“And you naturally thought such a sentimental journey required a car of a funereal color?”
Max was surprised to see the upbeat old man’s face grow sober.
“Max, you’ve just weathered a terrible physical ordeal, one that might have killed another man. And it’s an immense psychological trauma to wake up an amnesiac. Yet a worse psychological trial awaits you. Take it one step at a time. You can’t make a rabbit jump out of a top hat unless you first figure out how it got in.”
“Did I really do that?”
“What?”
“That corny rabbit trick?”
“No, my lad. You used doves. A cornucopia of doves.”
Obviously Garry thrived on being mysterious.
Max sighed. “You keep hinting that this land is my land, but I’m obviously as American as hell.” Max frowned. “Despite having a knack for vaudeville Irish accents. What kind of an Irish name is Max, anyway? It might be of German derivation, like the non-French part of the lovely Revienne Schneider.”
Garry pursed his lips. “German? No. Never. You’re American Irish through and through. We keep this secret also: how you became ‘Max.’ Your given birth names were Michael Aloysius Xavier.”
“Quite a triad of antique saints and one major archangel. That’s why you registered me as ‘Michael Randolph’ at the Swiss clinic! You thought I’d unconsciously respond more naturally to the name Michael. How long have I been ‘Max’ ?”
“Since you were seventeen.”
“And how did that come about?”
“I rechristened you to save your life.”
“What the hell? Why does a seventeen-year-old need his life saved?”
“Because you were a hell of a seventeen-year-old and you got three men killed. They deserved it, and you did it.”
Max didn’t answer that one. What an appalling past. Garry was right. TMI—too much information. Obviously, he needed to be spoon-fed the ugly truths. He strolled toward the Ford car, limping more than he liked after the flight and landing in the chilly Irish dawn. So an Irishman hankered for sunshine and heat? He seemed to. Or his legs did.
Max eyed the sedan from hood to taillights. “You expect me to drive this thing?”
“Yes, and on the left. It is at least an automatic.”
“Even worse!”
“How do you know that?”
Food for thought. “That I prefer to drive stick shift? I don’t know; isn’t that my key problem? I know the general past. I know what I like. And don’t like. I just don’t know my own damn past. I can’t recall what I did and where I was and with whom. Or whom I hated and whom I loved.”
“We know you had a good high-school English teacher.”
“Yeah?”
“Whom was the proper construction there, and you used it like some men swear. Frequently and fervently, without thinking about it. Relax, Max. Go through the motions and let your old self shine through bit by bit. I’m here. I’m your safety net.”
“Why?”
“We’re partners. Or were, for your formative young-adult years. I was all the family you had, for a long time.”
“After I killed three men. Justly.”
“After three men died. Justly.”
“I remember a popular song. ‘At Seventeen.’ It was about an unhappy, awkward girl. What kind of song is there for a guy ‘at seventeen’?”
“An Irish ballad. Which is why we’re here.”
“All the Irish ballads I recall were bloody and sad.”
“Exactly. But you’re here, mostly in one piece, and too puzzled to be sad. Things could be worse.”
Max opened the right driver’s door to the Ford Mondeo and eyed the seating and dashboard layout with resignation.
“I drive, old man. On the left, with automatic. You think that will help my memory return?”
“That depends upon where we drive and what we learn when we get there.”
“Why the hell don’t you just tell me?”
“You’re a dubious man, Max. You only believe what you see.”
“You mean I’m a magician.”
Garry nodded.
“I believe that now. I suppose it’s a start.”
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single—”
“Boring rent-a-car.” Max ended the truism. “Hop in and put on your seat belt. I have a feeling this is going to be a bumpy ride.”
Broke New World
Temple pulled her red Miata convertible under the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino’s shaded entry.
The relentless Las Vegas sun was hard on leather seats and even harder on slightly freckled natural redheads. That was why Temple wore sunscreen daily. Today, she’d added a straw visor with a built-in white cotton headscarf, circa the mid-1940s, tied under her chin.
When vintage-clothing-store-shopper Temple married fiancé Matt Devine, finding “something old” would be a snap.
“Going to be long, Miss Barr?” a parking valet attired in a snazzy bellboy uniform asked.
“Conference with Mr. and Mrs. Big,” she said. “Let the Miata cool its wheels in the ramp for a couple of hours, Dave.”
“Right,” he said, seeing her out of the car and himself in, and enjoying it. “Cool hot wheels.”
Temple was the hotel’s sole public-relations rep. That got her a permanent parking space and speedy ins and outs. As a freelance publicist, she was always dashing from one client to another, especially if something went wrong, which could be as minor as a short order of folding chairs, or even occasionally something major in the homicide line.
PR was getting tough now. Newspapers were sinking like the real London Bridge in the Arizona desert. Web sites weren’t taking up the slack. Vegas’s last best bet on megamillion new construction projects was still mostly stalled in midair. Tourism was down, along with optimism. Temple was very curious to see what had amped up the ambitions of Nicky Fontana, Crystal Phoenix owner, and his manager-wife, Van von Rhine.
In minutes she was sitting in the Strip-overlooking executive suite, being told.
“The past,” Nicky said, pacing around his wife’s ultramodern office.
Like all Fontana brothers—and he had a slew of them—he was tall, dark, and handsome, but Nicky was fierier than his laid-back bros. “The future is dim, the present is grim. Everybody’s talking Depression, although it’s only a recession. Why not cash in on what made Vegas in the first place? Our notorious past.”
“Retro is Metro?” Temple ventured, eyeing the cool blonde who was his wife.
As usual, Van had a crisp summary of her husband’s overheated rhetoric. “Nicky rebuilt this hotel, Las Vegas’s first boutique hostelry, from the still-standing corpse of the old Joshua Tree Hotel, Jersey Joe Jackson’s rival to Bugsy Siegel’s Flamingo. When he talks, I listen. It’s the least you can do too.”
Nicky paused behind his wife’s white leather desk chair, put his palm prints on her glass desktop, and nibbled a strand loose from her perfectly smooth French twist.
“You didn’t always believe in my founder dreams, Vanilla baby.”
She remained unruffled, even by the use of the first name she hated. Fire and ice worked well for them, Temple had always noted.
“You see,” Van told Temple, confirming her observation, “Nicky can sell ice to Eskimos and even get away with mussing my coiffure. Can you sell his hairbrained concept? Granted, his hair is very good. Still.”
Temple tried not to giggle. Sometimes spending time with the pair was like babysitting Grace Kelly and Tony Curtis in some never-made sixties romantic comedy.
All ten Fontana brothers were noted for good hair. Only Nicky, the youngest, and now Aldo, the oldest, had married. The other eight remained Vegas’s most eligible bachelors, en masse. Even Macho Mario Fontana, the family patriarch, had great hair, high-end, store-bought, and solid silver, the color of the old dollar coins used for some Vegas slot machines until the seventies.
Silver dollars were now history here. And so seemed to be the endless building boom that had produced profitable minarets of condo towers before the current financial unpleasantness. The Crystal Phoenix always moved conservatively and stayed small, so it had deeper pockets than some far-more-famous Strip names.