Chance Elson

by Ballard, Todhunter, 1903-1980

  "He isn't trying. He has moved in.'* Chance's voice was flat.

  "Have you talked to the other club-owners?**

  "Most of them. This came too fast. You did not want it known that you were backing me, and without backing, I carry no weight. If I'd had time to build my own position, it might be different. I haven't."

  Kern shook his head regretfully.

  "It's too late now. They're scared. Most of them have knuckled under. They are buying his wire service."

  "You've got to find a way to stop him."

  Chance took a tu^i of the room, came back to face Kern. "You set me up here, John, and I appreciate it. Without your help, I'd probably never have gotten started. You set me up for a reason. I told you when you did it that the club-owners couldn't be organized. The only way I could force these men to stand against Danzig would be with a club to hold over their heads. I tried to talk sense to them. I tried to tell them to throw out their horse books. I threw mine out last night, but they won't listen. They say they can't afford to." His sm.ile turned downward.

  "What kind of a stick do you need?" Kem's eyes were as hard as Chance's.

  "There's only one threat that would mean anything, if I could tell them that any man who took the \dre service from Cellini would lose his gambling license."

  Kern said slowly, "You're asking the impossible."

  "For Christ sake." Chance was standing before him. "This is a rough game you've shoved me into, John, and a rough boy you are asking me to fight. You can't compromise with

  Danzig. You people in Nevada tried to compromise when you legalized gambling. Some of you, the smarter ones, had sense enough to fear where it might lead you, and lead the state. It has. You've got your problem right on your doorstep. You either lick it or you let it in, and the only way to Hck it is to make it impossible for them to sell their wire service in this state."

  Kern said, "I'm not arguing with you, boy, but we have no legal grounds to pull a man's Hcense just because he's buying wire service."

  "You know damn well that he's giving a portion of his take to Danzig or he wouldn't be getting the service."

  "We may know it, but you can bet that there's no proof, that there is nothing in writing."

  Chance controlled himself with eflPort. "John, you can't keep control and let Danzig in. If you have to, outlaw book-making in the state. You'll stop Danzig because right now his power rests only on the wire service. But give him time to get estabHshe^i and he'll take over everything. He'll have control of prostitution. He'll bring in dope. He'll start shaking down your laundries and your gas stations and your labor unions. Racketeers work in patterns, and one of the first things they reach for is the politicians. There aren't many voters in this state. It won't cost Danzig too much to buy elections, to elect his men to the assembly, to even put a friend in the governor's office. If you give him time to do that, you've had it."

  Kern said, "You aren't teUing me anything I don't know, anything I haven't been saying myself for the last five or six years."

  "Then why in the hell don't the men in Carson and Reno do something? The men who licked the mining camps are surely tough enough to face facts when they have to."

  "I guess they're getting old."

  Chance said, "That isn't an excuse. Didn't you beheve when you called me up to the ranch that your friends would fight?"

  Kern said tiredly, "I guess maybe I suspected that when the showdown came they wouldn't. I guess maybe that's why I set you up. I talked to them before I came down. They are

  scared of several things besides Danzig. They are afraid that if all this came into the open, there would be a concerted move to outlaw all gambling in the state. There are several chiirch groups already trying to do just that."

  "Maybe it would be a good thing."

  Kern looked up at him. "That would ruin you and ruin Vegas."

  "I suppose so."

  "They keep coming back to the idea that the club-owners should organize to protect themselves. They simply refuse to believe that the Syndicate is that powerful."

  Chance shook his head. "John, the reason organized crime manages to muscle in is because no one man ever believes that what is happening to his neighbors will happen to him. The Syndicate puts pressure on individuals. We read in the newspapers where some dry cleaner's shop has been bombed. That man had the courage to stand against the men trying to muscle into his business, and he got hurt. He gets no help from the law and no sympathy from his neighbors, yet if he knuckles under people think he was wrong to do business with the racket boys."

  "You're right of co^u•se."

  "Crime couldn't get anywhere if everyone would stand against it. What about your old vigilante committees? Gather one here, run every racket boy across the border as soon as he shows his face. That would work because they wouldn't know who the committee members were, they wouldn't know who to pressure."

  "Could you head such a committee?"

  "Who would follow me? I'm a gambler. In the eyes of the general pubHc I'm almost as black as Danzig. Get some of your friends. If you can't throw these bastards out legally, do it with pressure, with fear."

  "There's no one to set it up, no one to lead it."

  "Christ." Chance turned away. "Where are the boys from Goldfield and Tonopah? Where are the boys who fought the Tonopah Sickness and saved the camp?"

  "Dead," Kern said, and the life had gone out of his voice.

  "So you've quit, too." Chance did not really mean that. He knew that one man could not rouse a state.

  "No." Kern shook his head. "I haven't quit, not the way you mean. Chance, but you don't quite realize what it means to get old. The trouble with Nevada is that we have no young men of our own. In the last twenty years, this state has offered very httle opportunity for the young, so the ones with abihty got out.

