The Albuquerque Turkey: A Novel (22 page)

“Didn’t what? Touch my girlfriend?”

A confrontation loomed, and while such a confrontation would further cement Vic’s shambolic reputation, it was my job as casino host to prevent such unpleasantness, so I intervened, cooling Vic out with soothing words, and steering him off the casino floor into the tranquil confines of a nearby sports bar. There, his nose still out of joint, Vic started arguing with Zoe over which team was a better baseball bet, the Cincinnati Reds because red is a power color, or the Milwaukee Brewers because they have beer mojo. I couldn’t tell whether this was improvisational theater or the daft logic you sometimes see in, for example, rookie horse players who bet the steed called Steamboat because they went skiing there once and had fun. Allie offered no clues. She just sat there sipping mineral water and thinking her private thoughts. God, I wanted to get her alone for ten minutes, have a frank exchange of views. Because here’s the thing: Although Vic was running my script, he was so deeply in character that I couldn’t tell whether he was in character at all. And while you do this on the grift—play a role and don’t ever let on that you’re role-playing—I’d never known Vic to be that accomplished an actor. He’d either gotten tremendous game while I wasn’t looking, or else he’d drunk his own Kool-Aid and bought into the Mirplo myth.

And Allie? I simply had no idea where she stood. She was in on the snuke, manifestly, for here she was, part of Vic’s entourage, but was she
on my script, hers, his, Woody’s, or whose? All I got when I looked at her was the empty gaze of someone passing time by trying to remember, say, all the state capitals in alphabetical order.
Albany, Annapolis, Atlanta …

Nor was Honey—Cookie—any help. While not neglecting to keep scanning the crowd for real or imaginary threats, he set out, with great enthusiasm though no apparent success, to explain to Vic and Zoe what an over/under line was. “The bookmaker predicts how many total runs the teams will score, and then you decide whether the real outcome will be above or below that number.”

“So then it doesn’t matter who wins?” asked Vic, vaguely grasping the concept.

“That’s right.”

“Why would you bet on a game if you don’t care who wins?”

“That’s the bet,” said Honey. “That’s the over/under line.”

“I’m not betting on a line,” Vic declared definitively. “I’m betting on a team.” He turned to Zoe. “Any of them wear purple? Purple’s lucky.”

And that was Vic that night in a nutshell: a proto-pompous, self-important clown, the last float on the clueless parade, all ignorance and arrogance, with the high likelihood of going off for a very large number. Not to mix metaphors, but if casinos are sharks, then this whale was chum.

Apparently attracted to the scent of blood in the water, Jay Wolfredian soon arrived. I was not altogether surprised to see him here, given Martybeth’s revelation about his pressing need for investors. And Vic had been hamming for the cameras with the awareness (mine, anyway, if not his) that Jay would no doubt be watching the new whale perform. Given all this, I would certainly have expected the Gaia’s VP of special projects to introduce himself to a new high roller and offer him the hospitality of the house. That’s just good business.

But that’s not what happened, exactly.

Playing the dutiful casino host, I facilitated introductions, and Jay
wasted no time in schmoozing Vic, who wasted no energy pretending he wasn’t lapping it up. Each was on script, of course, with Wolfredian massaging the mark and Vic promoting the Mirplo brand in all its twisted glory. Yet beneath the scripted exchange, I detected something unguarded, something authentic from both. The fan and the man. It was weird.

Jay made a point of mentioning that he’d just come into possession of a couple of Boggs notes—hand-drawn currency created not as counterfeits but as art and traded by the artist, J.S.G. Boggs, for whatever goods or services his traffic would bear. The way Jay eased this into the conversation, patently fishing for Vic’s approval, reminded me of a cat laying a dead mouse on his master’s doorstep. Vic, though, contemptuously rejected Boggs as a “ballpoint loser.”

“His thing is a parlor trick,” Vic declared. “It’s not art.”

“So then what’s art?” asked Jay.

“Something that moves you.”

“By that logic, a train is art.”

Vic graced this comment with a laugh, which seemed to please Jay—delight him, almost—and again I got the sense of something going on here beyond a Gaia guy doing his job. Jay was tapping into something, with a surprisingly deep-dwelling sense of urgency. Vic, meanwhile, cantered on down his path of his self-importance. “Now if it’s art you want,” he said, “you’re going to want to see Mirplopalooza.”

