The Fading Page 23

  One half of his fate had been decided. He would not go looking for Julie, yet. He would stay in Vegas until his next change. He did not know whether it would be one day or twenty years, but Vegas was Vegas and he was going to need some money. The more the better. Getting another job was not an option. He’d tried that and it hadn’t worked out. Also, he was never going back to the guest house and so had no place to live. He needed a base to work from. Food, shelter, a new wardrobe. Poker was out. Blackjack had never been his thing.

  This wheel, though. He liked the randomness of it, the spinning, blurring motion. The variety of bets and contrasting colors. It was the closest thing the casino had to a carnival game. A warmth was building inside him.

  ‘Excuse me, Sable,’ Noel said.

  ‘Sir?’ The croupier smiled.

  ‘Could you tell me today’s date? I forgot to check my calendar this morning.’

  ‘The twenty-ninth.’

  This number was pleasing, why he couldn’t say. ‘Sorry, I’ve been away for a while. The twenty-ninth of …?’

  ‘February.’ Sable winked.

  Noel’s body began to thrum. His legs nearly buckled. February the 29th was a leap day. Which meant this was also his true birthday.

  The number of times Noel had been sure of anything, absolutely dead certain about the result of a given action, could be counted on one hand. This was one of those times. It had to do with his leap-birthday, and it had to do with the slaughtered Bagley family that had assaulted him last night. More than this he did not understand, but he felt that, in this moment, fate was looking out for him and wanted him to play.

  ‘A leap year-leap day,’ he said, beaming at Sable. ‘I guess I had better play twenty-nine, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘I’m not allowed to say.’ Sable tossed him another of her practiced winks.

  Noel added the original hundred to the six hundred already on the turf and slid the entire pile onto 29, which was also black.

  ‘Believe it or not, today is my birthday,’ he said. ‘Only comes every four years, if you want to be technical about it.’

  Sable performed a little bow. ‘Is it, now? Well then, happy birthday to you, and good luck.’

  He expected a pang of last-second doubt, but it didn’t come. He felt free, as if he had just been excused from detention. His body felt lighter. His life felt lighter. Somewhere, he was sure, the dark god of his erasure was nodding down at him proudly.

  Sable, as if wanting to give him an extra moment to avoid total folly, hesitated. Other than his pile on 29, the board was empty.

  Noel forced himself to stop grinning like a maniac and waited her out.

  ‘29 it is.’ Sable gave the spokes a smooth shove and the wheel came alive. With an expert finger, its nail painted blood-red, she flicked the little white ball into its polished track. Ree-ooowwrr—ree-ooowwrr-ree-ooowwrr … The numbers blurred and the white ball made a delicious zipping-buzz in the wooden channel.

  Was it his imagination, or did Sable’s smile slip for just a moment there? As if she were concerned he had made the wrong choice? No. Sable didn’t care whether he won or lost. She had no stake in his financial salvation, his mood, his life. She was an hourly employee. She got paid to do her thing, nothing more.

  Sable did the swami wave – no more bets.

  Noel gritted his teeth.

  No, she didn’t care, but he had seen something move across her features, tensing her brow, drawing her smile down at the corners. Fear, like an invisible crow feather that had sailed across the table and traced a line between her eyes. Because maybe she wasn’t worried that he had chosen wrong or bet too much, but that he had chosen exactly right and bet it all. Maybe he was weirding her out a little here, with his cat’s cradle face and four-day stubble. Or maybe she had felt a sliver of what he felt – that something other than dumb luck and blind chance was in the air today, a dark force flitting about, looking for a home, and which had attached itself to this pale young man with hangover eyes.

  Noel’s heart thundered. His hands clenched the beveled table.

  The numbers were no longer blurring but popping with increasing clarity. He saw a 7, then a 21, then the green 00. The ball had stopped meowing and was cruising in a continuous, lazy zzzuuuzzzzuuuzzzzuuuzzz …

  He looked to Sable. Her eyes were locked on the wheel.

  Tink-a-dink-dink – and then the ball was hovering in the air, rotating like a tiny white moon before it plunged – rink-a-dink-CLICK.