  "Now, new people are coming in. These people don't understand our problems, and they haven't the habit of following our old leaders. Sooner or later they will develop leaders of their own. I hoped that you would be one of them. The one thing that could help us would be increased population. The larger the population, the less easy it would be for Danzig or any other one man to take over. And population is coming. This isn't for publication, but the government is preparing to build a big magnesium plant between Vegas and the dam. If we had enough such plants, we wouldn't need to keep gambhng."

  Chance had stopped pacing. "Does that mean this coimtry is going into the war?"

  "I think so." Kern's face was gray with fatigue. "I wish I'd flown down, but I did not want anyone to know I was seeing you. The way it shapes up is this. We can't take the action you wish, we can't close a club because we suspect that Danzig has a piece of it, but we can watch him. If you can show absolute proof that he actually owns one of these places, I'U do everything in my power to get the Hcense."

  He oflFered his hand and Chance took it.

  "Look, boy, when you are as old as I am you learn that time has a way of solving things, maybe not for us, but for those who come after us. Keep in touch with me and keep hammering at the other club-owners. At least it lets Danzig know that he has opposition. It lets anyone who might want to fight know that he has a rallying point. Don't think I won't keep working up north; I wiH. Well have to see how things develop."

  Long after he had pulled away. Chance stood outside. He felt drained, deflated. He had believed in John Kern's group.

  He had thought they intended to stand hke a bulwark between the state and any forces seeking to harm it. Now they were backing off. These were not after all the great men, not the giants of Nevada's early history.

  Kern had tried, but Kern could not do it alone. Sooner or later the people themselves would become aroused. Sooner or later they would move against the cancer which threatened to consume them, but then it would be too late.

  He knew a sudden, nearly overwhelming desire to quit. Never in his life except while he was sick had the impulse touched him. But now, it would be simple. Doc wou
ld be glad to be out of it. Dutch would do anything he said. He could buy a ranch somewhere, a small place, where Judy could raise pigs. But then, Judy wanted to be an actress. She wouldn't be content with the ranch very much longer.

  He felt as old as time. For he knew that he would not quit. There was a force inside of him, stronger than reason, which would drive him on. It wasn't the money. It was the game, and the winning, the aspiring, and carrying out what he had set himself to do.

  Nevada if handled right could be great, and it would take someone to whip Danzig and the men like Danzig. His jaw set. John Kern should have been that man, but Kern wasn't going to do it.

  He thought about it, walking in the silent yard. All right. He'd fight Danzig, and everything Danzig stood for. He'd fight alone if need be, with any tool that came to hand. And if Doc had thought he had grown tough in the last few months. Doc had seen nothing yet.

  He began to fight the next evening. He called the club-owners out to his ranch. He knew what he was inviting when he did it. At least one of them was going to report the meeting to Danzig. Chance expected that, and he did not much care.

  There were twelve of them and they crowded the ranch-house living room. He had sent Joe and Judy to the picture show.

  He stood now, facing the men he had summoned. His coat

  was off. He looked very big and very young standing there, and very certain of himself. He wasted no words.

  "We all know what's happened in this town in the last few days. I don't need to guess which of you have knuckled under to Benji Danzig. Anyone still running a book has cut him in."

  Some of them looked hostile, others annoyed at being summoned here like so many office boys, but not a single man had refused to come.

  "And I don't need to tell you what it means to let Danzig have a piece of your place. Danzig will keep crowding until he has it all."

  By the sombemess of their expressions he counted those who agreed with him. Could he win them to the fight?

  "What are you going to do about it? We've got a nice thing here. Our business is as legitimate as any bank. Your kids go to school without being ashamed of facing the other kids, your wives are as good as anyone in town. Are you going to spoil the whole thing because you haven't got guts enough to fight?"

  They shifted uncomfortably but no one answered.

  "Or are you going to tell me you can't fight?"

  One man in the back said, "How the hell can you fight a guy like Danzig? We're not mobsters."

  "No," said Chance, "we're not mobsters. Here we are honest businessmen. And if you stop taking the wire service, all of you stop, what in hell can Danzig do? He can't wreck every place in town, and if he did, it wouldn't do him any good."

  He spent two hours arguing. He pleaded pride. He talked economics. He dangled release from fear. But they had seen Danzig. There was no fight in them.

  Judy found him sitting alone when she and Joe came home. "How'd it go?"

  "It didn't. They don't trust each other and they don't trust me. They'd rather pray for a miracle."

  "What will it mean, that we have to leave here?"

  He shook his head. "I'm not leaving. There's nothing much Cellini can do to hurt me directly unless he blows up the place."

  "Why should you worry about the others?"

  "Because I want Vegas kept clean. And the only way I can do it now is to keep my own place clean, to prove it can be done. And Kern will keep trying for an angle. I'll play for time, as long as Danzig leaves me alone/'

  (^^uifotefi fO

  The town had been enjoying a minor boom, brought on by the opening of the magnesium plant and a gradual increase in the tourist trade.

  New motels had been built, mostly on Fifth Street, and a national chain of auto courts had erected what they called a hotel just beyond the city line on Highway Ninety-One. In reality it was a glorified motel with a lobby, a gambling room and a number of individual cottages.

  Chance had been interested in the idea. It was a year since the restaurant had opened and in that year they had paid off Hornbone and nearly erased the bank loan.

