I took revenge by zapping her, and then almost dropped the phone in the bathwater when the next message kicked off.
"Paul? It's me."
Usually, the only people who say "It's me" are your mum and your lover. (And some Korean B&B receptionists, of course.) I honestly don't think I would have dared tell Alexa
"It's me" any more—she might have replied in Cambodian or Gaelic. But she obviously thought it was still relevant to do so.
"Your mobile is on voice mail so I'm trying your hotel. Elodie told me where you are. I'm coming to Las Vegas. Can I stay . . . Can I sleep . .. ?" She swapped to French. It seemed that things were so complicated between us now that there weren't enough English verbs for us to communicate with. "Tu penx m'heberger?" she asked, meaning, could she sleep with me, but only in the sleeping sense.
I ducked under the water and let the gurgling jets massage my head.
At this rate, my suite was going to turn into a kibbutz.
9
You can't say you've seen all of human life till you've been to the Strip in daylight. The neon makeup is off and you can see its true complexion. It's the face of a madman. Or a genius. Or both. The whole city is a victory of humankind over nature. And over common sense.
I rapidly came to the conclusion that Las Vegas's planners (if they have any) must be permanently on cactus juice— anything is possible, the nuttier the better. Yes, we'll slot a life-size Egyptian temple inside a black glass pyramid. Yes, we'll build a practically full-size Eiffel Tower straddling the Gare de Lyon and the Hotel de Ville. Hey, why not have a fake volcano exploding every half hour? And real live lions in a Perspex cage in the middle of a casino?
As we drove around in the limo, Candy told me that one hotel has a suite with a full-size basketball court—twenty thousand dollars a night—and that guests can get whatever luxury they want in Vegas, right down to a caviar facial. I didn't like to tell her that having fish eggs smeared over my nose was not my idea of luxury.
Candy and I got married that afternoon. She made a very sexy bride, imprinting her bright-pink lips on my cheek and crushing her whole upper body against me. I was getting treated like a waxwork already. The priest— not an Elvis but a blue tuxedoed MC—performed the ceremony sitting down. There was no room to stand up because we were in a car. It was a publicity stunt for the wedding chapel who'd provided the limo. That was why the car was so huge—so they could hold drive-through weddings in it.
"Do you do drive-through divorces as well?" I asked the MC.
"No, that's my brother," he answered seriously.
Larry turned up, very appropriately, at the Venetian, where Candy and I took a romantic motorized gondola ride on a "canal" so clear and blue that a real Venetian gondolier would have got vertigo from being able to see so far down into the water.
After our cruise, Larry announced that he was taking me across the street "to get your dick wet."
"What?" I thought he might have fixed up some branded entertainment with the city's anytime-anywhere girls. Tyler seemed to have accepted every promotional offer going.
Twenty minutes later, I was looking down at the eerily lapping waters of a harbor, a seaport in the middle of the desert. This was the other side of the city's folly—water. The gondoliers' canal was a mere damp patch compared to the huge hotel swimming-pool complexes and the Bellagio lake, not to mention the millions of gallons needed to keep the golf greens looking like emeralds rather than coal dust. And I was now at one of the wettest bits of the desert—the Treasure Island's pirate harbor, with its hidden wave machines and two full-size galleons.
I had taken my place on one of the ships, wearing my usual kilt and anorak, plus a black three-cornered pirate's hat. Larry had gone to sit in a bar overlooking the harbor, where I could see him bantering with two security guys. They were being excessively respectful. Candy was with me on the ship, listening intently while a pirate with an eyepatch and painted-on beard explained what was going to happen. Or rather, what he really didn't want to see happen.
"Don't stand here or you'll get your ass fried by a gas flame," he said. He pointed down to a nozzle hidden in a barrel. "And smoke comes out of these at high pressure." He placed a hand on two pipes painted to look like lengths of wood. "And when the ship sinks, jump in that direction or you might get hit by the falling mast." He held out a naked arm toward the water. Candy seemed very interested in the arm, and in the torso it was attached to. I was much more concerned about where the arm was pointing.
