Ride the Titanic! (41 page)

We enter the
Olympic Casino
to mingle with the normal crowd of Vegas regulars; young lovers hand-in-hand, overweight people wearing shorts, bored teenagers on their smartphones, elderly couples with open collar shirts, floppy sandals, and silly hats. But much the same way a mob of tourists shifts from being gawky to reverential when it enters a cathedral, so too does our crowd of happy misfits quiet down as they fall under the spell of muted lighting, pristine white-paneled walls, triple-plush carpet and the genuinely warm smiles from the elegantly costumed wait staff and
White Star
uniformed croupiers welcoming them aboard for a first class evening of gambling delight.

Our ‘passengers’ soon find out that this is no ordinary casino, and they’re no ordinary pedestrians wandering in off the strip. Instead, our staff treats them like first class guests aboard the most elegant ocean liner in the world. Their wish is our command, and if they want to throw away their hard-earned money in hopes of winning more in return, despite the House always and forever being the real winner, then so be it and welcome aboard.

Herbie makes a big show of making the sign of the cross.

Scooter says, ‘Since when does a Jew bless himself?’

‘When he’s in St. Peter’s.’

While it’s true that the Basilica’s square footage in Rome beat ours by a mile, we’re out to make money not save souls. And from the crash of the slots, the snap of the cards and the clatter of the roulette wheels, business is booming. Small change compared to what’s happening in our high roller rooms with whales like Ulyanov, but this pays the rent – or will once our attraction is more established.

‘Poker for this boy.’ Scooter peels off from the group.

‘The little white bouncing ball for me.’ Joe sails off for the roulette table, leaving Herbie and me to stare at each other.

We take in the sights and sounds for a while – especially the sounds: the incessant waves of noise in a casino are unlike anything on earth: music, talking, bing-bing-binging, shouting, laughing, and now and then a WHOOP from someone winning big, and applause and more music, and ding-ding-dinging until your ears can longer isolate one sound from another and you surrender to the waves, slip beneath the bright shining casino waters and start swimming through them instead.

‘Mikey.’ Herbie leans closer to me to speak above the noise, ‘You a gambling man?’

I laugh. ‘What do you think?’

‘Just like your daddy, and Joe too. Those two sure liked to gamble. Cards mostly. Craps every once in a while.’

‘Joe still does.’

‘Except with some things he shouldn’t.’

In the distance Joe hunches over one of the roulette tables, his head swiveling back and forth, taking in the action, smiling like a kid.

Herbie whispers ‘He tell you yet?’

‘Tell me what?’

‘That figures.’

‘What ‘figures?’’

‘Always makes me do the heavy lifting.’ Herbie points to his rear end and makes a face. ‘Joey’s got cancer. Up his ass. In the colon. He’s gambling it ain’t Stage Four even though the doc says it is.’

I go deaf. Herbie’s mouth keeps moving but no sound comes out. Then the sounds of my breathing, then a roaring noise, and then the casino noise comes CRASHING back, and with it his rasping voice.

‘. . .but he says, no way am I telling her, and I says, ‘Joey, for Chrissakes she’s your wife!’ But no, no, no, THIS was just gonna’ be between the two of us, which was fine for a while, but I can’t take it no more.’

He grabs my arm, his skinny fingers like vice-grips. ‘Listen to me! You gotta’ talk sense to him. He don’t listen to me. Never did, never will. All he wants is for me to shut the hell up and be his friend, which I’m doing, don’t get me wrong – well, at least until now because I don’t want him to die without folks knowing he’s not got a lot of time left, know what I mean? So will you please talk sense to him, okay? Get me off the hook because it’s driving me crazy, and I go crazy when I get crazy. And I. . .’

His voice breaks into a sob, and he gulps it into silence.

I put my arm around his narrow shoulders. ‘You’re a good man, Herbert Gottschalk.’

‘Tell my ex-wives that.’

I leave him to his worry and make my way through the casino crowd and manage to get halfway to where Joe’s playing, when a ship’s steward intercepts me. A business card rests serenely in his white-gloved hand. Upon it is written, ‘James Cameron.’ That’s all. But what more identification is needed for one of the most famous Hollywood directors of all time?

‘Where is he?’

‘Men’s Smoking Room, sir.’

A surprised whoop of laughter at Joe’s table and he dances around; a happy winner. Our little ‘talk’ will have to wait. Time to enter a different lion’s den instead.

It’s a Vegas tradition for casinos to coddle their multi-millionaire whales with plush, sultan-like, inner sanctum, high-roller caves. We went at it differently. Instead of crushed velvet and
baccarat
crystal chandeliers, we patterned our exclusive, invitation-only gambling suites after sections of the
Titanic
reserved for her first class passengers, like the
Men’s Smoking Room
, where I spot Mr. Cameron trying his luck at poker. He could have just as easily been playing in our more casually appointed
Gymnasium
, or the stately and serene
Library
, or the plant-filled
Palm Court
. But considering the strength of the Hollywood director’s personality he seems perfectly matched with the red-leather, carved mahogany, stained glass-windowed world of power that men like John Jacob Astor enjoyed before the iceberg struck and made his life a legend.

I wait patiently in the outer orbit of his table, staring at the intricate craftsmanship of the stained glass windows fitted into carved wood-paneled walls. Designed to be exact replicas of the ones in the original ship, they’re backlit to create an eternal noontime sun. But instead of saints for subject matter like those in a church, each of these shrine-to-commerce windows portrays a
White Star
liner: the
Baltic
serenely mid-ocean, the
Cedric
anchored in an exotic, faraway port, and the
Olympic
proudly putting out to sea.