  He drove out with Doc to look at the place, at the lawns that were being planted, at the rows of neat, ordered cottages. "You know something, a place like this might do all right."

  Doc snorted. "Too far from town. They'll lose their shirts, watch what I tell you."

  All the way back to town Chance was quiet. After he dropped Doc at the club, he went on down to the bank and in to see the manager.

  The man grinned at him. "What's the matter, business so good you want to pay the rest of that loan?"

  Chance shrugged. "It's all right. How are things around town?"

  "Good, I guess. What's on your mind?"

  Chance said, "What's that land out along Ninety-One, beyond the new motor hotel, selhng for?"

  The manager scratched his head. "Well, I'd make a guess

  at about a hundred bucks an acre, although what anyone wants with it is beyond me."

  "Will you loan me twenty thousand dollars on the restaurant?"

  The man started. "You going to build a motel too?"

  "An investment," said Chance. "I think Vegas property is going up."

  Three weeks later he owned two hundred acres on the southeast side of the highway about a half-mile beyond the new hotel.

  When he brought the papers in for Doc and Dutch to sign. Doc blew his top. "Are you nuts?"

  Chance shook his head. "I don't think so. We're making dough. The town is growing and CelHni is letting us alone."

  "He isn't letting the rest alone. From what I hear, he and Danzig are taking twenty-five thousand a month out of the town."

  Chance said coolly, "Their business."

  They were in the oflBce of the club. Doc sitting at the desk, Dutch beside the window. Doc stood up. "Chance, it's about time we had a talk. Are Dutch and I partners in this place or what?"

  Chance was impatient. "Of course you're partners. Everything we've ever done is a three-way spUt. What's eating you now?"

  "Everything but decisions. You used to talk things over with us before you did them, even if you seldom listened to what we said."

  Chance started to grin. He thought for the moment that Doc was joking. "Come ofiF it." He stopped. He looked from Doc to Dutch and back to Doc. "You mean this, don't you?"

  God, Doc thought, it was hard to refuse Chance. There was something magnetic about the guy when you knew him, when you did not let his cold front push you away. But this had to be said and Dutch would never say it.

  "Yes, I mean it." Doc's voice was colder than Chance had ever heard it. "You knew I didn't think much of the hotels out along the highway, and yet without a word you sunk

  twenty G's of partnership money in land that a self-respecting jack rabbit wouldn't jump over."

  "I used bank money."

  "Sure, you used bank money, and what did you give for security? This place. Unless Dutch and I sign these papers, you don't get it, right?"

  "That's right. If you feel this way don't sign."

  "I'll sign," said Doc. "But I want one thing plain. I'm signing because youVe already committed yourself, and we can't afford to have it noised around town that we welshed on a deal. And I want another thing straight. This is your personal baby. You pay off the note yourself, and you own the property."

  "I think you're making a mistake."

  "I know you do." Doc was not giving an inch. It was hard to throw in the hooks when for once Chance's guard was down. "But it's my mistake, and my privilege to make it. That's what I'm trying to get across to you. Hell, man, there's more to life than making money. YouVe got to live a Mttle."

  "I'm living."

  "Are you? Sometimes I think you re like a kid who's never waked up, that the only side of your brain that really functions is the part that figures out how big you will be next year and the year after, and the year after that. Ever since we opened this place, we've all been working like dogs and taking only expense mon
ey. I didn't mind as long as we were on the hook, but now we're about off, I'd like to live a little before I'm too old to appreciate it."

  Chance said, "You'd rather bum your money on a bimch of whores than invest it in the future."

  "What future?" They glared at each other. It was the first time in their association that both of them had gotten angry at once.

  It made Dutch nervous. "Knock it off, will you?"

  Chance swung to face him. "I suppose you agree with Doer

  Dutch said a Httle weakly, "Well, heU, a man likes to have a few dimes in his pocket to spend."

  "Like you had when I first knew you? So you can drink yourself stupid every night?"

  Dutch sighed. He turned on his heel and went through the door, shutting it softly behind him.

  Doc said, "You shouldn't have done that."

  No, Chance knew he shouldn't have done that. He wouldn't have done it if he had not been goaded by anger. He had no desire to hurt Dutch. He had been as Doc said, like a small boy, striking out at them because they did not agree ^^fith him.

  "I'm sorry, Doc." He did not say the words gracefully. He was not schooled in apology.

  Doc looked at him for a long moment, then, as if not trusting himself to speak, he left.

  Chance went over and sat down heavily at the desk. He had never felt as lonely as he did at the moment.

  And the senselessness of the quarrel appalled him. If they had fought when times had been tough, he could have understood, but they had not fought then, they had stood together, against the world.

  And if they could only stand together a little longer. He had come into this oflBce to tell them his dream, for he had had a dream. A hotel, a great hotel rising out of the desert wastes, a resort hotel, hke they had in Palm Springs, in Miami and Palm Beach, a playground where people of wealth could come.

  He knew now what the driving force v/ithin him was. A desire to build something, to create something, to be able to see and touch what his mind and his imagination had envisioned. He had thought that Doc and Dutch would share his vision.