Daily Scifi Shorts, Sketches, & Starts

Sunday, October 19, 2014

Soren knew the that particular set of photographs well. He'd studied them both professionally and personally. They were stills from the Associated Press coverage of the 1971 opening of the north wing of the Sands Hotel and Casino. This project was the first to feature modular plumbing and fixtures in the expanded-size guest rooms and inclusion of modern design elements in the casino to encourage the spending of money and discourage leaving: unified textile choices, continuously curving throughfares and alleyways, and island gambling stations that are matter-of-fact see features even today. At the time, the project was thought to be innovator and cutting edge--even risky. Like so many things, it seemed obvious in retrospect, but at the time, a good deal of discussion and, in some quarters, derision, could be heard in the watering places of those insiders and hangers-on who followed such things. Soren had made a study generally of the small and large changes in the profit engine that, in the face of a lost overwhelming challenges and difficulties, had manages to perform for decades prior--and since. A line of cheap hotels out in the middle of a humorless and unforgiving desert, far from water, far from the comforts of a more familiar environment--Morris 'Mo' Green and his Sands of Arabia Hotel had been one of the first four to plan for something bigger and better than working the Pheonix - to-dos Angeles traffic. Mo had dreamt of visitors coming to Vegas not as the last water stop on the road to southern California, but as a destination in itself: a fantasy land of hedonism and vice unobtainable in the more staid East. Even Atlantic City couldn't offer the adult-oriented pleasures of what even back in the early 1960's was known as Sin City. Green and the group of initial like-minded visionaries created something different from anything that existed to that point in human history, and its continuing profitability--witness the wagon train of airliners full of people in and out at all hours of the day and night--had succeeded beyond even their wildest expectations. The Sands expansion of 1971 was a significant, if somewhat obscure, part of that, and Soren reveled in knowing about it, in being an expert on such things. He had studied the news coverage at the time in detail, and even had the color slides, from which the black-and-white prints that had appeared in the paper had been made--they were carefully packaged in black plastic, sealed, and filed. Soren was meticulous about such things. He had preserved much of the arcane documentary stream of papers of his own life in carefully organized files at his home. Such things as eighth-grade homework, acceptance letters to colleges, correspondence with his member of Congress, and a thousand other pieces of arcana could be found in alphabetical order in his files. He had something approaching a photographis memory for such things; once he had seen a piece of paper, once he had handled it, the fact of its existence was effortlessly and forever etched into his consciousness.
    And when he saw the man in the Venetian that day, sitting at a slot machine feeding quarters dour into a slot machine, Soren knew he had seen him before.
    In a photograph.
    Soren knew the man as one knows the barista at one's daily-visited coffeeshop, as one knows the driver of the bus one takes to work--that is to say, Soren knew his face. The man was not one of the colorless, anonymous, banker-from-Cleveland types that Vegas was full of; he had an interesting face, one that would be remembered by someone such as Soren, who noticed such things. The man was about 65, his wavy grey hair was parted and combed. He sported a well-grown mustache dfw the style that was known as Imperial--Soren knew it well. His father had affected such a mustache, and his memories of his father styling it carefully with a wet comb were distinct. The man was dressed casually, conservatively, a checked shirt open at the collar and tucked into beige gaberdines. Soren knew the man's clothes too. He strode past the man as he sat at the machine; they did not make eye contact, but Soren got a direct look at him, recognizing him as a familiar figure immediately but lacking the context to make a positive identification. His initial impression, arrived at within a half-second of seeing him, was not that he knew the man personally, but rather that he was someone whom Soren had seen in some public context. The man didn't look like an actor or some famous person, the type that could be spotted from time to time in the casinos; he had once recognized the actress Carrie Fisher in New York New York, looking unhappy as she sat in front of a slot machine much as the man in whom Soren was suddenly so interested did. Soren strode on past him, filing the man's face and form away in his mind for further analysis and ultimate identification; he knew it would come to him. It always did. He played with it as he walked along, but the man's identity and the context in which he had come to know the man--Soren was certain that he did know the man--still had not dawn upon him by the time he reached Davidson's office, which was the reason for his presence in the Venetian that afternoon. Miguel Davidson was the catering manager for the Venetian's food service operation: three major sit-down restaurants, five fast-food type counters, and support of 440 guest rooms with a limited room service menu for 20 hours a day. Soren had come to speak with him about a produce contract that was in dispute in an effort to persuade him to accept Gala apples instead of Red Delicious--it was a favor to a friend--and Soren was sitting in Davidson's office in the middle of a sentence about the temperature at which Galas should be stored when it hit him where he'd seen the man at the slot machine.