  Stuck between gold walls while the wheel coasted, the ball sat in its cradle and above them the screen blinked.

  29.

  ‘And a happy birthday it is,’ Sable said. She was not smiling.

  ‘Holy shit,’ Noel said. ‘Sorry, I mean, wow. What are the odds of that?’

  He meant it rhetorically, but the croupier answered, ‘Straight up on a single number pays thirty-five to one.’ She was counting a lot of chips.

  Noel couldn’t do the math. He tried, but when she shoved the tiers across the felt he simply said, ‘How much is that?’

  ‘Twenty-four thousand, five hundred.’

  A ventriloquist dummy of a man with a handful of show tickets banded against a detective’s leather notebook arrived at Noel’s side. ‘Congratulations, sir. It’s nice to see a winner on such a slow day. Can we offer you a complimentary stay in one of our Centurian Tower suites? Caesars Palace would be honored to have you as a guest.’

  A waitress arrived on his heels, a cheerful black woman with chorus line legs and enough cleavage to hide the guest services manager in her corset. ‘Something to drink?’

  Noel looked from one to the other. ‘Thank you, but I’ve got a couple more bets to place first.’

  The waitress curtsied and sauntered away.

  The guest services dummy took this news as decidedly welcome. ‘We’ll hold the offer, then. Enjoy your play.’

  But he didn’t leave the area. Noel saw him circling the tables, directing the other dealers while keeping one eye on the lacerated rube in need of a $25,000 haircut.

  Noel looked at his mountain of chips, then smiled up at Sable. ‘I’d like to put all that on one number, but I don’t think it will fit in the little rectangle. How do we make that work?’

  Sable offered her fourth or fifth type of smile of the day, this one a grimace of the sort one wears when confronted with true insanity. ‘I can change those out for chips of a larger denomination. Set them on the table in front of me.’

  Noel did, and Sable counted them down quickly, then set him up with twenty-four chips marked $1000, and change. He broke them down into two piles of a dozen and added the hundreds, then carefully ushered the stack onto 29.

  ‘It’s still my birthday,’ he said, with all the good nature of a man who has just won a down payment on a house.

  Sable looked around, craving a witness.

  Noel spoke gently. ‘Are you going to take my action or not?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Perhaps in response to his little jab, Sable snapped into a professional series of movements that set his folly in motion with maximum haste. When her fingers flicked the ball into the groove, Noel nearly levitated from his shoes. His scratches turned to ice. Breath like frost stung the back of his neck. The casino seemed to buckle under tremendous force, as if a fault line had opened beneath Las Vegas Boulevard, and every colored light in the room became a sun, burning his eyes, then was eclipsed by a larger consciousness that shuttered him in darkness.

  He was dying a glorious death and saw his life flashing behind his closed lids—

  His jellybean self snuggled in the womb as the black veil descended on him for the first time, illuminating and then blackening him like a resident of Hiroshima. His mother’s wet areola, enlarged to the size of a movie screen, its nipple spurting milk. His eardrums popped and he was on the street, riding his trike, then watching as Mr Sobretti flew through a rain of glass and ruptured his head against the weeping willow. His parents fighting. His
father slamming the door. His mother crying. The Nerf soaring into the April sky. Leaning down to kiss Julie, Lisa’s vacant stare through him, racing away on his motorcycle with a bag of jewels, his mother drugged in a therapy circle, his arm opening like a red river, his memories gushing on the tide of adrenaline, the cop in the snow, his neck blood steaming, the dead children on the stairs, their tiny milk teeth, the murder scene they had forced him to relive with them, glimpses of the man who had done it, a chubby older man with crazed hair and voices in his head, butchering and shooting and licking their blood from their faces like a whining dog, Noel saw these things, saw all he had lived through, all he had done.

