Ride the Titanic! (21 page)

‘Uh. . .
Ride the Titanic?
’

He laughs, his teeth almost blue they’re so white. ‘Yeah, that’s right, so you know all about how once upon a time those big liners ruled the waves.’

‘The only way to get from here to there.’

‘New York to Southampton took at least three days, minimum. Until October 26th, 1958, when Pan Am’s Boeing 707 flies from New York to Paris in eight hours, and BOOM, party’s over, new day dawns and ocean liners are a thing of the past.’

He snaps his fingers. ‘Just. . .like. . .that. Problem is, their owners don’t hear the jets flying over their heads. They’re too busy screaming at each other about how to cut costs and improve shareholder value. Short-sighted jerks, every last one of them.’

‘Sounds like you’ve got same problem with these casino owners.’

‘Naw, their problem’s solved. That’s why I’m here with the hatchet. Thing is, they picked the wrong solution. But hey, let’s cut to the chase, here. . .’ He points at Xia and me. ‘Won’t sugar coat the message: your
Titanic’s
sunk, along with the three thousand-room iceberg it sailed in on.’

‘Four thousand rooms,’ Xia says. ‘And you can’t do this.’

‘Watch me – well, not me exactly. It’ll happen. And by the way, you’ll find it impossible to trace this conversation back to any source. And if you’re wearing a wire, which I’m sure you are, be advised I’m wearing some kind of gizmo that defeats any known surveillance device on the market – or so my security guys say.’

Xia stiffens in surprise.

Again he bares his killer whale teeth in laughter. ‘See, what’d I tell you? Which one of you is carrying?’

Xia hesitates, then opens her clutch purse and pulls out a miniature digital recording device.

‘Go ahead, hit playback,’ Grayson says. ‘For every recognizable word you hear on that little gadget, I’ll give you a thousand bucks.’

As proof, he fishes out his bulging wallet and fans a wad of cash. The two of them lock eyes. She thumbs her device, cues it up and plays back a sizzling crackle of white noise.

‘See what I mean?’ Grayson slaps his sleek suit where his ‘gizmo’ must be located. ‘What happens in Vegas, always stays in Vegas.’

I say, ‘You’ll probably laugh at me for saying this, but isn’t what you’re doing against the law?’

‘Our conversation? Hardly.’

‘No, I mean threatening us.’

‘Am I? Look outside, Mr. Sullivan, tell me what you see.’

Now at the apex of the
SkyHi’s
rotation, all of Las Vegas is on display. Despite my anger, the spectacular sight ravishes me with its dazzle. Despite all the moaning and groaning about decadence and immorality and doom and perdition, Las Vegas at night is one of the visual wonders of the world. A teenager’s world maybe, but isn’t that where we remember life beginning? Where hope trumped every card in the deck of life? Where an infinity of tomorrows stretched out before us the same way the infinity of lights and fountains stretches out before the raucous, hell-raising world of Las Vegas teenagers-at-heart? Our sinking ship and the iceberg that strikes it can show them how precious those tomorrows really are by stripping them away every hour on the hour and twice at night, when the
Titanic
slides out of sight along this fantasy Milky Way of colored lights masquerading as stars.

Grayson says, ‘What do you see down there?’

I finally say in all honesty, ‘I see our ship and our hotel down there.’

‘So do I.’ Xia turns to Grayson. ‘What do your clients see?’

He groans, ‘My boys are like those ocean liner guys. Forget jets. They’ve got this Stone Age idea of building a combination high end shopping experience – slash – casino based on Monte Carlo. Like one Monte Carlo ain’t enough in this world, these guys want another one to clog the strip. More of the same. Even worse.’

I say, ‘Tell your ocean liner boys the jets have already landed. The
Titanic’s
staying put.’

Xia adds, ‘So’s our hotel.’

Grayson smiles. ‘I’m half sad you said that, and half glad too.’

‘Why half?’