"'Sinks'?" I asked.
"Yeah. The girls fire cannons at us, we sink, some of the guys do high dives into the water, dien we board the girls' ship, the two captains go aloft to make out, fireworks, curtain."
"You do a high dive?" Candy asked him.
"Nah," he said. "I hang on to the rigging and dance."
"Can't I hang on to the rigging as well? I can do a Scottish dance. Jigging in the rigging."
"No, best you jump clear."
I looked down at the dark-blue water. It didn't seem piratelike to ask whether it was heated.
By the time the show started, neon had flooded the night. The two ships were spotlit, music was making the masts vibrate, and a traffic jam of spectators was blocking the whole section of the Strip.
The crowd didn't seem to notice that one of the male pirates was not dressed in traditional seafarer's garb, although a few of them must have been wondering why the TV crew were pointing their camera at me when there was so much flesh on display elsewhere—male and female.
The show was a pantomime. The goodies were a crew of skimpily dressed girls who kept themselves amused during their long sea voyage by miming to raunchy disco music. The baddies were the male pirates, who also interspersed their skulduggery with bouts of frenetic dancing. The male ship moved threateningly toward the female vessel—very smoothly, I noticed, a sort of boat train on underwater rails. The girls taunted the men, and a battle ensued in which the girls defended themselves by shaking their booties even more provocatively than usual. It was a very effective ploy, because the guys' ship belched smoke and flames and then began to sink.
As the deck tipped away beneath my feet, the pirate in the rigging yelled at me to jump, and I hit the water.
It was a lot colder than the last time I'd taken my kilt for a swim, in the real Adantic over in Florida, but this time I had a much more attractive welcoming committee than a Miami policeman. I climbed up a rope ladder onto the girls' boat and was instandy grabbed by a thin woman in a ragged white shirt and black lingerie. She rubbed herself around me like a cat begging for milk, tlirust me away in disgust, then propelled herself back into my arms, all die time mouthing the words to a song about what she'd like to do to my body. Finally she squeezed me as if she wanted to wring all the water out of my dripping clothes, and then dragged me through a hidden door as die fireworks whisded up into the night sky.
"You must be die kilt guy," she said breathlessly when we got backstage. She looked down at the sopping length of cloth hanging between my legs.
"Yeah," I said, beginning to shiver.
"Can I get your autograph?"
"Sure, when my fingers stop shaking."
"Good one," the pirate with the eyepatch said. He clapped me on the back and sent a shower of cold water splashing off my anorak.
Candy was beside me now, and shrieked as she got hit by the spray.
"Let's go for a drink and something to eat," she said. "You want to come, too?" she asked the pirate.
"No thanks." He lifted his eyepatch and examined her with both eyes. "You're cute but you're not my type."
"Oh." Candy looked disappointed.
"Too female." He winked and covered his eye up again. "Hey, Paul," he said, "the guys' showers are through here."
10
The shower cubicle was roomy enough for three people, but I had it to myself. The eyepatch dancer also loaned me a tracksuit that was big enough for at least two people my size. He told me it had been left there
by a giant who had been fired from the show for taking the fight scenes too seriously and breaking off chunks of mast to use as weapons against the girls.
I found Larry and Candy in the harborside bar.
"Take him back to the hotel," Larry ordered Candy. "They got great food," he told me. "Sushi, Italian, whatever you want. Then you can go and persuade them to change the odds at their casino." He chuckled to himself. "Or maybe you got a system? Think you can beat the cards or the roulette wheel?"
"Yes, I've got a system," I said. "Don't bet, don't lose your money. Works every time."
I was only shaking his tree, of course. I got changed, slurped down some raw tuna, a seaweed salad, and a couple of Japanese beers, and went to check out the hotel casino.
