A Trip to the Stars (51 page)

I easily memorized the list, the one thing of my mother’s composed of words that I could hold inside me and preserve. Running through this list in my mind enabled me to feel closer to her—as if I could hear her speaking the names herself. As if they were the only words I would have known in her voice.

The handful of Bel’s other possessions that I found over time, and usually by accident, were a pair of onyx earrings—ovals ringed with diamond chips—a wooden ruler in which she had etched her initials, and a small working compass with a snap-on cover and a silver chain.
The compass, in effect, replaced the hummingbird pendant, for I began carrying it on me from the day I discovered it in that same box beneath the photograph album. There were also two LP records that I found tucked away behind Samax’s old opera collection: Christmas carols sung by a girls’ choir and Elvis Presley’s
Heartbreak Hotel
. The carols I played often on the portable phonograph in my room, especially the very last cut on the record, “The Star Carol,” which began,
Long years ago on a deep winter night / High in the heavens a star shone bright …
and ended,
And when the stars in the heavens I see / Ever and always I think of thee
. That one I played over and over again.

There must have been other physical traces of Bel in a place as big and complex as the hotel, but I never found them. All in all, with few material touchstones, and people’s memories of Bel seemingly sealed off by the grief that had overflowed and solidified around her death, the hazy picture I put together of her over the years remained remarkably unaltered. It began with a reclusive child who barely spoke while Nilus was alive, and then under Samax’s wing rapidly flowered while remaining intensely private. And, to be sure, it was a conflicted picture at first: a wallflower who could also be the life of the party, a bookworm who hung out with a fast crowd, a dreamy sort of girl with a violent temper.

In a rare burst of expansiveness on the subject of Bel, Samax told me outright that I reminded him of her. It was several months after my nineteenth birthday, one of those nights in his library when he had been going on to me about the Angel of Death; by then Samax was convinced that this entity could manifest itself not just as a walking fire or other spectacular natural phenomenon like lightning, but even in the form of a plant—one whose aura, to the naked eye, would be spectral, like moonlight.

“Bel kept to herself the way you do,” Samax said, abruptly changing the subject. “She could go for days with barely a word to anyone. And like you, she often walked far out into the desert. She loved the desert, as Ivy never did. She was a natural dancer—show her a step once and she never forgot it. As a kid, she read incessantly. Then, at sixteen, she got restless. Wandering at first, then staying out for nights at a time. When I clamped down, she sneaked out even more. She got wilder. We had been close, but I lost touch with her—even more deeply than I knew. She was so young—I remembered how I had been
when I was young, and I kept telling myself the pendulum would swing. But it never did: it just stopped.” His left hand was trembling, as it sometimes did after his stroke, and he kept locking and unlocking his fingers. “I’ll never forgive myself, Enzo, for what happened to her. I’ve tried to make it up through you. Bel got pregnant, ran away, had a difficult childbirth. In less than three months, you came into her life and went out of it. She was in all kinds of other trouble. And I knew nothing. I who could read the most inscrutable faces around a high-stakes poker table, who had spent a lifetime playing the angles other people didn’t see. Yet I didn’t even know you existed, much less who your father was.”

I was astonished to hear him express such feelings—most of all, his shame—so openly. “That’s not your fault,” I said from a parched throat. “None of it is.”

“It was my responsibility.” He shook his head in disgust. “I was responsible for her.”

“She was already eighteen when those things happened,” I put in, trying to help him let himself off the hook.

But that wasn’t what he wanted. “Eighteen?” he snorted. “Enzo, she never reached the age that you are tonight. The last time I saw her, she was crossing the courtyard in a yellow dress and I was rushing off to the airport. She waved to me. I waved back. She started up the front steps and I lost her in the fountain’s spray. The next day, she ran away. Months later, I got a call from some little hospital. She was already gone.” He was fighting back tears. “That night I slept in her room—your room—and I swore I could still smell her scent in the air, even in the blankets.”

From then on, some nights I thought I could smell it, too. It was only in the previous year I had learned that Room E, my room since I was ten years old, had been my mother Bel’s room from the time she was nine and a half until shortly before her death. I had not been informed of this particular bit of my history because Samax had thought it could have disturbed me when I was younger.

“Then why,” I asked, “give me that room at all?”

