It was in an old gymnasium, still imbrued with the dust of our youth, that we met again to mark the passage of time, to come together so we could keep the past from disappearing entirely. Not all of us had made it, many lost to calamities we thought of ourselves immune to when we were young; mental illness, drug abuse, suicide. None of these had any of the glory that we had presupposed would shroud any early deaths.
We hid from these tragedies by laughing at the foolishness of our past decisions, tomfoolery and pranks that might have ended in disaster, but didn’t, goals more bold than wise that had been judiciously abandoned. Tracy, though, cooled all of that by flashing her hand, the hoop of the promise ring still there. There was no marriage ring to replace it.
I remembered being in the same Baptist church as she, raising my hand to take the same vow she had. But I had given it away to the first woman who smiled at me, the exhilaration of consummation eclipsing any guilt I might have felt. When I met the woman I would eventually marry she still believed the assurance of my ring, though, and that was just the first of many lies that had ended with us parting ways.
I stared at Tracy with her bitter pride, and I couldn’t help but wonder which of us had lost more.
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Thinking about the puzzle of the girl, her Corsican, and all the other parties involved made getting through the rest of my shift tough. I scratched at my blazer, itching to get out of it, hovering in the dark of the slot machine sector, but always near the border of the Rococo architecture of the grand hall. I watched the besuited French elite of the city walk by, plodding or gliding or drunkenly rambling over the Versailles marble and Savonnerie carpets, past the gilded furniture and alabaster staircases, saying hello to the men they knew and ignoring the ones that were there with their mistresses.
It was enough to make a man weep for humanity. It was at least enough to make me glad that Cheryl and I never had children for fat parasites like these to rob their future.
For some reason that got me thinking about Balaclava and his voyous. Or maybe it was the only thing I came back to after pawing through everything that was going on that didn’t involve me waiting around for something to happen. Either way, when I finally clocked out I practically hopped out of my casino blazer and back into my coat, grabbed the umbrella Sophie had given me and headed west of town.
Impossible to tell from inside the cavern of the casino, it had stopped raining. It was a still a few hours till dawn, the concrete of the city’s streets exuding a deep kind of cool. It was pleasant, with just a hint of the coming summer heat, so I headed out to the Promenade. I walked a few miles along its cobblestones with the lingering lovers, trippers, drug dealers, and prostitutes, occasionally rising up to my full height to scare away the would-be pickpocket or mugger. No number of cops could keep the less savory elements of the city out of Old Town. After all, that’s where the money is.
When I got far enough west that I figured someone might know, I asked about the Factory. After the second or third nighthawk a stringy young woman with lazy eyes and a cigarette dangling out of her mouth gave me directions. It wasn’t close, almost out all the way out by the river.
It was still too early for the trams to be running so I stopped at one of the blue-signed taxi stations that were scattered about the city. The driver, red-nosed and bundled up in a thick brown jacket, quietly slid into the front seat as he saw me approach. I got in.
I started to give him directions while he fussed with his seatbelt and put the car into gear. He nodded in understanding at each step of my instructions, the tiny cab puttering from the curb, away from nocturnal pedestrian traffic and into the Promenade’s auto ways.
Nearly to the river the driver pulled off the thoroughfare and onto a road headed north, the thrumming of the tires announcing the change from smooth concrete to rounded cobblestone. A little time passed with each reflection of the streetlights on the rain-slick streets until he stopped on an overpass and announced my fee.
Without stepping out of the car I glanced around at our surroundings. It could have been the right area for a place called the Factory. Four squat warehouses, old enough to be stained from the years when this area had industrial output, windowless and grim, stood at the corners of the bridge, joined by identical brothers that marched off in the four directions. Down below the overpass, an orange light of indeterminate source illuminated a narrow alley, the uneven run of its cobblestones heading off into the dark in either direction.
Seeing my confusion, the driver pointed west
off the overpass, down the alley, the light there only showing steam pipes, worn bricks, and trash cans. “L’usine,” he said, indicating again with a thrust of his finger. I decided to trust him and took out my billfold for payment.
I thought about how nice it was to have spent quiet time in a car without anyone threatening to kill anyone else and asked for the driver’s card. According to the schedule hanging off the dash he was on till 7:00, but he still paused at my request. After a moment, he gave a fatalistic shrug and handed it to me. It said his name was Alon Felistone. I thanked him, left a decent tip, and got out.
The bakery flooded in the sixth day of rains and left Marjon without a living. When the levee on the fifth district broke, the water came flooding in through the basement windows fast enough that it knocked over the bread racks, inundated the ovens, and sank the cashbox.
She grabbed two of the two loaves she had made with her own hands and held them above her head as she fled. She kept them dry there even when she crossed water so deep she had to hold up her chin to keep from drowning, past fleeing rats and debris so wet and dark it was impossible to tell what it was.
Marjon finally made it to the higher ground of
the sixth district and sold the two loaves to a man who paid a fair price with soaked currency. He gave her one loaf back and gestured for her to eat, and the two sat on what was now the embankment of the district, watching the detritus of their lives and the lives of their neighbors float away.
Chewing methodically, the man patted himself down in the way people do when they have forgotten something. When Marjon looked at him questioningly he said, “I lost my keys.”
