The Magnificent Esme Wells

by Adrienne Sharp

  9

  Las Vegas

  1946

  We were at the cusp of a big change out here in the desert, with ground being broken for a whole highway of new hotels. The Flamingo was the first of them, but we wouldn’t be alone for long. My father and I had the only two finished hotel rooms in the main building, the one original building and the first one built, and when Mr. Siegel was here, he stayed there, too, on the top floor, in a private suite with steel-enforced walls and a bulletproof office, a suite with its own elevator and secret exit, the existence of which I never even questioned, other than to think he should have worried more about the front way in because the suite door hadn’t yet been installed: Benny kept changing his mind about the height of the ceiling. He didn’t know anything about construction. He just had visions of how he wanted it all to look. Expensive. Modern. Hollywood.

  First, Benny had wanted one building. Then, we were going to have three. Then one, again, a horseshoe design that melded all three pieces together in a way that reminded me of Hollywood Park. And as Mr. Siegel wasn’t there all the time, it was my father’s job to watch over things in his absence, to consult with the builder, Mr. Webb, about the incessant changes, to keep track of the January plans, the February plans, the March plans, scrolls of blueprints laid out in the hotel lobby that served for now as the construction office. I still couldn’t really read, my peripatetic life in and out of schools had left me almost illiterate, but I was always good with numbers, and so I studied the plans and the accounts, all of which were laid out there for anyone to see, which is how I knew Benny was paying out more than he was taking in.

  Copper piping, copper wire, concrete, wood, steel, fixtures, everything he needed for his hotel was at premium postwar prices, and he needed more loans, more money, from the Teamsters, from Mr. Lansky and Mr. Costello and Mr. Luciano and Mr. Fischetti and Mr. Trafficante, from friends, from Beverly Hills businessmen, really from everybody he knew, but still we were way behind schedule, the construction money seeming to vaporize as soon as it arrived. Materials came by day and were unloaded from the trucks. Yet, at night, I saw my father open the gates, supervise that same material as it was loaded back onto new trucks, which drove it all away. In the morning, those trucks returned with the same goods, but Ben said they were new and then asked Mr. Lansky for more money. The syndicate liked clever men, but the problem was that clever men were clever enough to look out for themselves first, always. And if they were too clever, the syndicate lost patience, and that was the end of them.

  Benny came by every week or so that summer, and I always looked forward to seeing his black roadster, waxed and polished like the dark side of the moon beneath its layer of Vegas grit, pull up by the front entrance. I always hoped he would come alone. He never brought his wife out here, but he sometimes brought his daughters or his girlfriend, Virginia Hill. Virginia was just over thirty then, which seemed to me at the time to be quite an advanced age. And also, it seemed to me, she was not exactly pretty, with her wide, block-like face and her painted-on eyebrows. She was a hooker, my father told me, making the kind of face my grandfather made when discussing something he found distasteful, got her start in 1933, the year I was born, at the Chicago World’s Fair, and had been passed from gangster to gangster ever since, Jewish and Italian alike. But Ben, who liked hookers, and who liked her long legs and her red hair, didn’t seem to mind any of that. All summer, every time she came with him to the Flamingo, there would be some kind of blowup, often followed by a trip to the doctor. Some of their scenes resulted in her packing her bags and fleeing to Los Angeles. Other of their scenes resulted in her taking an overdose of sleeping pills, an action she visited often in either fury or frustration or regret, I’m not sure which.

  But when Virginia wasn’t in that roadster, there was always something in there for me, tucked next to the packages of heroin Benny sometimes brought over the border from Mexico, which he told me was dusting powder and, no, I couldn’t have some, the bit of overflow his mules didn’t have room for—a long black dress, a pair of shoes with tiny gold bows, a silver compact with an E engraved on its lid. Having two teenage daughters, he knew how to buy for one, and even if I couldn’t wear these things around the burning hot, gritty acres of the Flamingo, Mr. Siegel assured me I soon would in the glamorous environs of the Flamingo Club, which currently existed only in his imagination.

