Within seconds a Chinese girl, another beauty, materialized with a bottle of Evian and a glass. Everything moved fast here.
'So, did you fly in, Peter?' Bernie asked.
'No, I drove, actually.'
'Smart, very smart. I'm telling you, to this day I won't fly anymore, at least commercial. Nine/eleven is still like yesterday to me. I could've been on one of those planes. My wife has a sister in Cape Cod. Roz! Can I get a cup of tea? So, you're a writer, Peter. How long you been writing scripts?'
'About five years, Mr. Schwartz.'
'Please! Bernie!'
'About five years, Bernie.'
'How many you got under your belt?'
'You mean just counting finished ones?'
'Yeah, yeah-finished projects,' Bernie said impatiently.
'The one I sent you is my first.'
Bernie closed his eyes tightly as if he were telepathically signaling his girl: Five minutes! Not ten! 'So, you any good?' he asked.
Peter wondered about that question. He'd sent the script two weeks ago. Hadn't Bernie read it?
To Peter, his script was like a sacred text, imbued with a quasimagical aura. He had poured his soul into its creation and he kept a copy prominently displayed on his writing desk, three-hole-punched with shiny brass brads, his first completed opus. Every morning on his way out the door, he touched the cover as one might finger an amulet or stroke the belly of a Buddha. It was his ticket to another life, and he was eager to get it punched. Moreover, the subject matter was important to him, a paean, as he saw it, to life and fate. As a student, he had been deeply moved by The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder's novel about five strangers who perished together on a collapsing bridge. Naturally, when he started his new job in Nevada he began to dwell on the notions of fate and predestination. He chose to craft a modern take on the classic tale where-in his version-the strangers' lives intersected at the instant of a terror attack. Bernie got his tea, 'Thank you, honey. Keep an eye out for my next meeting, okay?' Roz cleared Peter's line of sight and winked at her boss.
'Well, I think it's good,' Peter answered. 'Did you have a chance to look at it?'
Bernie hadn't read a script in decades. Other people read scripts for him and gave him notes-coverage.
'Yeah, yeah, I got my notes right here.' He opened the folder with Peter's coverage and scanned the two- pager.
Weak plot.
Terrible dialogue.
Poor character development, etc., etc.
Recommendation: pass.
Bernie stayed in character, smiled expansively and asked, 'So tell me, Peter, how is it you know Victor Kemp?'
A month earlier, Peter Benedict walked into the Constellation with a hopeful spring to his step. He preferred the Constellation over any casino on the Strip. It was the only one with a whiff of intellectual content, and furthermore, he had been an astronomy buff as a boy. The planetarium dome of the grand casino had a perpetually shifting laser display of the night sky over Las Vegas, exactly as it would appear if you stuck your head outside while someone turned off the hundreds of millions of lightbulbs and fifteen thousand miles of neon tubing that washed out the heavens. If you looked carefully, came often enough, and were a student of the subject, over time you could spot each of the eighty-eight constellations. The Big Dipper, Orion, Andromeda-a piece of cake. Peter had found the obscure ones too: Corvus, Delphinus, Eridanas, Sextens. In fact, he only lacked Coma Berineces, Berineces' Hair, a faint cluster in the northern sky sandwiched between Canes Venatici and Virgo. One day he would find that too.
He was playing blackjack at a high-stakes table, minimum bet per hand $100, maximum $5,000, his baldness covered by a Lakers baseball cap. He almost never exceeded the minimum but preferred these tables because the spectacle was more interesting. He was a good, disciplined player who usually ended an evening a few hundred up, but every so often he left a thousand richer or poorer, depending on the streakiness of the cards. The real thrills flowed his way vicariously, watching the big money players juggling three hands, splitting, doubling down, risking fifteen, twenty grand at a time. He would have loved pumping out that kind of adrenaline but knew it wasn't going to happen-not on his salary.
The dealer, a Hungarian named Sam, saw that he wasn't having a good night and tried to cheer him up. 'Don't worry, Peter, luck will change. You will see.'
He didn't think so. The shoe had a count of minus fifteen, highly favoring the house. Yet, that knowledge didn't change his play, even though any reasonable card-counter would have backed off for a while, come back in when the count climbed.
Peter was an odd duck of a counter. He counted because he could. His brain worked so fast and it was so effortless for him that having mastered the technique, he couldn't not count. High cards-ten to ace-were minus one; low cards-two through six-were plus one. A good counter only had to do two things well: keep a running tally of the total count as the six-deck shoe was dealt out, and accurately estimate the number of undealt cards in the shoe. When the count was low, you bet the minimum or walked away. When it was high, you bet aggressively. If you knew what you were doing, you could tilt the law of averages and consistently win; that is, until you were spotted by a dealer, the pit boss, or the eye-in-the-sky and booted and banned.
Peter occasionally made a count-based decision, but since he never varied his bet, he never capitalized on his inside knowledge. He liked the Constellation, enjoyed spending three-or four-hour stretches at the tables, and was scared of getting kicked out of his favorite haunt. He was part of the furniture.
That night there were only two other gamblers at his table: a bleary-eyed anesthesiologist from Denver in for a medical convention, and a nattily dressed silver-haired exec who was the only one putting serious money into play. Peter was $600 down, pacing himself and languidly drinking a comped beer.
With a few hands to go before the shoe got reshuffled, a young rangy kid, about twenty-two, in a T-shirt and cargo pants, planted himself into one of the two empty chairs and bought in for a grand. He had shoulder-length hair and a breezy western charm. 'Hey, how's everybody doing tonight? This a good table?'
'Not for me,' the executive said. 'You're welcome to change that.'
'I'd be pleased to be of any assistance I can,' the kid said. He caught the dealer's name tag. 'Deal me in, Sam.'
Betting the minimum, the kid turned a quiet table into a chatty one. He told them he was a student at UNLV majoring in government and, starting with the doctor, asked everyone where they were from and what they did for a living. After blathering about a problem he was having with his shoulder, he turned to Peter.
'I'm local,' Peter offered. 'I work with computers.'
Prompting, 'Cool. That's cool, dude.'
The executive told the table, 'I'm in the insurance business.'
'You sell insurance, dude?'
'Well, yes and no. I run an insurance company.'
'Awesome! High roller, baby!' the kid exclaimed.
Sam reshuffled the shoe and Peter instinctively started to count again. After five minutes they were well into the new shoe and the count was getting high. Peter puttered along, doing a little better, winning a few more hands than he lost. 'See, I told you,' Sam told him cheerfully after he won three hands in a row. The doctor was down two grand, but the insurance guy was out over thirty and he getting testy. The kid was betting erratically, without any apparent feel for the game, but he was only down a couple hundred. He ordered a rum and coke and fiddled with the swizzle stick until it accidentally dropped out of his mouth onto the floor. 'Oops,' he said quietly.
A blonde in her late twenties in tight jeans and a lemon-and-lime tube top approached the table and took the empty chair. She put her expensive Vuitton bag under her feet for safekeeping and plonked down $10,000 in four neat stacks. 'Hello,' she said shyly. She wasn't gorgeous but had a dynamite body and a soft, sexy voice and she stopped the conversation dead. 'I hope I'm not barging in,' she said, stacking her chips.
'Hell, no!' the kid said. 'We need a rose among us thorns.'
'I'm Melinda,' and they amiably dispensed their minimalist Vegas-style introductions. She was from Virginia.
