7. Vesper
VESPER
Everyone in this city has a story about how they made it.
Mine was the only one I believed, because I was the only one in it.
Now there was a woman named Diane standing in my office at nine in the morning with a foam board propped against my father's old filing cabinet, and on the board were the words I hadn't agreed to.
STRIP ICON WEDDING OF THE DECADE. Under it ran a row of swatches.
A photograph of a ballroom I'd never booked showed off enough crystal to drown in.
Below it lay a seating chart with a front row, and in that front row sat printed names I recognized from newspapers and from the way Vadim's men went quiet when certain cars pulled up out front.
"We're thinking searchlights," Diane said. "Two of them, angled from the porte cochere, so the whole Strip knows something's happening here."
"The Strip's known that since I put four men with earpieces on my floor to pretend they like blackjack," I said.
She laughed on cue, the way people do when they've been told to enjoy whatever I say.
She tapped a line item, a photographer's contract, three pages, a name I'd seen credited under magazine covers.
It promised exclusive rights, approved distribution, and a clause about which outlets got the images first, as if my face were a product with a launch date.
A garment bag hung on the back of my door, and I hadn't put it there. Someone had come in while I was on the floor and left it, heavy as a sleeping body, a dress inside it that three women would sew me into while a fourth photographed the sewing.
I picked up my father's dealer button off the desk and turned it over in my fingers, silver worn down to a soft gray at the edges, thumb-polished by a dead man before it was thumb-polished by me.
Diane kept talking. There would be cameras at the arch and a live feed to a second screen for the overflow crowd.
She promised recognizable faces like a favor she was doing me.
I'd built this place out of a corpse. My father's lounge had gone dark with the lights still on, chairs on tables, a debt taped to the door like an eviction has manners.
I took the wreck at twenty-three and I made the Silver Vale, the last house on the Strip that answered to no one, and I did it with my own two hands and no one's name over the door but the one I chose.
That was the story. That was the whole story.
It fit in a single sentence, and I'd said that sentence to myself on every bad night I ever had.
You couldn't string that sentence with light. You couldn't seat a crime family in the front row of it.
"I need the room," I said.
Diane gathered her boards. She was almost out when the door caught on someone coming the other way, and I heard a voice like warm oil poured over gravel.
"Ah, ah, forgive me. Forgive an old man his terrible timing."
Lazar Kadin came in the way weather comes in.
He wore a gray suit that had been beautiful when Sinatra was alive and was beautiful still, and he carried a paper cone of flowers, the stems wrapped in newspaper the way they did it in the old country, in some old country, the one he kept inside him like a second wallet.
He looked at Diane's departing back, then at the foam board tucked under her arm, and something crossed his face and was gone before I could name it.
"Kroshka." The flowers came at me. "Peonies. They had no peonies, so I made them find peonies. A man does not visit his girl with empty hands, no, no."
"You didn't have to."
"Have to." He waved the words off like smoke. "Sit, sit. Not you. Me. My knees keep a calendar, and today is a holiday for them."
He lowered himself into the chair across from mine, the one my father used to sit in when he came in at closing to count what wasn't there.
Lazar's eyes went around my office slow and fond, over the felt-topped table in the corner, over the framed first dollar, over the button in my hand.
He tended the room with his looking. He knew where everything was, the way you know a face you've watched age.
"You've done something here," he said. "You know what your father used to say, standing right where that terrible woman just stood? He said, one day this town will be too small for what I owe it." He smiled. "He was wrong about the size. He always got the size wrong."
"He got a lot of things wrong."
"He got you." Lazar set his hands on his knees. "So. Not everything."
I put the peonies in the water glass on my desk because I had nothing else, and the plain stems standing in it steadied me.
"You heard," I said.
"I hear the way an old man hears. Late, and too much of it." He tipped his chin at the door Diane had gone through. "Searchlights, was it?"
I hadn't said the word out loud. The board had been face-down under her arm. I was tired, and I let it go by, because with Lazar there was always more coming, and you learned to wait for the rest of it.
"It's supposed to be quiet," I said. "That was the deal I made in my head.
Sign the paper, protect the floor, keep the hundred and forty people out there in their jobs, and do it small.
A courthouse. A witness. Done." My voice thinned on me.
"Now it's a show. My face on a screen for every family in the country to read.
Standing next to him. Belonging to him, in front of God and the gaming commission. "
"And this is the part that cuts you." It was not a question. He already knew.
"I built this by myself." The button turned once, twice, in my fingers.
"That's the one thing that was ever true about me.
Nobody carried me. Nobody's money, nobody's name.
I clawed it out of the ground myself. And now they want to put me in a white dress in a front-row circus and tell the whole world I got saved.
Like I was a girl who needed saving all along. "
I set the button down and looked at him, because he was the only one left who could answer the thing I asked next.
