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My dear John,
I send the below chapter with some hesitation. Once you read it you will understand why. I know it will be safe in your hands, and also that, as the book will not be published before my death, the impact on me will be limited. I ask you to make the final decision on whether it should be included. It was a chapter I needed to write; I will leave to your judgment whether it is one the world needs to read.
Yours in trepidation,
Max
Now I told you, when I started this memoir, that I am not very good with words. Henry was very good with them. He was not always good at accents, unfortunately, and I called on him to be good at quite a few of them. But he was easy with people, and it was a great help to him that even when he had made some slip that betrayed his chosen disguise, he could find the words that would distract the person long enough for him to make his departure, if not convince them entirely. However, even he sometimes said things he regretted.
You have already seen evidence of this in the story of the woman with the walrus-tusk earrings. I will now tell you what happened the night Henry entered the high-stakes poker game with the Mafia boss and the Hollywood starlet.
Henry didn’t play poker often. When I first joined up with him, I assumed it was because he didn’t like it. I later discovered that he liked it very much: he would spend hours at a poker table, playing longer into the night than he ever did at the blackjack tables, completely absorbed in the subtle act of being just lucky enough to win without being so lucky that he aroused anyone’s suspicions.
He was very good at it, but he allowed himself to play only a few times a year. When he did, he insisted that his disguise be one of his most well-practiced and airtight. Men watched each other at poker tables, he told me: they studied each other carefully for the slightest tell. It was not like blackjack, where the dealer was a professional handling the casino’s money. Men at poker tables did not like to be fooled, and they liked very much to catch you out at it.
On the night of this story, Henry had made no plans to play poker. We were at a casino in Las Vegas, which I will call the Imperial Grand, and I had disguised him as displaced French nobility. It was a bit of whimsy on my part, I will admit, and perhaps an unwise one, since Las Vegas was a dangerous city for him, and the people who owned this casino were in fact the same ones who had driven Henry to my recruitment several years ago. But we had been at this for a while now, and we were growing cocky. “Here you are,” I said to Henry when I presented him with the passport from John Winston. “Louis Michel de Montpelier, a French aristocrat with such claims to the lost throne of France that no one who hears you will suspect you of being anything but a pretentious pretender, and therefore quite immune from actual suspicion.” And Henry laughed long and loud.
We had by this point perfected the rhythm of our evenings. First I would apply Henry’s disguise—in this case, shaping his hair into curls that just barely suggested an eighteenth-century wig without being vulgar—while Henry practiced his accent and mannerisms in the mirror. Then the two of us would order up a dinner from room service and eat together, talking of anything that came into our heads; Henry was a lively conversationalist, and I was often able to make him laugh. After dinner I fixed any aspects of his disguise that had been disturbed by time and use. In that way he would go down to the casino with all points of his disguise secure.
On the night of our story, Henry was ready to go at nine. I did my last inspection, smoothing back a stray bit of hair that had escaped a curl, and he grinned at me and went down to the casino.
I went out for my evening stroll, as I usually did when Henry went to work. Las Vegas at night is one of the more spectacular cities in the world, if you do not look too closely at the more shadowed doorways. I had not been one for shadowed doorways for many years now, and I was back in our suite before eleven.
At this point I would normally have gone to bed. However, that morning when we’d arrived at our hotel, I had received a package from John with some materials I had requested from a professional stagecraft supplier. I became absorbed in experimenting with the new materials he’d sent me for the crafting of prosthetic cheekbones, and I didn’t look up at the clock until past two in the morning.
“Good heavens!” I said. When Henry had left the room, he had not been planning to stay out particularly late. In Henry’s profession, when one does not come home at the hour one has predicted, there is always the possibility that something serious has gone wrong.
Henry and I had developed a routine for cases like this. I put on my best suit and went down to the casino.
Casinos in Las Vegas do not close. It was nearly three, but there was still a perfumed crowd milling about when I came down, cheering and groaning under the bright lights while casino staff made a genteel and menacing presence in the background.