“Mirplopalooza?”

“My installation out in the desert. You’ve seen the signs. B
E THE
S
HOW?”
Jay nodded. “I’m telling you,” said Vic, “when people get a load of what I’ve got planned …”

“They’ll be moved?”

“Just like a train.” Vic clapped a convivial hand on Jay’s back—and then proceeded to pimp Mirplopalooza, its grand design, musical guests, diversions and divertissements, things with balloons, kites, and ultralights. Vic pitched it like a fever dream, and though I’d been on the ground floor of the planning stage, those skeletal proposals lacked
the weight of authenticity—and courage of conviction—with which Vic pronounced them now.

Especially when he started talking numbers. “I’ll have five, ten thousand people there, easy. Next year, twice that.”

“You’re already thinking about next year?”

Vic leaned in close, conspiratorial. “I pulled a long-term-year lease on the site. Bureau of Land Management. They sell cheap. I’ll be doing Mirplopalooza till I die.”

This brought Allie—Miriam—into the conversation. “We’ve done revenue projections through 2025,” she said. “Over that time span, the event will net—”

Vic cut her off. “Big money. Who cares? Money’s only important to people who don’t have anything important in their lives.” He gave Jay a knowing look. “Like art, right? Like Boggs bucks.” He turned to Zoe. “Hey, do we got any sponsorship slots left?”

Zoe consulted her Geoid. “A couple,” she said. “A silver and two platinums.”

Vic turned back to Jay. “You want a hospitality tent?” He asked. “For the Gaia, I mean. There’ll be awesome foot traffic. Plus you can hang out. I’ll throw in some back-row seats to the show.”

“You mean front-row.”

“Don’t tell me what I mean. It’s my show. I know the best seats.”

Jay and Vic exchanged more art talk for a time, then Jay took his leave, wishing Vic luck at the tables, which is the single most disingenuous thing any casino functionary can say to a guest. Not that Vic cared. Once Jay departed, he declared himself tired and pulled the plug on the party. I delivered the group to their suite, then straggled down to the hosts’ office, where I punched out for the night. As I engaged in this prosaic act, it occurred to me that I’d attained, in a sense, the worst of both worlds. I had a straight job that I didn’t particularly want or like, and I was running a snuke over which I seemed to be losing control. On that cheery note, I headed back to my room. This involved a long trek down grotty corridors to the far reaches of the hotel, a good fifteen minutes’
walk from the main casino floor. Reaching my room, I slotted in my card key, waited for the green light, then opened the door and stepped inside. At this point, something dark and metal swung out and hit me flush on the ear. I spun around and sat down. In the ambient light spilling in from the window, I saw Red Louise standing over me, brandishing brass knuckles with a self-satisfied smirk.

“What was that for?” I asked.

“Fun,” she said. “Just for fun.”

P
eople have existential crises when they least expect it. Guy shoveling snow in Des Moines feels his chilblains and decides the time has come to buy that houseboat in Marathon. College girl crashes and burns in biochem and discovers that, hey, prelaw’s not such a crap choice after all. Man on the floor of a hotel room rubs ache from his ear and understands definitively that the merry of his merry-go-round is gone. The man likes to think he has an effect on women, though
violently negative
is not necessarily the one he’s going for.

Red Louise pocketed her knuckles and pulled out a Glock.

“Oh, what?” I muttered. “A gun? What for?”

“Maybe to shoot you,” said Red.

“Here in the hotel? No. Nope, sorry. I just can’t see that.”

“Then maybe just to scare you some.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s take it as read that I’m some scared.”

“I don’t think you’re anywhere near enough scared.” She grabbed me by the scruff of whatever, dragged me to my feet, and held the gun close to my face. My nose twitched to the odd conflation of her lemon chiffon shampoo and the gun’s sharp tang of Cosmoline. “So let me be clear. I’m going to ask you some questions. Choose your lies with care, because if I don’t like them, I will shoot you dead right here. Don’t worry about it being a hotel and all. The cleaning staff can be very discreet.”

Then she kidney-punched me. I expelled the pain on a whoosh of
sour-tasting breath. I admire strong women. Always have. But when they’re holding me at gunpoint and punching me and whatnot, I’m not so big a fan. Times like these, I wished I’d put more effort into bulking up, but that was water under the bench press now. There was no thought of getting the upper hand, or the drop, or whatever it is that the buff guys get. No, I’d just have to ride it out.

