The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [1]
Wayne clicked his mouse to advance the video and he watched the girl with the big eyes play another methodical hand. “Why would you need to disappear, exactly? Did I miss something on your background check?”
“It’s not about what I’ve done, man,” Peter said. “The government is listening to our phone conversations. Reading our e-mails. I mean, look at the shit we can do here at the casino. We can follow people anywhere—into the bathroom, up to their room. It’s fucking scary. All I know is that things can get so strange so fast, and the time to be looking this stuff up on the Internet won’t be after they’re already following me.”
The redhead, now in one little window on his screen, seemed to be losing about as much as she was winning, playing it exactly according to those color-coded cheat sheets they hand you on the Strip—splitting eights, doubling elevens, holding on bad cards when the dealer was vulnerable. Wayne tapped the keyboard and started an e-mail to his bosses. “Suspicious activity. Name: Canada Gold …”
“You have to bury yourself to the neck,” Peter said.
Wayne stopped typing. He didn’t send the e-mail. Instead, he restored the camera window and watched her play hand after hand after hand.
MONAD
There is no more obvious expression of power than the performance of a conductor.
—Elias Canetti
1
HIS CHARCOAL SUIT had been tailored on State Street and drew an intimidating line across his shoulders. It tapered at his thin waist and billowed subtly at his ankles. His left sleeve had been cut just millimeters shorter than his right to better expose his father’s heavy platinum watch. In all his suits, he looked tall and confident and independent. But everyone in this warm fifth-floor Chicago courtroom—jury, judge, media, spectators, prosecutors—already knew Reggie Vallentine was smart.
“Regardless of the facts, the state’s attorney wants you to believe that convicting my client would achieve some noble result,” he told the jury while orbiting the lectern at a radius of six or so feet. “Remember what the prosecution said in its opening statement: ‘We cannot have two systems of justice, one for the poor and unknown and another for the rich and famous.’ The government’s own case, however, has convinced me that two such systems really do exist. The truth is, my client never would have been indicted if not for the fact that he is a celebrity.
“As someone who makes a living at the far table in these courtrooms, I have always had great respect for the state of Illinois. The state of Illinois does not prosecute unknown people when it has not a single microbe of physical evidence. The state of Illinois does not prosecute unknown people on hearsay. The state of Illinois does not prosecute unknown people with uncorroborated testimony from witnesses whose character, as you have seen, compares unfavorably to the accused in every respect.”
His client had wanted to wear pinstripes on certain days, but Reggie convinced him that stripes make defendants look guilty. Instead, Reggie selected for him a number of dark suits with brightly colored shirts and patterned ties—a different combination for every day of the sixteen-week trial. An innocent man isn’t afraid to stand out in court, Reggie said. It’s the guilty man who wants to disappear. The outfits had to be approved by a stable of advisers, consultants, handlers, and hangers-on, but the defendant had made it clear to his people: We all work for Reggie Vallentine now. The only element of his appearance that was off-limits to Reggie was the trademark silver hair, which stuck from his head in all directions like a saint’s halo in a Byzantine mural.
“So you ask yourself, Why Solomon Gold? I’m not sure I know the answer to that question. Only the state’s attorney himself knows why he has mounted so vigorous a crusade for the purpose of sending my client to prison.”
On the first day of his defense, Reggie never even mentioned the victim, a twenty-two-year-old cellist in the Chicago Symphony’s training orchestra. Instead, he introduced controversial testimony