They sit in silence for a while. Curtis clenches his jaw; Kagami slumps wearily in his chair. Curtis is angry, but he can’t shake the feeling that Kagami isn’t entirely out of line. He’s about to stand up, head for the door, when Kagami catches a passing waitress and orders a cognac. What’re you drinking, Curtis? he says. You want another coffee?
No, thanks. I’m good.
C’mon, kid. Hang around for a couple minutes.
Ginger ale, Curtis says, and settles back in his seat.
The lights have stopped flashing in Naked City aside from an ambulance headed west on Sahara; they watch it until it reaches the interstate and disappears. Then their eyes drift back to the Strip. Following its blazing path south as it grows denser and purer, a tracer round fired at Los Angeles.
Put yourself in my place, kid, Kagami says. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I still don’t. What would you have done?
I hear you. You just want to protect Stanley.
I just want to be a good goddamn citizen of the People’s Republic of Clark County, Nevada. That’s all I want. I want to defend Stanley’s inalienable right to disappear when he wants to, and to stay disappeared for as long as he likes. I take this stuff very seriously, Curtis.
The waitress comes back with their drinks. Curtis sips his ginger ale, sips again. Kagami swirls his brandy, looks out the window. You spend a lot of time out here, kid? he says.
In Vegas? Not too much. My last trip was about three years ago.
Have you heard the CVA’s new ad slogan yet? The official slogan?
What happens here stays here? Curtis smiles. Yeah. I heard it.
It’s brilliant, Kagami says. It sums up everything. People call Las Vegas an oasis in the desert. No! It is the fucking desert. That’s the key to the whole trick. Look down at that valley. You know what was down there a hundred years ago? Nothing. Some Mormons. A couple dozen cowboys. A few pissed-off Paiutes. The year I was born, there were ten thousand people living there. Today there’s a million five. That’s sixty years. Sixty years is nothing, it’s a heartbeat. What’s drawing all these people? Huh? Nothing. It’s like a big blackboard, or one of those—what do you call it?—a dry-erase board. Wipe it clean. Draw in what you like. I mean, read up on your history, kid. You wanna make something disappear? You wanna make it invisible? Haul it out here. The desert is the national memory hole. Manhattan Project? Never heard of it. American Indians? Hey, I don’t know where those guys went. Gambling. Hookers. Nuclear waste. I guess you probably noticed the Desert Inn.
I noticed that it’s gone, yeah.
Steve Wynn blew it up a couple years ago. October 2001. Collapsing buildings were not regarded as so much fun at the time, so he did it without the usual hoopla. But remember the party he threw back in ’93, when he imploded the Dunes? Or that New Year’s Eve when they brought down the Hacienda? Name me another place anywhere that routinely blows up its historic buildings. Las Vegas is a machine for forgetting.
Kagami sets his snifter on the table. I’m gonna smoke a cigar, he says, leaning over and reaching into his pocket. Do you want a cigar?
No, thank you.
Kagami produces a brown leather case, removes a dark panatela, and sets to work on it with a gold bulletcutter. You’ve been around, Curtis, he’s saying. You’ve seen the world. Europe. Asia. Middle East. Me and my wife, we travel as much as we can. We did a fun thing last year for our tenth anniversary. We went back to Italy for two weeks. Northern Italy, where we did our honeymoon. You know what we did? We used the same guidebooks. Just to see if we could. And it worked. Same restaurants, same hotels. I remember we ate at this one place, this bacaro, that had been in business since 1462. Blew my mind.
Kagami’s cigar case and cutter disappear. He takes a big naphtha lighter from his pocket and strikes it. A spritz of sparks. A two-inch tongue of flame. After a few puffs he snaps it shut with a loud clear chime, like the sound of a flipped coin.
Okay, he says. Now imagine you and your better half are tooling around Las Vegas with a guidebook from 1993. How do you think you’re doing? Ooh, honey, let’s go see the Sands! Sorry, sweetie-pie. What about the Landmark? The Landmark’s a parking lot. The El Rancho? The Hacienda? You’ll never see the Hacienda, it doesn’t exist. The city is always changing. Always, just for the sake of doing it. And that’s why it’s always the same. Get it? That’s its nature, its essence. Invisible. Pure. Formless. Indestructible. What do you know about roads?
Say again?