BEN HASSARD WAS on his feet, nodding and bowing like a bobble-headed doll.
“I hope you continue to enjoy the accommodations, Mr. Christopher,” he told the white man in white, “and that our … discussions down here didn’t disturb you in the penthouse.”
“Your CinSims fanning through the hotel disturbed me. You do understand that the farmyard chickens and pigs and horses are part of the package, as well as Miss Gulch’s bicycle?”
“Horses and pigs and chickens? Oh, my.” Ben cast me a helpless look. “Miss Street was right. I’ll need some sort of unifying attraction … perhaps around a theme of Kansas, the Barnyard State.”
Their byplay gave me mental time to insert Vegas’s one and only albino rock star into this place and time and enterprise. I wasn’t surprised that Hassard hadn’t recognized the stage persona of Cocaine, lead singer of the Seven Deadly Sins rock group. Snow in white-suit civvies looked like a taller, younger, sexier … oh, Mark Twain.
“You’re the Vegas bigwig who’s been so generous with CinSims leases?” I asked, none too smoothly.
Shock does that to even a professional objective observer, and I was in no way objective about Snow.
His Western-style suit was not that different from the white Italian designer ones he wore offstage, but his river-boat gambler hat seemed so like the ghost of El Demonio’s black one it gave me shivers. Snow’s long white hair was tied back into a very passé mob-style ponytail that suddenly looked back again, big-time. And, of course, he wore the eternal dark sunglasses.
“Me, generous?” he replied.
I could tell his hidden eyes were taking in my plain navy suit. Some men’s looks could be said to undress a woman. His summation seemed to be burying my outfit under a chador.
“Hardly generous,” Snow addressed me again. “This was a business deal. Ben and I are both well satisfied, and now I have the unexpected bonus of … requisitioning Miss Street’s presence in my suite.”
“Ah,” Ben said. “Miss Street is not a potential, er, hostess, Mr. Christopher. Her presence is not a matter of acquisition. In a month, Emerald City will be fully staffed instead of running with a skeleton crew.”
“Mr. Christopher,” I put in, mispronouncing his name with glee, “knows perfectly well, from long experience, that I am not biddable. Is there a reason why I should accompany you upstairs?”
“The view,” Snow said, drawing it out like a slow sip of an Albino Vampire cocktail, “is spectacular.”
And … I’d get some private time to pump him on the what, how, and why of his astounding personal visit to the hinterlands.
I thanked Mr. Hassard, gave him my cell phone number, and asked him to alert me instantly if “my party” returned.
Snow waited beside the door the CinSims had just trooped through on a yellow brick road.
THE EMERALD CITY offered green glass elevators that shot riders atop each of the needle towers through an aquatic funnel of green gelatin, with a laser show of chartreuse lights lancing the emerald haze.
“I’m only here for the ride and the view,” I mentioned.
“Of course. Why do you care about any impression a sleazy operator like Ben Hassard has of you?”
Nah, we get a classy operator, Irma noted, happy to back me up with the Big Bad Wolf. She loved these settos of ours. That riverboat gambler suit fits Snow’s frame just a tad looser than his rock show catsuit … and did you catch those albino ostrich-skin cowboy boots with the ebony heels and platinum ankle chains? If I could get me a pair I would die right here and happily go to Hell.
Snow did resemble the quintessential Western dude, down to the white string tie with a platinum longhorn skull slide. I’m sure he impressed the local yokels no end.
“It’s not about me,” I told Snow. “It’s about the truth. Why did you wait to make your appearance until Ric and Leonard Tallgrass left? Did you want to separate me from them?”
“Just cutting you out from the common crime-chasing herd. You’re a devout Our Lady of the Lake graduate, I hear. I wanted to show you the Holy Grail.”
“Oh, come on.”
“You don’t believe the cup Christ sipped from at the Last Supper still exists in this world, somewhere?”
“Possibly, but that’s not my obsession.”
“Then you’ll be pleased that I’m going to … satisfy what is your obsession.”
Now that was a veiled threat if I’d ever heard one.
APPARENTLY PROGRAMMED, OUR elevator had reached the top. The faceted emerald doors split open on another vista so green it seemed to be underwater.
