The Incrementalists (23 page)

Jimmy raised a glass of the newly poured Chilean. “To the simplicity and refinement of truly excellent wine,” he said.

Jorge smiled and we all touched glasses.

They both ordered the duck. Jimmy introduced Jorge to a varietal Carménère he’d never tried, and I realized yet another layer of what it meant that Jimmy had been watching Phil and that, when Phil hadn’t wanted to leave Vegas during the World Series of Poker, Jimmy had been the one who did the additional research needed to delay Jorge in New York and bring me here. Jimmy knew all about my work and my bosses. He knew how music, even more than smell, could trigger memory, and that allowing patients to select the tunes assigned to reminders might make the difference between remembering medication and forgetting what the damn monitor was for in the first place. He knew why I did the work I did. And I watched him translate it into wine.

Jimmy was funny and subtle, and Liam and Jorge laughed and nodded along as he wove a body-anchored web of value statements and sense memories detailing the virtue of patience, of care and precision. “Smell the wine,” he insisted. “Cherry and earth,” he said. “Tobacco, dark chocolate, leather.” I made a mental note of Jorge’s scent switches.

Jimmy told a hysterical story about sloppiness punished, and with one finger, ever so slightly touched Jorge’s head, just by his ear. “This wine is made by a vintner who has achieved through his work, from the seeds he plants, to the time he waits, not success, but mastery. A life given to worthy work, is itself, a work of art,” he said.

I could almost hear Jorge’s mental oath to become not successful, as he had always and easily been, but masterful.

Whether its story was true or not, the wine tasted good, so I drank it and watched a meddle master work. Oskar put a brotherly arm around me and I hugged his wrist between my cheek and shoulder. We were forgiven. Liam was intrigued. I drank my wine and winked at my boss.

I missed Phil, and wondered how he and Matsu were doing, and whether they were playing poker. I figured Matsu was pretty good insurance, but no matter what Ramon said about the body only housing the self, I wanted Phil whole, house and occupant. House and home. And I figured even Matsu couldn’t keep an eye on Phil if he didn’t want to be watched.

Phil

Matt and I found a cab next to Binion’s and went through the ritual: The doorman asked where we were going, I said, “The Palms.” He leaned over and told the cabbie, “Two for The Palms,” and we were off. Matt didn’t say a word during the drive, and neither did I.

Once we were out, with no one around us, he said, “What do you hope to accomplish?”

“To find the next layer of her plan.”

“How, meddle with her?”

“Who? Celeste or Irina?”

“One will cover the other. Unless you can surprise her again. If you can do that, either will work. If not—”

“Can you think of a way to do that?”

“No,” he said. “Then how?”

“I don’t know.”

We entered the lobby. “You wait here,” I told him.

“No,” he said.

I exhaled slowly. “All right.”

We took the elevator to eight. Mom and Dad and two kids in wet swimming suits and towels joined us for the ride along with a girl who looked about nine and didn’t appear related to any of them. They all continued up after we left.

“You see it?” he said.

“The way everyone was afraid of Mom? Yeah. Want to fix it?”

“If you’ll come with me.”

I shrugged. “The abuse isn’t physical.”

“So that’s all right, then?”

“Nothing is all right.”

“Is all right the goal?”

“The goal is better.”

“Yes,” said Matt. “It is.”

I knocked on the door.

The peephole went dark, then light, and then there was a delay of a good ten seconds before Irina opened the door and said, “Phil. You bastard.”

She crossed to the other side of the room, leaning against the desk; there was a couch and a pair of stuffed chairs next to the table. Matt and I came in. “Good to see the two of you, as well. Which one am I talking to, or is it possible to decide?”

“Celeste,” she said, furious. “Celeste, stuck in this old lady’s body with no one for company except—”

“Oh, hush,” I said. “No one feels any sympathy for you except maybe Irina, so don’t talk trash about her.”

“You fucked up everything,” she said.

“If I were sure that was true,” I said, “I wouldn’t be here.”

I sat down, Matt remained standing.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Your next plan. Where you go from here.”

“Why? So you can stop it?”

“Yes.”

She laughed. “If I had a plan, I certainly wouldn’t tell you, dear Much the Miller’s Son. In fact, I’d make bloody damn sure neither of you interfered with it.”