‘I love ambition, especially when it’s naked, like yours and Mike’s – can I call you Mike?’

‘Anything but ‘Mister Sullivan.’’

‘Mike it is, and ever shall be, until. . .’ He lifts his shoulders and his biceps strain against the suit coat’s taut fabric. ‘. . .my boys declare war which, by my estimate, should be tomorrow morning at ten, providing they don’t call me tonight – but I doubt that – they turn in early, these old timers. Not like us, though. The night is young and Vegas is just waking up. Join me for a drink, why don’t you? I’m thirsty after all this deadly-serious talk.’

‘How deadly?’ I say.

His killer shark smile fades and then returns but not nearly as bright. ‘That, my innocent young friend, you are about to find out.’

Our hotel project director Mr. Wu has lost a lot of weight since I saw him a year ago, but that’s like saying you scraped a little snow off Mount Everest. He’s still big, and his sense of humor equally good, maybe even better, when Xia and I meet him the next morning at the construction site and warn him to expect trouble.

‘Not first time, not last,’ he says breezily as we tour the vast, poured concrete floor of what will eventually become the
Olympic
casino, named after the
Titanic’s
sister ship.

Wu dances lightly over a tangle of Teflon-coated rebar. ‘Remember Hong Kong?’

Xia nods with some reluctance.

‘My second hotel for Zhu family. The
Royal Pacific
. Fifty-three stories. Beautiful building. Curving glass curtain walls, great view of city.’

‘And?’ I say.

‘Two steel workers on forty-sixth floor. Safety rails in place. Wearing harnesses. Everything safe. Suddenly they fight. Before anyone can stop them, over the side they go. Forty-six floors down, BAM.’ He slaps his slab-sided hands and the sound echoes like a gunshot in the cavernous space.

‘Not an accident?’

‘No way. All planned. But man who push other one, his harness tangles and he goes over too. Killer gets killed.’ He smiles. ‘Irony beautiful sometimes.’

‘What was the trouble?’

Xia says, ‘Our fault. On bad advice we hired a construction company who bid the lowest – not the company whose turn it was next in that snake pit of a city.’

‘Careful.’ Wu lifts a cautionary finger. ‘Please respect my place of birth.’

She ignores him. ‘The threats started. We paid squeeze but it didn’t work. Then came a few workers’ strikes, which didn’t last long. Then the final threat, which we ignored, and then the accident.’

‘That wasn’t an accident.’

‘Of course not. We knew that. The workers knew that. It’s the world they live in. Their work place had become a war zone, so they walked off the job until peace was declared.’

Wu sighs. ‘Three weeks lost before they go back.’

Xia says, ‘And we did go back, but this time paying the competing company full freight as ‘consulting engineers. Cost us a third more than we planned, but we got the hotel built.’

‘So everybody lived happily ever after – except the two dead guys, right?’

‘Wrong,’ Wu says. ‘One was killer. He now in
diyu
.’

‘I’m guessing that’s Chinese for ‘hell’?

‘Worse.’

The hammering noise of an impact drill momentarily silences us. Xia points upward. ‘Pouring the sixth floor today. Thirty-six to go. We go up while you go down.’

From our fifth floor vantage point,
Ride the Titanic
’s construction site looks tiny in comparison to the hotel’s massive footprint. But that’s changing with every passing day. Excavation for the dive trench has progressed about fifty feet down into the Las Vegas desert, and will continue night and day, until we carve a massive, steel-reinforced, concrete-shot cavity big enough to swallow up an ocean liner and make it disappear from view, but not from the minds of thousands of riders who want to brush against death without having to kiss it on the cheek.

The cluster of crawler-derrick cranes with outrigger booms crowd around the hole like mourners at a gravesite. The real
Titanic
never had a grave. What’s left of it lays broken and rusting on the bottom of the ocean like a rich kid’s forgotten toy. But it will not be forgotten. Not on the strip. Not if I can help it.

I turn and face Xia. ‘I’m going back to work. ‘

‘Me too.’

