The Mirror Thief (8 page)

Curtis shifts his weight a little. I don’t know how Stanley does it, he says.

Well, Stanley’s got Veronica. And besides, Stanley doesn’t know anything else. Kagami smiles to himself. Stanley also has a supernatural gift, he says. You did not hear that from me.

The doors slide open on a little glassed-in chamber, which opens in turn onto a rubber-flagstone path bordered by rosemary and budding desertwillow. A tiny restaurant at the terrace’s edge:
RAVENCREST
branded on a wooden sign. White tablecloths flutter in the light breeze.

Kagami walks slowly, hands in his pockets. So, he says, how’s old Donald doing these days? I haven’t talked to him in years.

He’s doing real good. He’s not Donald anymore, though.

That’s right, I forgot. What is it now?

Badrudin Hassan. He remarried a couple years back, too. He’s playing gigs again. Being Muslim and being married both seem to suit him real well.

His wife’s a young little thing, isn’t she?

I don’t know about little, but she’s younger, yeah.

Kagami chuckles, kicks a stone chip from the rubber path. What about you, kid? he says. What’s a young fellow like you do after retirement? Work on your golf game?

Curtis smiles. A friend of mine is setting me up with a job, he says. Security supervisor. He’s a shift boss at a joint in Atlantic City, a new place. I know him from the Corps.

He anybody I’d know?

Damon Blackburn. He works at the Spectacular.

That’s in the Marina District, right? Kagami pulls the restaurant door open, holds it for Curtis. I don’t suppose, he says, that he’d be the friend of yours who’s looking for Stanley?

Yeah, Curtis says. He is.

The maître d’ greets Kagami deferentially and seats them at the terrace’s edge. Curtis chooses the strip steak from the succinct leatherbound menu and looks down into the valley, shading his face with a cupped hand. Somewhere on the ridge above them a pair of ravens calls back and forth; Curtis can’t see them at first. Then one flutters down and lands atop the restaurant. The Mormon temple is in full view, below and a little to the north, like a dead bug at this angle, with its six spires and its battened brown roof. The spires’ golden tips blaze orange in the late-afternoon light.

Kagami’s talking to the waiter, ordering appetizers and wine. The waiter nods, walks away, and Kagami looks across the table, leans forward in his chair. So, Curtis, he says. I gotta ask. Are you sorry to be missing out on all the action? In Iraq, I mean?

Did the war start?

Not that I’ve heard. Sounds like pretty soon, though. I guess you probably know a lot of people who are over there.

Curtis takes a sip of water, then another one. It’s ice-cold, but the glass is barely sweating. The second raven joins its mate on the gambrel roof.

It’s complicated, Curtis says. In a lot of ways, sure, I wish I was over there. I trained for it. I trained other guys to do it. I’d like to be there taking care of my people. But in most ways—most ways that matter—I’m glad to be sitting this one out. I’m not a kid anymore. I got a wife to think about. And when I got hurt in Kosovo, that rearranged my thinking on a few things, I guess.

If you hadn’t retired, you think you’d be over there now?

Hard to say. Probably I would.

You were a military policeman, weren’t you?

I was an MP, yeah.

Stationed in the Philippines?

That was a long time ago. When my dad got out of prison in ’89, I put in for a transfer to the Second Marines. I wanted to be closer to him.

You’ve been at Camp Lejeune, then?

That’s right.

You ever spend any time at Guantánamo Bay, Curtis?

Curtis feels his stomach tighten—up high, under his ribs—and he takes a quick involuntary breath. Kagami sees it, was waiting for it. Yeah, Curtis says. A little bit.

The waiter reappears, sets down a plate of frybread, some jalapeños stuffed with goatcheese, a tiny baked pumpkin. Opens and pours the wine. Across the table, the sun is doubled in the lenses of Kagami’s spectacles; Curtis can’t see his eyes at all.

Kagami waits for the waiter to go before he speaks again. How long ago were you there? he asks.

I got TDY’d to Gitmo about a year ago. I was there for six months.

Because of the prisoners?

The detainees, yeah. They were moving them to the new facility.

Camp Delta.

That’s right.

Kagami cuts himself a slice of pumpkin, takes a piece of frybread. So what’s it like? he asks. The facility? He says
facility
like he’s handling something dead.