I circled the floor, walking purposefully but not too quickly. A man in clothing like mine was a natural feature of a casino late at night. I looked at every blackjack table and roulette wheel. I had had to do this several times in the past, and every time, I’d found Henry quickly and in harmless circumstances.
This time, Henry was nowhere to be found. Fortunately, we had a plan for this, too. I went up to the concierge in his neat scarlet uniform and told him that I had an urgent message for M. Louis Michel de Montpelier. The man told me coolly that he would be happy to deliver the message for me, but I insisted that, no, this message could be trusted with no one else.
It took a few minutes for the concierge to dispatch an attendant with Henry’s name and description, and a few more for the man to return. By this point I was getting anxious. Aside from the incident with the men’s room, I had always found Henry relatively quickly, and I wasn’t sure what I would do if I found him in more serious trouble.
I was relieved to see the attendant return, but my relief didn’t last long. The attendant informed me that M. de Montpelier was not at any of the tables. He had, however, been spotted going into the private chambers of Mr. Luigi Caravaggio.
I knew that name. No one who frequented the casinos of Vegas could fail to know that name. Luigi Caravaggio, or Louie the Ledge, as he was more often called, was not the most powerful man in the mob outfit that owned this casino and several others. But there were only one or two men alive who would feel comfortable telling him that.
“I must follow him,” I said, as my stomach sank. “I have to deliver this message to him.”
The attendant gave me a supercilious look but agreed.
He led me to a door halfway down the casino floor, set off with palm trees and velvet ropes. Beyond it was a hallway, wood-paneled and marble-floored. My guide tapped on a door halfway down.
It was opened by a man in a dark suit and darker glasses. I had worked on enough films to know his type immediately. The bulge in his jacket was no doubt a gun. “This man has a message for Monsieur de Montpelier,” the attendant said, and the heavy put a finger to his lips and let me into the room where there was a poker game in progress.
There were perhaps twenty people in the room. Eight people, seven men and one woman, sat around a table. At various points around the room, standing well back from the table, were more of the men in dark suits. There were several other women present as well, sitting on the laps of the men or leaning over their shoulders as they played or sitting against the wall looking bored.
I saw all of this in a flash, for my eyes stopped and rested on Henry’s face.
Rarely had I seen Henry do this part of his work. His face when he does takes on a truly astonishing quality that I have never been able to properly describe. It is something like a glow, only it is not made of light; it transforms the features, but I, who know his features so well and transform them nightly myself, know that the lines of his face do not change. It is only their aspect that changes, their quality. I had seen it before, but I still found it hard to look away.
It was like that for a single protracted moment. Then Henry looked away from the cards and said, “Call,” pushing a pile of chips into the center of the table. The tension in the room increased, breaking only when Henry and his opponent flipped over their cards, and a sigh went around the table. Henry had won. He scooped the pile of chips toward him.
I was of course not invested in the hand of poker as they were. Henry could win or lose as many hands as he liked, at any moment he chose. What he was doing in this room, and whether he had chosen to be here—that was the question in my mind.
At that moment Henry looked up, and his face transformed again, in a different manner this time. “Alfred!” he said.
I bowed my head at the name, a private joke we had developed based on the comic books I had used to teach myself English years ago.
“Gentlemen,” Henry said, addressing the table, his French accent heavy, “I have clearly been trespassing on your good will too long. It is evident I have been missed.”
“Hey now, you can’t leave us so soon as that,” drawled the big man a few seats down from Henry, leaning back in his chair and putting his hand on his ample belly under his finely tailored suit. I could have been mistaken, but I believed the man was Louie the Ledge. “My namesake here has been obliging us with a game,” he said, turning to me. “We’ve become very attached to him.”
Henry laughed merrily, and I guessed that he had been having some fun with his new disguise. “It’s true that I haven’t taken all your money yet,” he said. “But here, let me buy into the next round, in gratitude for your having allowed me to play with such graciousness.”
