The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [31]
“I’m picking you up at four.” Bobby still felt a little drunk, but in another couple hours he’d be okay to drive.
“Why?”
“I want to beat traffic on the Skyway.”
“The Skyway? What’s in Indiana?”
Kloska blew smoke from one side of his mouth, away from his sleeping date. “Just wear your pledge pin, college boy. You’re going back to campus.”
12
THE THIRD-LARGEST BAR at the Colossus Casino and Hotel had a Soviet theme—crimson walls and black carpet and mural-size photos of missile tests and military parades and yellow hammers paired everywhere with sickles. Club Nikita served 107 different brands of vodka, the names of which, on her first evening here and for no reason, Nada had quietly memorized and alphabetized and also sorted according to price. For atmosphere (although there was some unlikely explanation on the drink menu about the proper environment for the enjoyment of Russian spirits), the temperature was maintained at just below sixty degrees.
Ducking through the crowd, Nada used the toggle in her head—her “spider”—to block out the thumping German disco, and as she brushed past the other patrons, she tuned in bits of random conversation—narcissistic small talk and exaggerated gambling adventures, most of it. After a minute or so, she blocked those out, too. Sometimes it was important to go silent, to shut the whole operation down for a while. Unwind. Unfocus.
Noticing every damn thing, she knew, could make a girl crazy.
Peering through white and odorless smoke piped in for aesthetics, she finally made it to within a few tightly packed bodies of the bar and, after catching Kelvin’s eye, stretched her arms high into the hyperoxygenated air and turned her hands helplessly. Kelvin nodded and waved her past the far turn of the bar, where it was dark and there was an empty chair. A man—probably the oldest person in the room by twenty years—was meditating there with his drink, and when Kelvin motioned to him, he looked about and, seeing Nada, smiled and stood and shook her hand, giving a short bow.
Courtesy, Nada thought. She had almost stopped missing it.
Jameson wore a lime cotton shirt—heavy starch—with long sleeves and pressed khakis. Between his feet sat a soft leather briefcase, the kind that might hold a laptop computer. He was fit and had broad, strong hands, and his thick, graying hair had been massaged with expensive hair product. More than twice her age—late into his fifties, she assessed—he was still taut and strong, and possessed the dignified ruins of a once-handsome face. Nada searched for a surgeon’s signature in front of his ears and around his eyes but saw nothing. Dozens of times she had casually nodded at an attractive man old enough to be her father and said to Bea for a laugh, “I’d fuck him on a bet,” and she wasn’t always kidding. Jameson was in that category.
Following an earlier direction, Kelvin brought them a pair of Rodnik rocks with the slightest bit of tonic. Nada tilted her head at the drink. “Thanks.”
“Gary Jameson,” he said, shouting a bit. Nada almost told him that as long as she could see his lips, there was no reason to raise his voice at all.
With his carefully arranged hair, buffed shoes, and business school manner, Jameson couldn’t have seemed less like her father. Solomon Gold might have been American nobility, but he was also a wild-haired nonconformist who, in spite of his young daughter’s disability, taught her to aim and fire a handgun at their Michigan summer home when she was only nine. Still, she detected a subversive resemblance around the eyes. Her therapist once claimed that Nada looked for traces of her father in all men of a certain age. Self-awareness did not stop her from finding such markers attractive.
“I know a great deal about you,” Jameson said. “I want you to know that up front. I don’t want you to think that it’s creepy.”
“Too late,” Nada said.
“I always do my homework, Ms. Gold. That has been the secret to whatever success I’ve enjoyed. My attorney described you as having ‘extraordinary powers.