Gosh, Irma whispered. We’ve got a few of those obsession thingies. Wonder which one our sexy host is so bound and determined to cater to? He does owe you at least a spanking for transferring the physical pain and marks of Ric’s bullwhipped childhood slavery to his own truly porcelain albino body. I’ll watch.
Shut up, I told Irma. I was already jumpy, knowing we were dealing here with Christophe, the billionaire casino king. I was all too aware of his slick Oklahoma oilman wardrobe and the draw of the white silken shirt and suit jacket across the Snow-white skin of his back with every move. Yet he seemed all business, all entrepreneur now. Nothing of the raunchy rock star remained. And certainly nothing of the victim of a paranormal pain transfer.
The room beyond the private elevator sported a sprawling conversation pit upholstered in so many shades of green velvet I thought I was in mossy Ireland. I noted that the suite had his and her powder rooms off the entry hall, like the layout at werewolf warlord Cesar Cicereau’s Gehenna Hotel penthouse. Effete Vegas luxuries were infecting even Wichita.
Snow went ahead into the massive main room to open the verdigris-lacquered doors of a green-mirror-backed bar.
“I have absinthe and Albino Vampires and crème de menthe cocktails,” he offered. “Any preference?”
I stared at a trio of green glass bottles. “Wait a minute. You’ve bottled my Albino Vampire recipe?”
“Just add the vodka of your choice, from Grey Goose to lighter fluid. Much more economical than by the martini glass at the Inferno Bar. And of course, also much more profitable to me in the larger mass market.”
I shook my head. “I’m stunned that I’m allowed into this temple of greed wearing just my plain navy interview suit.”
“My mistake. You’re quite right. I’m violating the hospitality of the Emerald City Hotel and Casino. I should have directed you to the suite Green Room first thing. It’s a must for every occupant. You do want to taste what this theme-park gambling joint will offer the paying customers?”
He gestured to a pair of zebrawood doors striped in pale and vivid green.
“I’ll have the absinthe,” I said over my shoulder, stepping through.
Whoa. I was in some kind of New Age subway tunnel, with nowhere to go but forward.
The setup, despite its relentless laser-green glow, immediately reminded me of the detoxifying entrance tunnel to germ-phobic Howard Hughes’s 1001 Knights getaway on the low-rent end of the Strip.
Green laser lights buzzed and swiveled as they rose and fell on either side of me, etching my form as if I were a jigsaw puzzle piece. I walked through an emerald-green mist, feeling warm and then cool. Unseen air vents lifted my heavy plaits to writhe and untwine around my face and shoulders like Medusa’s serpents—not Kelly green, I hoped.
I came though the opposite doors feeling I’d enjoyed a steam room, sauna, and massage. In fact, I felt absolutely wonderful.
Snow was waiting with two tall, thin glasses of opaque, chartreuse-tinted absinthe. The drink had been a nineteenth-century fad with a bad rep because an herbal ingredient called wormwood had a marijuana-like effect.
“‘A great star fell from Heaven,’” he recited as he handed me one glass, “‘burning like a torch, and … the name of the star is wormwood.’”
“‘And Kansas, she said, is the name of the star,’” I sang like the Good Witch Glinda.
If Snow wanted to quote the Book of Revelation to an Our Lady of the Lake girl, I could quote The Wizard of Oz right back.
“Nice pipes,” he said, the sunglasses dipping to eye my legs.
I was shocked to view a thigh-high slit in a long green satin skirt that showcased the familiar as a silver “garter” snake.
“Passing through the Green Room has a stunning effect, doesn’t it?” Snow commented. “Like going through a glamorizing car wash for humans. They call it the ‘Emerald City Dorothy spa option.’ The lasers take your measurements and melt off your everyday wear, ‘painting’ the bedazzled client with more formal clothes. I see the females get a gown fit for a movie queen, so the obsessed gambler has his lady distracted from the moment they enter their suite.”
“I suppose the gaming man only gets a fistful of green casino cards.”
“Oh, no. They offer a spa experience for gentlemen clients too.” He held out his suited arms. “They need the money man relaxed and ready to rock and roll the dice and roulette wheel all night long. You don’t think I’d dress like a riverboat gambler on purpose? My only … successful resistance to the process was to reject the bilious green color.” He eyed me from top to toe. “Well, you are black Irish, and the plaits didn’t suit you as well as having your hair loose.”