    The Sands photos from the 1971 expansion.
    Soren suddenly knew the exact photograph in which the man he'd seen 20 minutes ago appeared. It was one of the few which had not been composed ahead of time--photographs of actual people in public places inevitably included midline eye closures or the strange grimaces that arise as people change their facial expressions, but this one looked natural and posed, the people seeming to be the type that make a casino fun and desirable. The men were handsome enough and dressed appropriately; the women were youngish and pretty in a girl next-door way without being beautiful enough to threaten the wives of men who might want to come--with or without them. The man in question was just to the left of center and his face was clear and we'll illuminated. He was one of a row of people crowding up to the far end of a long roulette table. He was wearing the same checked shirt that he'd been wearing 20 minutes ago. His hair was parted and combed, his Imperial mustache bristled above his lip. Soren suddenly realized he was no longer listening to Davidson, so he put away his thought of the Sands photograph and the man who was--impossibly--in two places that seemed to be mutually incompatible.
...
Soren pulled his car into the garage and immediately hit the button to close the overhead door. By the time the rubber seal at the bottom of the door settled onto the painted concrete, he was out of the car, through the door that led to what his wife called a mud room but what seemed to him to just just a small room whose purpose seemed to be a place for shoes to be kicked off on the way in--Andrea liked everyone to do that, family and visitors alike. "Shoes in the house is an abomination," he had heard her say to their daughters more than once. He supposed it was the influence of her Japanese mother, who had married Andreas father, a serviceman, returning with him to Carbondale, Illinois. She had said it to him too, and he automatically stepped out of his loafers as he entered the house. He made his way straight for his home office and it's fileroom; he'd been thinking about what lay in the stack labeled with an 'S.' What he was after lay in the third drawer down, near the front; he could see it in his mind as he dialed the combination into the lock, unshakeable the stack, and opened the third drawer. "Ah, yes," he muttered, picking out the file and carrying over to the adjacent low table. He sat down and opened the folder; the photo he'd been thinking of was the third one down and it was precisely as he remembered. There just to the left of center was the man, in the checkered shirt. His face appeared to be in the middle of a contracture to a smile, but it was not an unpleasant expression. Soren stared at the photo and the man's image as he recalled the at the slot machine. He felt certain that this was the same man, despite the obvious impossibility of it. His hand opened a drawer to the left and he retrieved a magnifying glass which was contained within. Bringing it to his eye, he examined the man's face varefully. The color photo was a high quality one, and the man's face was clear and sharp. Soren noticed a speck on the man's right cheek; it was too small to discern the color clearly, but it looked for all the world like a small clot of blood, the kind that would be formed if the man had shaved with a somewhat dull blade, or if the blade were sharp and it had inadvertently dug a tiny bit too deep in that particular spot. The man's face appeared to have been recently shaved. He tried to recall the slot machine man's face--he had approached the man on the right, walked past him on that side. Had the man not had a speck of blood on the cheek on that side? He wasn't sure and couldn't allow himself to believe such a thing in the absence of positive evidence--and yet, it seemed possible.
    Then it suddenly occurred to him that the casino might have some security camera images of the man he had seen that morning. Soren knew very well how the cameras worked: the were positioned and pointed such that every gaming device and entrance was visible on one camera or the other, and they constantly recorded full-color digital video at a high resolution, which was stored as it was generated in a high-capacity hard drive located in the casino's security office. The drive looped such that the newest images were recorded over the oldest; at anytime, the most recent ten days or so of video was on the drive. Soren thought for a moment--who did he know in security at Venetian? He picked up the phone and dialed a number.
    "Venetian Resort and Casino," the operator answered briskly. "How may I direct your call?"
    "Bill Hayes, please," Soren said.
    "Please hold." The phone clicked and then an Italian aria--Soren recognized it as coming from Verdi's Carmen, although it was not the iconic tune--was in his ear. He pressed a button on the phone and lay the handset in its cradle while the tune played through the phone's tinny speaker. After some minutes, the music clicked off in the middle of a pleasant phrase, rang once, and a gruff voice in stark contrast to the contract spoke. "This is Hayes."
    "Bill. Soren Rothwald here."
    "Soren," he said. "How are you doing today?"
    "Good. Listen, I was on your floor today."
    "Yeah? How'd it look?"
    "Fine, just fine."
    "Yeah, well, we had a hell of a mess in here last night," he said. "Did you see the news?"
    "No," Soren said. "What happened?"
    "Woman stabbed her husband right there on the floor," he said. "Who the hell comes to Vegas to stab their husband? There was blood everywhere. Took until this morning to get it cleaned up."
    "Stabbed?" Soren said.