He slid a pile of his chips into the center of the table. It was a large pile, though small compared to what he had earned.
Louie the Ledge looked at the pile of chips Henry had slid into the middle of the table.“Buy-in’s gone up,” he said, and the atmosphere in the room took a sharp turn toward the dangerous. The foppish look on Henry’s face changed to one of hard challenge. The bodyguards moved their hands toward their guns.
Then Henry laughed brightly, and the dangerous moment was over. “But of course,” he said, sliding the same amount of chips to the middle of the table again. “A small price to pay for such delightful company.” Then he picked up the rest of his winnings and walked toward me.
I did not feel that the danger was quite gone for good, as the rest of the gamblers did not seem pleased to have Henry walk off with such a large quantity of their money, and hungry eyes followed him as he moved toward my end of the room. But it was evident they were not going to act without Louie’s approval.
“Come, my friend, let us go,” Henry said, clapping his hand on my back and moving us toward the door. That might have been the end of it, and this story would never have become long enough to tell, except that one of the women sitting in the lap of one of the gamblers at the table straightened up and said suddenly, “Max!”
I have told you already that I am not skilled at finding the right words to deflect a difficult situation. I froze, and it was Henry who responded, only a moment later than he should have. He laughed easily and said with a bow, “On the contrary, mademoiselle, I am called Louis, but a young lady as charming as you may call me whatever she likes.”
“No, not you, your friend,” she said. She was a very beautiful young lady in her late twenties or early thirties. I couldn’t place her at the moment, but evidently we had met. “Max, it’s you, isn’t it?”
“You are mistaken, madame,” I said as naturally as I could.
“No, no—” Here she smacked the man she was sitting with on the shoulder. “Gary, you remember, right? This is the man who made me up for that monster movie I was in all those years ago. Remember, I introduced you to him afterward, because he did such a good job.” She looked at me with her wide blue eyes. “I didn’t even know myself, I swear to God. You are a miracle worker with stage makeup.”
Louie the Ledge was already straightening up in his chair, and at this he jerked fully upright. “What’s this? The man is a makeup artist?”
“Of course not,” Henry said. “I think I’d know if you’d gone into face painting, wouldn’t I, Alfred?” He looked at me with a twinkle in his eye, like it was all a big joke, but his hand was still on my back, pressing more firmly than it would have otherwise.
“Maybe he has a past you don’t know about,” Louie said, stretching the words out like he doubted the premise.
“I would hope not,” Henry said, “as he’s my brother.”
“Your brother?” asked one of the poker players—the woman, a striking redhead in her thirties or early forties. She looked back and forth between us, probably comparing the colors of our skin.
Henry’s mouth turned up at the corners. “Well,” he said, sliding his hand from my back up to my shoulder, letting his fingertips brush my neck, and her eyes widened.
I understood the implication immediately. I was just as immediately embarrassed for leaping to that conclusion, and assumed I must be mistaken—but Henry was not naïve. He had spent the past decade or more traveling the world, and he wasn’t ignorant of the ways of it. The implication was not accidental.
Louie’s lip curled up in disgust. “Well, in that case,” he said, his voice heavy with irony. “We couldn’t dream of separating our friend from his brother, could we, boys?”
There was a rumble of agreement around the table, and some looks at Henry’s hand on my shoulder, some shocked, some bored, some disdainful. I saw at once the genius of Henry’s lie: having seen through one layer of our disguise, these men would not attempt to see through another. As with Henry’s disguise as the French aristocrat, the very implausibility made our cover believable.
This is what I thought, but Louie the Ledge was not to be so easily deceived. He had just lost a great deal of money to Henry, and the news that Henry traveled with a professional makeup artist was too much for him to pass over. He put down the cards he was preparing to deal. “In fact,” he said, “I think we should make them even more welcome. What do you say we find a place more conducive to their tastes?”
