The Fading (30 page)

‘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.

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.

Under the blinking lights and eye-in-the-sky cameras on the casino floor, everyone and everything was watched, taped, recorded,
stored. But in the rooms, under the mattresses, in the rented pool houses, parking lots, and inside the safes and duffel bags
and SUVs’ removable seat cushions, there were no cameras. In such places where the big money must eventually travel, the adrenaline
players, Rain Man geniuses, techno-savants and Lear Jet jocks grew cocky, confident, as relaxed as train robbers who’ve galloped
across the border.