The Raiders

by Гарольд Роббинс

  They talked for a while about nothing consequential. Then Batista explained why he had invited the Cords to come to Cuba.

  "It is too bad that neither you nor your father has ever come here before," he said. "This country is poor, but this island is beautiful. The climate is better than Miami's. The beaches are extraordinary. The fishing is superb. The flight is short and easy. The Cuban people are hospitable. No nation in the world offers more beautiful — or complaisant — women. I have determined to build our economy by making Cuba attractive to tourists. Anyone who invests merely two hundred thousand dollars in a hotel or motel can have a gaming license. Cord Hotels, Incorporated, wants to build a casino-hotel in Las Vegas. Why not build it here?"

  "The Saturday Evening Post article —" Bat started to say. He referred to an article published in that magazine in the spring, exposing dishonest practices in Cuban casinos.

  "But you do not know what we did," Batista interrupted. "I turned the army against the card sharps. Military intelligence was given the task of identifying them. Many were Americans. We arrested them and deported them. The Cubans were released from jail with a warning they would return to jail and stay there if they ever went near a casino again. Now we play by new rules. The razzle-dazzle games — eight-dice games and all that — are forbidden. We know we cannot attract the clientele we want if we allow cheating."

  "It's hard to control," said Bat.

  "I've hired an expert," said Batista. "You know him. Meyer Lansky."

  "I've never met him," said Bat. "My father knows him."

  "A really profitable gaming operation," said Batista, "can only operate if the people who play can have confidence in it. That's what Lansky knows: what the rules should be and how to enforce the rules. Strictly."

  "That's what we're doing in Las Vegas," said Bat. "Playing by the rules. Including the tax laws."

  "I want to make Cuba the Monte Carlo of the Caribbean," said Batista. "Most Americans don't want to take the time or spend the money to fly to the Mediterranean, but here — a short flight from their shores — we can provide everything Monte Carlo offers and more."

  2

  Bat accepted Great-Uncle Fulgencio's offer of "a really superior girl" for the night and woke exhausted and hungry when the telephone rang and the hotel operator said a Mr. Lansky would like to see him. Five minutes later Meyer Lansky was at the door. Wearing a white terry-cloth robe. Bat welcomed him in.

  The word about Lansky was that he was a small man. He was: a solemn little man, prematurely aged as Bat judged him. His temples were gray, his face was marked with liver spots, and his eyes looked weary. He had an extraordinarily big nose. He bore the marks, too, of a heavy smoker. He wore a dark-blue suit that looked a little too large for him, a white shirt, and a bow tie.

  "I wasn't expecting you," Bat said.

  "I can come back another time," said Lansky.

  "No. Sit down. You'll have to forgive me, though. There's a girl in the bathroom, and breakfast is on its way up. She'll be out of the suite in five minutes. I ordered for two. Can you use some breakfast?"

  "Just the coffee," said Lansky.

  "I'm told it's a Cord family trait to be hungry in the morning," said Bat. "I'm only gradually picking up on Cord family traits. Anyway, I'm glad you're here. We have some things to talk about."

  Lansky sat down in a leather-upholstered chair facing the couch where Bat would sit and take his breakfast off the coffee table. "The President," he said, "made you a pitch about building a casino-hotel here."

  "Right."

  "If he can make it work, what he's talking about, there's a ton of money to be scooped up in Cuba."

  "The country isn't stable," said Bat.

  "Once there's a big American investment, certain people will lend their talents to make it stable," said Lansky.

  Bat shook his head. "I wish you hadn't mentioned it."

  "I've got nothing to do with that," said Lansky. "You'll have nothing to do with it. It'll happen just the same, and the President will accept the help he gets."

  "We'll all be tarred with the same brush," said Bat.

  "Would you refuse to take profits from oil because John D. Rockefeller was a robber baron?" asked Lansky.

  "You're a consultant to President Batista. You're a consultant to us. Is there a conflict of interests?" Bat asked.