It was smaller than the conurbations of gaming tables that I'd seen downtown, but there was still plenty of room for anyone who wanted to play cards, roulette, craps, or the slot machines. And there was quite a crowd in, lots of people wearing delegates' badges for a conference.
I tried to watch a poker game, but of course the players were keeping their cards flat on the table and showing no emotion, so it wasn't exactly a spectator sport.
I had a flutter at roulette, which was fun for the time it took for the ball to stop whirring round and rattle into a number slot. Then the wheel proved, four or five times on the trot, that my birthdate, Paris postal code, and PIN aren't lucky numbers.
So I went and played a few hands at blackjack, testing a theory that I'd worked out. If you double your stake with each hand, surely eventually you'll win all your money back? The weakness with this theory is that if, like me, you lose four times in a row on a five-dollar-stake table, you quickly arrive at an eighty-dollar hand, panic, and decide to keep your remaining cash so you'll have something left for food.
I took a bottle of beer for a walk as far as the giant aquarium at one end of the casino, a coral reef alive with fish of all sizes and colors, from blue thumbnail to silver dinner plate. Names of species came back to me from when I'd tried to read a guide to tropical fish on vacation in Thailand—parrot fish, angel fish, puffer fish, suckermouths that were trying to gnaw their way out of the tank, and a few varieties that looked decidedly edible.
I wasn't the only one gazing in at the reef. There was a girl there, too, a blonde who looked as though she might be an off-duty cocktail waitress. Very tall, almost no makeup, her hair hanging loose, kind of hippie style. She had a strong-featured face with a longish nose and real eyebrows, characterful.
I saw she was looking at me, but I decided not to make eye contact. Even though she might only want to ask me the name of the fish with a blue face and a big nose, I didn't want to get into any kind of chat-up situation.
"Don't you think it's spooky they put it so close to the Japanese restaurant?" She was the one who broke the ice.
"I'm trying not to. I just ate there," I said.
"Are you here for the crime-writers' conference?" she asked. She had a southern English accent.
"No. You?"
"Sort of."
"Right."
OK, dead end, I thought. I smiled to show I didn't mind that our conversation had died of natural causes, and took a slurp of beer. Or tried to. I was standing too close to the tank and the bottle clunked against the glass.
"Careful!" She was looking into the tank as if checking the fish for signs of shock.
"I don't think I traumatized them," I said. "They've only got ten-second memories, haven't they? They'll get over it pretty quickly."
"That's not true. Some of them are capable of quite complex learning processes." She flashed a pair of accusing blue eyes at me.
"I wish I was." I stepped back from the glass and took a tentative sip from my bottle.
"You're English, aren't you?" she asked. "On holiday?"
"Yes." I didn't feel like explaining the truth.
She moved closer and looked conspiratorial.
"I'm here for the fish," she said.
"The fish?"
"Yes, I'm checking all the different ones they have in their aquariums, making sure there are no endangered species."
"And do they have any here?"
"No. Though I wonder why they have to have them at all. What's the point of a tropical-ocean aquarium in the middle of the Nevada desert?"
I hoped she wasn't planning to liberate them. I remembered a story about a well-meaning pop star who'd bought all the live lobsters in a French restaurant and "liberated" them into a river, where they'd died instantly on contact with the fresh water.
"I guess it's just because the fish are beautiful," I said, and as I pronounced the last word I couldn't help looking at her face and making it sound as if I was talking about her. She was beautiful, so I was perfectly justified in doing it. But even so, it sounded like a tacky come-on.
"Yes, you're right, they are," she said.
My phone cut into our fishy conversation. It was the hotel laundry, asking for confirmation that the skirt I had given in was under the right room number.
"It's not a skirt, it's a kilt. A men's kilt. Yes, it's mine. Will it be ready for tomorrow?"
The laundry woman assured me it would and I hung up a happy man.
"I thought I'd seen you before. You're the guy with the kilt and the puffy jacket. Paul, isn't it? They've got you doing some weird stuff." She was grinning at me, but in a way that I didn't mind at all. She somehow seemed to express that it was all a cosmic joke, that the whole situation was absurd and not just me.
