The work here was easy and repetitious and he didn’t mind it a bit. The vacuum canisters came down, with cash for chips, or chips for cash. George and the other three tellers made the transactions and kept track of the drawers of money and the drawers of chips. No cash was used up in the casino; even the slots took only chips.
At the beginning of each run, down here in the money room, they’d have a full supply of chips and just a little money. By the end of each run, they’d be down fifty or a hundred chips, because people forgot they had them in their pockets or wanted to keep them as souvenirs, and they would have a lotof money, particularly on Friday and Saturday nights. It was fascinating to see the efficiency with which it worked. And if George Twill had ever had a tendency toward being a betting man which he had not being around this efficient money machine would have cured it.
When the buzzer sounded, all of a sudden, at twenty minutes to one, it startled them all, and at first George had no idea what that sound was. Then he remembered; it was the bell for the door, the entry to and from the rest of the ship that was always kept locked and that none of them ever used. He’d only heard it once before, the third day of his employment, and that time it had been the ship’s nurse, a recent hire like George, bringing around medical history forms to be filled out. Apparently she hadn’t realized she wasn’t supposed to have done it that way, but mailed it to their homes. Pete said he’d heard that a couple of executives from the company had really reamed her out that time.
So whatever this was, it wouldn’t be the nurse again. Feeling his responsibility, and feeling also a sudden nervousness, wondering what this would turn out to be, George moved his foot closer to the panic button and watched Pete, frowning deeply, walk over to the door and speak into the intercom there.
George could hear that it was a woman’s voice that answered, but he couldn’t make out the words. Pete said something else, the woman said something else, Pete said something else, and then Pete unlocked the door.
Susan Cahill came in. George remembered her, she was one of the people who’d interviewed him when he applied for the job. She’d seemed remote and cold and a little scary, and he’d thought she didn’t like him and would recommend against his being hired, but apparently he’d been wrong. This was the first time he was seeing her since, and the familiar face eased his tension and brought his left foot back to its normal spot on the floor.
Three men followed Susan Cahill into the room. The first was short and stout and grumpy-looking, glaring around at everybody as though looking for the person who stole his wallet. The other two men were large one of them huge blank-faced, tough-looking, in dark suits and ties.
Susan Cahill said, “Thank you, Pete,” then addressed the rest of the room. She seemed to George to be annoyed or upset about something, and trying to hide it. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “this is Assemblyman Morton Kotkind, from the New York State legislature, and he’s here on an inspection tour of the ship. We operate, as you know, at the discretion of the legislature. Assemblyman Kotkind wanted to see where the money eventually comes. These are his
aides, they are state troopers, Trooper Helsing and Trooper Renfield.”
“That’s funny,” Pete said, grinning at the two troopers.
They turned and gave him blank looks that seemed to contain a hint of menace. Susan Cahill, sounding frazzled, said, “What’s funny?”
Pete seemed to belatedly realize this was a formal occasion, not a casual one. “Nothing,” he said, and avoided the troopers’ eyes as he turned to say to George and the others, “Folks, just keep doing what you’re doing. The congressman is here to see how the operation works.”
“Assemblyman,” the grumpy man said.
“Oh. Sorry.”
A vacuum canister slid into the basket in front of George. He picked it up, twisted it open, and five one- hundred-dollar bills dropped out, along with the upstairs cashier’s transit slip. Only an hour left on the cruise, and they were still buying chips.
Grey Hanzen, in the darkness at the water’s edge, stripped out of shoes and socks and pants. What he really wanted to do was get back in his car and drive down to the Kingston bridge and across the Hudson River and line out west and not stop until the water in front of him was the Pacific Ocean. If only.
How had he got himself into this mess? It had all been so simple and easy to begin with. Now there were all these different bunches of people, and him in the middle like a grain of wheat in a goddam mill. Any one of those people could crush him in a second, and most of them would have reason. How in the good Lord’s name was he going to steer himself through these rapids and come out safe and alive on the other side?
“I should just get the hell out of here,” he told himself out loud as he waded into the cold water. Gloomy, despairing, not even pretending to have hope, he waded out to his boat, threw his clothing into the bottom and climbed in.
Nothing else to do. You can’t escape your goddam fate, that’s all.
He was certainly taking his time about it, this assemblyman. George found it hard to concentrate on the task at hand, the numbers coming in, the numbers going out, with those three silent men moving around and around the room, slowly pacing, stopping from time to time to watch a particular operation. They didn’t ask any questions at all, which was a relief. But their presence was distracting and made the room feel uncomfortable.
Now the assemblyman was standing beside George, just to his right, watching George twist open a canister, make his entries into the computer terminal in front of him, slide the greenbacks into their bins in their drawer, put the transit slip in its bin, scoop out the right denomination of chips
He was on the floor. He had no idea what happened, he just had a moment of disorientation and panic. Why am I on the floor? Heart attack?
He was on his right side on the floor, and the left side of his head felt a sharp stinging pain. He blinked, thinking he’d fallen, blacked out, and the pain spread across his head from that electric grinding point just above his left ear, and when he looked up, the bigger of the two state troopers was standing over him, but not looking at him, looking across him at the other people in the room, pointing at them, saying
A gun. Pointing a gun. A pistol, a gun. Pointing a gun at the people in the room, saying, “Hands on your desks. Helen, Ruth. Come on, Sam, you don’t want to die.”
And another voice the other trooper, it must be was saying, “Pete, hands on your head. Susan, if you reach for that beeper, you’re dead.”
He hitme, George thought, and felt more astonishment at that than even at the fact of the gun and the things they were saying. We aren’t children in a schoolyard, we don’t hit each other, we don’t