Curtis lifts his glass, takes a sip of wine, then another sip of water. Steel mesh enclosures, he says. Eight by eight by six-and-a-half. They have flush toilets, bedframes, sinks. An exercise area.

Pretty luxurious.

At Camp X-Ray they were using Port-A-Cans and sleeping on the deck, so it’s a step up. These are bad dudes, Walter. Really evil guys.

I hear they got kids locked up there. Twelve, thirteen years old.

Juveniles are in a separate facility, Curtis says.

One of the ravens arcs past them, lands with a thump in the middle of a table a few yards away. The waiter calmly shoos it off with a dishrag, and it hops onto the rock wall at the terrace’s edge. Up close, it’s much bigger than Curtis had realized. He and Kagami watch it awhile.

Look, Curtis says. I don’t think anybody’s happy with the way things are. I don’t like it myself. It’s one reason I decided to retire.

Curtis has never told anyone this before; he’s surprised now to hear himself say it. He pops a stuffed pepper in his mouth, feels the sting on his palate and in his sinuses.

I’m not trying to cross-examine you, kid, Kagami says.

I don’t know all that much about it, Curtis says. To tell you the truth. Gitmo’s a Navy base, but the Army’s responsible for security inside the camp. I was just there to handle the logistics of the transfer. I never had a lot of contact with the detainees.

Well. It’s somebody else’s problem now, right? You’re joining us in the gaming industry.

Yeah. Honest work at last.

Kagami laughs. I see a lot of you ex-military guys in security, he says. Lots of former MPs. Your buddy at the Spectacular—Damon, right? Was he an MP, too?

An MP, then later an MSG. An embassy marine, in Bolivia and Pakistan.

Sounds like serious business.

Damon’s a sharp guy. I’m looking forward to working with him.

That’s good to hear. You know, Kagami says, I don’t think you told me
why
your friend is trying to get in touch with Stanley Glass.

Kagami is smiling, slowly tearing his frybread; it falls to his plate in nickel-size chunks. His eyes are still hidden by the reflected sunset, but Curtis can tell from the tone of his voice that he already knows the answer to his question, has heard the news from somebody in Atlantic City and figured it out. He’s probably known since they walked into the restaurant. All that stuff about Gitmo was designed to rattle Curtis, to make him sweat a little. A soft spot Kagami knows about somehow. How?

The waiter comes with their entrées, unfolds a stand, sets his tray down. Kagami has ordered braised duck with blackberry sauce; Curtis’s steak is served with a tiny bowl of steaming posole. Everything is very good.

They eat in silence for a moment. Curtis chews slowly, sets his fork on the edge of his plate, looks down into the valley. He opts to stick to the script, see how far it gets him. Damon’s trying to clear up a misunderstanding, he says. Two months ago he wrote Stanley a marker for ten grand, and Stanley hasn’t made any payments on it. On Tuesday night—midnight Eastern—it’s going to be delinquent. That’d be bad for Damon and for Stanley both. Damon just wants to work something out.

And that’s why he asked you to come out here.

Yes sir.

Kagami takes off his glasses, polishes them on the edge of the tablecloth. Curtis, he says, you and I both know that doesn’t make a goddamn bit of sense. Ten grand is not a lot of money, not for a joint like the Spectacular. And there’s a hell of a difference between delinquent and irrecuperable. Your friend won’t take any heat for writing that marker. Sure, it’s cute that he’s worried about Stanley—but at this point Stanley is a celebrity, a goddamn institution. Casino hosts and credit agents from one end of this country to the other will comp him six ways to Sunday just for darkening their door, no matter whose black book he shows up in.
Casinos love professional gamblers, Curtis. They’re great for business. They’re like saints. Proof that salvation is really possible.

Curtis looks up, doesn’t say anything. He knows there’s more coming, and he’s just going to wait for it. A raven strides into view from under the tables, disappears again. The wind shifts. From somewhere in the mountains he can hear the engines of a lowflying A-10; he thinks about the Gulf again, but only for a moment.

Kagami eases his glasses back onto his face. I heard an interesting story recently, he says. About two weeks ago, a team of cardcounters hit a string of casinos in Atlantic City. Like you’d expect, the bosses are being pretty tightlipped about how much these guys won, but the rumor mill’s been throwing around some pretty goddamn unbelievable numbers. In any case, the managers could look at their counts at the end of the night and see right away that something bad had happened. Do you know how often cardcounters make hauls like that without getting burned, Curtis?