“I hate wearing green,” I muttered to dismiss his compliment.
Green was for jigging, red-haired, freckled Irish lassies, not a dark and deep depressive diva like me. Okay, I dramatize. Shut up, Irma.
However, I was determined to avoid any and all of the green mirrors in the suite in case they skewed my mirror affinity, so I found his comments a mystery, except for the hair, which I’d felt unwinding. He led me through another set of doors, and down a dim aisle of shallow stairs.
A giant movie screen faced us, but it was matte black and mirrored nothing.
Looking around, I spotted glassy green reflections bouncing from multiple surfaces, all too fractured to add up to a mirror. That was comforting. I didn’t want to display any mirror-walking tricks in front of Snow.
I could only glimpse a tiny reflection of myself in his sunglasses’ lenses. Although my hair was still black, I was wrapped in shiny shades of green, like a Christmas present.
“If I were a talking mirror,” Snow said, the sunglasses moving up and down me like the laser lights, “I could report that you’d whip that slinky green vintage gown you’re wearing off a black-and-white movie screen in a Wichita minute.”
“If it’s green, I doubt it. The latest antiterrorist technology and clothes manufacturing trends could account for much of the makeover wizardry,” I speculated. “Nothing was that ‘magical.’ The laser measurements. The melting outer garments. Even the clothes spun like webs onto living mannequin forms.”
“True,” Snow said. “Millennium Revelations may come and go, but if you sell entertainment to the public, you always have to have a gimmick.”
He led me down the plush-carpeted stairs to a row of pistachio-colored leather theater seats. I noticed that my navy pumps were as plain and simple as ever, but now dyed teal-green. I wondered how my blue eyes had fared in the Emerald Tunnel.
Snow continued playing tour guide.
“You must be dying to know what I’m doing here. Please sit, Delilah, and prepare to observe the wonder of the century.”
I placed my long-stemmed glass in the chair’s builtin beverage holder and arranged myself. My satin gown seemed to be made of green linguini, it draped so easily over me and the chair, but when I leaned back I felt a chill. The leather was room temperature and cool. My back was bare from tailbone up as the leather accepted the pressure of my skin. My naturally pale, unblemished skin.
If I’d been asked to lie on a reclining chair of thorns I couldn’t have been more pained.
Seeing Snow again had focused my mind on the whip strikes I’d transferred to him from Ric. Were they still raw? In an ordinary human being, they surely would be.
No matter how luxe and silken the surroundings, that unspoken fear rubbed my expectations raw. The cushy ambiance prickled me all the more as I pictured that supernaturally white skin beneath the silk shirt festered and scabbing and feverish, no matter how much Snow always mastered cool.
Or … not. That was the bed of nails he had me on, constructed from my too-vivid imagination and my guilt.
“I don’t understand why you’re here,” I blurted.
He’d taken his own chair, sitting forward as taller men will, leaning his forearms on his knees, pure white hands loosely laced together, not putting his back flat against the leather back. Was he trying to make me think the worst?
A reporter knows only to push. I eyed my wristwatch, squinting at a hard-to-read greenish abalone-shell dial now encrusted with green garnets. I assumed emeralds would not be bestowed on the wives of even gambling whales.
“What,” I asked, “is Vegas impresario Christophe doing at a remote casino operation like Emerald City in Wichita? Not even you can jet back to Vegas in time for your seven p.m. show,” I pointed out. “Unless you have dragon wings.”
His pale lips split in a smile that revealed yet whiter teeth. “Can you have caught me out in a trade secret, Delilah?”
“You’re a shape-shifting dragon?”
I dearly hoped so. That would make him a major new supernatural on the Millennium Revelation map and way too inhuman—and huge—for me to worry about having hurt.
That was the crazy part. I was worried I’d hurt the impervious Snow when he probably had the power to destroy me six times over with a wave of his little finger. I looked closely. That milk-white digit now flaunted a peridot-set green-gold ring.
Apparently he hadn’t escaped the Emerald City Green Room’s do-over as thoroughly as he’d thought.
Snow set his white riverboat gambler’s hat on the empty chair seat next to him. He tilted back his profile and throat and ran his fingers through his tied-back hair, releasing it to his shoulders, smiling at the blank screen straight ahead.
