by Frank Sibila
“Okay. I’ll make sure the door’s open. Be seeing you.”
She hung up, typed a four-digit code on the keypad beside the toilet, heard the front door unlock, and leaned back in her mountain of bubbles, pausing only to position her breasts as a pair of islands floating in the surface of Lake Tub. Had there been a couple of miniature palm trees sprouting from the nipples, and perhaps a couple of bedraggled castaways regaling each other with the captions from old New Yorker cartoons, the illusion might have been perfect. If inferior to the unenhanced thing.
It never hurt one to put one’s best foot forward, in delicate business negotiations.
After a few seconds she heard the front door open, and footsteps ringing on the cold parquet floor of her entranceway.
“In the back!” she shouted. “Don’t worry about my modesty! I have none!”
The man who had introduced himself to her as Frank from New York, the one who had given her the ground rules of her aborted drive to New York, the one who Veronica had prevented her from speaking to since the mission began, entered, wearing the same this-is-certainly-over-the-top expression that must have been stamped on his face since the lobby.
His eyes widened slightly as he beheld the archipelago of Lake Tub, but she had to give him credit for recovering quickly.
“All right,” he said. “Here’s my plan.”
Crap.
After the last few days with Yorick, she’d been hoping Frank would say he’d changed his mind.
THIRTEEN
WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS stays in Vegas, and sometimes that’s a good thing.
The reception to which the various attending members of the International Cat Bed Designer’s Association were invited looked like a hallucination ramped up to twelve, complete with elves and unicorns. There were drag queens, strippers of all four sexes, furries, fake Sinatras, and professional dwarves. There were also Elvises walking around, none of them particularly persuasive recreations of the King, but hey, you might as well have an Elvis if you have anything. The sign-in table at the door was manned by a strange elfin girl with magenta hair, whose oversized T-shirt bore the legend I SLEEP ON A CAT BED MYSELF and had an instant photo of herself curled up on what could be more properly called a St. Bernard bed to prove it. The music was pounding. It honestly didn’t matter that some people sensed that they were missing at least part of the backstory behind all this; the sensory overload more than took care of all that, especially with a gospel preacher testifying in one corner and a man dressed like Abraham Lincoln reciting the Gettysburg Address in another.
It was into this maelstrom of wholly contradictory impressions that Yorick, Urich, and Anastasia found themselves summoned, two days after the meeting at the Salt Lake City airport. They were bleary-eyed and headachy and not at all ready for the size of the occasion they had wandered into, and were not at all mollified by the sight of a fat woman in a towering scarlet wig chasing a man in a tuxedo with a huge rubber fish. Urich, blinking, said, “My life is now being written by Benny Hill.”
The fat lady had caught up with the man in the tuxedo and was beating him around the head and face with the fish, to the amusement of a number of middle-aged women known for the elegant design of cat beds. Yorick said, “And to think I’m paying for this.”
“You’re paying? How are you paying if Felicia still has your check?”
“Something always comes up,” Yorick said mysteriously. “Besides, I’m enjoying myself. I’m not sure I understand the point of it all, but then, that happens to be equally true of myself and most things. —Oooh, look, Swedish meatballs.”
Keith Custer arrived at the reception in a state of mild pique. This had been his default state, unless you count debauchery, since before his wedding to Monica; the various debaucheries with which he’d occupied himself since his arrival in Vegas the day before—you can really get a lot in within a single twenty-four-hour period, if like Keith you start on the plane—had failed to mitigate his irritation at being summoned to this bullshit meeting by a guy who was supposed to be making it convenient for him to cheat on his wife. The tap dancers and the trained seal honking on the kazoo just made the whole thing surreal, and the one element capable of rendering Keith more irritated at this juncture was anything that made his life more surreal.
As promised, or warned, depending on your point of view, he found Frank Sibila waiting for him at the bar. The bastard was wearing a shiny black tuxedo and drinking something pink, one infinitesimal spot of which had already become a little buggie in the center of his cummerbund. As he drew closer, Keith perceived that the liquid in question was not some fruity drink, but Pepto-Bismol. The last few days must have been as stressful for him as dealing with Monica on a daily basis was for Keith.
Keith grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around. “Who the hell do you think you are?”
Frank stuck out his lower lip and assumed a French accent. “I am Frigate-Captain Hugues Duroy de Chaumereys, master of the Medusa.”
This stopped Keith cold. “What?”
Frank shrugged. “Famous shipwreck. Look it up.”
There is a certain sensation, well-known to the readers of novels, that occurs when pages stick together and more than one is turned at the same time. You are having a fine old time listening to Joe and Bill debate a visit to a brothel while on a fishing boat in the Mediterranean, and then you turn the page and find yourself parachuted into the middle of a conversation between Betty and Patricia, fighting a polar bear on an ice floe. Keith Custer had just discovered that it could happen in conversations as well. “What what what what what WHAT?”
“You asked me who the hell I think I am and I thought I’d give somebody else’s name for once. I always did think that was a stupid question. What are people supposed to say when asked that?”