“Not that easy,” I said.

“But it is,” she said, and about the time I realized she was holding a gun, it was already pointing at me; and about the time I realized it was pointing at me, it was flying through the air, and Irina was on her knees clutching her wrist, with Matt standing next to her.

I caught the gun, more by accident than design. A revolver, Smith and Wesson .38. A big gun for such a frail old lady.

“You broke my wrist,” she said.

“No,” said Matt. “I didn’t. It’s just bruised. Alternate cold and warm, half-hour inter—”

“Shut the fuck up.”

She rose shakily to her feet and glared at me, still holding her wrist, as if everything she’d done had been my decision.

“I have,” I said, “only one thing to threaten you with, Irina. You’re old; you’re going to need a new Second soon. And everyone will know about this. The harder you push, the more unpleasant we can make things. Want to sleep through the next hundred years? How about two hundred?”

“You Judas!”

“Shut up, Celeste. I’m talking to Irina. Help us out, Irina. Tell us what Celeste is planning.”

“I can’t.” It was Irina speaking now; I could tell from her inflection. She was pleading.

“You can. You’re strong. Fight her. Or you can take the consequences if you don’t.”

“Why are you doing this to me?” That was Celeste again, dammit.

There were so many answers to her question, I could have recited them for a day. I settled on, “You tried to kill Ren.”

“That was Irina,” she said. “But I had a backup for that. Besides, I’ve always hated the little cunt.”

One plus zero is one. One plus one is two. Two plus one is three. Three plus two is five. Five plus three …

“Celeste? I can’t remember. How much is five plus three?”

Before she could answer I shot her in the face.

THIRTEEN

Keep Walking

Ren

By the time Jorge and Liam were done eating, my planned rewrites and new photo shoot were irrelevant. Jorge would call tomorrow, I could see it, and in a brief but pivotal conference call, explain to me, and to my boss, that of the three ideals—high quality, quick delivery, and low cost—we mere mortals could expect only two. Quality, nay artistry, was nonnegotiable to RMMD, and because elderly patients can only wait so long, speed was literally vital as well. He would open the budget and let us tell him what we needed. I could almost hear the gears in him turning. But Jimmy caught me checking my phone for anything from Phil, and with a brief digression over half a glass of Tokay on the virtues of and history behind the hot water spa, Jimmy moved the call back a day. Jorge was going to take tomorrow off, and so should Liam and I.

I still hadn’t heard from Phil by the time we reeled out of Hugo’s. His phone went straight to voice mail when I called him. We ambled through the night oven and parried invitations from Liam and Jorge, arms slung around each other, to shows, or drinks, or the zip line overhead until Ramon managed to peel them away. He piled them into a cab with override instructions to the cabbie not to leave Liam and Jorge anywhere but their own hotel, no matter where they went between here and there.

Ramon gave the driver two hundred-dollar bills and his business card. “Call me tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll double this when I hear from my friends that they are awake and well. No penalty to you for hangover, but keep them from thieves, photographers and beautiful women.”

“What are you?” The cabbie chuckled. “Their goddamn fairy godmother?”

“Almost exactly that.” Ramon closed the cab door, and we waved good-bye.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Jimmy will reimburse me.”

“Then thanks to you both.”

Ramon silently inclined his head.

“What now?” Jimmy asked me.

“I’d like to find Phil.”

“He plays poker at The Palms,” Ramon said.

I shuddered. “Irina’s there.”

“It’s a big place,” Oskar told me. “And you’re not alone.”

“It still gives me the willies,” I said. “But let’s go.”

Jimmy pointed out that none of us should be driving, so we took a cab ourselves. For as late as it was, traffic was grindingly slow, and by the time we turned onto Flamingo, our cab wasn’t outpacing the drunks weaving the sidewalk, so we paid up and got out. From the walkway it was easy to see why the cars weren’t moving. A welter of ambulances, fire trucks and cop cars was balled in a clot ahead of us.

“I think they’re in front of The Palms,” Oskar said.

