Then Jordan felt the familiar fear and terrible anxiety. If he fell asleep, he would die. He desperately wanted to sleep, yet he could not. He was too afraid, too frightened. But he could never understand why he was so terribly frightened.
He was tempted to try the sleeping pills again; he had done so earlier in the month and he had slept, but only with nightmares that he couldn’t bear. And left him depressed the next day. He preferred going without sleep. As now.
Jordan snapped on the light, got out of bed and dressed. He emptied out all his pockets and his wallet. He unzipped all the outside and inside pockets of his Vegas Winner sports jacket and shook it upside down so that all the black and green and red chips poured down on the silk coverlet. The hundred-dollar bills formed a huge pile, the black and reds forming curious spirals and checkered patterns. To pass the time he started to count the money and sort out the chips. It took him almost an hour.
He had over five thousand dollars in cash. He had eight thousand dollars in black hundred-dollar chips and another six thousand dollars in twenty-five-dollar greens, almost a thousand dollars in five-dollar reds. He was astonished. He took the big jagged-edged Hotel Xanadu check out of his wallet and studied the black and red script and the numbered amount in green. Fifty thousand dollars. He studied it carefully. There were three different signatures on the check. One of the signatures he particularly noticed because it was so large and the script so clear. Alfred Gronevelt.
And still he was puzzled. He remembered turning in some chips for cash several times during the day, but he hadn’t realized it was for more than five thousand. He shifted on the bed and all the carefully stacked piles collapsed into each other.
And now he was pleased. He was glad that he had enough money to stay in Vegas, that he would not have to go on to Los Angeles to start his new job. To start his new career, his new life, maybe a new family. He counted all the money again and added the check. He was worth seventy-one thousand dollars. He could gamble forever.
He switched off the bedside light so that he could lie there in the darkness with his money surrounding and touching his body. He tried to sleep to fight off the terror that always came over him in this darkened room. He could hear his heart beating faster and faster until finally he had to switch the light back on and get up from the bed.
High above the city in his penthouse suite, the hotel owner, Alfred Gronevelt, picked up the phone. He called the dice pit and asked how much Jordan was ahead. He was told that Jordan had killed the table profits for the night. Then he called back the operator and told her to page Xanadu Five. He held on. It would take a few minutes for the page to cover all the areas of the hotel and penetrate the minds of the players. Idly he gazed out the penthouse window and could see the great thick red and green python of neon that wound down the Las Vegas Strip. And farther off, the dark surrounding desert mountains enclosing, with him, thousands of gamblers trying to beat the house, sweating for those millions of dollars of greenbacks lying so mockingly in cashier cages. Over the years these gamblers had left their bones on that gaudy neon Strip.
Then he heard Cully’s voice come over the phone. Cully was Xanadu Five. (Gronevelt was Xanadu One.)
“Cully, your buddy hit us big,” Gronevelt said. “You sure he’s legit?”
Cully’s voice was low. “Yeah, Mr. Gronevelt. He’s a friend of mine and he’s square. He’ll drop it back before he leaves.”
Gronevelt said, “Anything he wants, lay it on him. Don’t let him go wandering down the Strip, giving our money to other joints. Lay a good broad on him.”
“Don’t worry,” Cully said. But Gronevelt caught something funny in his voice. For a moment he wondered about Cully. Cully was his spy, checking the operation of the casino and reporting the blackjack dealers who were going partners with him to beat the house. He had big plans for Cully when this operation was over. But now he wondered.
“What about that other guy in your gang, the Kid?” Gronevelt said. “What’s his angle, what the hell is he doing here three weeks?”
“He’s small change,” Cully said. “But a good kid. Don’t worry, Mr. Gronevelt. I know what I got riding with you.”
“OK,” Gronevelt said. When he hung up the phone, he was smiling. Cully didn’t know that pit bosses had complained about Cully’s being allowed in the casino because he was a countdown artist. That the hotel manager had complained about Merlyn and Jordan’s being allowed to keep desperately needed rooms for so long despite fresh loaded gamblers who came in every weekend. What no one knew was that Gronevelt was intrigued by the friendship of the three men; how it ended would be Cully’s true test.
In his room Jordan fought the impulse to go back down into the casino. He sat in one of the stuffed armchairs and lit a cigarette. Everything was OK now. He had friends, he had gotten lucky, he was free. He was just tired. He needed a long rest someplace far away.
He thought, Cully and Diane and Merlyn. Now his three best friends, he smiled at that.
They knew a lot of things about him. They had all spent hours in the casino lounge together, gossiping, resting between bouts of gambling. Jordan was never reticent. He would answer any question, though he never asked any. The Kid always asked questions so seriously, with such obvious interest, that Jordan never took offense.
Just for something to do he took his suitcase out of the closet to pack. The first thing that hit his eye was the small hand gun he had bought back home. He had never told his friends about the gun. His wife had left him and taken the children. She had left him for another man, and his first reaction had been to kill the other man. A reaction so alien to his true nature that even now he was constantly surprised. Of course, he had done nothing. The problem was to get rid of the gun. The best thing to do was to take it apart and throw it away piece by piece. He didn’t want to be responsible for anybody’s getting hurt by it. But right now he put it to one side and threw some clothes in the suitcase, then sat down again.
He wasn’t that sure he wanted to leave Vegas, the brightly lit cave of his casino. He was comfortable there. He was safe there. His not caring really about winning or losing was his magic cloak against fate. And most of all, his casino cave closed out all the other pains and traps of life itself.
He smiled again, thinking about Cully’s worrying about his winnings. What, after all, would he do with the money? The best thing would be to send it to his wife. She was a good woman, a good mother, a woman of quality and character. The fact that she had left him after twenty years to marry her lover did not, could not, change those facts. For at this moment, now that the months had passed, Jordan saw clearly the justice of her decision. She had a right to be happy. To live her life to its fullest potential. And she had been suffocating living with him. Not that he had been a bad husband. Just an inadequate one. He had been a good father. He had done his duty in every way. His only fault was that after twenty years he no longer made his wife happy.
His friends knew his story. The three weeks he had spent with them in Vegas seemed like years, and he could talk to them as he could never talk to anyone back home. It had come out over drinks in the lounge, after midnight meals in the coffee shop.
He knew they thought him cold-blooded. When Merlyn asked him what the visitation rights were with his children, Jordan shrugged. Merlyn asked if he would ever see his wife and kids again, and Jordan tried to answer honestly. “I don’t think so,” he said. “They’re OK.”
And Merlyn the Kid shot back at him, “And you, are you OK?”
And Jordan laughed without faking it, laughing at the way Merlyn the Kid zeroed in on him. Still laughing, he said, “Yeah, I’m OK.” And then just once he paid the Kid off for being so nosy. He looked him right in the eye and said coolly, “There’s nothing more to see. What you see is it. Nothing complicated. People are not that important to other people. When you get older, that’s the way it is.”
Merlyn looked back at him and lowered his eyes and then said very softly, “It’s just that you can’t sleep at night, right?”
Jordan said, “That’s right.”
Cully said impatiently, “Nobody sleeps in this town. Just get a couple of sleeping pills.”
“They give me nightmares,” Jordan said.