  So that afternoon, I got out of the pool with my towel around me, the pool once an old gravel pit before any motel, even that old crumbling one we’d knocked down, ever stood here, the pool Mr. Siegel had ordered filled just for me. One side of it lay razor-blade straight and the other was all angular sawtooth edges, no dull rectangle for the Flamingo, but something clean, new age, sun-bleached, ringed with date palms and cypress trees and grass struggling to grow. I ran eagerly toward the lobby in the blinding heat. The desert sun had turned my hair so blond it was almost white and the sun had darkened my skin so much I looked, my father joked, like a blond Negro or a photographic negative. He told me if I got any darker, he’d have to drop me off in West Las Vegas, on the other side of the highway overpass we called the Cement Curtain, which separated us from the Negro part of town.

  A chilling joke, though he didn’t know it. Just a half block from my school—I’d spent a few spring months at the Fifth Street school, where the Negro, white, and Indian kids, the natives of old Vegas, fought constantly, and where I hardly learned anything at all—a Negro man had leaned out of his car and asked me to show him my pussy. On the playground, a Negro boy had asked me to suck his balls, two for a quarter. I knew I wouldn’t last long on the other side of the Cement Curtain. But I didn’t say anything about any of this to my father or Benny. I just kept quiet and waited for summer.

  My wet footprints dried instantly now on the concrete in the July heat, and I was happy, wondering what Benny might have brought for me this time. I believe I was hoping it would be a tube of lipstick. Pretty in Pink. Before I even got to the glass lobby doors, I could hear him, though I couldn’t see him. I could see only my father, the back of him, shirt back wet, big white fedora with the black band that he wore always dusted with sand. He must have just come in from the construction site when he heard Mr. Siegel had arrived. He might be sweaty, but my bathing suit was already dry, my brittle hair stinking of salt and chlorine, the goose bumps on my long skinny legs having long since gone flat from the heat.

  Their voices were loud, so I stayed quiet.

  “I’ll get the cash from Chicago.” That was Ben.

  I watched my father take off his sunglasses and wipe at them with a handkerchief from his pants pocket. “Ben, you’re already almost $500,000 behind. The contractor can’t pay his suppliers or his men.”

  “I’ll get the goddamn cash, Ike.” Mr. Siegel thumped his fist on the lobby counter and the scrolls of his many blueprints rattled and rolled. Half the problem right there.

  My father said, “We have to stop work. We’re going to have to let everybody go.”

  “I’ll go to Chicago, I’ll go to Phoenix, I’ll go to Utah, to the Mormons, those goyishe shitheels.”

  “You’re going to need millions to finish this. You can’t get that much money that fast.”

  It was odd for me to hear my father being practical, the voice of reason.

  Mr. Siegel just shook his head. “You let me worry about that. The casino’s got to open by the end of the year.”

  I knew from my father that Benny’s investors were restless, harping at him, Just open the joint already, put in the carpet and open, fed up with delay after delay, like the one earlier in the summer, when the federal government had shut down construction for a month over rumors about what had been done to poor Billy Wilkerson, once Ben’s partner out here, now hiding from Ben in Paris.

  “Can’t be done, Ben,” my father said, stalwart. “Impossible.”

  By this point I’d edged up enough to the hot glass, careful not to touch it, so I could see them both as if through a
lens. Mr. Siegel was pacing the lobby floor, agitated, his face glowing, the anger within like a pure white light that seemed to suffuse his skin. A camera bulb going off inside him. He wasn’t used to being told he couldn’t get what he wanted. Didn’t like it.

  “Don’t give me all this cocksucking shit, Ike. I’ll get you what you need.” He pivoted the glare of himself toward my father. And then Benny paused, a man at a tripwire he both set and set off. “Just don’t tell me it’s impossible. Because nothing in this life is impossible.”

