later, the game and gammon were mine.
“That’s gammon,” I said quietly. “That makes double what’s on the cube. I make that thirty-two hundred pesos. Plus the eleven hundred forty you already owe me, and that makes-”
“I can add,” he said brusquely. “There’s nothing wrong with my math.”
I resisted the temptation to point out that it was his skill at backgammon that was at fault, not his math.
Garcia looked at his watch. And so did I. It was ten-forty.
“I have to leave,” he said, closing the board abruptly.
“Are you coming back?” I asked. “After you’ve been to your club?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I’ll be here for a while. To give you a chance to win it back.”
But we both knew he wouldn’t be returning. He counted out forty-three hundred-peso notes from a fifty-note bundle and handed them over.
I nodded and said, “Plus ten percent for the house, that’s two hundred each.” I riffled my fingers at his remaining cash. “I’ll pay for the drinks myself.”
Sullenly he thumbed another couple of bills at me. Then he closed the catches on top of the ugly backgammon set, tucked it under his arm, and quickly walked away, shouldering his way through the other gamblers like a character in a horror movie.
I pocketed my winnings and went to find the casino manager again. He looked as if he’d hardly moved since I’d last spoken to him.
“Is the game over?” he asked.
“For the moment. Senor Garcia has to visit his club. And I have a meeting upstairs with Senor Reles. After that we may resume. I said I’d wait here to give him a chance to win back his money. So we’ll see.”
“I’ll keep the table free,” said the manager.
“Thank you. And perhaps you’d be kind enough to let Senor Reles know that I’m on my way up to see him now.”
“Yes, of course.”
I handed him four hundred pesos. “Ten percent of the table stakes. I believe that’s normal.”
The manager shook his head. “That won’t be necessary. Thank you for beating him. For a long time now I’ve been hoping that someone could humiliate that pig. And from the look of things, you must have beat him good.”
I nodded.
“Perhaps, after you have finished your meeting with Senor Reles, you could come to my office. I should like to buy you a drink to celebrate your victory.”
STILL CARRYING BEN SIEGEL’S BACKGAMMON SET, I caught the elevator car up to the eighth floor and the hotel pool terrace, where I found Waxey and another elevator car already waiting for me. Max’s bodyguard was a little friendlier this time, but not so as you’d have noticed unless you were a lip-reader. For a big man he had a very quiet voice, and it was only later on I discovered that Waxey’s vocal cords had been damaged as a result of being shot in the throat. “Sorry,” he whispered. “But I gotta frisk you before you go upstairs.”
I put down the case and lifted my arms and looked past him while he went about his job. In the distance, the Barrio Chino was lit up like a Christmas tree.
“What’s in the case?” he asked.
“Ben Siegel’s backgammon set. It was a gift from Max. Only he didn’t tell me the correct combination for the locks. He said it was six-six-six. Which would seem appropriate if it was. Only it’s not.”
Waxey nodded and stood back. He was wearing loose black slacks and a gray guayabera that matched the color of his hair. When his jacket was off I could see his bare arms, and I got a better idea of his probable strength. His forearms were like bowling pins. The loose shirt was probably supposed to conceal the holstered weapon on the back of his hip, except that the hem had got caught under the polished-wood grip of a.38 Colt Detective Special-probably the finest snubbie ever made.
He reached down into his trouser pocket and took out a key on a silver chain, stuck it into the elevator panel, and turned it. He didn’t have to press any other button. The car went straight up. The doors opened again. “They’re on the terrace,” Waxey said.
I smelled them first. The powerful scent of a small forest fire: several large Havana cigars. Then I heard them: loud American voices, raucous male laughter, relentless profanity, the odd Yiddish and Italian word or phrase, more raucous laughter. I came past the detritus of a card game in the living room: a big table covered with chips and empty glasses. Now that the card game was over, they were all out on the little pool terrace: men in sharp suits with blunt faces, but maybe not so tough anymore. Some of them wore glasses and sports coats with neat handkerchiefs in their breast pockets. All of them looked exactly like what they claimed to be: businessmen, hoteliers, club owners, restaurateurs. And perhaps only a policeman or FBI agent would have recognized these men for what they really were-all of them with reputations earned on the streets of Chicago, Boston, Miami, and New York during the Volstead years. The minute I walked onto that terrace, I knew I was among the big beasts of Havana’s underworld-the high-profile Mafia bosses Senator Estes Kefauver was so keen to talk to. I’d watched some of the Senate committee testimonies on the newsreels. The hearings had made household names out of a lot of the bosses, including the little man with the big nose and neat, dark hair. He was wearing a brown sports coat with an open shirt. It was Meyer Lansky.