Henry tried to protest, saying that we were tired and just wanted to go to our room, but our host wouldn’t hear of it. “I’m sure you wouldn’t refuse our hospitality,” he growled. “Not such a skilled poker player as yourself.” And with the bodyguards suddenly standing much closer than they had been a minute before, Henry was forced to admit he had a point.
“Well, let’s go,” one of the other poker players said. “It sounds like a good time to me.” He spoke in an unusually high voice, and I realized to my surprised that he was actually a woman, slim and short-haired and wearing a tuxedo so that I should hardly have known. She gave Henry and me as wink that sent heat to my cheeks.
Some of the other players begged off, but it was a sizable group in the end that accompanied us out front and into Louie Caravaggio’s personal limousine. In addition to the woman in the tuxedo, several of the men came along, as well as the red-haired woman and a few of the younger woman who had been accompanying the gamblers. The bodyguards came too, of course.
In the limo Louie seated us facing forward, while he sat sideways and fixed his eyes on us. Henry carried on a spirited conversation with one of the younger women, a girl in a sequined jumpsuit with the arm of a horse-faced heavy draped over her shoulder. As I’ve said, Henry was good at conversation; he gave no outward sign of discomfort except for the rigid press of his thigh against mine.
The limo was very crowded. Henry and I had no chance to talk privately before we arrived at our destination. But as we all climbed out of the limo, he found a moment to press up against me and whisper in my ear, “I’m so sorry, my friend. Just follow my lead.”
We had arrived at a back alley with a doorway—this one not shadowed but bright, lit by the caged floodlight above it that cast bright squares and dark lines over the door itself and the bouncer that stood in front of it. Louie slipped him a bill and a word, and he let us in without question.
Inside it was dark except for the colored lights that spun and pierced and gave the room an eerie sense of unreality. The music was loud and electronic-sounding, like nothing I’d ever heard before. It had a strong beat that rumbled in our chests. People were dancing and sitting at tables, a few alone or in groups, but most of them in couples. Couples that looked not at all like the couples that strolled arm-in-arm on the street outside—couples of a kind that I had convinced myself, at one time, could not safely exist.
Men with men. Women with women. Some couples where I couldn’t determine the gender of either party. And such clothing: everything from slouchy trousers and sweaters to velvet; shiny dresses and tight-fitting pants; leather jackets and collars with metal studs on them. There was one person who had lashes four inches long and plumed like a peacock’s feathers, and the professional disguise artist in me was seized with the desire to find out how she’d affixed them.
Our party had stopped just inside the door. “What a lark,” one of the women with us said, the one who had recognized me as Max. “Shall we dance, Gary?”
“Let’s get drinks,” Louie said to Henry and me, giving us a look hard as a shark’s and staying between us and the door.
We went to the bar. Henry was looking around him in a perfect simulacrum of appreciation, as if this was nothing new to him but certainly an admirable specimen of the genre. I was torn between my desire to make a show of my very real astonishment—even if I had been in places like this before, it had not been for many years, and when I had, it had not looked like this—and my consciousness that that would be contrary to our aim here. My stomach was jumping all over the place, and I would have liked to have had a ginger ale, if I’d thought Louie would let us get away with that.
Henry took my hand and gave a comforting squeeze as we got up to the bar, though he couldn’t have known what was going on in my head. “Now what shall we get?” he asked, finding a spot where no one else was standing. There was just room for both of us to stand without needing to be uncomfortably close, to my relief.
“Make room for a guy, will you?” Louie said a moment later, shoving up next to us, and I found himself pushed against Henry. There was a split second’s hesitation, and then Henry’s hand came up smoothly to rest on my hip. “Pick your poison, it’s on me,” Louie said, giving us that predatory grin of his.
Henry ordered for us. I was caught up in the feeling of Henry’s hand on my hip. I was not a young man, and I should have been able to endure a touch like that without distraction, but I found myself very distracted indeed. I thought about what we might look like to anyone observing: me, leaning back against Henry to keep from losing my balance, Henry with his arm slung around me, and that proprietary hand placed low. I had been trying not to look too closely at any of the other couples around us, but there were several I thought looked embarrassingly similar to us.