  And more – into the future he had not yet lived, yet knew to be true – he was in a $4000 Italian suit no one could see, lost among the throng of double-breasted warriors on Wall Street, rising in a service elevator, picking a lock, staring at a screen in some executive’s corner office, watching information roll on a Bloomberg terminal, his brain plucking numbers from the green shower of encoded numbers he would reference against another file in a safe concerning a pending merger only three men in the world knew about, worth billions. Moving unseen across Union Square, dogs at a rescue pavilion snarling and gnashing at him, bubbled-up and strapped, a gun in his pocket, walking among the pedestrians who flowed through a farmers’ market while a faceless man in an Army coat followed him down into a subway station. The shrieking platform, a train car filled with the dead. Rotting corpses, limbs on the tracks, blood-bewhiskered rats, a homeless man screaming his name, he turned to see it was himself, Noel Shaker unwashed and mad in the filth, and in a flickering blink himself again, this same man, Noel Shaker, age thirty-eight, standing in a vast, cavernous penthouse apartment on the sixtieth floor, his palace, a Caesar of his own making hosting a party with three hundred guests while Lehman Brothers sank in the crash of ’08, the man without a face in his Army jacket watching from the corner of the party while Noel laughed and poured more champagne. An explosion, a flash of orange over churning clouds below. The cabin of a jetliner gone chaotic, tilting, rocking under the assault of lightning forking across the sky, passengers screaming, overhead bins emptying onto his head as he staggered toward the cockpit, they were going down but he would be saved by a woman who plopped into his lap at the last moment, never knowing she was giving herself up as a human airbag. A hospital, where he stole medical supplies and followed a nurse in black stockings. Graves in Queens, a plot of grass with two freshly turned patches of dirt, one large the other small, with two headstones: one for Julie Wagner and another for her child. A child she had borne and named Colin, the father unknown. All of it flashing before his eyes, here and now as the roulette wheel spun and the ball raced along its circular track, and his heart felt filled with liquid hydrogen and he wanted to—

  The dummy was back, the little puppet manager. Sable casting a rictus grin of terror from her boss to Noel. Behind him the endless-legged waitress lost control of her cocktail tray and tumblers shattered on the carpet. Someone at the end of the table screamed, ‘Yee-haw! Ain’t that a sumbitch!’

  Noel blinked. ‘What? What? What happened?’

  Then he saw it. Blinking up on the board.

  29.

  Instinctively, Sable reached for his chips, then stopped as it sank in. Her mouth fell open and after the delay she said, ‘I don’t have that. I don’t have that much.’

  ‘The cashier will handle it,’ the guest services manager announced calmly, stepping between Sable and the roulette table. ‘This table is closed. We’re going to have to inspect the wheel.’

  Several spectators booed.

  Guest services raised his hands to placate. ‘Caesars Palace honors all bets, so long as they are not the result of illegitimate malfunctions. Please,’ he smiled and his forehead was sweating.

  ‘I can feel it,’ Noel said to everyone and no one. ‘Do you feel it coming? It’s almost here.’

  The manager took Sable by the elbow. ‘Care to explain this to me? Now.’

  ‘I’ve never seen him before,’ Sable said. ‘I didn’t touch that wheel.’

  He turned to Noel. ‘Sir, would you do me the kindness of coming this way?’

  ‘How much?’ someone in the peanut gallery hollered. ‘What’s the payday?’

  Noel couldn’t get his mind around numbers, their meanings had vanished.

  ‘… doesn’t just waltz in and call it twice, taking us for almost nine-hundred large,’ the Napoleon of guest services was saying to Sable. ‘Something happened, and we’ll find it, so if you have something to share with us, now is the time to …’

  The machines and lights on the casino floor became a rivered blur. A crumbling sensation pounded up his legs, through his body, as if he were a building that had just been detonated. Noel covered his mouth to keep from laughing or screaming, he didn’t know which, and the little puppet was staring at him, saying to Sable, ‘Where did he go? He was just here with us. Where did he go? Did you see him leave?’

  A shocked silence fell over them all as they peered this way and that way, dumbstruck. Behind the gaming tables, raised on a wide dais of a watering hole, the ancient lizard king shaman in his bolo tie turned on his barstool and stared at Noel.

  I tried to warn you. Now you are home to demons.

  Beside the roulette table, standing against the wooden bumper, with one arm stretched over the wheel and two fingers squeezing the round knob at the top of its axle, there stood a middle-aged man in a garish pink Hawaiian shirt, with a cherubic face and a black leather cord pulled so tight around his throat his neck had turned purple and his lips were black. He tapped the knob twice and Noel knew from the look in his bulging eyes that he was happy to lend a hand.