  And then, while I watched, nose almost to the glass, Ben began beating the counter with his fists, bam bam bam, kicking at the glass cabinetry until it cracked like parched earth, pitching one of the heavy freestanding ashtrays into the front door where I stood, and right before my eyes the plate glass sent lightning-bolt zigzags in all directions from the epicenter of impact. I jumped back. All these things and everything else Ben touched and ruined were now things that would need to be replaced and Benny would have to beg for the money to do it on top of all the other money he would have to beg for, which he must have been aware of in some pinpoint of logic in his brain and maybe that logic simply fueled his frustration. Whatever could be lifted, flung, kicked, or beaten, was. It was the first time I had seen one of Benny’s uncontrollable rages, though my father had described them. And I saw it all through that broken glass.

  There had always been stories about Benny and the havoc he unleashed in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, about men he’d shot in the street, like James Regan or Big Greenie Greenberg, his head resting by a curb, or men he’d thrown from the top of a hotel like Abe Reles, limbs akimbo. And now there were new stories about Mr. Siegel, Las Vegas stories, stories of his pistol-whipping a clerk at the El Rancho who’d referred to the Flamingo as a gyp joint, stories of Ben’s threatening to kill the owner and burn the place down. Our nearest neighbor. As Ben’s face flicked from its lightbulb-white incandescence to a meaty, bloody red, my father began edging away, backing toward the doors. Because the next thing Ben was going to strike was my father. By this time in my life with my parents, I had seen a lot, of course, but I had never before seen my father physically assaulted. Ben advanced and advanced and then put his fist to my father’s face and sent my father smashing with some finality into the already cracked glass door.

  And then it was over. I didn’t even have time to cry out. My father made no move to strike back. He made no move at all.

  Breathing hard, Mr. Siegel smoothed his shirtfront, smoothed his hair, reassembled, with visible difficulty, the features of his face into what he believed to be a version of normality, of reasonability, of accommodation. It seemed only then that Ben as I knew him was returned to himself, the rage retracted and capped. It was only then that he focused again on my father and whatever expression his face held. Shock? Fury? Fear? Resignation? I couldn’t tell you. I couldn’t see.

  “Give the men a week’s break, Ike,” Ben said. “I’ll have the money then.”

  My father’s back was pressed against the glass front door like a fly to a spiderweb, and by now I was crouched down small as a stink bug behind him. I’m sure at this moment my father quite seriously considered driving away from here, returning us both to Los Angeles, leaving behind the pilings, the wire, the sheet metal, the concrete blocks, letting it all disintegrate in the heat the way the original hotel on these thirty-three acres had disintegrated, crumbling, tiny and abandoned, a neglected home for lizards and insects and a magnet for tumbleweed. Hidden behind the figure of my father, I tightened my towel around my shoulders, though I was not cold. Far from it.

  My father, dismissed, moved to open the door inward, and I was suddenly exposed, bare-footed, straggly-haired, hunched like a beggar child, hotel towel twisted around my torso. And my face was exposed, too, revealing my terror, a tiny fraction of, an echo of, a child-sized version of my father’s.

  My father looked down at me, horrified, one side of his face already swelling. Ben’s smile at suddenly seeing me, a genuine smile, slid into an O of regret as he realized by my face and posture just how long I had been there, just exactly what I had seen.

  My father took a step toward me. “Esme—” he began.

  I turned and ran from him, a flesh-colored rabbit from the brush, towel flying off my shoulders and blowing white and plush into his face for all I knew, and I didn’t stop, even though my father had by now come out the lobby door to call after me, shouting my name over and over, “Esme. Esme. Esme. Come back!”

  When I reached the pool, my unconscious destination, I leapt in, dove for the bottom, and stayed down there, arms around my knees, feet on the concrete, rocking the ball of myself back and forth and squinting up at the surface, hiding in plain sight and holding my breath and eventually my father’s distorted face appeared over the water’s edge. He was waiting for me. He knew I couldn’t stay down here forever. And, eventually, of course, I had to surface, though I wouldn’t look at him when I did. Instead, I pressed my face to one of the pool lights, treading water and staring into the domed glass that concealed the big lightbulb behind it.

  Above me, my father spoke.

  “Esme, it doesn’t matter. We’re here for the big prize, baby girl, and nothing else matters. We’re just going to keep our eyes on the prize.”

