As Nicky and the whole Glory Hole Gang hustled to help her and Van down from the high-step-up vehicle, Temple glimpsed an edge of unlit neon sign atop the building that looked as high-profile as the Hard Rock Hotel’s iconic guitar and thrusting, neon-fretted neck.
But first Temple needed to get her feet on the ground, and when she looked up to human height again she was greeted by a reception committee of eight Fontana brothers arrayed on either side of a suggestively red carpet, wearing not their usual sherbet-tinted summer suits, but pink pinstriped navy suits with black silk shirts accessorized with Miami Vice neon-colored ties, ranging from peach to turquoise to hot pink to cobalt, melon, and purple.
Van bowed her flaxen-haired head, perhaps the only female on Planet Vegas immune to the conjoined attractions of the brothers Fontana. That was probably from having been married to the youngest, Nicky, and the absence of the eldest, Aldo.
The middle of the pack seemed more like clones, but Temple had always found that the Fontana brothers’ biggest charm, their unanimity. Somehow it made their high spirits and good looks less overwhelming.
As they extended their welcoming, finger-spread “jazz hands” of Broadway dance ensembles to the visitors, the Glory Hole Gangsters do-si-doed down the red carpet in their battered cowboy boots, well-worn jeans, and plastic mother-of-pearl-buttoned plaid shirts.
It was desert western versus Vegas dude.
“Love the suits,” Eightball O’Rourke said. “I can’t give up my jeans, but I’ll do the shirt and jacket with my bolo tie.”
Nicky had escorted Van and Temple by the simple gesture of extending both arms, so the women inspected the honor guard from vastly different points of view. Van was theme-hotel executive, dubious to her pale pink–painted toenails.
Temple was curious down to her “Tara O’Hara Scarlett”–painted toenails just what Gangsters would reveal beyond this production-number greeting. Obviously, some remarketing renovations had already been done.
What the interior revealed was Macho Mario Fontana, the boys’ uncle, who had dyed-in-the-DNA-authenticated mob roots, as a tour guide.
On his pasta-enhanced rotund form, white pinstripes looked like parentheses with a stutter, but they matched the silver streaks in his Men’s Spare Club toupee.
Temple couldn’t help thinking had his suit stripes been horizontal … they’d have resembled vintage prison stripes. Perfect uniforms for the parking valets. No. Bellmen. The valets would be both male and female here, Bonnie and Clyde types.
She knew this was Nicky and Van’s job, dreaming up revamped hotel themes, but she had so many good ideas. This was her best job assignment in aeons.
Their party turned a lot of heads. Nine of the ten Fontana brothers and their Uncle Mario would anytime, even without eight of them attired in Broadway-musical gangster suits. The Glory Hole Gangsters were older and shorter and less natty, but no less interesting. Van and Temple could toddle along ignored, which suited them, because it allowed for a sotto voce tête-à-tête, to combine both Italian and French phrases.
“Nicky is really jazzed on this Gangsters redo,” Temple started, stating the obvious.
“And it is Nicky, solo,” Van replied. “I had no idea. Obviously the brothers had been cooking this up since their custom limo service became such a famous local attraction. I am worried that the accentuated “mob” theme is going to focus too much attention on Nicky’s Family connections.”
“The consensus,” Temple pointed out, “is that the mob ‘went corporate’ in the seventies, and any remaining shenanigans are shadows of their former selves.”
“I know. But the Fontana name carries overtones of the old days.”
Meanwhile, Temple had been taking in the usual casino trappings. “This place always came across as old-fashioned and intimate and has a ready-made vintage gangster ambience. Oh, look! I love that the shopping marquee reads the ‘Moll Mall.’ Don’t you?”
“I don’t quite get it,” Van said, trailing Temple to the brightly lit tunnels of shop windows sparkling with feminine glitz.
“You grew up in Europe, so you wouldn’t know the reference, but Americans would. A ‘gun moll’ was a gangster’s girlfriend. Usually her clothes were brighter than her I.Q.”
“Wasn’t there some civil unrest in Africa decades ago, before the Tutsi and the Hutu? A bloody uprising of natives who were called the Mau Mau?” Van asked.
“Exactly. Almost everybody younger than a stereo system has forgotten that, but ‘Moll Mall’ has that same ring of madness, only it’s all us riled-up female shoppers.”
“I’m not much of a shopper,” Van noted.
She doesn’t have to be, Temple thought. The more money a woman has, the less she likes to join the shopping scrum to hunt for bargains and “perfect little” thises and thats. Temple could see that women and shopping are like men and sports: both are self-expressive, energetic youthful hobbies that become sporadic spectator sports as one gets older and tired and more responsible.
Of course, Temple herself was aeons away from any of those last three things.
A sharp whistle—not a wolf whistle—turned Temple from her chance to educate Van on conspicuous consumption that was more conspicuous than costly. Most of the biggest and choicest Strip hotels sold only luxury goods in eerily quiet, elegant shops far from the madding crowd.
Gangsters was clearly not that kind of place. Nicky’s urgent whistle alone showed that.
Van turned slowly, like the Queen Mary, annoyed by the streetwise hailing.
“The Mob Museum,” Uncle Macho Mario Fontana mouthed reverently from the bottom of an escalator flanked by neon cityscapes of Chicago.
“Not likely to be on the level of the Guggenheim at the Venetian,” Van suggested under her breath as she and Temple hustled through the milling gamblers. “This is going to be a bigger disaster than the revamped Aladdin was, but I suppose Nicky wants gainful employment for his playboy brothers.”
“They have made a lucrative go of the limo service,” Temple said.
“What have we made quite a go of?” the nearest brother asked.
It could have been Armando. Or Ralph. Their white straw summer fedoras made the look-alike clan even harder to distinguish from one another. What part of tall, dark, and handsome is a hallmark?
“The museum is up here,” Macho Mario gestured from twelve smooth-gliding steps above them. “Watch yer high heels, ladies. We don’t want any unfortunate accidents at Gangsters.”
Nicky had waited to swing onto the moving stairs behind Temple and Van. “Don’t worry,” he advised, “I’ve got your backsides.”
Van visibly bit her tongue, while Temple was tempted to turn around and stick hers out. Nicky was in an ideal position to be cheeky and knew it.
At the escalator’s top, Temple wasn’t surprised to spot a lavish 1930s-style movie theater blinking its neon-bulbed marquee at them like a flirtatious chorus girl’s false eyelashes.
The name between the blinking lights read The Roxie.
“Oh,” Van said, impressed for the first time, “an American movie palace.”
The graduated triangle of Art Deco columns thrust up in step-pyramid glory. Its towering central spire was silhouetted against a twilight-azure sky darkening to a navy blue dusted with golden stars, a sickle moon serving as the dot on the spire’s exclamation point.
They followed the red carpet through the lobby populated with black-and-white human-sized cutouts of the great gangster noir movie actors … James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino, Robert Mitchum and Barbara Stanwyck.
Beyond the double doors with the porthole windows, tommy guns rat-a-tatted and car brakes screeched as men groaned and women screamed. It sounded as much like a shooting gallery as the Santiago-occupied suite at the Crystal Phoenix had, but when two Fontana brothers swept the doors open, the movie “screen” before their eyes was a cutout set that they could walk right through.