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The security office also had a board with everyone’s schedules. I checked it to see what sector I was stationed in, then took a glance to see Jasper’s break schedule. That information in my pocket I went to the oubliette of the slot machines to wait. Other than answering the questions of a little old Greek lady, my shift passed with its usual boredom.
It was easy enough to get from the dark of the slot machine sector to the equally dim backroom without passing through the manufactured glamour of the main halls, although walking through the marble and velvet would have made a nice change. Outside of the bathroom and at least one of the changing rooms, the security break room was one of the few places in the casino with no cameras. I’m sure that wasn’t a coincidence.
The room did have a round, cameo window, hanging at head height like a porthole. The first time I passed by I peeped through it to see Jasper wasn’t alone, so I kept walking. The second time he was so I pushed all the through the door and in. Like all of the internal rooms of the casino, the grey walls of the break room were windowless and undecorated. Jasper sat alone with his bow tie and crisp white shirt at one of two long, wood laminate tables. With a small cooler and a few pieces of sliced apple in front of him, he could have been a schoolkid eating his lunch alone. Except, like most of his co-workers, I’m sure schoolkids around here went home for their lunch breaks.
For a moment, I felt something like pity lurch in my chest, some misbegotten beast that wanted to stagger towards Jasper. But I beat it with each of my few steps to him, my familiar contempt of the small man taking over by the time I sat myself at the table.
I don’t think any of that showed on my face, but there was a wariness around Jasper’s eyes as he gave me his unctuous grin. He said it was good to see me and I nodded. I annoyed him for a few minutes by butchering his language in a series of mundane questions meant to sound like I was trying to make small talk.
“Thanks for pointing out the high roller the other day,” I lied, hoping to make it seem that I didn’t understand Jasper’s actual motive.
His smile told me I was at least partially successful. He replied, “It made for a pretty exciting evening. Lots of talk in the back room for many hours.”
“Yeah,” I nodded, sneaking a glance to the break room’s entrance, appearing as a man who doesn’t want to be caught. “I was hoping to keep that from happening again.”
Jasper grinned as men do when they’re certain they know more. “I don’t think he’ll be coming back after what happened with Sarti.”
“Yeah, but they’re trouble,” I said, taking out a few of the hundred Euro marks I had brought with me, keeping them in my fist. “I was wondering if you could keep an eye out for me.” I peeled off two of the Euro c-notes.
Jasper tried hard to appear offended, sharing his fellow continentals’ affected disdain for money, but I noticed he kept glancing down at the currency, noting there was still more in my hand. “That is already my job – but I do it for the house.”
“Absolutely.” I peeled off a third Euro, slipping into English. “And I don’t want to get in the way of that. But I was wondering if you could let me know about anything unusual. New faces, familiar faces doing new things. That sort of thing.” I pushed the money across the tiger stripes of the fake wood towards Jasper.
He chewed on his apple, still staring at the money without taking it. “Why would I do this?”
I hesitated to point out that he had done this very same thing the other night without me asking for it, but I didn’t want to overplay my hand. Instead I replied, “The Beard might be involved in human trafficking. Casino management doesn’t want to get involved, and they don’t want it around either.”
Jasper stopped chewing his apple, tucking it into his cheek so he could speak. “You’re working for Sarti?”
I let my face fall into a dead blank, as someone who’s remembered his poker face. Instead of answering I just pushed the cash towards him. “I can’t say.”
Jasper smiled more broadly, tonguing the rest of an apple slice into his mouth. He slid the money off the table then replaced it with one of his feet. He leaned back, unfurling himself like some kind of supercilious caterpillar. “Sure. I can do that for you.”
“Great.” I tried to smile in a way that I hoped hid my impulse to slap his feet off the table. Echoing Mitnick in a way that I wasn’t entirely comfortable with I added, “If you spot anything useful there’ll be more where that came from.”
His face screwed into a rictus of confusion while he sorted through my last sentence’s structure and contractions. I was fairly certain he wasn’t just pretending to understand when he nodded. I got up and left the blank walls of the break room, feeling like a man escaping a submarine before the waters rush in.
Walking along the steam pipes and moving through the shadow and light of each dim light fixture, I wondered what I was doing. I couldn’t tell if I was betting on Jasper seeing something and telling me, or if I was betting on his inability to keep his mouth shut to bring something out of the woodwork.
The wax on the candles had begun to run a little long before Max had even begun to question his plan. He was meant to be out of town, but had gotten back early, early enough that he could get into the apartment before Lisa would get off work. Struck by inspiration from the frayed edges of their relationship, he ordered a to-go meal from her favorite restaurant, unfurled the tablecloth, laid out the candles. But she was late, and he was still waiting, left to wonder what an unhappy wife got up to while her man was out of town.
He dodged into the closet when he heard her finally buzz in, the walls so thin you could hear everything from the adjacent stairwell. Over her footsteps her voice carried up to him. She was speaking to someone and, for a moment, he imagined that he had caught her with an illicit lover, his surprised turned disaster. The conversation, though, was one-sided, and he breathed a sigh of relief, realizing she was talking on her mobile. “And you’re sure?” she whispered as she entered. The door closed, she added, “I just slip this into his food and he drifts off?”
Max stayed in the closet, piecing together what Lisa was saying as she rounded the corner into the kitchen, her last words out before she saw his surprise, “I don’t want him to suffer.”