  So.

  So, while we might have been blindsided that day at Hollywood Park, my father and I couldn’t say we didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into here in Vegas. We had plenty of warning.

  10

  Benny did manage as instructed by Meyer Lansky to open for business in 1946, the day after Christmas, even if everything wasn’t exactly finished and even if it was practically the last day of the year.

  Unfortunately, it was raining that night. The days right after Christmas are always empty days in Vegas—even now, everybody comes in for New Year’s—but it was emptier still in the casino that first night as we waited for everyone, anyone, to arrive, the cigarette girls and coat-check girls and all those young, handsome Greek men Mr. Siegel had imported from Havana as his croupiers standing aimlessly by their tables, his men in the counting room with nothing to count, the sun gone, the early evening sky slate-gray with low storm clouds we could see through the windows traveling fast across the flat valley from the hills, heading for us, ready to punish our impudence for even thinking the world would come crawling to us way out here. And at first I thought, Good. Serves Ben right.

  The airplanes Ben had leased back in Los Angeles to transport his most important Hollywood guests had been grounded because of the weather, and the movie stars who did come arrived in somewhat less glamorous conveyances, their own dirt-covered cars. Despite the bad weather, a few of Ben’s Hollywood friends made it here. And Benny, grateful, stood by the door with Virginia on his arm to greet every arrival. It was a little discomfiting for me to see Virginia wore an evening dress not entirely unlike one of the black dresses Ben had given me. He himself wore swallowtails, white ones, the two of them straight up dandies from nowhere. Which I guess I could say about everyone I know, including me.

  I walked the casino floor that night as an underage cigarette girl, wearing too much lipstick, too much eyeliner, legs skinny as an actual flamingo’s, those legs finished off with a pair of red high-heeled shoes just a bit too big for me. I’d begged for the job over my father’s objections, and Benny interjected, “She’ll just be selling cigarettes, Ike. Let her do it. Opening night. Just this once,” still trying to curry favor with me since his argument with my father. The fact that I was underage didn’t matter much in Las Vegas, where I’d already seen everything was upside down, everything illegal elsewhere legal here, everything shameful elsewhere perfectly acceptable here. Bribes. Battery. Drugs. Adultery. Divorce. All acceptable here.

  Laudable, even.

  And tonight the finished Flamingo Club was the most laudable thing of all, Benny Siegel’s big, beautiful dream come to life, no part of it more beautiful and dreamy than its casino, the ceiling a gre
en-blue pocked lunar landscape, the columns throughout pasted up with desert flagstone, the bar glowing like a universe of stars with its bottles and mirrors, the seat covers a shocking flamingo pink, the spiral staircase made of marble and polished wood, the wall of windows one big square of the shimmering desert.

  Because we were the Flamingo, those pink birds stood on one impossibly thin leg on the serving trays, the napkins, the bottoms of the martini glasses, winking at you when you took your last swallow, though the two real flamingos Mr. Siegel imported as test subjects had died in September, in the desert heat. He’d cried over them, had to cancel his order for a hundred more, which he had imagined roaming the grounds like a flock of exotic indigenous animals but which didn’t belong here any more than they belonged in the Hollywood Park infield. But, ultimately, the birds didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was the tables, upholstered in traditional green baize, the thick material embossed with gaming grids, and the slot machines, waist-high, silver, like gasoline pumps filled with coins instead of fuel, every deck of cards marked, every roulette table wired, every pair of dice weighted.

  In my short skirt, tray of goods strapped to me like a baby, and, as Mr. Siegel requested of all the girls, wearing red lipstick and red painted nails like my mother’s, hair coiffed like a movie star’s, I circulated those slots and tables with my cigarettes. I felt delightfully glamorous and adult, listening to Jimmy Durante singing “Inka Dinka Doo” and joking into the microphone in the half-empty nightclub and Xavier Cugat leading his band to a brassy racket as if every seat in there was filled. And in the half-empty casino, I pretended the same, pausing by each guest to ask, “Cigar? Cigarette?”