Nicky surveyed the surrounding vintage cars and blown-up photographs.
“Great stories make museums, not exhibits,” he said. “We need to bring everything alive.”
At that moment, a figure in a huge photograph stepped away from the wall and sprayed the onlookers with … the neck of an electric guitar, as a sound track played screaming riffs, and the static photographs started streaming past as if everyone present was riding a carousel.
Which they were.
Even Van lost her composure enough to reach for Nicky’s support, at the same instant chrome stripper poles shot up from the floor, ready to be grabbed for balance. Nightclub booths also levitated around the moving circle’s edge. The Fontana brothers gestured the others into seats, then swung round the poles and seated themselves.
Santiago in his white pseudo zoot suit with his hopefully unloaded vintage tommy gun leaped between the rotating booths into the carousel’s center like a ringmaster.
“Sound,” he shouted into the din. “Motion. Surprise. This must look like a traditional museum but become an ‘amuseum.’ An amusement park that does not ‘park’ itself but takes you, the viewer—the ‘amusee’—places.”
Temple grabbed hold of a cocktail-table edge. The entire exhibit area was slowly screwing itself down to a lower level, the surrounding walls changing into black-and-white movie scenes, with Edward G. Robinson barking threats at the circling party as anonymous punks in trench coats and fedoras sprayed crescendos of gunfire into their midst.
There was only the slightest jerk as the elevator floor reached the lower level and stopped turning.
Leggy cocktail waitresses with aprons as small as their bar trays scissored their fishnet-hose-clad gams to the tables, setting down drinks in vintage lowball and small martini glasses.
Temple tried to name the drinks. The first to come to mind was … an old-fashioned. She thought she recognized some gin rickeys and Singapore Slings.
A flat-screen TV menu materialized from the middle of each booth’s table, flashing movie scenes of the available drinks clutched in some long-gone movie star’s black-and-white hand.
“Disneyland for adults,” Van declared, sipping her—Temple checked the flashing “pages” of filmed drinks—Tom Collins. “Everything’s animated.” Van eyed the six frozen-faced beauty-queen waitresses floating drinks down to tables occupied by the men in the party, while Santiago explained their video menus to them. “Except for the eye candy.”
“Gangsters gotta have that,” Nicky said.
“Vegas too.” Van glanced at Temple and sighed. “What do you think?”
“This is just the first stage Santiago proposed,” Nicky said. “It can always be redacted.”
Using that ridiculous word made Temple and Van laugh in tandem.
“We can always ‘redact’ Santiago,” Van added.
“Meanwhile,” Temple suggested, “let’s see what other media magic tricks he has to show us. I do like the sinking cocktail bar. Very post-Titanic.”
“Uncle Mario wanted a bank of Marriott-style bullet-shaped glass elevator cars with tufted white satin-lined doors to reach the underground level,” Nicky admitted to the women’s groans, “so I vote for the cocktail carousel myself.”
By then Santiago had reached their booth and swung into his sales routine.
“This is only a crude approximation yet. The Speakeasy bar and restaurant will be under the area of the hotel we just left. That offers necessary ventilation and crowd-control possibilities in case of disaster. This descending carousel is the cocktail area, of course, and beyond us, in the dark, Gangsters limos on rails will await passengers desiring an exciting trip to the Crystal Phoenix.
“These elderly gentlemen are becoming quite animated about the menu possibilities. Apparently, they have actually drunk some of these amusing old cocktails.”
The Glory Hole Gang members were indeed hashing over future entrée names on menus, and Temple was dreaming up a theme of bullet-hole-riddled online pages, with sound effects and videos, and Van’s face was still paler than her hair.
“Trends change constantly in the hospitality industry,” Van said at last. “What’s new quickly becomes ‘old hat,’ and what was forgotten becomes the new favorite. For a while.”
“Why, Miss von Rhine, could you possibly be talking about Santiago’s multimedia inventions?” the man himself asked.
“Eventually,” Van said, with a softening smile. “Everything moves so fast these days.”
“One would hope values would not,” Santiago said.
The word seemed odd coming from such a flamboyantly shallow persona, Temple thought.
Still, every artist in every media had to be a one-man or one-woman show these days, on the Internet, on Facebook, on Twitter—“on” all the time, everywhere. She’d even heard Matt complaining that the radio station wanted to move him “onto YouTube and beyond” their Web site.
“Let me show you,” Santiago suggested, “the darker possibilities ahead.”
His gel-slicked hair reflected the motion in the wall-cast videos as he nodded into the unlit direction of the proposed Chunnel of Crime.
As they walked forward, out of the elevator-cocktail area, work lights hanging above them glowed into life as they passed.
That caught the eyes on the cocktail carousel, where Nicky’s brothers were content to sit and sip and flirt with the waitresses dressed in pointy, short, and skimpy, patented Rat Pack sixties style. The Glory Hole Gang, though, couldn’t resist exploring the unknown dark for possible treasure. They deserted their drinks and came clattering after the disappearing party of four. So far, the lower depths of Gangsters were just that: a crude basement tunnel hacked from limestone.
“Love the ambience,” Nicky said. “Raw, real. We’d want to keep the earthy stone walls, dirt floor, dim lights, the sense of a primitive flouting of the supposed order and law above. Bathtub gin. Sin.”
“Nicky,” Van asked, “have you been tunneling through from the Phoenix already?”
“Ah, call it an investigative sampling,” he answered.
“Call it chutzpah,” Van said tartly. “So …”
She turned to the Glory Hole Gang, who’d regarded her with elaborate and even fearful courtesy since the introductions at the Crystal Phoenix. “… Am I to understand you five would look favorably upon reinventing Lake Mead’s popular Three O’Clock Louie’s restaurant as Three O’Clock’s Speakeasy subterranean bar and restaurant down here?”
“Ah …” Spuds, the short-order cook, rubbed his palms on his jeans’ side seams. “Yes, ma’am. All that deep frying is hard on the epidermis. I would be beholden if I could try a more varied and European, but kitschy, cuisine. I am a big fan of Julia Child and Wolfgang Puck. Something, uh, high-end, I mean. And fun.”
He winked, looking like Long John Silver in chef’s clothing.
Van blinked.
She turned to Temple. “Am I right in believing that your PR genes are eating all this up?”
Temple went with the flow. She rubbed her palms together, flexing her fingers and flashing her long, strong natural fingernails, painted Hyper Hussy Red, which was a bit toned down from her Scarlett-Woman toenail color.
“Yes, ma’am,” she decreed. “I could make this concept pop on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and every surviving newspaper online. Baaad is good. I’m thinking a downloadable temporary-tattoo page.”
Van’s delicate brows frowned ever so slightly. “Why the tunnel and riding the rails?”
Nicky, as usual, had an answer. “The average tourist can’t afford to rent a Gangsters limo for the whole evening. This way they invest in a kicky new-old drink and get a shot of speed and nostalgia in one bolt.”
“What about ventilation? Regulations? You’re talking an underground fast rail operation, no matter how short the distance.”