  More of them began to appear, blinking into existence around the casino floor. A cleaning woman who had been raped and battered past her body’s limits, her uniform skirt torn as if by tigers. A pill suicide dame in a fur coat, the vomit dried to her chin. A black boy in a blue Cripps bandana, his Dodgers jersey perforated with bullet holes. Others, pale as cream and fat with death, simply wandered over, drawn like moths to his dimming flame. Some were rotting, falling apart, others were leaking formaldehyde from cotton-stuffed cheeks and glossed lips. There were dozens of them haunting the casino, the restaurants and bars, and, by implication, the many rooms above. The living died everywhere, after all, but Noel understood now that Las Vegas had more than its share of suicides, homicides, overdoses and heart attacks. They had been here all along, waiting to be seen, and for some reason decided to make his a happy birthday.

  ‘Up in smoke, man!’ the cowboy said. ‘Up in smoke!’

  ‘He’s gone,’ Sable said, and cackled at her confused boss. ‘What did you do to him, Gene? What did you do?’

  Noel closed his eyes and swayed back on his heels. There was no way to claim his winnings, not now, not like this. But he was not bothered by the fact that he had lost $857,500 minutes after winning them. He had been rewarded with something far more valuable and intoxicating.

  After spending four years in the hot hell waiting room of the Nevada desert, his number had been called. In the one place on earth where money flowed like the Rivers of Babylon he was now free to roam unobserved by all but the eyes of God.

  28

  Nine weeks later Noel Shaker was a millionaire six times over, and bored.

  The secret, he soon discovered, was not the gaming tables. It was not the cashier bays, the stacks and cases of chips, the waterfalls of coins tumbling from the slot machines. It was not the sports book receipts he could have swiped from the lounge tables, the ATM machines or the restaurant cash registers. The secret was not to be found in the countdown rooms and vaults, the keno parlors, the high-stakes poker tournaments. It was not the casinos, the banks, the fortified bunkers below.

  It was the people. The gamblers themselves. Particularly the whales from Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Moscow. It was the men who flew to desert Nevada on their own plane, set
up shop in comped penthouse suites, and moved with an entourage of bodyguards and five-grand-per-night escorts. It was the hotshot poker gurus after they had cleaned up in a forty-hour Texas Hold ’em death match at Binion’s, their velcro saddlebags weighted with chips and – sooner or later – cold hard cash.

  Men who considered the house their enemy, and who did not trust the casinos with the money they had just won or were preparing to plunk down. Men who liked the tactile grubbing of cash green money, who used the banded stacks of hundreds as hard-on fuel, who liked to flaunt it, carry it, blow it on luxe goods, screw their girlfriends on it.

  These were men who played blackjack at a grand per hand, took poker pots of two, four and sometimes six hundred thousand month in and lost it month out. Men who were used to having a net worth of half a million after the Super Bowl, going broke by March, then up three hundred more by May. Some were hustlers, addicted to the game. Others owned sports teams, oilfields, a chain of two hundred fast food restaurants – men who came to Vegas a millionaire fifty times over and if they left up or down 1 per cent, so what? To such people money was grain fuel, made for burning.

  Noel learned to spot them, which wasn’t always easy for the simple reason that not all big dogs liked to wear a diamond collar. Many of them dressed in plain suits, or in casual shirts and pleated khakis, with cheap loafers and expensive cigars. They strutted with quiet confidence, their pinky rings emitting power rays. They ordered champagne for their friends and drank soda water. Just as often it was some kamikaze tweaker kid in flannel and Puma sweats who’d flown in from Gainesville or Yale or Mazatlan on his family trust.

  Once he learned to spot them, Noel followed them. He learned to hide in their rooms, making himself very calm and silent. He learned to watch over their shoulders as they unlocked their brushed aluminum suitcases and transferred their winnings to the in-room safes, a Gold’s Gym bag bulging at the seams, into the trunks of their limos, to another hotel room where a member of their staff was checked in under a false name. Once he knew where they stayed and where they secreted their winnings, once he learned to be patient, making his fortune back became bafflingly easy.