"Were you there?" I said. "The night it went dark. The night he signed away the last of it."
He went quiet, and the quiet had a shape to it.
"I was where I always was. Close enough to see, too far to catch him.
" He looked at the felt table in the corner.
"It was a bad hand of faro, kroshka, at that very table, the one you keep like a saint's bone.
Three men, your father, and a marker he should have burned before the ink was dry.
He turned this button between his fingers the whole night.
" He nodded at my hand. "I told him, Emil, get up, walk to the bar, buy a stranger a drink. He stayed. He always stayed."
"You never told me that part."
"You never asked in a voice that wanted the answer." The smile forgave me. "You ask now. Good. It means you are ready to hear the thing, so you never do it yourself. He lost because he wanted the table to love him. You have never once wanted a table to love you. You want it to pay, and it pays."
Out on the floor a machine ran through the bright falling sound of a payout, the cascade that isn't coins anymore, only a noise they keep because the noise is the drug.
"May I tell you something true, so you will not have to be gentle with it?"
"You've never been gentle with me a day in your life."
"No." The smile deepened all the lines. "I loved you too much for gentle.
Gentle is for strangers." He leaned in, and his voice dropped into the register he saved for the real thing, the stories he told only once.
"You think a crowd changes what you are.
It changes nothing, kroshka. Put a thousand people in that ballroom.
Put every jackal on the Strip in your front row, with their wives and their bad teeth.
You will still be alone in your corner, because that is the only room you have ever trusted, and it is the reason you are standing when better men are underground. "
"That's supposed to comfort me?"
"It is the only kind that lasts." He said it lightly, almost merrily, an old man delighted by a hard truth.
"The rest is decoration. Peonies in a glass.
" He nodded at them. "Your father died in debt because he needed people.
He needed partners. He needed friends. He needed a hand on his shoulder at the bad tables at three in the morning.
Emil could not sit by himself for one hour, and every hand he reached for closed on his throat.
That is not a tragedy, kroshka. It is arithmetic.
He reached, and reaching is how they find the soft part of a man.
" He let it sit. "You do not reach. You never have.
Not since you were a little thing, so small, watching the room instead of the cartoons, counting the exits.
I used to think, this one will be all right, because this one already knows the secret. "
"What secret?"
"That you come in by yourself, and you leave by yourself, and in between, if you are very strong, you let no one close enough to hollow you out.
" He said it like a lullaby. "A wedding is a photograph, and a photograph is a lie that holds still.
You will smile for it, because smiling costs nothing, and inside the lie you will be exactly what you have always been.
Yours. Only yours. No searchlight reaches that far in. "
Something in my chest had been standing on a chair with a rope around the beam above it.
I felt it step down, quietly, and set the chair back where it went.
I don't know how else to say it. He'd taken the worst thing about my life and turned it in the light until it was the best thing, the one thing that had kept me breathing, and he handed it back to me polished.
"How do you always do that?"
"Do what? I only tell you what you already know.
I am a mirror with a good memory." He reached over and, with one finger, touched the dealer button in my hand.
He didn't take it. He touched it, the way you touch a relic through glass.
"He carried this every day of his life. Turned it just so.
You do it exactly as he did, did you know that?
The same little turn. I have watched the pair of you do it across thirty years of felt.
" He sat back. "The difference is, he turned it to remember he was not alone.
You turn it to remember that you are. That is the whole difference between you, and it is why this house is yours and his is dust beneath it. "
Thirty years. I'd run the numbers on my own life a thousand times, and I let his number go by, because it was warm, because he was the last one left who had known my father's face, because when he talked the whole ugly arithmetic of my history came out even for once.
"They want an answer by tonight," I said.
"Give them their beams and their front row, their photographer, their crystal.
It is theater, kroshka, and theater is what you feed a crowd so they do not look at the woman actually holding the knife.
" He pushed himself up out of the chair with both hands, a small performance of age.
"You hold the knife. You always have. Let them light you up like a marquee.
A marquee tells the world nothing except that the show is worth the ticket. "
He crossed to the door and paused with his hand on the frame, looking back at the office one more time, at the felt table, at the flowers in the glass, at me. Whatever tenderness ran under the look, it had a straight edge to it that I was too grateful, right then, to hold up to the light.
"You will be the finest thing in that ballroom," he said. "And the loneliest. And you will not mind, because you will know something none of them know. You will know you got here by your own hand, and no crowd can take back a thing they had no part in giving."
I came around the desk and put my arms around him, and he was smaller than he used to be, the way all the old lions get smaller, and he smelled of cedar and the newspaper the flowers had come wrapped in.
"You never needed anyone, kroshka," Lazar said, and kissed my hair. I would remember it at exactly the wrong moment, which is the only time that kind of thing ever surfaces.