I charged ahead. “You can’t convince me you’d be interested in investing in some over-the-rainbow casino property in Wichita, Kansas.”
“Oh, but I am.” He finally sat back and directed the sunglasses’ blind gaze my way. “And, since you’ve turned up at this opportune moment, I’m here to show you a movie.”
What is it with these guys? Irma crabbed. First Ric and now Snow. We’re lounging around here like blond bombshell Jean Harlow and Mr. Rock Star Hottie wants to watch a movie with us? Your chances of even copping us another hickey here are zero, baby.
I sipped the slightly bitter taste of green anise in the absinthe, glad Irma was right. This was a rare retro moment in La-la Land. Private screening. Major Red Carpet slinky gown. Retro cocktail. I glanced again at Snow. Irma was right again. That bleached Southern Comfort, Rhett Butler outfit didn’t do him a disservice.
Tomorrow is another day, baby, I told Irma.
Then “Rhett” hit the twentieth century’s greatest contribution to humanity, the remote control. The minute he did, reels of a silent black-and-white film began flickering on the screen, and my pulse started doing the jitterbug.
I sat forward, no longer worried about exposing my uneasily naked back to Snow, Rhett, or whoever. The scenes and figures I watched were pretty jitterbuggy too. That’s the way silent films were seen in the early days, like 1927, in that herky-jerky motion.
Immediately, I recognized the astonishing, luminous images of an imagined ultramodern city combining the space opera scenery of Flash Gordon with the despair of a union movement for robotic workers.
Some would say this was the most classic film ever done by the German expressionist director, Fritz Lang. The studio and censors had hacked the film apart even before it was exported to the larger world. The Nazis would embrace the mechanized super-city as their own, making Lang loathe the product of his own genius. No complete authorized edition existed to this day. A rumored one found a few years ago in Rio had proved fraudulent.
“Snow,” I breathed, “what do you have here? Not the complete lost footage? That would be … priceless.”
His sunglassed gaze remained fixed on the screen. “I didn’t say ‘Holy Grail’ for nothing. Yes. Somehow the foot of the Oz rainbow pointed to the archives of a restored Wichita-area Art Deco movie palace, the Augusta, and this lost, rare, impossible footage. That’s what I want here. That’s what I’ll take back to the Inferno Hotel, an entire new wing built around this vintage futuristic vision. I’ll call it the New Metropolis Towers and Condominiums and maybe, if you treat me right, you’ll have visiting privileges.”
I was so freaking sold. “Imagine guests living in this vintage film city of the future. So the subterranean Nine Circles of Hell aren’t playground enough for you? You’re reconstructing the film world’s Art Deco Tower of Babel in Vegas? You realize those biblical Babel builders blasphemed?”
“You realize,” Snow said, “that ‘blaspheme’ is a pretty archaic concept? Especially in Vegas? Just tune in to your film fanatic mode, Delilah. I must say having you sitting here in that seriously anti-Code evening gown much enhances my viewing pleasure.”
“I would wear a green clown suit for the privilege of seeing Metropolis uncut.”
Snow chuckled, returning his hidden gaze from the screen. “I knew you’d appreciate this.”
It’s hard to overstate how rare this film was. The Holy Grail of vintage films indeed. Remembering it was twelve years from the grim but luminous black-and-white futuristic robotic fable of Metropolis to the hypercolorized, deceptively happy fable of The Wizard of Oz shows how fast the art of film developed—by leaps and bounds—and so had its audience.
I rapidly scanned my all-things-vintage memory bank.
Metropolis was a dark antitechnology tale of Maria, a sweet, loving girl who became the movie’s model for the ultimate roboticized worker-drone. The “manufactured” robot queen bee built on Maria in Metropolis had inspired George Lucas to create the shiny gold C-3PO robot in the Star Wars film saga, but a more recent descendent was Seven of Nine, that sexy mechanical Borg female “construct” of nineties Star Trek television.
Now I stared at the moments of heroine Maria’s on-screen re-creation, a human woman being made into a silver-metal superwoman, perhaps the most powerful image of feminine power since the Neolithic fertility goddesses. Only this dame wore body armor.