I shivered, looking at the impassive facade and the wheeling red-and-blue lights. “You know, when they’re hightailing it down the road, and need those people who are not in their mad dash to rescue someone or apprehend someone else to get the hell out of the way, I’m sure those lights are just right. But even the anemic fluorescent bulbs in coffee shop bathrooms are wired with sensors and switches to plunge their perhaps too-stationary occupants into darkness requiring the coffee-filled and jittery to pee in the dark, or pray that seated, their flailing arms reach high enough to count as present to the censorious sensor. If toilets can interpret sheer inactivity as a Darkness Now directive, could not the flashy chariots bearing our dear extinguishers of flame and catchers of criminals not be similarly equipped with light-stopping technology? Would it not be to their advantage, even, to cease calling such grotesque attention to themselves, advertising the life-and-death excitement of whatever incident has brought them screaming forth? Would it not perhaps afford the stricken and maimed they’ve flown to some pretense of privacy or at least peace in the disorienting post-life moments should our stalwart foes of Death and Chaos have come too late?”

It seemed we had stopped walking. Jimmy and Oskar were staring, and Ramon was shaking his head. I was holding a rose, though I didn’t know where it had come from. I smiled uncertainly, not quite remembering what I’d been yammering on about.

“Sorry,” I said. “I had quite a bit of Jimmy’s gorgeous wine. And fucking Phil has just fucking killed me.”

Jimmy staggered. Oskar caught his massive shoulders and steered him to a planter. Jimmy sat, not on the edge, but in the dirt.

“I’ll get us a suite and computers,” Ramon said. “We’ll need an ops center as close as we can manage.” He vanished.

Jimmy looked up at me. “Celeste,” he said. He dropped his head into his hands and started to sob.

I looked at Oskar, pale and motionless, and clearly
en guard,
and whispered, “Who’s Celeste?”

Phil

If you’re going to play the “Pick a moment, call it now” game, I suppose it would be when I settled down enough to realize what had just happened. I don’t mean shooting Irina-Celeste; that part was sculpted in marble and would no more fade than my first death, coughing blood and cursing God. I mean that I became aware that we were walking towards the west door, which led to the parking ramp. That took us past the poker room, and I realized someone had said hello as we walked by. Matt had said, “Keep walking.”

Matt had been taking care of things. He wiped the gun clean, he got us out of there, and he had been talking to me the whole time. And I’d responded.

“Almost out,” he said. “Now, again, what do you say if you’re arrested?”

“I need to speak to my attorney, and I do not consent to any search.”

“Good.”

“When do we call the others?”

“As soon as we’re out the door.”

“The family on the elevator are witnesses. Are you going to meddle with them?”

“Of course. Me or someone.”

“Can you fix Mom while you’re at it?”

“I’ll try.”

No one stopped us from leaving. No one needed to; this was a casino. There were more slot machines than cameras, but only just barely. It was a question of when, not if.

Las Vegas’s heat hit me in the face. We walked out into the parking lot next to the ramp. We stopped right there, and Matt said, “Give me your phone.”

I did. “I can’t believe someone heard the shot,” I grumbled. “You’d think they’d have better soundproofing.”

He spoke on the phone and I walked away, because I didn’t want to hear one side of it. The conversation went on for a while. He came back still holding on to my phone, and said, “They’re getting things started.”

I nodded. “What’s my job?”

“Go home. Stay there until you’re either arrested, or we know you won’t be. If I put you in a cab, can I be sure you’ll go home and stay there?”

“Yes,” I said. “But you’ll have to take the long way around getting a cab. The cops—”

“I know, Phil,” he said patiently. “This isn’t my first rodeo.”

“Sorry. And thanks. For. You know.”

“You’re welcome. Ren will be joining you.”

I closed my eyes and nodded and almost cried.

“And Phil. Celeste is back sporadically. In Ren.”

“All right,” I said, meaning it wasn’t.

He used my phone again and arranged for us to be picked up at a convenience store on Decatur. It was a long, long walk on a hot night.

As we walked, Matt said, “If you do get arrested, what—”

“I need to speak to my attorney, I do not consent to any search.”

“Do you have an attorney?”

“I have the Garden, Matt. I suspect I can manage to find a fucking criminal defense lawyer. This isn’t my first rodeo either.”

“Can you afford one? How’s your sugar spoon been?”