He looked surprised. “But what other room could you have been given? That was always your room—even before you knew it.”

What a strange answer, I thought, and only then understood that Bel’s time in that room had included a good portion of her pregnancy,
which meant I had also resided there long before Samax had first brought me to Las Vegas.

Some months later, midway through the summer of 1975, Deneb returned from the Aegean exactly as he had said he would: four years after his departure. He was not as somber as I remembered him; perhaps because his work was done, or because now he didn’t have his face buried in a book or treatise every waking moment. He had a leathery tan and was wearing his hair—a full shade grayer now—much longer. His dark glasses were the darkest pair yet, and his customary white suit was of a baggier cut, bought off the rack in Iráklion, Crete, and complemented by a madras tie. Copies of his Atlantis monograph in red binders were neatly arrayed on the sideboard and it was almost like the old days when, at dinner on Deneb’s second night back, Samax and the rest of us sat down to hear what conclusions he had reached after his long years of research and contemplation.

Despite the buzz of anticipation in the air, it was painfully clear to me that night how much our ranks had been thinned. Calzas was gone, and Auro, and Ivy always dined alone now in her rooms. Zaren Eboli was on an extended field trip, fulfilling his quest of cataloguing all the spiders of the Southwest. And of course Delia and Denise no longer choreographed the meal itself. For this, Samax had hired a laconic middle-aged woman with long red hair held in place by turquoise barrettes whom all of us knew only as Mrs. Resh, the former manager of a four-star restaurant in San Francisco. Unlike the two sisters, she never sat at the table, but always hovered behind Samax or by the door. Desirée sat across from Samax now, at the foot of the table, and Labusi in his wheelchair was on his left.

The ranks of the more transient guests had also dwindled. That particular night only two of them were at dinner: Professor Zianor from Pakistan, a short, immensely fat man in a black turban, who was writing a book about paintings that depict Adam with a navel; and a lady from Malaysia named So Li who was studying the history of bells. Also present was a man named Forcas whom Samax introduced to me as an old friend. I had never heard of him before, but he would become a frequent guest at the hotel over the next few years. Often he played chess into the night with Samax, who had much less opportunity to play with Labusi now that the latter was so absorbed in his
billiard career. Forcas was a trim man about seventy, of average height and weight, with brown eyes and steely gray hair. But, as with no one else I had ever met, while I could spell out the particulars of his features, I always found it impossible to retain a clear picture of him in my memory after he was gone. He possessed an air not so much of mystery as abstraction. As if he didn’t really exist except when he was physically standing before you.

“That’s right,” Desirée replied when I mentioned this to her. “Even professionally he doesn’t really exist. He’s a gangster without a gang, famous and at the same time anonymous. Solitary, but with connections everywhere—none of which you could document. He’s filthy rich, with no known bank accounts, property, or investments. He’s fathered a dozen children, but has no women in his life. He lives comfortably but has no home, and while he can go anywhere, and does so openly, his whereabouts are always unknown. He’s one of Samax’s most valued friends, though they haven’t seen one another in ten years.”

My first thought, which I shared with Desirée, was that Forcas was Rochel, Samax’s old Zuni cellmate at the Ironwater Penitentiary.

“I don’t think so,” she said, without elaborating.

What he was, it turned out, was probably the only mutual friend Samax and Vitale Cassiel had in common, someone who had done favors for both men over the years, and had the favors returned. In fact, as tensions grew between Samax and Vitale Cassiel, Forcas would come to serve, briefly, but crucially, as an intermediary. Once, finding myself alone with Forcas in the billiard room, I asked him about the feud—why it never ended.

“Oh, I don’t know how something like this ends,” he said in his low voice, puffing a cigar and crossing his legs in one of the big leather armchairs. “It’s not about ending—it’s like a circle neither man will step out of.” He shook his head. “Recently, your uncle decided to sell off a big spread up in Elko County, next to the Paiute reservation, on the Idaho border. He bought the land in 1950 and its value has skyrocketed. The buyers were a consortium of ranchers—Junius didn’t want the land to go to developers. Suddenly, as they’re closing the deal, a Bureau of Indian Affairs inspector shows up with a writ, saying a third party has complained of irregularities.” Forcas chuckled. “Then a couple of mob lawyers from Tahoe go to district court and stop the
deal, claiming their clients had an option on the land. At that point, the ranchers get cold feet and pull out. After sending up a team of lawyers himself, and pouring a lot of money down the drain, your uncle discovers what he already knew: that it’s Vitale Cassiel’s agents, after getting the tribe a casino license, who’ve been empowered by the Paiute lodge to block the deal. Suddenly the Paiute say they want the land for themselves. At the same time, none other than VC Enterprises has bought and sold an adjoining stretch of land in Idaho to the mob, who now want to consolidate. Still following me?”