  Lansky shrugged. "Find one," he said. "My job for the President is to make gaming profitable in Cuba — by making it honest. That's what your father asked me to do for The Seven Voyages. That and to avoid a tax prosecution by stopping the skimming. There's money to be made in Cuba. I wish I had enough to build a casino of my own."

  "I'd be reluctant to make a long-term investment in Cuba," said Bat. "And I know my father would be reluctant. It would take ten years to recover the money it would take to build a hotel. Cuban governments don't last that long. You may be confident in the staying power of my great-uncle, but I am skeptical."

  Lansky pursed his fleshy lips and frowned. He lit another cigarette. "You don't have to build a hotel to have a casino," he said.

  "I know. If you invest two hundred thousand, they'll give you a gaming license. Surely you have two hundred thousand, Mr. Lansky."

  "My money is tied up in a place called the Montmartre Club," said Lansky. "Ask around about it."

  "I already have," said Bat. "You attract the high rollers because they know the Montmartre is run to the Meyer Lansky standards. Serious gamblers respect you and your club."

  "But they leave my tables to go get something to eat, to see a show, to get laid. I can't afford to build a big swimming pool for their wives to lie around while they play. Look, Mr. Cord —"

  "Call me Bat."

  "Okay. And call me Meyer. You know the origin of the name Meyer? It comes from the name of a rabbi called Mei-or, meaning 'the bringer of light.' I was born Meier Suchowljanski. When we arrived in New York forty years ago, my father changed me from Meier to Meyer and changed us all from Suchowljanski to Lansky."

  Bat smiled. "I am Jonas Enrique Raul Cord y Batista," he said.

  "Anyway, Bat, I have an idea. I'd like to install a casino in a hotel like the Floresta — which is a hotel, with pool and shops and all that. I could attract the serious gamblers the way I do at the Montmartre. I'd also get the tourists, who'd know they were playing honest games."

  "The way the new Vegas hotels work," said Bat.

  "Exactly. Ben Siegel saw the connection. The difference is that Havana is a tropical paradise, not a dusty desert town. What's more important, Chicago and everything east of it are a lot closer to Havana than they are to Las Vegas."

  "Are you making a proposition, Meyer?"

  "A million dollars will build a gaming room and a show room on the Floresta," said Lansky. "It's a more modest operation, but the investment can be recovered in four years, maybe less."

  "The President wants Cord Hotels, Incorporated, to build a casino-hotel."

  "Tell him you want to test the waters by investing in the Floresta," said Lansky. "If that's a winning proposition, you'll do something more. I can assure you he'll welcome an investment of one million."

  "I want to see the Floresta," said Bat. "I'll want to talk to President Batista."

  3

  "How much of a commitment did you make to him?" Jonas asked. They sat over lunch at the Four Seasons. Bat had returned from Mexico and was reporting to his father on his talks with Fulgencio Batista and Meyer Lansky.

  "I made no commitment," said Bat. "I had no authority to make a commitment."

  "But you think it may not be a bad deal?"

  "It may not. The Floresta is known for quiet, sumptuous rooms, good food, and an interesting swimming pool set partly in living rock and surrounded with flowering shrubs and palms. Americans stay there. They come back to it as a refuge after a night in the gaudy, flashy places. Lansky means to keep it that way. The casino and show room would be in a separate wing. He wants to do higher-quality shows than are done at mo
st of the Havana clubs. And of course the gambling will be honest."

  "Do you trust Lansky?"

  Jonas lifted his glass and took a sip of Jack Daniel's Black Label. It impressed Bat as a strange thing to be drinking with the famous Four Seasons crab cakes, but that was not the only strange habit his father had.

  "No, and I don't trust Great-Uncle Fulgencio either. But let me tell you something about Meyer Lansky. In this country his reputation is that he's a gangster and nothing but. You know — 'the Chairman of the Board.' He —"

  "It's exaggerated," said Jonas.

  "When the government wanted the cooperation of Lucky Luciano in 1942, they used Lansky as the go-between," said Bat.

  "I doubt that."

  Bat shrugged. "You can look it up. I did."

