Ride the Titanic! (33 page)

Twenty-four hours later, the results of Xia’s thinking – and mine too – materializes in a caravan of shiny black SUVs, snaking their way down the Strip, bumper-to-bumper. The vehicles turn onto the building site, where five of them peel off like fighter planes and head for the ship construction area, while the remaining five continue up the long curving road until they screech to a halt, Secret-Service-style, in front of the
White Star Grand Hotel
.

Their doors open simultaneously with a collective BANG, and out leap
Men in Black
characters dressed in dark suits, white shirts, skinny ties, and Ray-Ban wraparound sunglasses that hide the fact that
Ride the Titanic’s
so-called private ‘assets protection’ force is a hastily-gathered team of ride attendants with enough theater experience to act like they’re the baddest asses in town. The fact that they’re damn good actors, plus tripling their paychecks, infuses the moment with more drama than Xia and I expected.

Six guards fan out to form a protective phalanx; suit coats unbuttoned, right hands snugged inside, ready to pull out – thank God – imaginary Glock pistols, while the rest of the security team marches resolutely into the hotel’s main entrance to take up positions throughout the various floors as predetermined by Joe and me the night before.

Joe’s thick thumb leafed through the headshots of the proposed actors that I quickly gathered together as possible candidates.

‘Only one Asian in the bunch,’ he said. ‘That’s too damn bad.’

‘I agree.’

‘How can you threaten Chinese muscle if these kids look like a bunch of Salt Lake City Mormons?’

‘With these.’ I pulled out my Ray-Bans and put them on. ‘Bingo, I’m bad-ass.’

Joe regarded them for a long moment. ‘Might work for your crowd scenes, but you’re gonna’ need the real thing for close-ups.’

‘No close-ups.’

‘You’ll need at least one when you launch this phony rocket ship of yours. After that, maybe you can get away with it.’

‘Damn it, I’m telling you, there’s nobody we can find to do this.’

‘Watch your temper,
paisan
.’ Joe patted my shoulder. ‘Keeps you from thinking straight.’

‘I’m not angry.’

‘Not saying you are. But guys like you, their heads fill up with rocks the instant they get pissed off. And beneath that piss is fear, and you got it bad.’

‘Okay, okay, what do you propose?’

Joe gathered up the stack of headshots and tapped them into a neatened pile. ‘Problem is you’re looking in the wrong place for your big, bad, Chinese goon.’

‘Where should I look?’

‘Right under that Irish Mick nose of yours.’

‘Who?’

‘Mr. Wu, that’s who.’

Joe led me to a costume designer-friend of his from
Bally’s
, who, overnight, transformed our highly reluctant hotel-designer genius into a rock-solid, muscle-bound replica of
Goldfinger’s
‘Oddjob’ – minus his morning suit. In its place, a form-fitting Armani suit with a subtle bulge beneath the left armpit where his Beretta 9mm pistol supposedly waits.

‘Feel phony,’ Mr Wu said into the mirror when the transformation was complete.

‘But you look scary as hell,’ I said.

‘Got hotel to build.’

‘Not if they keep shutting us down you don’t.’

He smoothed his tailored lapels. ‘You think this work?’

‘If you play your part.’

Wu examined his sunglasses as if they’ve just arrived from Mars. Then he took a deep breath, put them on and looked at the mirror. He jerked back slightly, looked closer as if to be certain and then said softly, ‘I look scary.’

‘When you talk, speak in a sort of gravely whisper, like Clint Eastwood.’

‘Who he?’

‘Never mind, just talk like this; ‘Unless you’re done living, get. . . out. . . of. . . my. . . FUCKING. . . life.’

I had Wu repeat it three times in the mirror. After the last one he shivered and then smiled. ‘What his name again?’

‘Clint Eastwood.’

‘No. Mine.’

‘Mr. Tong, chief of security.’

‘How long. . . Mr. Tong?’

‘Until the moray eels go back inside their caves.’

He turned around to me and gravely-whispered, ‘Leave. . . that. . . to. . . me.’