I nodded my head in disbelief.

“In other words,” Forcas concluded, “Vitale Cassiel played both sides against the middle, just to screw Junius, and in the end it worked: Junius sold half the land to the mob guys and half to the Indians, at a loss. Not to mention the loss of time and energy.” He paused. “And, in his mind, the loss of face.”

“Vitale Cassiel did all that out of pure hatred?”

“Oh, VC Enterprises made a pile of dough in the process, but you have to believe the real motivation was the ongoing revenge. Your uncle has taken his shots in the same way: undermining deals, financial sabotage, court actions. But, never forget, loss of face drives them more than loss of money. The feud only ends if that’s resolved—or when one of them dies.”

Nonetheless, I thought, I had been right about the bodyguards: in his dealings with Vitale Cassiel, Samax had more to fear from cutthroat lawyers than actual cutthroats.

As always, the night Deneb made his presentation I was sitting on Samax’s right, with Hadar beside me. Hadar was voluble, despite his usual hard edge, from the moment he settled his great body onto his chair. His mitts for hands were as rough as sandpaper from handling rocks. His hair looked ignitable as straw from all his hours in the sun. In fact, except for his corkscrew eyes seeming to have recessed even farther into his skull, he had barely changed in the nine years I had known him. As we waited for Deneb to speak, Hadar was telling me about a man in Zurich who had recently contacted him.

“A collector. Claimed to have the Ensishein meteorite.” He stirred his tomato juice with a stalk of celery. “Do you know what that is?”

I shook my head.

“A famous meteorite that fell to earth in 1492. In the Black Forest. Local constable locked it in a dungeon to keep it from flying back into space. Kept it there for 105 years.” He chuckled. “Then it disappeared.”

“Maybe it did fly back into space,” I said.

“Well, it hasn’t come back now,” he grunted, then leaned his big head close to my ear. “This afternoon Deneb told me his whole theory is built around an asteroid.”

“Really.”

Hadar sat back slowly. “We’ll see.”

Samax clinked his glass for quiet, and Deneb stood up, clearing his throat.

“Let me state categorically,” he began in his high voice, “that the coordinates for Atlantis were 42°55’N and 26°6’W, 600 miles off the European continent, east of the Sargasso Sea in the North Atlantic. It was a land mass of 220,000 square miles—roughly the area of the Iberian peninsula. From Plato on, every ancient source agrees that Atlantis suffered a swift, explosive cataclysm and sank into the sea. That includes tribes as diverse as the Berbers, who called Atlantis Attala, the Celts, who named it Avalon, and the Vikings, on whose maps it appears as the continent of Atland. The Phoenicians referred to it as Antilla, and the Basques,” Deneb paused, glancing at Samax, “gave it the name Atlantida, and even today in the Pyrenees call themselves Atlantika. On this side of the Atlantic, too, the Aztecs claimed their ancestors fled the eastern island of Aztlan before it disappeared.” He leaned forward, planting his palms on the table. “Here is my solution to the mystery: Atlantis was destroyed by an enormous asteroid.”

He sipped ice water and scanned the table eagerly for our reactions. Then he spelled out his theory:

The asteroid that struck near Atlantis did so with the combined force of a hundred nuclear warheads. One of the Adonis group that are drawn to the major planets, the asteroid approached Atlantis at twelve miles per second, and before impact blazed with a fiery light, exceeding the brightness of a hundred suns. Everyone who saw it was blinded. When it hit the ocean near Atlantis, the asteroid’s temperature had reached 40,000°F, vaporizing tons of seawater and hurling up a succession of 3,000-foot tidal waves—taller than Atlantis’s mountain ranges—that devastated the island and drowned the entire population.