“I can live with luck,” Gronevelt said. “But skill and cunning I can’t abide.”
Gronevelt was working on the cheap fake silk lining of the coat, scissoring it into tiny strips, but it was just to keep his hands busy while he was talking. He spoke directly to me.
“And you, Merlyn, you’re one of the worst fucking gamblers I have ever seen and I’ve been in the business over fifty years. You’re worse than a degenerate gambler. You’re a romantic gambler. You think you’re one of those characters like that Ferber novel where she has the asshole gambler for a hero. You gamble like an idiot. Sometimes you go with percentages, sometimes you go with hunches, another time you go with a system, then you switch to stabbing in thin air, or you’re zigging and zagging. Listen, you’re one of the few people in this world I would tell to give up gambling completely.” And then he put down his scissors and gave me a genuinely friendly smile. “But what the hell, it suits you.”
I was really a little hurt, and he had seen it. I thought myself a clever gambler, mixing logic with magic. Gronevelt seemed to read my mind. “Merlyn,” he said. “I like that name. It sort of suits you. From what I’ve read he wasn’t that great a magician, and neither are you.” He picked up the scissors and started cutting again. “But then why the hell did you pick that fight with that punk hit man?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t really pick a fight. But you know how it is. I was feeling lousy about leaving my family. Everything was going bad. I was just looking to take it out on somebody.”
“You picked the wrong guy,” Gronevelt said. “Cully saved your ass. With a little help from me.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“I offered him the job, but he doesn’t want it,” Cully said.
That surprised me. Obviously Cully had talked it over with
Gronevelt before he offered me the job. And then suddenly I realized that Cully would have to tell Gronevelt all about me. And how the hotel would cover me if the Feds came looking.
“After I read your book, I thought we could use you as a PR man,” Gronevelt said. “A good writer like you.”
I didn’t want to tell him that they were two absolutely different things. “My wife wouldn’t leave New York, she has her family there,” I said. “But thanks for the offer.”
Gronevelt nodded. “The way you gamble maybe it’s better not living in Vegas. The next time you come into town let’s all have dinner together.” We took that for our dismissal and left.
Cully had a dinner date with some high rollers from California that he couldn’t break, so I was on my own. He had left a reservation for me for the hotel dinner show that night, so I went. It was the usual Vegas stuff with almost nude chorus girls, dancing acts, a star singer and some vaudeville turns. The only thing that impressed me was a trained bear act.
A beautiful woman came out on the stage with six huge bears, and she made them do all kinds of tricks. After each bear completed a trick, the woman kissed the bear on the mouth and the bear would immediately shamble back into his position at the end of the line. The bears were so furry they looked as completely asexual as toys. But why had the woman made the kiss one of her command signals? Bears didn’t kiss as far as I knew. And then I realized the kiss was for the audience, some sort of thrust at the onlookers. And then I wondered if the woman had done so consciously, as a mark of her contempt, a subtle insult. I had always hated the circus and refused to take my kids to see it. And so I never really liked animal acts. But this one fascinated me enough to watch it through to the end. Maybe one of the bears would pull a surprise.
After the show was over, I wandered out into the casino to convert the rest of my money into chips and then convert the chips into cash receipts. It was nearly eleven at night.
I started with craps, and instead of betting small to hold down my losses, I was, all of a sudden, making fifty- and hundred-dollar bets. I was losing about three thousand dollars when Cully came up behind me, leading his high rollers to the table and establishing their credit. He took one sardonic look at my green twenty-five-dollar chips and my bets on the green felt in front of me. “You don’t have to gamble anymore, huh?” he said to me. I felt like a jerk, and when the dice sevened out, I took the remainder of my chips to the cashier’s cage and turned them into receipts. When I turned around, Cully was waiting for me.
Let’s go have a drink,” he said. And he led me to the cocktail lounge where we used to booze with Jordan and Diane. From that darkened area we looked out at the brightly lit casino. When we sat down, the cocktail waitress spotted Cully and came over immediately.
“So you fell off the wagon,” Cully said. “That fucking gambling. It’s like malaria, always coming back.”
“You too?” I asked.
“A couple of times,” Cully said. “I never got hurt, though. How much did you lose?”
“Just about two grand,” I said. “I’ve turned most of the money into receipts. I’ll finish it up tonight”
“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” Cully said. “The lawyer friend of mine is available, so early in the morning you can make your will and have it mailed to your brother. Then I’m sticking to you like glue until I put you on the afternoon plane to New York.”
“We tried something like that once with Jordan,” I said jokingly.
Cully sighed. “Why did he do it? His luck was changing. He was going to be a winner. All he had to do was hang in there.”
“Maybe he didn’t want to push his luck,” I said. I had to be kidding, Cully said.
The next morning Cully rang my room, and we had breakfast together. After that he drove me down the Vegas Strip to a lawyer’s office, where I had my will drawn up and witnessed. I repeated a couple of times that my brother, Artie, was to be mailed a copy of the will, and Cully finally cut in impatiently. “That’s all been explained,” he said. “Don’t worry. Everything will be done exactly right.”
When we left the office, Cully drove me around the city and showed me the new construction going on. The tower building of the Sands Hotel gleamed newly golden in the desert air. ‘This town is going to grow and grow,” Cully said.
The endless desert stretched out to the far outlying mountains. “It has plenty of room,” I said.
Cully laughed, “You’ll see,” he said. “Gambling is the coming thing.”
We had a light lunch, and then for old times’ sake we went down to the Sands and went partners for two hundred bucks each and hit the crap tables. Cully said self-mockingly, “I have ten passes in my right arm,” so I let him shoot the dice. He was as unlucky as ever, but I noticed he didn’t have his heart in it. He didn’t enjoy gambling. He sure had changed. We drove to the airport, and he waited with me at the gate until boarding time.
“Call me if you run into any trouble,” Cully said. “And the next time you come here we’ll have dinner with Gronevelt. He likes you and he’s a good guy to have on your side.”
I nodded. Then I took the cash receipts out of my pocket. The receipts good for thirty thousand dollars in the casino cage of the Xanadu Hotel. My expenses for the trip, gambling and air fare came to about the other three thousand. I handed the receipts to Cully.
“Keep these for me,” I said. I had changed my mind.
Cully counted the white slips. There were twelve of them. He checked the amounts. “You trust me with your bankroll?” he asked. “Thirty grand is a big number.”
“I have to trust somebody,” I said. “And besides, I saw you turn down twenty grand from Jordan when you were flat on your ass.”
“Only because you shamed me into it,” Cully said. “OK, I’ll take care of this. And if things get real hot, I can loan you cash out of my roll and use these as security. Just so you don’t leave any traces.”
“Thanks, Cully,” I said. “Thanks for the hotel room and the meals and everything. And thanks for helping me out.” I felt a real rush of affection for him. He was one of my few friends. And yet I was surprised when he hugged me goodbye before I got on the plane.
And on the jet rushing through the light into the darker time zones of the East, fleeing so quickly from the descending sun in the West, as we plunged into darkness, I thought about the affection Cully had for me. We knew each other so little. And I thought it was because we both had so few people we could really get to know. Like Jordan. And we had shared Jordan ’s defeat and surrender into death.
I called from the airport to tell Value I had come home a day early. There was no answer. I didn’t want to call her at her father’s house, so I just caught a taxi to the Bronx. Vallie still wasn’t home. I felt the familiar irritated jealousy that she had taken the kids to visit their grandparents in Long Island. But then I thought, what the hell.
