“Ghosts,” the American said. “But we know what we’re here for, and we know why we came.”
“Yeah, MI-6 leaving us to clean up their mess.”
The Russian snorted at the athlete. “In my homeland, they have a more efficient manner of dealing with disgraced former employees. One finds a pistol loaded with a single bullet on one’s desk. One is intended to know how to address the matter from that point.”
“I’ve wondered about that. Why only one bullet?”
“It is
not
expected that one Russian will make two mistakes.”
Delightful, when they walked into it. It almost made up for the blistering heat on the nape of his neck and the packed earth under his soles cooking his feet in his shoes. One-handed, he loosened his tie.
“In any case, my partner is correct. Our friend Jackie may be a poker player, but he’s no spy. And if he means to use us to get his vengeance on the . . . genius . . . who killed his partner, it would take little in the way of moral suasion for me to use him in return.”
The Russian glanced up from his shoes as they touched the melted, sticking tarmac of the Strip. The Hacienda was appreciably closer, and if he turned left, he could see the “Drive Carefully” side of the “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign. He blew his hair out of his eyes, checked for oncoming traffic, and walked faster. The athlete and the scholar paced him easily, the American nearly trotting to keep up.
The athlete was nodding. He leaned forward one more time as they gained the western side of the highway. “So you think there’s a way to use him to get to the assassin?”
“I think it can’t hurt to give it a whirl,” the American said, leading them up the driveway to the casino. “We’re catching a cab back, gents—”
The scholar held the door for the rest of them, but the American balked a moment, glancing up. “No air curtain.”
“You mostly get those downtown, where people walk in and out a lot. Come on; Uncle Sam doesn’t pay you to air condition the Mojave.”
“Uncle
Sam
doesn’t pay me at all,” the American retorted, but he stepped inside, and the Russian followed tight on his heels, breathing a sigh of relief as cool darkness closed around them. A moment later, and they were ensconced at the bar, the only four customers this early in the morning.
The scholar contented himself with orange juice. The American and the athlete ordered mimosas, and the Russian a bloody Mary. “So, what’s your plan?” he asked his partner, when they’d each had a chance to get in a few pulls of their drinks, and suck on a couple of ice cubes.
“I’ll let you know when I figure that out,” the American answered. His eye lit on something over the Russian’s shoulder, and he finished his drink in one long swallow and clinked the glass on the bar. “I’m improvising. Excuse me for a moment—” He stood, straightened his tie in the bar mirror, winked to his partner, and took off in pursuit.
The Russian checked his watch. “He’ll either be back in fifteen minutes, or four hours,” he predicted confidently, watching in the bartender’s looking glass as the American strolled up to a pretty brunette near the one-armed bandits, exuding gallantry.
“What’s his batting average like?” The athlete watched more openly, with a professional interest.
The Russian pursed his lips, working through the sports metaphor. “He swings at every ball,” he answered at last. “He has to knock a few out of the park, yes?”
“What if we have to get in touch with him?” The scholar, looking less amused and more annoyed.
“He has his cigarette pack. I can call him if I must.” A long sigh, and another sip of his bloody Mary. “So,” he said, turning on his stool and glancing up at the athlete with calm interest. “About that tennis match—”
One-Eyed Jack and the House of the Rising Sun.
Las Vegas. Summer, 2002.
Vampires sneeze like cats. Who knew?
I concentrated on amusement to keep another image the hell out of my head—Stewart, alive, and bound to Angel somehow, drugs or magic or something else. It took a lot of willpower to walk down the stairs rather than stomp, but I thought I had my heart rate back to normal by the time I walked out into the parking lot. Both John Henrys waited by the front door of Jeremiah’s Steak House. I paused in the shade as they crossed the asphalt and glanced over my shoulder, drawn by a whisper of breeze and the tang of ozone. Storm clouds piled up behind the Spring Mountains, not quite pushing over; another alleged monsoon season that was going to pan out mostly dry.
In ninety-nine, the rain nearly washed the whole damned town away. Just goes to show you never can tell.