Choose my lies with care.

“Fine,” I said. “What do you want to know?”

“First of all, what’s with the bogus cop routine?”

“Dim Ysmygu? It means ‘no smoking,’ you know.”

She gonked me with the gun on the top of my head. Just a tap, really, to demonstrate her not-so-frivolous mood. “I don’t give a crap what it means. Why’d you mess with Martybeth’s head?”

“To find out why you snatched my dad.”

“I didn’t—”

“Please,” I said. “You plucked him from Blue Hills five minutes before I got there. You almost ran me off the road. It wasn’t necessary, you know. I mean, what does it change? I brought Jay a deep pocket. The rest is up to him.”

Red clouted me again. I fell down a little. “Man, stop hitting me,” I said. I may have only thought it.

She straddled me. “This deep pocket,” she said. “How deep? How real?”

Let me start by saying that I have a fairly high tolerance for pain. It doesn’t make me panic, and it doesn’t really cloud my thinking all that much. So as I lay there on the floor, slugged four times in three minutes, I understood without doubt that the snuke hung by a certain thread. Trouble was, I wasn’t sure which thread. Like if you’re James Bond dismantling a bomb and you don’t know whether to clip the yellow wire or the blue. What was Red telling me? That Wolfredian didn’t buy my whale? He’d certainly seemed engaged earlier, but now here was Louise very nearly calling Vic a fraud. So should I stick with my story, keep calling my spade a spade, or bail on the tale and jump to a new one?

What’s it going to be, Mr. Bond? Yellow wire or blue?

Choose your lies with care.

I studied Louise in the half light. Who was she in all of this? I’d had her pegged as Jay’s right arm, but this visit felt very freelance, unsanctioned. Of course, Wolfredian could have sent her here with a nod and a wink, to present me with a disunited front, your standard misdirectomy. But this didn’t feel like that. It felt like a legitimate difference of opinion. Jay, I believed, made Mirplo as the real deal—the weak-minded mook whose fortunes Jay could Ponzi off at will. His view, however, may have been colored by his infatuation with Mirplo the artist—at least that’s what cynical Louise seemed to think. So here she was, independently attempting to confirm her doubts, with coercive outrages against tender Hoverlander flesh as the lie-detector of record if required. Like I said, I have a high tolerance for pain. I’d regret to have to test how high.

So okay, Radar, all you need is an answer that meets her needs, Jay’s needs, and your needs. Happen to have one of those handy?

Time to dance out on the high wire of improv. I’ve been there before. The trick is to not look down.

The first move was obvious: feed Louise the expected narrative. So I stood up and took a deep, confessorial breath. “You’re right,” I said. “Mirplo’s smoke.”

“He’s not an artist?”

“He’s an artist on the come. Most of his accounts are receivable. He’s jacking up his image for the sake of future hires.”

Louise clenched everything it’s humanly possible to clench. “You asshole,” she growled. “You fucked with me.” Notice she didn’t say “fucked with my boss.”

“I didn’t fuck with anyone,” I said. “I brought you a deep pocket. It’s real. It’s just not his.”

“Whose, then?”

“The woman he’s with.”

“What, that thing with the green hair? Come on.”

“Not her. The other one. Plowright.”

“She’s his flunky.”

“No,” I said forcefully, “she’s his financial manager. And he’s not her only client. She controls …” I stopped. “Well, I guess you know what she controls.” This was a bluff, and a key one, because if Louise or anyone had done diligence on Plowright, I was toast. I could only hope that they’d been too focused on Vic’s bright and shining colors to pay too much attention to his roll-withs. Well, they’d be paying attention now, and investigating Ms. Miriam Plowright at the first opportunity to determine whether my story held water.

That story, hastily stitched together, presented Mirplo as a borderline whack-job earnestly trying to parlay a couple of lucky commissions into a full-blown career. “He’s all self-fulfilling prophecy,” I said. “Act like someone, you’re someone.” I offered Mirplopalooza as evidence of that. She might or might not have known how Vic had pimped it to Jay, but she would have seen promotional evidence of it on the Strip and elsewhere. “He’s trying to bootstrap himself to stardom.”

“And how does Plowright figure in?”