In 1912, they burned real coal in the
Men’s Smoking Room’s
marble fireplace. But the light from this evening’s ‘fire’ comes from LEDs buried inside each translucent nugget, thanks to ingenuity of some genius who designed a computer chip to replicate the flicker and pulse of a flame forever cool to the touch.

‘Michael Sullivan, right?’ Cameron’s voice snaps me out of my daydream. ‘James Cameron.’

His handshake is as firm and direct as his gaze. ‘Hell of a thing you dreamed up.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘It’s James, and I want to make you a proposition.’

‘You’re more than welcome to be in the ride bridge when we go down, if that’s what you mean. In fact. . .’

He bats away my answer. ‘Oh, that? Sure, great, looking forward to it, but no, I’ve got something else I want to talk with you about. Shall we?’

He grabs me just above my elbow like a cop making an arrest, and steers me away from the gaming tables to a quiet corner of the room, where a young man dressed in black sits at an empty table, hands primly folded, chunky black glasses too big for his small head, staring at a tropical drink as big as a shoebox.

‘Mr. Sullivan, meet Fenric, my amanuensis.’

My handshake is naturally firm and I feel the bones in Fenric’s hand crunch a little, but he doesn’t flinch.

‘What is a. . .’

‘An amanuensis is a person who writes down what another person dictates. In this case, me.’

‘But I don’t see any paper or laptop or anything.’

‘Show him why, Fen.’

His amanuensis slowly taps his head.

‘Fenric’s got eidetic recall. Photographic memory. I say it, he remembers it. Watch. January 7, 1994. Story pitch,
Avatar
.’

Fenric takes a sip of his drink; a lemony-looking concoction packed with cherries, pineapple, and orange slices, and then rattles off in a high-pitched monotone, ‘A paraplegic Marine dispatched to the moon
Pandora
on a daring mission becomes torn between following his orders and protecting the world he feels is his home.’

‘March 15, 1991 Story pitch,
Terminator
.’

‘One or two?’

‘Don’t play games.’

A wisp of a mile, then again the monotone. ‘The cyborg who tried to kill Sarah Connor is dead, and another T-101 must now protect her teenage son, John Connor, from an even more powerful and advanced Terminator, the Tee-one thousand.’

He primly sips his drink.

‘I don’t leave home without Fenric, right buddy?’

He nods.

‘Because I never know when the muse will strike, right?’

Another modest sip.

Cameron checks his watch. ‘Six months, two weeks, four days, ten hours, and twelve minutes ago. Story pitch,
Ride the Titanic
.’

Fenric says, ‘An amusement park ride designer dreams up a
Titanic
thrill ride that sinks and come back in Las Vegas, but on its maiden voyage his enemies make sure it doesn’t.’

‘A movie?’ I say.

‘Making one of your attraction.’

His voice is gentle but insistent, his eyes like a mongoose and I’m the helpless garden snake as he pitches a storyline ten times more exciting than the one I’ve been living for the past two years. When he finishes, before I can say a word, he smoothly segues into more practical matters, as though it’s a done deal.

‘Attention to detail is the secret to my success,’ he says. ‘I’ll need full access to both yours and Ms. Zhu’s correspondence, e-mails, meeting notes, and of course we’ll conduct a whole slew of recorded interviews – that a problem?’

‘Have you spoken with Xia about this?’

He idly rotates a small ring on his pinky finger. ‘She’s completely onboard.’

‘Sure about that?’

The mongoose holds me for a long moment. ‘Your business partner values the amount of forward promotion this will give your other site launches. Five locations from what she says, and three more in the pipeline, or is it four?’

‘Four, but the
Titanic
. . .’

‘Sinks? Hell, yes, it sinks. Always does. You know that.’

‘But ours comes back.’

‘Mine doesn’t.’

I leave Cameron a contented man, and I feel okay too, because while I raised no objections to his ‘play-within-a-play’ proposal, I got him to agree to a final meeting with Xia about the whole thing before we commit to any kind of deal. But that’s later. Right now my father-in-law is more important to me than all the make-believe madness in the world.

I call his room. No answer. His cell phone. Ditto. I call Herbie. ‘Joe still with you?’

‘Left a while back. Got tired of winning, he said.’

‘Know where he went?’

‘To the doc I hope.’

‘Help me out here, Herbie.’

A long pause. ‘Back at Disney when things got bad, Joey always used to say, “They can take my job, but they can’t take my joy.”

I know exactly where to look.

The lights are turned off in our production office on the top floor of the hotel, except one over the easel holding Joe’s concept painting of
Ride the Titanic,
the one he did in Orlando way back when
.
He’s been fussing with it off and on for ever since, adding a detail here, subtracting one there, fiddling with it like a picture that refuses to hang straight.

Not wanting to startle him, I say quietly, ‘Like the way you got it looking.’

Joe grunts but says nothing. He swirls his brush into a vermillion puddle and makes a series of dotted blobs that magically transform themselves into a crowd of people lining up on the wharf to take the ride.

‘Don’t know how the hell you do it,’ I say.

‘Do what?’

‘Paint like an angel but act like an asshole – inside of which is growing, Herb informs me, stage four cancer that has spread elsewhere. That about right?’

A swirl of cadmium yellow high above the
White Star Grand Hotel
becomes a full moon.

‘That little man’s got himself a big mouth.’

‘Matches your fat head. Why the big secret?’