attracts too much attention. We need to be a little less conspicuous for a few minutes.”
Raft shrugged. “I’ll try the chemin-de-fer room.”
“Good idea,” I said.
Then he moved off, and I took Siegel by the arm. “What do you have in mind,” I asked him, “where these gambling losses are concerned?”
“In mind?”
“What do you intend to do about it?”
He shrugged facially. “Well, we’re switching dice more frequent. Cards, too. Tonight I’m gonna move dealers from table to table…”
“Some of your dealers need to be moved farther away than that.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you patted them down on their way out the door, you’d find subs full of chips.” A “sub” was a hidden pocket.
His eyes tensed. “You’ve seen this?”
“Have you got your temper in check?”
“Nate, I’m cool as a cucumber.”
“Good, because the answer is yes. I’ve seen half a dozen dealers sweeping chips into subs.”
“Christ, I interviewed them all myself!”
“Never mind that. Just take a look there.”
I nudged his attention to the roulette table where I’d been leading him; we were now about five feet away from it, behind and to one side of the croupier, a thin, hawk-faced man who was pushing chips across the table to a pockmarked heavy-set gentleman in a brown suit. The problem was, the pockmarked heavy-set gentleman who was having chips pushed his way was not winning.
“That guy isn’t hitting any winning numbers,” Siegel whispered harshly to me, after a while, his eyes large.
“Right,” I said. I nodded toward the croupier. “You get the pit boss to take him off the table. I’ll handle the phony player.”
Siegel, eyes narrowing, nodded. He turned away.
I walked up to the pockmarked player, thinking Siegel was off getting the pit boss.
But the Bug had changed his mind, because he was standing right behind the hawk-faced croupier.
“I oughta kill you, you son of a bitch!” he said, and punted the croupier’s ass.
It lifted the man off the floor and sent him skidding across the table, chips scattering. When he came to a stop, his hawkish nose pointed to the double-00 on the numbered felt.
“You lose,” Siegel said, and reached over and picked him up like baggage and hurled him into the aisle.
Without looking back, the ex-croupier picked himself up and ran. The astonished onlookers-and the very pleased Ben Siegel-watched the guy hurtle up into the lobby and out the front doors.
Siegel gestured big with his hands, like a ringmaster. “No cover charge folks!” he said, letting loose his dazzler of a smile.
And people, smiling too, if not dazzlingly, shaking their heads, chattering amongst themselves, turned back to their gambling.
Siegel came over to me and slipped his arm around my shoulder. “Let’s go have a talk.”
We walked across the terraced green grounds that not so long ago had been barren, and he walked me across the painted, carpeted lobby of the unfinished hotel and took me up the elevator to the penthouse suite.
We sat on the chintz-covered sofa. He was drinking tonic water; I had some rum on ice.
He was shaking his head. “I hired those guys myself, Nate.”
He meant the dealers and other casino floor people.
“Most of them local?” I asked.
“Right. I screened them all personally.”
“After Sedway thinned the pack, you did.”
“Right.” His eyes slitted. “What are you saying?”
“I think there’s widespread cheating going on out there. And I don’t think it’s random.”
“You mean, it’s organized?”
“Yeah. I think so.”
“Moey?”
“Who else?”
“What about Quinn?”
I shook my head no. “He’s not smart enough, and besides, I put him on notice. He’s too scared of you to pull anything. He’s even scared of me. Moey? Moey resents you, and that breeds a kind of bravery.”
“Moey resents me?”
“I think it goes back to that scuffle you had over politics.”
He sat and thought about that.
I went on: “I think he’s angling to take over. My guess is he’s trying to make you look bad to your friends back east.”
Siegel’s face tensed with thought. “And if he convinces them I’m a bad manager, they’ll ask him to step in?”
“Yeah. He seems to be in pretty thick with Lansky.”
Siegel nodded. “He is at that. You know what Meyer said to me last night? He said, ‘Ben, you’re a smart dreamer, but a lousy engineer.’ Can you imagine?”
“Ben, none of this is my business…I’ve told you what I know, and what I think.” I was getting uncomfortable being privy to Siegel’s inside thoughts.
But he pressed on: “He just got back, Meyer did, from Havana. They just had a big meeting down there, with Charlie Lucky.”
Luciano. A big secret syndicate confab in Havana, and I knew about it. Great.
I rose. “Ben, you’re getting into areas…”
“Sit down, Nate. I trust you.”
“That isn’t the point…”
“Sit down, Nate.”
I sat.
“Meyer said the boys aren’t happy with me, the money I spent, here. They want me to bring in a top hotel man. They want to hire somebody from one of the downtown joints to run my casino.” He grinned but there was desperation in it. “You know what else?”
I said nothing.
“You’ll get a kick out of this, being Ragen’s pal and all. They want me to fold Trans-American up. Guzik has control of Continental now, through that McBride character. I told Meyer, sure-just buy me out.”
My mouth was dry. Nonetheless, I managed to ask, “How much did you ask?”
“Two million.”
Jesus.
“I’m pulling in twenty-five grand a week,” he said. “Why should I give it up, otherwise? They’ll make their money back in less than two years. It’s a fair offer.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I need the money,” he said. “This place eats money.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Moey, huh?” he said. Then, reflective, he went on: “Meyer said they heard bad things about me. Some of the boys said they heard I was skimming off the top of the construction money. Jeez!” He shook his head, gestured toward the two picture windows, out of which the terraced lawn and the scalloped-edged pool could be seen. “Those wop bastards, don’t they know I put every available penny into this place, including my own? And my heart and my fuckin’ soul? This is my…what, monument, the thing that’ll be around when I’m gone that’ll make people know I was here.”
“When you get the kinks ironed out,” I said, carefully, “it’ll be a great success, I think.”