Before we could discuss the cosmos further, my phone rang again. This time it was Suraya. I apologized and took the call.
"If I kill my father, do you think I'll inherit when I get out of prison?" she asked.
"No, and I don't think it's a good idea to advertise a murder when you work in a call center," I told her. "Your calls are all recorded, aren't they?"
"Yes, but I can steal the recordings."
"OK, go ahead and kill him and then tell me why you called."
In fact it was partly a courtesy call, to make sure I'd cleared things up with Tyler. But she also wanted to know what the French were up to. Not just the events—which Tyler knew about—but the ways Elodie might have tried to sabotage my campaign. The Brits were finally getting worried about the competition, it seemed.
"I'm seeing Elodie tomorrow. I'll do some detective work I can let you know what she got up to in New Orleans and Miami, though. Pretty sneaky stuff."
I promised to send an e-mail and curtailed my call so that I could get back to talking about puffer fish and puffy jackets.
But when I turned back to the aquarium, the girl had disappeared.
11
I woke up next morning to find a text message from Juliana: "crossed texas, nothing happened." Poor old Texas, I thought. It must hate being so uneventful.
Juliana estimated that they'd arrive in Las Vegas in the early afternoon.
There was also a message from Alexa, saying she was getting here "before the evening."
It looked like being a crowded teatime.
I spent a relaxing morning at the hotel, getting a massage in the spa, floating around in the indoor swimming pool, and being photographed in my branded-entertainment outfit while eating another sushi meal. I looked out for the aquarium girl, but didn't see her.
After lunch, I headed back to the room and vegged out in a T-shirt and boxer shorts to wait for my guests. There was football on TV—two armies of gladiators trying to break each other's bones. I was amazed to see how the Americans had managed to take rugby, a violent but fast-flowing game, and turn it into trench warfare. I wondered why they didn't go all out and create an armed version. The team with possession of the ball could soften up die opposing defense with artillery, while the other team would be trying to take out the quarterback with a sniper rifle. At least if there were explosions, it'd be more exciting than triis stop-start affair in which the players took a five-minute break every time one of them passed the ball. No wonder
they had cheerleaders to liven tilings up, I thought.
It was somehow inevitable that I should be ogling pompom girls when Juliana arrived. She whistled in appreciation at the sheer enormity of the room and sat at die end of my bed to see what I was watching on TV
"Hmm," she said disapprovingly. Not about my choice of viewing, though. "They look jaded. Haven't been training hard enough. They need my help."
"Where's Jake?" I asked, half expecting diat she'd got fed up widi die poetry and abandoned him in the desert.
"He couldn't wait to go gambling. I left him at a poker table downstairs."
"You can't put chips on a hotel bill, can you?" I asked.
"No. He's got the rest of the cash you gave us. Hundred dollars or so. Now I'm going to take a shower and have some sleep. Hey, three beds. Whose is which?"
"Well, I thought..." I had been giving this a lot of consideration, but hadn't come to a real conclusion. "You two can share a bed, and then ..."
"You're not sure if you're sharing with Alexa?"
I did a Parisian shrug. That was up to the great French architect of the universe.
12
An hour or so later, the football players were still headbutting each other, the cheerleaders were looking even more jaded, and Juliana was asleep in her queen bed.
I heard someone trying to open the door and swearing in French because they couldn't manage the electronic key. It had to be Jake.
To stop him hammering or yelling, I went to let him in.
"Paul!" I smelled booze on his breath. "Man!" He fell across the threshold into my arms.
"You lose it all?" I asked.
"Lose? Huh, man. I footed them one in the girl."
I guessed that this was a French phrase meaning he'd shafted the casino.
"You won?"
"Oh, oui, man. I am very good in poker. You forget, I am un homme de Las Vegas. Merde!" He suddenly looked more confused than before. "Your room, there is no beds in it!"