  "Did your homework, huh?"

  "In the States," Bat continued, "Lansky is known as a gangster. In Cuba he's thought of as a businessman. And not just by Fulgencio Batista."

  "He couldn't get a Nevada gaming license," said Jonas. "But for all his reputation, he has no criminal record. In his entire life he's spent only three months in jail."

  "He couldn't be a silent partner in the Floresta," said Bat. "It would be his reputation that would attract the high rollers."

  "We wouldn't buy the hotel, I assume," said Jonas.

  "No. We'd build the wing for the casino and show room. The owners of the hotel would lease the wing to us. But we'd pay no cash for the lease for, say, fifty months, until we got our investment back."

  "Who owns the Floresta?" asked Jonas.

  Bat grinned. "A real estate group in Havana. But if this deal goes through, ten percent of it will be owned by my Great-Uncle Fulgencio."

  "Insurance?" asked Jonas.

  "Whatever you want to call it. I'm glad I went to Cuba. It was worth the trip to meet Lansky. He told me something we are going to have to think about."

  "What?"

  "Our friend Morris Chandler has been talking to some pretty rough characters. For one, Jimmy Hoffa went to Vegas and met with him."

  "I know," said Jonas. "Angie saw him and called me."

  "That's not the half of it," said Bat. "Lansky says he's been in touch with men like Murray the Camel in Chicago and Anthony Provenzano in New Jersey. If he's working for us, why would he contact people like that?"

  "Because Nevada Smith is dead," said Jonas. He put down a gulp of whiskey. "That's why."

  "Meaning?"

  "He and Nevada were close. Besides, I think Nevada had something on him. With Nevada gone — Chandler resented my taking over The Seven Voyages. He doesn't like the way I make him run it. I'd guess he wants to muscle us out."

  "Buy us out?"

  Jonas shook his head. "Muscle us out. Your assignment is to get out to Las Vegas and take over the hotel. The Cuban thing is a sideshow. Where I want you is Las Vegas."

  Bat nodded as he lifted a forkful of crab cake to his mouth. "Las Vegas? What am I going to be doing in Las Vegas?"

  "As of today you're a vice president of Cord Hotels," he said. "The corporate headquarters is the fifth floor of The Seven Voyages."

  Bat shook his head. "Wait a minute. Our deal is that I learn the business, the overall business, not just the hotel business. In New York or Los Angeles."

  "I ran the overall business from the fifth floor of The Seven Voyages for months," said Jonas.

  "But —"

  "What do you think I'm doing? Sending you into exile? We'll be in touch every day."

  "About the hotel business."

  "Right now, about the hotel business chiefly. Jesus Christ, you've got to start somewhere! Right now, that's where I need you. I'm running a business. You're my son, and I want you with me. But you've got to go where I need you. Learn the business? Okay, learn the hotel business first. Then — Well, each piece in time."

  Bat shook his head. "This isn't the deal we made. Las Vegas, for Christ's sake?"

  "As a vice president of Cord Hotels, Incorporated, your salary will be a hundred thousand," said Jonas as he lifted his glass to sip bourbon.

  "You can be very persuasive," said Bat. "Said another way, you have ways of getting what you want out of people."

  4

  Bat arrived in Las Vegas on an Inter-Continental corporate Beech flown from Los Angeles. From the moment he saw the town, he didn't much like it. It was what Meyer Lansky had called it: a dusty desert town. Only Lansky hadn't added that it was a pretentious dusty desert town. Without Nevada's laws allowing casino gambling, it would be nothing.

  Though he hadn't said so to anyone, he hadn't much cared for the Cord ranch either, or for the land around it. As somebody in the army had put it, "Y' seen one boondocks, y' seen 'em all."

  The ranch house was in distinct contrast to the hacienda house near Cordoba. The hacienda house had style. The ranch house had fashion. Las Vegas had neither. The Seven Voyages was a plastic dump.

  "I'll take over the top floor, all of it, for the company headquarters," Bat said to Chandler within five minutes after they met.