Henry had gotten us cognacs. I moved away from the bar with relief.
Our group had taken over a few tall tables near the dance floor. The starlet, formerly of the monster movie, was dancing with her date, and the others were standing around in various degrees of discomfort. The bodyguards weren’t even pretending to fit in. I noticed several other patrons looking at them with distrust, but this was a mafia town. Armed bodyguards were not an unusual sight. Maybe they were used to this.
Henry and I stood side by side, sipping our cognacs, and proceeded to be grilled via casual conversation by Luigi Caravaggio.
Had I ever been to Hollywood, he asked. A few times, passing through. I had enjoyed Hollywood Boulevard. Where did I live most of the time, then? I traveled with my brother, of course. Our permanent home was in the Loire Valley, as close to our ancestral lands as we’d been able to acquire. (Henry added this detail.) Had I no interest in stagecraft? The art of illusion, of sleight of hand? Well, I’d been to a magic show once. It was very impressive. Perhaps he could recommend a good one in Vegas? (At this Henry caught my eye, grinning.)
I was doing, I flattered myself, a creditable job of sidestepping his questions. I was helped by the many layers of our disguise: as we had not admitted openly that Henry was not my brother, I was able to keep up that fiction and so avoid the necessity of a more convincing truth. Louie clearly suspected the deeper truth, that I had some other reason for accompanying Henry to the casino, but I was starting to think that he would have trouble catching us in it. My primary concern was that he would be too stubborn to acknowledge his defeat and would resort to harsher methods.
I was wondering what those might be when a laugh rang out behind us and I turned to see the red-haired woman dancing with the woman in the tuxedo, close enough that I suspected this was not the first time nor the only way they’d danced together. “But I’m being rude, gentlemen,” Louie said, that hard-eyed smile spreading across his face again. “Here I am at a dance establishment, and I’m keeping you from dancing. Please.” He swept an arm toward the dance floor.
Henry glanced at me, and for the first time I saw true alarm in his eyes. It was hidden in a second, but I had no doubt that it was still there. This was clearly a test: if we did not pass, I would probably find out what harsher methods Louie the Ledge had at his disposal.
“Of course, let’s dance,” I said to Henry.
We went onto the dance floor, and I took the follower’s position. Instantly a flood of memories came back to me. I had danced with men like this, years before. I had thought I had put those experiences out of my mind, but as soon as Henry’s hand settled on my back, it was if no years had passed. I might have been an eighteen-year-old in Vienna, wide-eyed and half-frozen with a mix of terror and desire.
Fortunately Henry was in the lead, and we were now close enough that we could talk without the rest of our party hearing. “Good God, Max, curse me for a three-times fool,” Henry said into my ear as he moved me across the floor.
I put a grin on my face. “What makes you think I haven’t already?” I replied, my voice admirably steady.
Henry laughed. “Is he looking?” he asked.
I looked over his shoulder. “He’s staring straight at us.”
Louie kept looking—didn’t take his flinty eyes off us. Henry and I kept dancing, staying mostly silent; I was too distracted for conversation. I couldn’t even tell you what dances Henry was leading me in. But I was aware of Henry’s hand on mine and his other hand on the center of my back, and the scents of powder and aftershave and the subtler, half-familiar scent of his skin.
After several minutes of this Henry cleared his throat. “I’d like to know what comes next,” he said. “Do you think we’ll get away with it?”
“I think it depends how much money you took off him,” I said honestly.
Henry muttered a curse. “I’d give him the damn money back if he’d just ask for it,” he said. “At least we could be done with this act. Here, put your arms around my neck.”
We shifted into a more intimate dance position, the one so many of the couples around us were using. As we did so, Henry’s hands trailed down my back to my waist. I focused on showing nothing.