No idea.

Never. In all my years, I’ve heard of it happening maybe three or four times. Always to a
single
casino. These guys clobbered four or five places inside of twelve hours. That is unprecedented.

Kagami lifts his wineglass, drains it, refills it from the bottle. I’m bringing this up in the present context, he says, because—funny thing—the joint that got nailed worst of all was the Spectacular. What strikes me as
really
strange is that the Point was also the
last
joint to get hit. Hours after the other ones. Is this ringing any bells with you?

You just keep going, Curtis says. You’re doing real good.

I have it on pretty solid authority that security at the Point was tipped off in advance that these guys were coming, and they thought they were ready. All hands were on deck. In AC, of course, you guys aren’t legally permitted to bar counters the way we do out here, but there are other defenses, as I’m sure you know. From what I hear, the Spectacular threw out the whole bag of tricks: lowering table limits, reshuffling decks, the works. Pissed a lot of people off. And they
still
got massacred. From where
I sit—and I’m speaking now from the perspective of a casino manager—that does not look too good.

Yeah, Curtis says. You could say that.

Kagami grins, shakes his head. I’ll tell you a secret, he says. I’m jealous as hell of these guys. I used to put teams like that together, you know. Some of them were pretty good. But these guys! This was the kind of score people make Hollywood movies about. Weekend before Mardi Gras. Right? Very heavy traffic at the tables. Way I hear it, they were dropping out of nowhere. Tracking shuffles, cutting cards to each other, moving counters and spotters around as much as bettors. Totally invisible. At our best, we were never anywhere close to that good.

Kagami snaps his fingers, as if suddenly remembering something. But, hey! he says. You know who
could
put a team like that together?

Don’t make me say it, Walter.

Stanley goddamn Glass, is who. And now you’re telling me that your buddy, Damon Blackburn of the United States Marine Corps, loaned Stanley—a notorious professional gambler and known associate of hotshot cardcounting teams like the very one we’re talking about—ten grand of his casino’s money just six weeks before they got their asses kicked up and down the Boardwalk. And I’m wondering if maybe right about now Damon isn’t a little worried about his job.

That may be a consideration, Curtis says.

The grapevine’s been telling me that heads are already rolling at the Point. They got the Jersey State Police looking for one of the dealers who was on duty that night. Management fired a pit boss on the spot, then they fired the chief of security the next day. I don’t suppose that’s the vacancy
you’re
planning to fill, is it, Curtis?

Curtis forces a sour smile.

Now naturally you’re not going to get that gig unless Damon’s around to give it to you. So far, he’s staying afloat. But if Stanley’s name shows up on the Spectacular’s delinquent list Wednesday morning, alarm bells are going to go off, and Damon can start cleaning out his office. Since you know Stanley—because he and your dad are old pals, right?—Damon wants you
to track him down and remind him to settle his account before it’s too late. You get nice new job out of the deal. Am I on the fairway here, Curtis?

Yes sir, Curtis says. That’s about how Damon’s got it figured.

Curtis swirls the dark puddle in his wineglass. Not nervous anymore, just ill at ease, ready for Kagami to finish. He thinks back as he waits: the look on Danielle’s face when he told her he was going to work for Damon. His father, years ago, behind the plexiglass in the D.C. Jail, after Curtis said he was quitting college to enlist.

Kagami laughs, wipes his mouth on his napkin. This is really nice, he says. Let me just throw something on the table. Okay? What if this
isn’t
a big misunderstanding? What if Stanley hasn’t been returning Damon’s calls because he just finished screwing him? What if Stanley really
did
hit the Point, and all those other places? What if he put that team together, and he used the Spectacular’s own money to help bankroll it? He’s done stuff like that before, kid. Many times.

Sure, Curtis says. Thirty years ago. But Stanley doesn’t work with big teams anymore. You said so yourself: he doesn’t have to, he’s got Veronica. Besides, Stanley and Damon are friends. You know how loyal Stanley is, Walter. You really think he’d take advantage of Damon like that? That’s just not Stanley, man.

Okay. I also know Stanley doesn’t take any shit off anybody. Has Damon done anything to piss him off?