For a moment, Treviscoe was taken aback. She stood above him on the stairs, dressed as she had been when he had first seen her eight years before, as a boy in breeches. Her hair was no longer piled above her head, but pulled back and club-queued. Her face showed no trace of cosmetic, but her pale complexion accentuated rather than diminished the power of her eyes.
She descended with elaborate nonchalance.
“I see that you are escaping town,” he said.
“I have no choice. Walter will settle my debts,” she said, seemingly unconcerned. “My career as a lady of fashion has run its course, even if it hasn’t accomplished its purpose, and I fear it was not without considerable cost.” She smirked. “Would you have hearkened to my entreaties had I appeared before you at Lloyd’s as I am now?”
“You know that I would have,” he replied, his voice soft. “But, madam, I fear that you have put yourself in the power of a scoundrel. I shall not hinder your departure, but you must hear me.”
He told her everything. As he spoke, her expression softened, and when he at length fell silent, he saw that her eyes were glistening.
“Walter has summoned me to Dover, as if I were some trull to do his bidding,” she said, and he saw the anguish in her face. “We are to take passage to Calais, and thence to Italy. With Francis dead, I have no other resource, Mr. Treviscoe.”
She reached up and touched his cheek with her right hand, and then quickly withdrew it. “So many secrets. How I hate them! How different might life have been without them.”
Before he could realize what she was doing, she leaned into him and kissed him softly on his lips. He stood confounded. He had long ago surprised her with an uninvited kiss, but his had not been so tender.
“Good-bye, Mr. Treviscoe.” She strode past him with purpose.
He followed her outside, and signalled Hero to release the coach. She climbed in, and it rattled off into the mist. All at once, Treviscoe felt weary beyond endurance.
It was Thursday, September 16, and London was abuzz with excitement. The pervious day, the young and handsome “Daredevil Aeronaut” Vincent Lunardi of the Neapolitan Embassy had flown from London’s Artillery Ground to Hertfordshire in a balloon filled with inflammable air, accompanied by a dog, a cat, and a caged pigeon. The crowd at the aerostat’s launch had by most estimates surpassed two hundred thousand, and had included no less an eminence than the Prince of Wales.
There was no other topic of conversation, but Treviscoe did not share in the public’s enthusiasm. As if the day were no different from any other, he sat in his usual place at Lloyd’s, again reading the List.
The portly and overdressed Jervase Barkway, one of Treviscoe’s least favourite underwriters, sat down heavily across from him.
“Quite the news, eh, Mr. Treviscoe?” he asked. His faced was flushed; he had obviously been celebrating. “Astonishing, what?”
“All the world is in love with a balloon,” Treviscoe responded.
“Not that, not that,” Barkway said, frowning. “Damn’d French contraption. Dangerous. Nought but a crotchet if you ask me, and I daresay the fancy for ’em shall pass soon enough. No sir, no sir, I was speaking of your noble friend.”
“My noble friend?”
“That Baroness.” Barkway then winked ostentatiously and elbowed Treviscoe. “Fine filly, she. Still, quite tragic.”
“You have me at a disadvantage, Mr. Barkway.” Treviscoe folded his paper and looked quizzically at him.
“Haven’t ye heard? ’Tis in the Gazette. Tragedy. Her friend, that young Artillery officer.”
“What of him?”
“In Italy, they were, Tuscany — say, an’t Lunardi from Tuscany? — anyway, they were visiting that famous tower, the one that don’t stand up straight.”
“The campanile at Pisa?”
“Aye, the very one, the very one. Slipped and fell from the top, didn’t he, and right in front of her very eyes. Dead, of course. Well, sir, you don’t survive such a fall as that, do ye? The newspaper says she was most distressed. Apparently he was her protector, you see.”
The Penthouse View
Joseph S. Walker
Who else was there the first time I heard Jocko tell his story about Jake, and the Giant, and the penthouse elevator? I want to say Yuri, which would make it a while back, since it’s been three, four years since Yuri tumbled off the wire in one of the casino circus acts. Alec was probably around, the slick young con man’s face getting lost in folds of fat. Maybe Freddie G., the doorman at the Sands who hustled bigger tips singing and jiving as the tourists rolled in. There’s a floating group of us who gather in the bars off the main rooms as our shifts end. Whatever we had been, we’re just menial labor of one kind or another now. We don’t play the slots or sit at the tables or go to the shows, but we’re wired in. We drink and tell stories — Vegas stories — and hope that’s all we’ll ever need.
Vegas is all story, really. Bugsy Siegel looked upon the barest, driest, most useless piece of land in the country and told a story about glamour and excitement and money, and lo, it came true. It exploded in wood and cement, metal and glass across the sands, though there was always enough sand left to cover the bodies that fell along the way. That’s the legend, anyway, and we put a lot of stock in legends. We live inside them. The story was always there, bones beneath the flesh, the skeleton giving form to the dream in the desert. Air conditioning is the dream’s breath. The chilled metallic air and the click of ice cubes in short, squat, thick glasses — oh, the story is sweet in the details. Smooth green felt that cards and dice glide over, men in tailored suits, and neon everywhere. Bill Cosby is in the lounge for the dinner show, or there’s Redd Foxx after midnight for the daring. Doyle Brunson and Amarillo Slim stare each other down at the Horseshoe, surrounded by showgirls in sequins and smiles. Business trips with willing secretaries and steaks the size of home plate, and running beneath and around and over it all money, rivers of it, nickels by the bushel and hundred dollar bills by the bale. Everything you really need to know about the story is in Sinatra’s undone bow tie hanging against the breast of his tuxedo shirt.
Some of the old-timers, like Jocko, say all of that is gone now, but I think the new Vegas, the Disney Vegas, the pyramid and pirate ship Vegas, is still built on the bones of the old one. The DNA is there, even if the slots take debit cards and they pipe in the sound of coins cascading out. Every slob in a Steelers T-shirt and cargo shorts, trying to remember the odds card he studied on the plane, feels the Rat Pack standing behind him as a UNLV dropout slides the cards out of the shoe. They can build their roller coasters and put Celine Dion on the marquee, but there’s still a pit boss and his eyes are still slate, and given his choice he’d throw Celine Dion off the building and cut the brakes on the coaster.
So we tell the stories, taking them out of our pockets like kids swapping baseball cards. A lot of the stories are the ones you’d expect about Frank, and later Elvis, and unmarked graves in the desert, and a roll of the dice that moves millions of dollars and a platinum blonde from one guy to another. Some of the stories are about guys like us, though, guys who just came to try to be some part of it, and those are the ones Jocko likes the best, the ones he gathers together and treats gently and cultivates. They’re his desert orchids, I guess. His favorite is this one about a guy called Jake. Me, I don’t like Jake so much, for one simple reason: the girl. Lord knows I understand the lure of that neon glow on the horizon, but it takes a special kind of maniac to bring your thirteen-year-old daughter to this town and think anything good will come of it.