“What the hell did you do?” Jesse says.

“Shaved myself,” Edgar says. “What do you think?”

Jesse’s been shaving his brother as long as he’s been looking after him, Edgar afraid to do it himself after trying and winding up nicked from cheek to chin. He got himself in a couple spots this time, too, but that didn’t stop him. Jesse takes hold of his jaw and twists his head from side to side.

“Smooth as a china teacup,” he says.

Emboldened by this success, Edgar demands to drive to Beaumont’s when they go out to the Grand Prix and gets pissy when Jesse refuses. Johona distracts him with a game.

“I spy, with my little eye, something yellow,” she says.

“Is it a banana?”

“Man, where’s there a banana around here?”

Beaumont lives beyond the edge of the city. His house, which resembles a concrete bunker fortified against the hot sun and scouring winds of the desert, is perched on a rise with a view of the Strip, the yard landscaped with cacti and boulders lit from below. Jesse parks on the driveway next to a white Cadillac.

Beaumont answers the door dressed in a bright-red disco suit. He shakes Jesse and Edgar’s hands, kisses Johona’s. “You look lovely,” he says.

The furnishings of the house are modern, chrome and black leather, the carpet spotless white shag. Nothing—not the abstract paintings on the walls, the enormous television, the hi-fi system—hints that the man living here is 2,000 years old.

Beaumont leads them into the sunken living room, where they share a long couch while Beaumont relaxes in a swivel chair on the other side of the glass coffee table.

“Champagne, Tommy,” he says, and a young man dressed in old-time livery brings in a tray with four glasses on it.

“This place is something,” Jesse says.

“I designed it myself,” Beaumont replies. Jesse once asked Claudine where the man got his money. “He married well,” she said. “Many times.”

“You don’t got that parrot anymore?” Edgar says.

“Gigi?” Beaumont says.

“The one could speak French.”

The man in the servant getup returns, this time offering shrimp and little meatballs on toothpicks.

“Gigi passed away some time ago at the ripe old age of eighty,” Beaumont says. “I was devastated.”

Edgar licks a meatball and pops it into his mouth. “You should get you another,” he says. “Teach it to talk Chinese.”

“I’m afraid I don’t speak Chinese,” Beaumont says.

“I do,” Edgar says. “Ching chong ching chong ching chong.”

“I have something you’ll like even more than Gigi,” Beaumont says.

He takes Edgar over to the hi-fi and hands him a microphone. “Sing something.”

Edgar belts out “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” and Beaumont flips a switch when he finishes, playing back a recording of the performance. Edgar is thrilled.

“I could be on the radio,” he says.