    "Yeah, apparently it was a dispute about a girlfriend. The guy's okay and the woman is in lockup. Anyway, what can I do for you?" Bill asked.
    "Well, as I say, I was on your floor this morning and I saw a man sitting at a slot machine. I want to take a look at him on your tape."
    "Sure," Bill said. "Come on down."
    "Great. How about tomorrow afternoon, say about three?"
    "Yeah, sure. Just come to the cage and Laura will let you back," he said. "Is it a player?" By that word, Bill meant to ask whether the man who had attracted Soren's interest might be one of several hundred persons whom the casino had come to believe was cheating at the various games the casino offered. There were always players; once they were identified and photographed, the casino worked hard to keep tabs on them and keep them out of the house and out of the till--but it was surprisingly difficult, even with the highest of high-tech surveillance systems in and out of the building. As there was no right to admittance in any casino, these individuals--and sometimes teams--were banned, and they were prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The casino never settled. But the bean counters accepted a one or two percent loss to cheating as the cost of doing business, and there was an upside to it. When there was a big win, word got around that the tables or the machines at such-and-such casino were 'hot' and the amateurs from Palookaville swarmed in.
    "No, just a guy," Soren responded. "I only saw him for a second, but--" he judged how to put it. "I think I know him from somewhere."
    "Yeah, well come on over and we'll see."
    "Okay, tomorrow at three."
    "Yeah." The line went dead and Soren clicked off the speakerphone. He continued to examine the face on the photo through the glass. Who are you? he thought, and what are you doing here?
...
Soren was early, but Bill was in his office, and Laura, the woman running the casino's cash cage on the afternoon shift, recognized him and buzzed him through the inocuous-looking door that led to the casino's security operation. Like every modern casino, the Venetian spared no expense in attempting to provide a safe, positive environment for its guests and visitors, and by any mrasure, it did a pretty good job. Its accident and criminal - loss rates were down to Disneyland levels--statistically, you were far safer in the Venetian at 2 am than you would be in any mall in the country at 2 pm. Casino operators were only too aware that were word to get around that the house was unsafe, that pickpockets lurked there, that mugging occurred or rooms were burglarized, a casino could find itself being avoided by Mr. Joe Ordinary--and any casino that could not appeal to ordinary middle-class burghers was doomed. They all knew this, and so crime prevention was a critical part of protecting the billion-dollar investments that had been made here. The security budget for the Venetian alone was twenty - million dollars a year; that kind of money bought expertise that dissuaded even the most desperate thugs of all stripes. Besides, when it came right down to it, sitting in a wheelchair on the sidewalk with a cardboard sign was easier and less risky; the worst that could happen there is you could be shooed away by Las Vegas' finest.
    The show areas of the resort were professionally and elaborately decorated in a style designed to recall old Venice--or at least the American sense for what old Venice might be like. In the service areas, the pretense was dropped and the walls were painted industrial white; the elaborate murals on the ceilings were dispensed with. Soren walked down the corridor to a door marked with the letters 'VS.' It was standing open, and Bill Hayes sat at his desk.
    He rose as Soren approached. "Hey, Soren," he said, crossing the space, his hand extended.
    "Bill," Soren replied. "Thanks for letting me come by." They shook hands and Hayes gestured to one of two chairs in front of his desk. When Soren was seated, he took the other one. "So you got a friend on my floor, then," he said.
    "Not a friend, exactly." Soren had thought about what he would say to Bill, how he would explain why he wanted what he wanted. He doubted that Bill would ask too many questions or be put off if he were less than forthcoming, but he wanted to have a reasonable-sounding reason for wanting to see the footage, and he sure didn't want to tell the truth, not until he got a close look at the man who he had seen only briefly and in passing. Soren was convinced that the man was either the same one in the old photograph, but he realized other could not be based solely on his report. The footage from the security cameras would be his evidence, if in fact it showed the man in sufficient detail and if he decided he needed to reveal the man's image on the Sands photograph.  It certainly was a very interesting situation, but Soren wasn't sure where he wanted to take it. He hadn't thought much about the man past an identification of him. Maybe the man would turn out to be a son, or possibly a grandson, of the man in the photo from 1971--one who resembled his forebear to an uncanny degree. This was not an unusual situation, and yet the clothing had been identical, and this detail lent a strangeness to the situation that made Soren want to get to the bottom of.
"He's someone I think I know from some records I have access to."
    Bill considered this for a moment, and then shrugged. "Okay, let's go take a look," he said, rising and gesturing for Soren to move toward the door. "You've been in our shack, haven't you?"
    "Not in a long time." The two of them stepped into the corridor and Bill locked his office door with a key.