Cat In An Ultramarine Scheme

They followed the red carpet through the lobby populated with black-and-white human-sized cutouts of the great gangster noir movie actors … James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino, Robert Mitchum and Barbara Stanwyck.

Beyond the double doors with the porthole windows, tommy guns rat-a-tatted and car brakes screeched as men groaned and women screamed. It sounded as much like a shooting gallery as the Santiago-occupied suite at the Crystal Phoenix had, but when two Fontana brothers swept the doors open, the movie “screen” before their eyes was a cutout set that they could walk right through.

Then they were strolling ill-lit alleyways littered by fallen bodies, with wax figures in trench coats huddled over submachine guns and a sound track blaring out threats and counterthreats and lines of immortal gangster-film dialogue, like “You dirty rat.”

“Dis is where the latest find will be,” Macho Mario said, adopting Chicago-style mobster diction like a theatrical pro.

“Latest find?” Van asked.

“Yeah. The body part that just surfaced from Lake Mead, now that the dried-up fringes uncovered some dirty work.”

“Surely,” Temple said, “the police wouldn’t release—”

“Vegas is not just some one-Bugsy burg,” Macho Mario said. “We have a Madam Tussauds wax museum in town. There are these mortuary artists or whatever from the morgue to the Madam’s working here. Macho Mario does not wait for things to become public domain. My domain is public. Voilà!”

Well, Temple thought, according to legend, the old-time gangsters did carry submachine guns in violin cases. She supposed that implied some “culture.”

Macho Mario whisked a black trench coat from what seemed a nearby hunched figure to reveal a display pedestal surmounted by a Plexiglas box. Through the clear plastic, one could view a glob of coagulated concrete from which two splintered shin bones stood up like giant toothpicks in an aspic of solid cement oatmeal.

“Oh, my God,” Van muttered, “shades of the Black Museum.”

“Black Museum?” Macho Mario was gratified by the reaction to his prize. “I like that title. This is just a mock-up of the latest body parts found in Lake Mead, but it will be in Gangsters upgraded Black Museum. Oh, wait! We gotta make clear we’re not celebrating black gangsta rappers. Boys, isn’t that going to be confusing?”

Yes, Temple thought, as the Fontana brothers rolled their eyes in unison.

“The Black Museum I was referring to,” Van explained, “is a very old, private, and venerable museum kept at Scotland Yard in London.”

“‘Venerable’?” Macho Mario rolled the word on his tongue like Mama Fontana’s world-famous pasta sauce. “That means fancy, right? Scotland Yard? That’s Sherlock Holmes stuff, right?”

Van absorbed Macho Mario’s further questions with inarticulate disbelief, while her husband placed a quieting palm on his uncle’s well-padded suit shoulder.

“Yeah,” Nicky said. “Pardon my wife’s shock. She’s a tender blossom, reared in Continental girls academies. The Black Museum hit her at quite an impressionable age. The museum is this ‘little shop of horrors,’ you could say, at Scotland Yard headquarters. Few outside the constabulary get in to see it, but her daddy was a major hotel manager—”

“Like you.” Macho Mario nodded seriously.

“Like me and Van. Only in London. Her father got them an ‘in,’ because this place is famously hard to get into.”

Macho Mario’s manicured hand lifted like an upscale traffic cop’s. “Say no more. That happens with them fancy French restaurants in Paris. You gotta reserve months in advance by letter. Now that is class. The Eiffel Tower joint at the Paris Hotel on the Strip is classy, but a letter in advance is real class.”

“Real class,” Nicky repeated. “And e-mail may do it nowadays. You must remember that Van’s father was German.”

“Sorry,” Macho Mario commiserated with Van, who was now biting her lip from either fury or laughter. “Italian is much better.”

Nicky soldiered on. “So Van was just twelve when they had the tour, and there was a pedestal like this one, with a clear cube atop it, only it was actually really thick glass.”

“This Plexiglas here is better than glass.” Macho Mario rapped thick knuckles on the surface, making an interior liquid quiver creepily. “It’s lighter. More modern. More expensive. Not breakable.”

“Absolutely, Uncle Mario.”

“I buy the best.”

“Of course, but back to the Black Museum,” Nicky said.

“Did it have all these lights and sound effects, eh? Like a gangster movie?”

“No,” Van finally said, speaking for herself, “it was just a series of offices then, really, with some framed Jack the Ripper notes on the wall, an acid murderer’s claw-footed bathtub, and tables of confiscated homemade weapons, including Freddy Krueger’s clawed gloves from the American horror film series, with human blood on the razor-blade nails.”

“Yeah? I’m impressed. That Freddy the Ripper! What a hit man! Dressed up like a movie creep and doing the serial-cutter crawl through London.”