Louie kept watching, as we circled in our clinch, and still a few minutes later, as I rested my cheek against Henry’s shoulder. I didn’t think he was enjoying watching. I was starting to worry what would happen when he got bored of it.
“We need a plan,” I said to Henry, who was so smooth in this kind of situation; surely he could get out of this one.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” he said. “I think I’ve spotted a back exit. If we engineer a distraction, we should be able to sneak out.”
“We’re staying in his hotel,” I reminded Henry. “If we disappear, he’ll call and have us intercepted.”
“Damn,” Henry said. “You’re right. Head straight for the airport?”
“We won’t have the disguise kit,” I said.
Henry was silent for a long moment. I could see a few possibilities: we could fly to L.A., visit some of the supply outlets or some of my old friends. Or we could hole up somewhere else and have John Winston send supplies. Either way would lose us a few days, but I didn’t see any other option.
I assumed Henry reached the same conclusion, because he sighed. “All right. I’m sorry about this, Max. I hope you’ll forgive me for it,” he said. I was about to assure him I would—my supply kit was important to me, but it could be replaced—when he leaned down and kissed me.
I was instantly frozen in shock. As I’ve said, I was not a young man: there was no excuse for my being taken so strongly aback at something so simple as a kiss. Nor was there any excuse for the way I acted next: I threw my arms around his neck and hooked my leg around his knee and kissed him for all I was worth.
Henry took it admirably well. He kept his balance and kept his hands on my back and allowed the kiss to deepen—as I was insisting it do, anyway. He did not even protest when I moaned and let my tongue slip into his mouth. He kissed me back, in fact, encouraging the heat that was already burning in me.
No excuse, I said, and yet, in the moment, Henry felt like an excuse. The way he tasted, that hint of cognac on his tongue, was turning my head; the movement of his lips against mine, and the pressure of his hands against my back, were making a fool of me. In that moment it felt as if he were kissing me back with as much desire as I was kissing him.
I would probably not have stopped if Henry hadn’t broken the kiss. “Is he still looking?” he asked.
I’m ashamed to say I needed a moment to remember what I was talking about. My eyes were resting on his mouth, which was pink, swollen with our kiss. I moved them over his shoulder, to where Louie still sat on a sofa, bodyguards statue-like beside him. “No,” I said.
He had looked away. He was talking to the red-haired woman and her dancing partner, for all the world as if he weren’t interested in us. We had bought his belief, and his subsequent disinterest—at the cost of the heat that still burned within me, and my reluctance to meet Henry’s eyes.
“No,” I said. “I think we convinced him.”
We went with Louie a few minutes later when he called the group of us back to his limo. There was nothing to fear now: Louie was ignoring us entirely at this point. We had proven ourselves something beneath his notice—less detestable than cheaters, perhaps, but also less worth engaging with.
Henry sat quietly beside me in the limo on the way back to the hotel. When we reached it, Louie brushed us off with barely a wave, and we went up to our suite.
We were both silent in the elevator. I was preparing my apology. It was inexcusable, I would say. We had had a cover story, but I had gone too far. I could only hope he would forgive me.
Henry shifted next to me in the elevator, adjusting his weight. I stared straight ahead.
He was ahead of me as we went into our suite. I took care of the door, latching it and sliding the deadbolt for security. Then I turned to make my apology.
Henry was still standing near the door. He was looking at me, the same rigid look he’d worn in the limo and in the elevator. I opened my mouth to ask for his forgiveness. His eyes dropped to it—and then he was pressing me against the door, his hands in my hair and his mouth open on mine.
I was, if possible, more shocked than before. But I adjusted quickly: I got my hands in his pale-green suit jacket and pulled him in, and when he was close enough, I slid my hands up under his shirt and kissed him for all I was worth.
When we separated, a few minutes later, he was flush-faced and gasping. “Should I apologize this time?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “Let’s go to bed.”
***
My dear Max,
Please believe me when I say I would never take a thing away from your and Henry’s story. I’m not changing a word of this chapter.
Your constant friend,
John