  "I explained to your father, that'll cost money," said Chandler.

  "I may need part of the fourth floor, too," said Bat.

  Chandler shrugged. "You're the boss."

  "I'm glad you understand that. Angie will be my father's personal and confidential assistant when he's in town, mine when he's not. The rest of my personal staff will be coming in from Los Angeles and Mexico City."

  "Whatever you say, boss."

  "Don't call me boss."

  "What do you want me to call you?" Chandler asked.

  "Until we know each other a little better, you can call me Mr. Cord," said Bat. Then he grinned and walked over to where Chandler was sitting and slapped him on the shoulder. "I figure we'll know each other better in about fifteen minutes, and then you can call me Bat."

  As soon as Chandler was out of the suite and on the private elevator, Bat turned to Angie and said, "I'm hot. I want to go swimming. You have a bathing suit handy?"

  "Uh ... Sure. In my room."

  "See you at the pool in ten minutes," said Bat.

  She appeared in a white two-piece swimsuit and white high-heel shoes. Swimsuits that exposed the navel and a little below were just beginning to appear in the States and were being called bikinis, and Angie attracted stares as she crossed the pool deck and sat down beside Bat at an umbrella table.

  "You are a luscious woman," he told her. "If you didn't have a relationship with my father — "

  "If I didn't have a relationship with your father, I'd be glad to have one with you," she said soberly. "Let's understand, though, what that relationship is. I love your father. I don't suppose he loves me, at least not the way I love him, but I do love him; I don't just sleep with him."

  He put a hand on hers. "I asked you to meet me down here because we have to establish some new rules. I've hired a company in Los Angeles to come here and sweep the hotel for hidden microphones and the like. Until that's done, no business talk in the offices or rooms. Also, none on the telephones until I have new lines installed."

  "Someone said you're tougher than your father."

  "Not at all. Not a question of tough. Question of realistic. When you called my father and told him Hoffa had been here, he was grateful. I have to wonder if Chandler doesn't know you made that call."

  "If he did?"

  "It puts you on his shit list," said Bat.

  "I'm on it anyway."

  "It's something more than just personal," Bat said. "Las Vegas is immensely attractive to organized crime, and they're moving in more and more. In times past, guys were making money by skimming the casino take. Now it's something more. Have you heard of the term money laundering?"

  "I've heard of it," said Angie.

  "A lot of secret money from a variety of rackets is laundered in Las Vegas. Some of it is being laundered in Cuba now. Money laundering makes casinos all the more important to the rackets."

  Angie nodded. "You know I did time in a fede
ral pokey, don't you?"

  "I do know that, Angie. If my father doesn't worry about it — which obviously he doesn't — then I don't either. So far as I am concerned, we can forget all about it."

  "Thank you, Bat," she said softly. "Anyway, I learned more about this kind of thing than I wanted to know."

  "Anyway," said Bat, "we are going to have to watch out."

  "Bat ... they are dangerous," she said solemnly.

  5

  When Bat's bug sweepers worked the fourth and fifth floors of The Seven Voyages they did find hidden microphones. Several of them were hidden in the telephones. Others were behind pictures, in the bases of lamps, in the upholstery of chairs, and in the box springs of beds. The telephones were tapped, as he had expected. The bug sweepers killed all the bugs and removed all the taps. They left devices that would detect new ones. Bat contracted with them to return at irregular intervals to sweep again.

  He said nothing to Chandler about the bugs and taps, and Chandler said nothing to him. It was remotely possible — very remotely possible — that Morris Chandler didn't know. Bat considered having Chandler's office swept but decided not to.

  He settled into the fifth-floor suite his father had occupied two years before. Toni flew out from Washington to spend a week with him. She disliked Las Vegas as much as he did.

  "It's about as cheap a place as I've ever seen."

  "Actually, it's one of the most expensive places I've ever seen."

  "How long will you be here, Bat?"

  "Only as long as I have to be."

  He saw Morris Chandler every day, but in October Chandler asked for an appointment and came up to talk with him.