight as she turns. Her hip comes to rest against Curtis’s leg: scrawny and sharp, fever-warm. He looks down. There’s the tattoo again, more of it this time. The two figures under the tree are a bearded old man and a young man with a sword. Two triangles are superimposed over the scene: one pointed up, one pointed down. Veronica’s skin is dark, tanning-bed tan.

  You ever think about going back to school, Curtis?

  That’s pretty much what my wife wants me to do.

  I’ll bet she’s real excited about you being out here, isn’t she?

  Yeah. We weren’t exactly on speaking terms when I left. She’s pretty upset.

  Veronica’s hair is sliding off her back, across her left shoulder. She drops her head forward and the rest of it comes down. Behind her, the hotel readerboard is playing video of a juggler next to flashing blue text: A PEACOCK WITH A THOUSAND EYES!

  Curtis, she says, how come you’re not wearing a wedding ring?

  He takes a long breath, moves away a little.

  Is that a bad question?

  No, he says. It’s a good question. I’ll give you an honest answer.