Keith circled the moment like a small plane whose pilot had just discovered a runway too short for a successful landing. It took him all of five seconds to find the landing lights once again, and snarl, “I oughta sue the shit out of you.”
“For confusing you?”
“No! For canceling our contract and then dragging me to Vegas to endanger the alibi I paid for!”
Frank swigged pink, then belched. “I cancelled your contract because I don’t like you. But I’m still supporting that alibi. We’re still business associates, and it’s because we’re business associates that you’re supposed to be in Vegas. So. Do you want to go into business?”
“With you? No!”
“I didn’t think so, Keith, but that little yes and no qualifies as a business meeting. You can even write it off on your taxes if you want to. Now you can go away and either enjoy the rest of this party, or fuck off in some other, more spectacular manner. In the meantime, I advise you, with all due seriousness, that it would be a very, very bad idea to check out a little package I left for you in the coat check, down the stairs to the right.”
Keith positioned the tip of his nose one inch from the tip of Frank’s. Spittle flecked his lips as he snarled, “You don’t expect me to fall for that!”
Frank placed five fingertips on Keith’s chest and gave him a gentle nudge, too polite to be called a shove, but not even remotely enough to qualify as the first sally in a physical confrontation. It was almost loving, practically Gandhian in its denial of the hostile impulse, and it drove Keith six inches back, mostly out of disbelief. “Not now that I’ve warned you. Going to that coat room would be a very, very bad idea. I don’t advise it at all.”
“Fine,” Keith said. “I won’t.”
“Good.”
There was a moment of uncomfortable silence.
“I mean it,” Keith said.
Frank licked some pink off his lips. “That’s probably wise.”
“I’m telling you. I’m not fooled.”
“Good. You’re better off.”
The moment could h
ave been put on a pedestal, like a sculpture surrounded by museum patrons intent on discerning its meaning at every angle.
A certain terrible cunning entered Keith Custer’s eyes. “Still trying to outsmart me, aren’t you, yarn-spinner. You want me to think that you don’t want me to go down there, but the subtle truth is you really don’t want me to go down there!”
“No,” Frank said in a monotone. “Please. Don’t.”
But Keith Custer would not be denied. With a hearty a-ha and a heroic tilt to his jaw, he turned his back on his nemesis and fled, his beeline to the exit so determined that even some of the observers who didn’t know the full story here imagined they could see the dotted line marking his path.
Bugs Bunny said of Elmer Fudd, He don’t know me vewy well, do he?
There was a bowl of baby carrots on the bar. Frank selected one and bit into it, finding deep satisfaction in the volume of the crunch.
Monica Custer, arriving late in a sparkling red gown with a slit up the side, wandered the assemblage with bugging eyes and an expression midway between hysteria and religious epiphany. Hit on fourteen times by the time she reached the bar where Frank sat nursing his pink drink, but as of yet unable to find her husband, she climbed aboard the stool and ordered something capable of sterilizing surgical instruments.
“Nice party,” she said simply.
“Nice isn’t the word,” Frank told her.
“What is?”
“Surreal.”
“Well, it is that.”
“True. More importantly, it’s that by design.”
“I can’t wait to hear this explanation.”
“Third Law of Lying. When you can’t create an acceptable truth, bury the falsehood in excessive detail. This party has Elvises, Elviras, cat bed designers, at least two guys dressed up like a camel, and fat ladies chasing tuxedo-clad guys with fish; we have actors walking around with instructions to have nonsensical but memorable arguments at regular intervals; we have a substantial door prize with runner-up prizes that essentially amount to dog doo. Against all this, who wants to untangle all the threads and find the truth beneath it all?”
“But who are you hiding it from?” Monica wondered. “I already know my husband’s a dirtbag. Beth Yorick already knows that her husband came here to get laid. None of this hides anything from either of the two people you were contracted to fool.”
“True enough,” Frank said, “if I admit even for a second that you and Beth Yorick were the targets of all this. But even if you were, who says that you’re the only two involved? How do you know that tonight’s guest list doesn’t include half a dozen other clients you haven’t heard of, along with an unknown amount of significant others? How do you know that I’m not using this very public and very memorable event to rope every so-called innocent here into backing alibis I’ll still be using six months from now? And, most pressingly in your case, how do you know that my professional refusal to betray confidences already contracted for, means that I must always take an active part in preventing my clients from tripping over their own exposed genitalia?”
Monica blinked several times. “What?”
“You made a convenient tactical error, Monica. You dialed your cell phone in front of me. Sure, you didn’t let me see the keypad or the screen, but I’m much better at seeing what your fingers are doing than you think. The truth is that I’ve been in touch with Felicia since shortly after I left you in Salt Lake City, that I met with her yesterday, that I’ve settled with her for the return of Yorick’s check, and that I’ve had even less difficulty suggesting lucrative opportunities in the form of a certain well-known fellow with a loose wallet and a pretty intense impulse-control problem.”
“You mean Yorick?”
“Don’t be silly. I don’t have any motive for screwing with Yorick.”
“Keith?”
