His way is blocked and he looks up to see the valet frowning down. He steps aside and the valet steps with him. He sighs. The valet nods at the guitar case in Niko’s hand. “Back door, chief.” He jerks a thumb that way and looks through Niko and loudly chews his spearmint gum.
Niko sizes him up indifferently, then sets down the guitar case and moves to step past him. The expected hand comes up. Niko grabs it and ducks under it and turns clockwise with it and folds it down. The pop of dislocating elbow echoes in the driveway. Still twisting the arm Niko brings the wrist down to the pavement. The valet follows until his shoulder lands on the back of his own hand. His eyes are wide. His mouth works like a gaffed bass. Niko straightens and picks up the guitar case and steps past him. The doors open for him automatically. Ye who enter.
LIGHT AND SOUND envelop him. Polyglot hubbub and cries of pain, flashing neon and shattering glass, ringing bells and howling laughter, strobing lights and screeching brakes, striking klaxons and consumptive coughs, whirling gears and baying hounds, growling buzzers and screaming children, rattling dice and yowling cats, shuffled cards and cocking guns, clicking roulette wheels and churning tank treads, chuckling chips and ticking bombs, keno chimes and funeral bells, clapping hands and cracking whips, payoff gongs and marching jackboots, croupiers calling and rifle bolts clacking, tinny lounge music and air raid sirens, ringing coins and murmured treasons, roaring ovens and crackling ice swirled in glasses of smoky liquor. Smells of beer and cheap perfume and cigarettes and money and hideous endless desperate need.
The casino stretches off as far as he can see. Thick corinthian columns recede to infinity. A nicotine pall hangs on the sickly air. A constant rush of furious and pointless activity swarms like a stomped anthill. The floor is plush carpet, hunter green with a florentine pattern in burgundy and cream. Columns and walls are white marble veined in pale blue. The carpet fiber Niko treads is woven human ganglia, nervous systems of the tortured damned. The pale blue veins in the marble walls and columns are human veins once pumping blood but surging now with burning lye. Stretching off for miles are banks of slot machines run by naked patrons seated on the upturned mouths of slavering creatures slowly gnawing them to bloody gobbets. The damned are fused to their machines, right wrist merging with the arm of the one armed bandit and pulling, ever pulling, no scrap of humanity or personality remaining as their flickering consciousness focuses on the whirling bars, all their remnant being fixed upon the hope of one two three whirling eyes. Every millennium or so the eyes align and sweet relief comes as the monster beneath them ceases chewing for a solid minute. The only pleasure here the absence of pain. The eyes on the whirling bars are blinking and alive.
Tuxedoed demons of many shapes and sizes stride about like hurried maitres d’ and snap their fingers or claws or tentacles and fire off orders to misshapen dwarves who push preposterously laden carts past fishnet stockinged women wearing posture collars and tottering on nine inch heels while balancing huge drink trays crammed to overflowing.
Some tables hold demons, others imprison bleary desperate alcoholics chained to hard and angular chairs to order drinks that never come. At one table holding several dozen demons a waitress with eyes so sunken her face looks like a skull takes down orders as fast as she can write. One Coke with a cherry, one Diet Coke no cherry, one Cherry Coke with a cherry, one Diet Cherry Coke no cherry, one Coke with a lemon slice, one Lemon Coke, one Lemon Slice with a slice of lime, one Diet Lemon-Lime Slice with a cherry. And no ice on that Lemon Coke, hon.
Haggard waitresses of all ages and sizes and races queue before a brassrailed bar that stretches to a distant vanishing point and call out orders to gaunt and wide eyed bartenders who move as fast as they can to fill orders that will never stop or even slow.
One walleyed waitress turns away with a laden tray hoisted to her bony shoulder. She gets five yards before a demon sticks out a hoof and trips her. Tray and contents fly and mindless alcoholics strain their chains to suck spilled liquor from the living carpet. The tortured filament nervous system develops a fuzzy buzz. The little demon who tripped the waitress orders her to clean it up and fetch another round. The eternally harangued waitress bends to obey and passes out from the posture collar as a demon at a nearby table licks her nylon covered ass with a slobbering tongue.
Variations on this scene are repeated everywhere Niko looks. The din is deafening. It feels so strange to be indoors and in the light after all this unknown time.
Now a tuxedoed demon all angles and propriety strides toward him, rapier nose cutting the dense air and his expression a perpetual snit. He stops before Niko and eyes him up and down and glares at the guitar case. He shoots his cuffs and actually sniffs. “And where do we think we’re going?”
Niko lifts the guitar case slightly. “Gig.”
“I suggest we take a less conspicuous route.”
“I’m here to play for the boss.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“You tell me where to find him?”
“If we don’t know where to find him we certainly have no business seeing him.”
Niko wants to argue but Snit here is right, when you think about it. “Got a point there,” he says, and turns away and walks among the tortured throng who cry out not for aid or comfort but simply to give voice to their despair. Past hope past want past care. The farther in he goes the thicker Niko feels. Detached from self and surround. The cacophony become distant sussuration. Eyelids heavy. Feet hovering above the living carpet. Skin thick and itchy. All about a hollow echo like a giant transit terminal at rush hour looked at through a lens of fever dream. Guitar case a dead weight in his nerveless hand a thousand miles away. These sensations naggingly familiar. Maybe just exhaustion. But no. No. Something else. Something elusive. Like the unrecalled name of a former lover. Memory on tip of tongue awaiting utterance to fix it in the world.
Fix.
Niko stops amid the seething ruin of souls. He stares unseeing and listens to that old peaceful whisper suffuse into his mind like friendly fog. Like an old habit, yes?
Niko grips the case’s handle harder. His free hand brushes his locket as he moves to scratch and scratch his collarbone.
What you gonna do boy? You gonna shrug off a rush? Gonna jump this train?
Nope dont think so. Nothing to be done for it now. In for the longhaul. Rollercoasters left the starting gate and seatbelts come undone. Clack clack clack. Niko has left the building. Ride it out. Let it ride the highrollers say. Ride the white horse.
He shakes his head and gapes around the casino. Blur he fix recedes on tunnel down carpet footed ground, headed sky. place ace yer bets ets. faraway walls, jackpot bingo snake eyes craps, round and round she goes, just move a foot, just one. i gobble dug dare you.
A battered filthcaked hiking shoe slides forward. Now the other one. Just keep doing that. One foot in front of the other. That’s the ticket.
Looking only at the floor he makes his thickened way. Just walk. Don’t look up. Don’t listen. Just walk. He pictures his slack body on his living room floor in the Hollywood Hills. Empty syringe nearby. Someone faraway slapping his face. Come on bud stay with me hang in there breathe.
How could he have been dosed? Cause that’s sure as shit what’s happening. He’s rushing like a dog with its head out the window of a Ferrari. That old familiar glow heating up his veins. Each thought like a card in an evershuffled deck, lost and unremembered as the next one comes along. He hears down a narrow tube. Sees through the big end of the binoculars. Feels over a bad phone connection. Wants to sleep. Maybe is.