While we were getting Tong ready for Broadway, Lewis was busy tipping off the news media of growing threats to our project and the measures we would be taking to protect it, which served up two camera crews, one at the hotel and the other at the ship site to document the D-Day-like landing of our security forces, especially ‘Mr. Tong,’ who now stands at the apex of the phalanx outside the main entrance, arms across his chest, legs splayed, Ray-bans hiding his eyes.

At my subtle nod, he sweeps them off and his fierce Chinese face regards the scene with snarling disdain. Then, sensing the news camera crews have the footage they need, Mr. Tong slips on his Ray-Bans to match his silent henchmen.

Xia underscores our security team’s malevolent presence with her on-camera interview. She wisely turns to the camera at just the right moment and says, ‘Reluctantly, we have taken this necessary step to ensure that our investor’s best interests are protected while we complete what will be the star attraction on the Las Vegas Strip.’

The young reporter, hoping to gain some traction with her news director, tries one of the oldest interviewing tricks in the book; ‘Some say you’re making a mountain out of a molehill by having this force in place.’

‘Oh really? Xia smiles blankly. ‘Who?’

Caught in her own deception, the reporter moves on. ‘You’ve been quoted as saying
Ride the Titanic
will be the star attraction along the strip. But other than an ocean liner going up and down like a bathtub duck, how will it be more attractive than – say –
Bellagio’s
fountains?’

‘They deliver water. We deliver the end of the world.’

After two years of round-the-clock construction, the
White Star Grand Hotel
stands nearly complete.

Heavy-mil plastic sheets cover chairs, couches, bar stools, tables, bureaus, breakfronts – even toilets – waiting for the finishing crews led by Mr. Wu – when he isn’t appearing as the much-feared ‘Mr. Tong’ – to uncover, open, count and check each and every object contained in 4,062 staterooms, 91 suites, 6 banquet rooms, 4 casinos, 3 ballrooms, and a gigantic reception lobby.

Wu’s finishing teams wade into staterooms like bouncers breaking up a bar fight; plastic flying this way, cardboard ripping that way, and in less than half-an-hour can transform a chaotic, furniture-jammed jumble of rooms into a three-room, luxury
A Deck
Suite. The ritual goes even faster when Wu works side by side with them, his high-pitched giggle blending in with the tearing sounds of plastic wrap, as he makes hard work feel like happy vandalism instead.

‘You two do bed. You three come with me, do bath. You do windows, no jump!’

Period-authentic furniture, painstakingly researched, makes each stateroom feel like a window into the past. In one in of them I comment to Wu on the quality of the delicate, rose-colored silk fabric covering a low settee

‘Thank God for China,’ I say.

‘We make. You take. Perfect match. Even windows.’

‘Portholes, you mean.’

In place of the ordinary hotel windows, we have fitted – not round like expected – but rectangular ‘portholes’ into the first class stateroom’s exterior-facing walls, exactly like the ones on the original ship.

Wu fingers the window’s dogging clips. ‘Everything made in China.’

‘Not the ocean. Ellie created that in America.’

Wu remains unimpressed. ‘She make nice movie of water, sure thing, but China make video screens it float on.’

He connects the electronic leads that activate the LCD screen behind the porthole glass. ‘Anchors up!’

‘’Away.’

A high-definition video ‘ocean,’ shimmers to life on the screen, slowly rising and falling, its rippled surface glittering in the afternoon sun. Timed to the hour, it changes as day gives way to night.

‘You like?’

Wu giggles. ‘So real I am seasick.’

‘Let’s see Vegas instead.’

I pressed the ‘EXT’ button on the remote. The ocean view shifts to a high-resolution video view of Las Vegas as seen by video cameras mounted outside. I thumb the directional control to tilt down and bring the dive basin into view.

‘Nice, huh?’

Wu examines the picture. ‘Crazy down there. When it ever going to sink?’