In any case, the moisture in the air warmed the sunlight to a glow less like a welding arc and more like the sort of thing you might want to go out and walk around in and feel on your hair. It shone through the John Henrys, rendering them momentarily translucent, until they stepped into the shadow of the overhang.
“Did you find him?” asked the steel-driving man, shifting his hammer over his shoulder. Doc coughed into his handkerchief and reached for his flask.
I nodded and looked back up at the mountains remote behind a forest of power lines, billboards, and low-pitched roofs. I didn’t feel like looking anybody in the eye, and the center of my chest felt like John Henry had caved it in with his hammer. “I found him. I want to thank you gentlemen for your help—”
“You know you can’t dismiss us now,” Doc said, and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Not ’til the business you called us up for is finished. And this isn’t it.”
“No. This isn’t it.”
John Henry’s hammer didn’t ring on the concrete when he set it down by his feet and leaned the handle against his bulky thigh. He hooked thumbs as thick as two of my fingers together through the belt loops of his canvas trousers and dropped his head, staring at the ground in between my boots. “Do you want us to stick around and make sure he leaves town?”
“He’s not leaving town,” I said. They fell into step alongside me, Doc on the left and John Henry on the right. “He’s helping me find Angel.”
Doc’s laugh turned into a coughing fit, his bony elegant white hand pressed against his lips hard enough to blanch away the little color left in them. “Think he’ll be any use?”
“I think so,” I said. “Turns out Angel offered him a job.”
John Henry tossed his hammer idly, letting it turn in the air, end over end, before he caught it by the handle again. His muscles slid and writhed under glossy skin. “What kinda job?”
Stewart
.
“Protecting her from me.”
The American, the Russian, and the Man Who Shot JFK.
Somewhere in Las Vegas. Summer 1964.
When the American rejoined the Russian some hours later, the Russian was cross-legged on one of the twin beds in their hotel room, his Walther disassembled on newspaper in front of him. His jacket was tossed carelessly over the foot of the bed. The black leather of his shoulder holster cut across an impossibly white shirt; the American made a note to find out what laundry he used.
“The mechanism won’t rust in the desert,” the American said, closing and locking the door.
“Sand,” the Russian answered acidly, capping the bottle of gun oil without looking up. “You believe them.”
“Don’t you?”
“As much as I dislike admitting it.” He reassembled the mechanism while the American leaned against the wall beside the yellow louvered closet door and watched. “Somehow, it doesn’t surprise me that we would be the last to know.”
“There are implications that could be worked to our advantage, once we understand the process.”
This time the Russian did glance up, a flicker of a smile twitching his lips as he slid the magazine home. The click as it latched echoed with finality. “My thoughts exactly. I finalized some details with our colleagues while you were indisposed”—the American coughed—“and we are to serve as the primary bait. The other team will attempt to locate the assassin through more proactive measures.”
“Tovarisch,” the American said, delighted. “You’ve weaseled us out of the footwork, haven’t you?”
“Weaseled may be an unfairly pejorative term.”
“You have a better one?”
“Given how thoroughly you despise footwork—” The Russian rose from his place on the bed without using his hands, tucking his gun away as he fluidly stood. “I think you could manage politeness. You’ll please remember this the next time you’re sweating in the passenger seat of a Chevrolet, complaining how much your feet hurt.”
“Still, your master plan leaves us getting shot at.”
“All our plans leave us getting shot at.”
The Russian ducked into the bathroom to wash his face and let cool water run over his arms, despite the air conditioning. His hair was still wet from what the American suspected was the latest in a series of cold showers. The American walked past him, crossed the garish carpet to the window, and flicked aside heavy drapes geometrically patterned in shades of rust and tan. “So, how do we play at being bait?”
“An endless succession of pricey meals and dinner theatre, leaving us ostentatiously exposed, would be too obvious a lure, unfortunately.”
“Besides, we’re not on an expense account.” The American let the drapery fall. “Very frugal of the old man, getting us out here on our own nickel.”
The Russian snorted. “He’s nothing if not cheap.”
“Pot.”
“I am thrifty. I am also not eternally broke, like some profligate, bourgeois Americans I could name—” Their eyes met, and they both grinned in affectionate understanding.
