Far to the west, on the other side of the vast mountains, I wondered if Raoul was on his date with the woman from Venetian security. Or was he still chatting up gamblers at the craps tables trying to find someone who remembered his wife?
And where the hell in all those lights were Bob and his cherry Camaro?
What answers, if any, were sitting in a Kinko’s box in my office?
My impulse was to charge downtown and find out.
I reminded myself that what Bob had written was part of a novel.
Fiction.
Stuff he’d made up.
Stuff I was supposed to wait to read.
35
Diane, in rare moments of candid self-doubt, would express astonishment that she’d ended up with Raoul. “Why me? Look at me. Look at him. Why on earth did he choose me?”
Raoul was an olive-skinned Spaniard with piercing eyes, a prodigious intellect, an entrepreneurial instinct for innovation, and a bloodhound’s nose for money. He had a smile as sweet as honey, and his thick hair looked black until the sun hit it just so and lit it up like golden floss. He could give charm lessons to George Clooney, put on continental airs when he felt the situation demanded, or pull on faded jeans and cowboy boots and slide right into a farmhouse discussion of southern Colorado water rights as though it had been his family that had cut the first irrigation canals into the dusty San Luis Valley.
In much the same way that the progeny of Holocaust survivors have been indelibly scarred by Germany’s twentieth-century embrace of the Nazis, Raoul had been bruised deeply-down to the place where tissue ends and the soul takes up corporeal space-by Spain’s fifty-year flirtation with fascism. Memories of long-absent relatives, and nightmared imaginings of what had happened to them at the hands of Franco’s Falangists, flowed through his blood like perpetual antibodies to authority.
The result? Raoul had wide shoulders, and a chip on them that was sometimes big enough to obscure his handsome head.
My impatience to hear an update finally compelled me to dial Raoul’s cell number before I climbed into bed. He answered after three rings.
“Yeah?” he said to the accompaniment of Las Vegas background sounds. Music, traffic. Something else-hissing, muted explosions. I wasn’t sure what it was.
The single word he’d spoken as he answered had carried a boatload of hope; every time his phone rang he was praying that the caller was Diane. To me, ironically, his hope meant that he hadn’t found her. My own hope, which was hovering like a flat stone skipping on a smooth lake, sank instantly to the muddy bottom.
“It’s me, Raoul. You didn’t find her.”
He said something in Catalonian. It sounded like “bandarras.” From the spitting tone he employed, I guessed it had been a profanity and that it didn’t really require translation, although I was always more than a little eager to add to my knowledge of the profane spectrum of his native tongue.
“Were you able to talk with that woman from hotel security?” I found myself shouting to be heard above the din.
“Marlina has a story,” he said. “Unfortunately, it takes her a while to tell it.”
“Yeah?” I didn’t get whatever he was saying.
“She’s from Mexico. What’s on her mind is about her brother and something that happened to him on the way from Chihuahua to Tucson. She needs to talk. With some women, it has to first be about them. She is one of those women. Fer un solo de flauta. Trust me, it’s the only way.”
Raoul spoke about women the way he spoke about IPOs and RAM. With authority. Again, I considered asking him for a translation of the Catalonian, but I didn’t.
“You haven’t learned anything?” I asked.
“Not yet.”
He sounded fried-Raoul’s anxiety seemed to be swelling with every conversation we had. The appearance of my voice, and not his wife’s, on the line had robbed him of whatever buoyancy had been keeping him afloat. I could feel the deflation in his spirits as hope leaked away; whatever vessel he was in was taking on water and he was getting tired of bailing.
“Did you find anyone playing at the craps tables who remembered Diane?”
“I set up a half-million-dollar credit line. I assumed that would give me a little bit of latitude in the casino.”
I couldn’t imagine. “Yeah? How much were you betting?”
“Five or ten. Sometimes twenty.”
Thousand. “You win anything?” I asked.
“I did all right,” he said. Raoul, I knew, would take no joy in a big pile of craps winnings. In his various tech businesses, he played for stakes that would make a huge pile of casino chips seem paltry by comparison. But given the events of the last twenty-four hours, Raoul would take some pleasure in the fact that he had taken the money-if it were a large enough pile-from the coffers of the Venetian.
“How good?
“I’m up eighty or so. The only luck I’m having in this town is at a craps table.”
I whistled. “Thousand?”
“Minus four. I tipped a couple of dealers. I’m hoping they’re appreciative, might let me buy them a drink.”
Two craps dealers were each a couple of grand richer than they’d been before they’d gone to work that day and met Raoul. With that kind of incentive they might be inclined to have a drink with him after their shifts were over.
I asked, “When are they off?”
“Three hours or so. We’ll see what happens. My expectations are low. I gave a woman some money to pass each of them a note that said I wanted to talk with them. She says she did it, but who knows? Their bosses may have warned them off.”
“A frustrating day?”
“They’re the house. They have the cards; they have the odds. My only advantage is that I’m more motivated than they are. They don’t understand that yet. One guy at the craps table slipped me his business card when he heard me ask the woman next to him about Diane. He’s a VP for some shopping-center developer. They do malls.”
“A gambler?”
“In his heart, that kind of gambler. I waited until he left the table and then I called his mobile number after about twenty minutes. I told him I was the guy from the craps table. He said, ‘Not now.’ I asked, ‘When?’ And he said, ‘I have your number now. I’ll call you.’ Then he hung up.
“Pastanaga. I think he was playing with me.”
“He hasn’t called?”
“In Vegas terms the night is young, right? Me? I’m twenty years older than I was at this time yesterday. A week more of this and I’ll be ready to trade in the craps table for some pinochle.”
I could almost feel his despair. I was on the portable phone, wandering between the mostly dark kitchen and the mostly dark living room, where I stopped and found myself, once again, searching for Twelfth Street in Boulder’s dark grid. Looking for the Millers’ house, and for Doyle’s.
The noise in my ear was Sinatra and percussion. Traffic, too. A siren.
“Are you in a club?”
“I’m at the Bellagio. Outside, watching the fountains. I like them. I know they’re garish, but I like them. Have you ever seen them?”
“Only on TV.”
“Someday then.”
“Yes.” Maybe. “With Diane.”
“With Diane, sí. Alain?”
I was a bit taken aback. He hadn’t used the French pronunciation of my name for a long time.
“Yes.”
“If there were a man involved-with my wife-you would tell me?”
“What? You mean a-”
“Yes. Un autre. We’re grown-ups here, right?”
That Raoul was susceptible to whatever affective tides the prospect of infidelity caused in other people surprised me. Where romance was concerned, Raoul lacked confidence the way Spider-Man lacks grip.