“Oh, here he is,” said Reles. His voice was a little louder than usual, but he was a model of sartorial rectitude. He wore gray flannel trousers, neat brown shoes with Oxford toe caps, a blue button-down shirt, a blue silk cravat, and a cashmere navy blue blazer. He looked like the membership secretary of the Havana Yacht Club.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “this is the guy I was telling you about. This is Bernie Gunther. This is the guy who’s going to be my new general manager.”
Like always, I flinched at the sound of my own name, put down the attache case, and took Max’s hand.
“Relax, will you?” he said. “There’s not one of us here that doesn’t have as much fucking history as you do, Bernie. Maybe more. Nearly all of the guys here have seen the inside of a prison cell at one time or another. Including myself.” He chuckled the old Max Reles chuckle. “You didn’t know that, did you?”
I shook my head.
“Like I say, we all of us got plenty of fucking history. Bernie, say hello to Meyer Lansky; his brother, Jake; Moe Dalitz; Norman Rothman; Morris Kleinman; and Eddie Levinson. I bet you didn’t know there were so many heebs on this island. Naturally, we’re the brains of the outfit. For everything else we got wops and micks. So say hello to Santo Trafficante, Vincent Alo, Tom McGinty, Sam Tucker, the Cellini brothers, and Wilbur Clark.”
“Hello,” I said.
Havana’s underworld stared back at me with modest enthusiasm.
“It must have been some card game,” I observed.
“Waxey, get Bernie a drink. What are you drinking, Bernie?”
“A beer’s fine.”
“Some of us play gin, some of us play poker,” said Max. “Some of us don’t know a game of cards from a sorting office in a post office, but the important thing is that we meet and we talk, in the spirit of healthy competition. Like Jesus and the fucking disciples. You ever read Adam Smith’s
“Can’t say that I have.”
“Smith talks about something he calls the ‘invisible hand.’ He said that in a free market, an individual pursuing his self-interest tends to promote the good of his community as a whole through a principle that he called ‘the invisible hand.’ ” He shrugged. “What we do. That’s all it is. An invisible hand. And we’ve been doing it for years.”
“That we have,” growled Lansky.
Reles chuckled. “Meyer thinks he’s the clever one, on account of how he reads a lot.” He wagged his finger at Lansky. “But I read, too, Meyer. I read, too.”
“Reading. It’s a Jew thing,” said Alo. He was a tall man with a long, sharp nose that might have made me think he was one of the Jews; but he was one of the Italians.
“And they wonder why the Jews do well,” said a man with an easy grin and a nose like a speed bag. This man was Moe Dalitz.
“I read two books in my life,” said one of the micks. “Hoyle on gambling, and the Cadillac handbook.”
Waxey returned with my beer. It was cold and dark, like his eyes.
“F.B.’s thinking of resurrecting his old rural education program,” said Lansky. “Sounds like some of you guys should try to get in on it. You could use a bit of education.”
“Is that the same one he ran in thirty-six?” said his brother, Jake.
Meyer Lansky nodded. “Only he’s worried that some of the kids he’s teaching to read, that they’re going to be tomorrow’s rebels. Like this last lot that’s now doing a stretch on the Isle of Pines.”
“He’s right to worry,” said Alo. “They get weaned on communism, some of these bastards.”
“Then again,” said Lansky, “when the economy of this country takes off, really takes off, then we’re going to need educated people to work in our hotels. To be tomorrow’s croupiers. You gotta be smart to be a croupier. Math smart. You read much, Bernie?”
“More and more,” I admitted. “And for me it’s like the French Foreign Legion. I do it to forget. Myself, I think.”
Max Reles was looking at his wristwatch. “Talking of books, it’s time I threw you guys out. I got my call with F.B. To go through the books.”
“How does that work?” asked someone. “On the telephone.”
Reles shrugged. “I read out the numbers, and he writes them down. We both know that one day he’s gonna check, so why the fuck would I cheat him?”
Lansky nodded. “That is definitely
We moved off the terrace toward the elevators. As I stepped into one of the cars, Reles took my arm and said, “Start work tomorrow. Come around ten and I’ll show you around.”
“All right.”
I went back down to the casino. I felt a certain amount of awe at the company I was keeping these days. I felt like I’d just been up to the Berghof for an audience with Hitler and the other Nazi leaders.