“There’s also the issue of Jackie,” the American said, when the silence had lasted long enough.
“Ah, Jackie.” The Russian snagged his jacket and shrugged into it, leaving it unbuttoned over his shirt. “Yes. He will expect us to pay his toll—and I admit to rather liking the fellow. If we can bring him this Angel person he described to us . . . spreading good will and so forth.”
“Besides,” the American said, “she killed his partner. And his partner looked like you. There’s got to be an angle there somewhere . . . ” The American looked down and fiddled with his pinky ring, attempting to conceal his second-hand wrath on behalf of Jackie, and Jackie’s partner, and failing. “It, ah. It occurs to me—”
The Russian was looking at him, an expression playing across his face that would have been unreadable to anybody else. “You want to see if we can combine our tasks? Go back to two thousand and two?”
“I don’t know,” the American said. “How do you go about finding the genius of Los Angeles within Las Vegas City limits?”
The Russian looked at the American, and smiled. “Footwork.”
The Russian’s feet baked in his shoes and his toes felt as if they’d been gone over once lightly with a carrot grater, but he’d never let it show on his face. Not when his partner limped ostentatiously behind, muttering under his breath. At least the malevolent desert sun had slipped behind the mountains. “We haven’t talked about the... the spooky thing.”
“Jackie mistaking you for his partner?”
“Did he seem a little innocent to you? A bit of
un naif
for his role?”
“His role as the spirit of Sin City?” The American craned his head back, looking up at the simulated skyline of New York City rendered in bright primary colors that lorded it over the south end of the Strip, wrapped in the yellow garland of a roller coaster reminiscent of something from a science fiction film. “Tovarisch, what could possibly be more naive than that? New York City with no crime, no grime, no Greenwich Village, no Soho, no Harlem—”
“—no jazz—”
“I bet the hookers even have all their teeth. Look at that place.”
“I take your point. Venice without the toxic water. Remember how sick you got? . . . ”
“Intimately.” The American made a moue, and the Russian laughed at him, quite silently. It didn’t matter; the American always knew when he was being laughed at. “You know, it occurs to me that our chances of finding one girl in all of Las Vegas when we have no photo, and the best description we have is ‘brunette, five-three, one-ten, looks like an L.A. hooker who thought she could get a role in pictures’ is probably a lost cause. We’ve been trying for hours. What do you say we call it a night?”
“Have we been shot at yet?”
The American checked his watch. “Not since 1964.”
“Then we’re not trying hard enough. The British team can’t nab the assassin if we don’t lure him into the open. Come on—three more bourgeois excrescences to go.”
They walked in silence for a while. The American never seemed to sweat. The Russian mopped his brow with a formerly clean white handkerchief. The Luxor and the Excalibur yielded them nothing, and they wandered shoulder to shoulder, aimlessly, once they entered the tall gold building called Mandalay Bay. Some artificial scent on the air made the Russian sneeze. He dabbed his nose with the same handkerchief, and wiped his watering eyes. The place was huge, arched cavernous hallways oppressive as the sewers and catacombs of Paris. “Oh, brother. Is this the last hotel?”
“It’s the last hotel on the whole goddamned planet—”
“Groovy. We haven’t been shot at yet. Where to next?”
The American sighed and set his heels. “Did you just say
groovy
?”
“I like slang. Do you want to start on downtown?”
“What if I promised you dinner?”
The Russian bit back a grin. He’d been holding out for the trump card. “A casino buffet?”
“Bait,” the American said, and pointed over his shoulder, back the way they’d come.
“A sushi bar in Las Vegas? Don’t be ridi—”
“This is the millennium, tovarisch. There was a place in the last casino but one called
Hamada of Japan.
Looked promis . . . oh, my god.”
“What?” The Russian turned, following the direction of his partner’s shell-shocked gaze, his smooth-soled shoes turning on the shiny, dark floor without a squeak. Years of training kept his jaw from actually dropping.
“That’s Lenin.”
“Correction,” the Russian said, starting forward. “It’s Lenin—without his head. Funky . . . ”
“Did you just say? . . . ”
“I wanted to see if you were paying attention. It appears to be a restaurant. And the statue is a replica.”