“Now you’re getting into areas of client confidentiality. Understand that I’m not about to tell you where he is. My professional obligations require me to remain silent on that point. But I did advise him that it would be a very bad idea to go to the coat room. Call me later if you want to let me know how it comes down.”
She blinked several times, still unbelieving, then grinned the broadest of all possible grins, pecked him on the cheek, and launched herself off the bar stool, a scarlet comet as much a blur as Superman’s cape had ever been.
Later, not too much later but later, Frank received a text message from Keith Custer, reading simply: NEED YOU RIGHT NOW. He smiled, deleted the message, and ordered another club soda, feeling a great peace descend over him.
Outside, at the invitations table, Destinii used an iPhone to answer her text message. “Here’s a good one,“ she said. “This married guy from Jersey has been stringing along his girlfriend for six months now, disappearing for weeks at a time and returning with the admission that he’s a secret agent. Now she’s grown skeptical and he wants us to stage a couple of feats of Bondian heroism to support his pose of derring-do. Has a decent budget, too. I swear, I always believed that dodge a myth. Do guys really tell women that? And do women really believe it?”
Max, who sat next to her in a plain white T-shirt and kilt, using his own laptop to kill the giant floating heads in DOOM II, immediately provided a tinge of Scottish brogue. “I could tell you, Miss, but—”
Destinii rolled her eyes. “Oh, shut up.”
“—then I’d have to—”
“And he continues,” Destinii muttered.
“—kill you.” Continuing the brogue: “What are you doing after the party?”
“I don’t know, Marty, what are you doing?”
“Anything to do in this town after hours?”
“I dunno,” Destinii said. “One or two things.”
“Wanna do ’em together?”
“No comic book stores,” Destinii said.
“It’s a deal,” said Max, who still hadn’t looked up from his aliens.
Destinii rolled her eyes and turned the next e-mail and wondered just why the hell it took some guys so long to notice.
George Yorick, who was wearing a white tuxedo with ruffles, had succeeded in baptizing it in several places with the Swedish meatballs from the buffet where he’d parked himself for the past twenty minutes. Jackson Pollock would have been proud of the spurts of brown color besmirching his elegance. Yorick was aware of the mess, even more aware of the ruination of the tux he’d purchased with cash just that morning, but didn’t care: There are foods that inflict miracles upon the space–time continuum by rendering infinite the space our bellies provide to contain them, and Swedish meatballs had always been the phenomenon incapable of filling his own black hole. So he ate, and ate, and for the moment forgot all about his arrested lust, failing to notice the softening of the daggers that his poor betrayed wife was staring at his back.
He did turn around, with sauce-lubricated lips, when she patted him on the back. “Beth?”
“Hello, George.”
He hurriedly located and made good use of a napkin. “How did you find me?”
“At any given party, I will always find you near the Swedish meatballs.”
He looked down. “I meant here, here. This city.”
She looked sad. “Oh, George. I always knew where you were going and what you were doing.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“I’m given to understand that,“ she said, with genuine sympathy. “But I heard that it wasn’t for lack of trying. That’s going to be pretty hard to live with, George. I’m not sure that I can manage it. What are we going to do?”
He averted his eyes. “I’d say we should go to my room and talk about it, but I’m not sure I’m allowed. It’s my party.”
She looked at him. “What do you mean it’s your party?”
“I mean I’m paying for it. Every cent.”
&
nbsp; “We can’t afford that.”
“Well, ummm, actually, it turns out we can.”
“Really.”
“It’s been an interesting few days,” he said apologetically. “No actual sex, but some luck at the slot machines, a road trip, a house built out of rubber bands, and this. Wanna call a lawyer or shall we dance?”
Enjoying the calm in the center of the hurricane, feeling the bliss that comes with enjoying a oneness with all things, Frank Sibila thought a few last thoughts about lying.
Lying, he thought, is a double-edged sword.
Lying hurts and prevents hurt. Lying wounds and salves wounds. Lying makes things possible that are not always possible. Lying eliminates opportunities and creates new ones. Lying is artless but it can be an art. Lying is a way of life and no way to live. I offer no apologies for lying and yet I’m sorry for it. Am I large? Do I contain multitudes? Yes, I contain multitudes. I contain so many multitudes that I could just shit.
He also thought of the age-old tradition of the gunslinger brought out of retirement for one last job, the one who sees another opportunity for greatness in taking down Black Bart down Oklahoma way. It’s usually a bad idea. But the question remains. How did he know how to quit in the first place? At one point in his storied career did he say, you know, this is an awfully stupid way of making a living?
How many times is it possible to belly-flop into pools of crap, come up smelling like roses, and ignore the law of averages that says it can only happen a limited number of times?
Maybe, he thought, it’s time to quit. Maybe this is as good as it gets.
He was still contemplating a change in careers when a drunken fat guy wearing a fez, one name-tag identifying him as Starshine from the International Stripper’s Convention and another saying don’t be stupid, he was one of the cat bed designers—but who was probably none of the above—found him at the bar and declared, “You’re that guy!”
By this point the had moved on to the hard stuff, ginger ale. “What guy?”
