Cat In A Flamingo Fedora

Chapter 22

Flamingo Tango

The empty lot was a sea of that indescribable shade of pink called flamingo when Temple stopped by the first installation site in the morning.

She could hardly get near it for the rubberneckers slowing their cars to ten miles an hour to gawk at the latest imitation life -form to descend on the Strip.

Since it would take her at least fifteen minutes to come abreast of the driveway into the vast sandy parking lot the site was, she followed Mad Matt's example with the Hesketh Vampire and drove over the curb. An aging Geo Storm was not a motorcycle. Two sets of wheels jolted over the barrier, nearly knocking Temple's big plastic eyeglass frames off her retrousse nose and giving her a very French nosebleed.

She parked as soon as all four wheels were on sand, ignoring the indignant honks of people who had no business being there anyway.

By ones and twos, at close range, the plastic yard ornament was a cheap thrill. Two for nine ninety-five. You could see the manufacturing seams and the molded-feather shapes.

But here . . .

Domingo's plan was more than a two-dimensional layout on paper. He had made sure that certain flamingos were propped up higher than the rest, as if standing on hillocks, or walking on water, if one were paranormally inclined.

The effect was of waves of flamingos. Through the sun shimmer came an odd illusion that they moved, that feathers ruffled and long necks bobbed. Temple could sense what a real flock of thousands of flamingos would look like in the wild. There were few library books devoted to the subject. One ancient text--so old it was illustrated with black-and-white photos! --written by a British explorer who nearly lost his life pursuing the haunts of Great and Lesser Flamingo tribes in Africa, said that the sight was so overwhelming that he could hardly describe it. And considering his long and precise descriptions of alkaline mudflats, that was quite a concession to loss of words.

Now Temple glimpsed his awe. She actually was impressed by Domingo. If art was getting people to look at their world in a different way, he was a genius. There they bloomed en masse, like so many cactus flowers, unreal as anything around them, yet representing a form of natural life seldom seen in its glory.

The display both mocked and celebrated the artificiality that was Las Vegas. It looked as if all the half-million plastic flamingos sold in both the Americas every year had marched here in protest at being parceled off two by two. This was a flamingo convention, and surely not the oddest birds to descend on Vegas over the years.

"You like?"

Temple started to find Domingo beside her, his showman's arms lowered for once.

"It's... amazingly lovely," she said.

"Much that we do not look at closely is lovely." Domingo had no accent, but he phrased his words like someone foreign to the English language. Somewhere in that tone was flattery.

Temple tore her eyes from the flamingos--and it was an effort-- to view their assembler.

Domingo was smiling at her, looking far more human than she had ever seen him.

"Here is your hat. I understand it was forcibly borrowed the other day." He bowed (another foreign affectation) as he handed it back.

"I wasn't expecting it back."

"A shame. I have had a word with the ... mynah bird who took it. She will not trouble you again. Or me."

"Verina? But she--"

"She had attached herself to me. I rely on others to help me with my work. I had not looked closely at her. I work so long and see the results only infrequently." He began walking toward the installation, and Temple fell in step with him, amazed. "It is not good to have those around you who are more selfish than yourself. She is gone, back to where she found me. I am in love with my flamingos for the moment, anyway."

"You have so many helpers," Temple marveled, watching college students move among the flamingos like body servants, adjusting angles, tilts, postures.

"I rely upon the passions of others to complete my own, whether professionally or personally." Espresso-dark eyes seared her face. "It is a terrible, heartless lifestyle , art. It attracts terrible, heartless people, who in turn draw terrible, heartless hangers-on." He stopped and turned to Temple. "You are refreshing. I am glad to have met you. Now I do not need only plastic flamingos to restore my faith in life and the living. We will celebrate the return of your hat and my optimism. With a late lunch at my hotel this afternoon. And without Verina."

Temple may have been in a flamingo-daze, but she was not oblivious to the obvious.

"Domingo, if you're hitting on me because your girlfriend skipped town--"

"So refreshing." Domingo took her arm to lean companionably closer. "I wish to find out how you have kept your charming optimism, and your charming skepticism, in such a place as Las Vegas. I am sorry, Miss Temple, but you are my flamingo of the moment. I like your ideas. I like your honesty. I cannot afford to ignore reality when I encounter it. To me, at this moment, you are as real as they are."

This was the most dubious compliment Temple had ever heard, so of course she was flattered by it. Besides, she had a rather wild idea about where Darren Cooke's bad seed might be lurking. After her experience with Cooke, she would have to be demented to go off alone with another known ladies' man. But just saying no did work in certain areas, if not with addictions. And if she couldn't decide to say yes to two perfectly attractive men her own age, she didn't see herself succumbing to another midlife charmer.

Domingo swept a hand, finally, in a grandiose gesture, toward the wonderful parliament of birds.

"Your suggestion. And it looks marvelous. Several major hotels that had already rejected me out of hand are reopening negotiations. You will have to help me nurse along their revived interest, otherwise my project will make a fool and a failure out of me. You do wish to contribute to great art, don't you?"

"That, Domingo, is a loaded question, and I never answer those. But I will join you for lunch, mainly because I'm curious to hear about Verina's downfall."

He laughed, facing the sky as if it would laugh with him if it could. "Women! Revenge is always more interesting to them than love."