He’s right. Seen from the forty-first floor, the empty dive basin and dive trench look forlorn. The
Titanic,
its
moveable stern section unattached,
resembles a broken toy in an empty bathtub. I zoom in for a closer look at the ant-like swarm of workers dotting the Boat Deck. For two, frantic, round-the-clock weeks they’ve been installing boat ventilators, lifeboat davits, rigging, skylights, and most importantly the fore and aft masts, which, as the ship sinks, telescope into storage tunnels like massive car radio antennas.

Shallow puddles of water dot the empty dive basin, leftover from a ‘partial fill’ test performed a week earlier to check for leaks. If you’re wondering how we can fill the basin without flooding the dive trench with even more water, imagine an aluminum pie plate. That’s the dive basin. Then cut a slit in the center just long enough and wide enough for a banana-split dish to snuggle underneath until it’s flush with the surface. That dish is the dive
trench.

For the test, fill the pie plate with water - but only up to the lip of the banana split dish. That way the water doesn’t go splashing down – and in our case, won’t pour into the concrete-lined hole already filled with water to hide the ship
when she sinks. That momentous time is soon approaching, and my blood pressure is rising.

During the partial test last week, perimeter leaks sent a few thousand gallons of water sheeting onto the Strip, much to the delight of our sidewalk superintendents, who danced around like water nymphs. But other than these easily-repaired cracks in the basin, everything has gone surprisingly well, especially in the inspection department.

After a bit of hemming and hawing, mostly theatrical, Krofchik’s goons declare the basin good-to-go. And it’s not just because we greased the palm of their corrupted boss, which we did. To be fair, if inspectors found any serious defects, they would have crucified us, and rightly so. While there is no honor among thieves, inspectors have plenty of it when it comes to public safety and convenience.

The chattering of an impact drill outside our porthole window catches my attention. I rotate the exterior camera one-hundred-eighty degrees to look straight up. Directly above our forty-first floor, workers swoop back and forth, suspended from safety harnesses like SWAT teams rappelling down a mountainside.

‘That should be the last of the panel repairs.’

Wu claps his hands. ‘I am happy beyond happy.’

Last week, a half-dozen of the translucent, carbon-fiber reinforced panels interleaved over the hotel to make it look like an iceberg unexpectedly. None had fallen, thank God. After a rigorous inspection, it turned out to be an installation error easily corrected, not a calamitous one like defective steel attachment bolts or some equally disastrous screw-up that would have required re-skinning the entire structure.

During daytime hours our hotel ‘iceberg’ will shine with virginal radiance as if some Nordic giant snatched it out of the Labrador Current and plunked it down in Nevada. At nighttime, while all the other structures on the Boulevard – hotel, casino or otherwise – blare out their Technicolor, smeary blur of neon and swooshing searchlights, our hotel, towering over the lesser structures on the strip and glowing from the inside as it looms over the
Titanic
, will be a glowing harbinger of the disaster to come,

Dare I say it?

Less than one month from now.

My Orlando homecoming begins with a joyful embrace and happy laughter. Fiona, by now an opinionated, evasive fourteen-year-old, chatters about this and that before taking off to spend the night at a girlfriend’s house. Minutes later, Joe, who flew back with Lewis and me for the quick, weekend visit, sweeps in with Marianna to snatch away the twins for overnight laughter and tickling, which leaves Geena and me alone at long last, until problems in Vegas bust up our romantic, welcome-home dinner. After three frantic phone calls – two before the main course and one during dessert – plus a hurried text message, I say cheerfully,

‘Alone at last. . . . again.’

Silence. Geena stares stonily at the flickering candles.

‘Sorry.’

Her continuing silence is a warning. But so consumed with work am I that I barely notice her blowing out the candles during my next two phone calls. And while she clears the table with great clattering and clashing, I answer a frantic text from Max about a pressurized hydraulic line that failed during the partial immersion test.

The clattering of dishes in the sink draws me into to the kitchen, and to Geena’s stiff back as she stands in front of the sink, washing plates by hand. I dutifully open the dishwasher and begin putting in the silverware.