‘Fincantini promises it will deliver the first pressure hull section on time.’

‘That’s good news.’

‘The bad news is that Robbie tells me we’re still running at least four months behind schedule.’

A flash of fear crosses her confident features like summer heat lightning, but quickly shifts back to confidence. ‘The sooner we get this up and running the better our chances of surviving what they’re going to throw at us.’

‘I don’t want our guys falling off steel girders.’

‘Doesn’t have to be that bad. Fire, flood, delivery delays. They’ve got a big playbook. Four months? Really?’

‘That’s what Robbie says.’

She nervously chews a perfectly-polished fingernail and then stops herself and smiles. ‘Your father-in-law’s Italian, right?’

‘Full-blooded.’

‘Speaks the language?’

‘Better than the Pope.’

‘Got an idea.’

After she tells me, she says, ‘Think he could get them off their lazy,
a domani
asses?’

‘Only one way to find out.’

‘You’re choking me to death,’ Joe says, for what seems the hundredth time, as I finished tying his bow tie in the mirror of our hotel room in Trieste, Italy. Thirty-six hours earlier he was in Orlando complaining to Lewis about how the lighting cues were ruining the color palette in the
Wireless Room
Scene. Now we’re standing in a hotel room in Italy, courtesy of Xia’s
Gulfstream
, dressing for a late dinner with the Fincantini reps, who are more than happy to enjoy an all-expense paid meal at one of the city’s finest restaurants,
Il Bocco Lupo.

‘Hold still,’ I say.

‘You’re doing it all wrong.’

‘Am not.’ I stand behind him, my arms draped over his burly shoulders. ‘This is how Geena does it for me.’

Joe’s brow furrows. ‘You leave this Mercurio
paisan
to me, okay? He’s the hairbrush stuck in the toilet.’

‘How elegant.’

‘My pop was a plumber. He saw the shit of this world in more ways than one.’

I finish his bow tie, brush dandruff off his tuxedo and spin him around. ‘You look good enough to kiss. C’mere.’

‘You
pazzo
sonofabitch, let go!’’

I not only let him go, I turn him loose an hour later, when
Il Bocco Lupo’s
maître’d, poster-size menus in hand, sails across the polished marble floors of the Michelin three-star restaurant overlooking the sparkling lights of Trieste harbor, with Joe and me sailing line abreast behind.

As we approach our table,
Signor
Mercurio rises from his seat like Caesar from his throne. Massimo leaps to his feet like a happy puppy. To my pleasant surprise they have table mates; two beautiful women wearing basic little black dresses. The younger one, obviously Max’s companion, looks a little stunned by the elegance of the setting, whereas the older woman, obviously
Signora
Mercurio from their matching wedding bands, nods to me as her husband makes introductions in passable English.

‘
Ti presenti
my wife, Agostina, and
Signora
. . .’ Mercurio hesitates slightly and Max blurts, ‘My wife Elena.’

A deep blush suffuses her olive skin as I take her hand, bow slightly and say, ‘
Piacere
.’

Joe takes
Signora
Mercurio’s bejeweled hand and says, ‘
Incantevole,
’ which means ‘enchanted,’ and from that moment on, he rattles away in Italian, while I smile until my gums get dry, and nod in agreement when he shares the occasional English explanation.

Nobody seems to notice my passive role, so captivated are they by Joe’s animated performance. He begins by casually joking with the wine steward, then cajoles him into delivering two bottles of the restaurant’s prized
Barolo
. Then he waxes brilliantly on the
primo
course of buttery Risotto and Clams. Ditto for the wide variety of the
secondo
fish courses, and the
insalate
, and finally ending with a silver tray of indescribably beautiful dessert creations proffered by the
dolce
chef, who arrives at Joe’s joyful but imperious bidding. Up until now I’ve only witnessed my father-in-law’s artistry on canvas. Tonight this son of a humble plumber is using people and food to create different kind of living masterpiece.