Curtis, Veronica says. Seriously. You should go home.
And at this point that’s pretty much what Curtis wants to do. His nose tickles, his face grows hot, and he’s blindsided by a memory, something he hasn’t thought of in twenty years or more: a trip he took to the shore with his dad and Stanley and some gambler friends. Curtis couldn’t have been more than six or seven. Somebody told him a story about pirate treasure; he found a corroded can, picked out a spot on the beach, and spent the afternoon slinging sand while everyone else horsed around in the surf. When his hole got hip-deep he ran to show Stanley, but by the time they made it back, it had filled with seawater. Knock it off with the whining, kid. This is no good. You gotta find a map. Take it from me, kid: a story is not the same as a map. Curtis has no map. After all these years, he still hasn’t learned. Tell him the right story and he’ll start digging.
He blinks, looks up. They’re coming to the end of the fake sky. He thinks of the gun on his belt, of the wedding ring locked up topside, of Albedo cruising the Strip in his big black car. He’s been lucky. There are worse ways this could have gone.
But he’s still not quite finished. Where was Stanley? he asks.
Huh?
While your team was in the Spectacular. Where was he?
She looks confused for a second. He was back at the hotel, she says. At Resorts. Graham and I ran the team in the field. Stanley was with us at the beginning, at the first couple of places we hit, but that’s all. He got too tired.
She grimaces, then looks away, pretending to check out a mannequin in a shop window. Stanley doesn’t get around like he used to, she says. To function in a team like ours, you have to move quickly. Stanley can’t.
He’s pretty sick, isn’t he?
I don’t know. He won’t see doctors. I kept telling him to go. I kept saying that I was just going to call a fucking ambulance. I guess I should have. And now—
Her voice is steady, but she’s still looking away. Her hands are balled into fists. The fake sky is falling away behind them. Ahead, the living statue stands in its marble circle, a daub of pure white, a lone candle in the gloom.
I think maybe he’s just bored, Veronica says. He wants a challenge that’s worthy of him. He’s afraid he’s wasted his one real gift.
He nods, half-listening, distracted by what he’s still puzzling through. Then he notices her scowl.
I don’t mean gambling, she says. I mean looking.
She’s quiet for a second. Do you know Frank Stella? she asks.
He’s a gambler?
He’s a painter. A post-painterly abstractionist. I heard a story once about Frank Stella from one of my professors. Stella thought that Ted Williams—the Hall of Fame hitter for the Red Sox?—he thought Ted Williams was the greatest living American. He thought Ted Williams was a genius because Williams could see faster than anybody else alive. He could count the stitches on a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball as it was coming across the plate. Frank Stella would have loved Stanley Glass. For Stanley, vision is action. It’s a pure, discarnate thing. The swing and the hit aren’t even necessary. The look itself is the home run.
They’re back in the Great Hall. Veronica’s eyes are aimed at the ceiling: the fleshy queen and her allegorical court, afloat above awed onlookers. Armored horsemen on rearing stallions. Heralds and angels blowing trumpets. A winged lion statue. Gray cumulous hung between white spiral columns. Curtis walks quietly beside her, following her eyes, half-aware of the big painting. Thinking instead of a trick Stanley used to do: Curtis’s dad would throw a deck of cards across the room—let’s play fifty-two pickup—and Stanley would collect them, naming every facedown card before he turned it over.
They’re on the escalators now. Down below sunlight blazes orange through the doors of the Doge’s Palace. The Ace Hardware guys have thinned out; the hallway is less crowded. A masked mattacino is performing there, comparing his flexed biceps with a security officer’s.
Veronica is still looking up. Veronese, she says, pointing. Did that dude have some balls, or what? Check out that forced perspective. Look how beefy those guys at the bottom are. I’ll bet when they unveiled the real one in the Hall of the Great Council people were afraid to stand under it. Have you ever seen it?
The real one? Curtis says. I think so, yeah. Couple of years back, when I was on leave in Italy. Does Stanley still talk about going over there?
Just about all the time, yeah.
Why doesn’t he? Short of funds?
No. Money is never an issue with him. He just never had a passport.