The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [176]
Invisible.
They played the count much the way Nada had with David, probably better, as Wayne knew everything a casino—especially one with limited resources—would be watching for in a counter. They were never greedy. Under hats and behind sunglasses, she was never recognized, or if she was, no one ever approached. They always had fun. Wayne did anyway. He thought Nada seemed to.
The papers along the way—Buffalo News, Oneonta Daily Star, Albany Times Union, Hartford Courant—printed good news and bad, most of which they ignored. Wayne showed her a short paragraph with a Las Vegas dateline reporting that Phillip Truman had been sentenced to fifteen years. Peter Trembley hadn’t killed Bea before she had had the case locked up good.
Nada asked Wayne about the photos and video the police found on his computer, about the credit reports and other personal information. What could he say?
“I didn’t keep any crazy record of the hands you played,” he said, copping lamely to all the rest. “Someone else put it there.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Peter. Rhodes, maybe. To frame me after Peter killed you.”
“Rhodes was watching my play? Why? To catch me cheating? If he wanted to know, I’d have told him I was cheating.” She laughed, or maybe cackled, cackled to say that Rhodes’s idea of cheating and hers were very different.
“Maybe he was collecting your hands the way Jameson collected tiles. Maybe cheating is your art.” Wayne intended it to be funny.
Every so often, Nada would make a phone call and a week later a package would arrive at some post office up ahead, always with the same return address: 3414 North Ravenswood, Chicago. She would pick it up with Wayne in the car and then open it in the passenger seat and, after a long examination, put the contents in a large container in the trunk with the rest of Patrick Blackburn’s tiles. He was making them for her now, it seemed, so that one day she could see what he once saw. And her father. And Wes Woodward, too. She and Wayne joked about buying a hitch and a trailer for the tiles, when it got to that point.
They traveled as friends and occasionally, at her invitation, maybe once a week, as lovers. They never discussed it. During long silent stretches, though, she held his hand in the car. And sometimes in a casino, especially when they were winning, she would touch him casually and secretly on the shoulder or the face or even brush a lone finger hip-to-hip across the back of his pants, signifying nothing, just to let him know she was there.
He asked himself, sleeping alone, if this would be enough for him the rest of his life, wanted, on the run, never in contact with his disgraced family, never leaving a mark or a trail, ever so rarely sleeping with the only friend he might ever have, certain that she would never love him exactly the way he loved her.
In the morning, he would always answer yes, and every morning he expected her to be gone.
76
IT WAS A MASSIVE and ancient castle of a church, forgotten on a remote and overgrown Austrian mountainside. The only road to it had been covered many times over with fallen trees and vines and dead rodents and dust. Thirty vehicles of different makes and colors—Land Rovers and Humvees, mostly—traversed the rough terrain all the way from Vienna, leaving from seven different hotels at more than ten-minute intervals. A convoy, after all, would attract attention, which the mathematici never did, according to their unwritten, unspoken motto, in Latin for some reason instead of Greek.
Imperium Sine Fama. Power Without Fame.
Thirty-nine sworn members of the tradition had made the trip along with one they called “the initiate.” Or even sometimes “the novitiate.”
Over 120 musicians and choir singers, none of them German-speaking, had been brought to the site in blindfolds. They rehearsed