“Of course.” Her personal preference was that he be reborn a worm in hell, but that wish she wisely kept to herself.
“You are to go to China with Riordan. Satisfy him in all aspects. I am sure you have already ascertained his pleasure points. Make sure that you make yourself indispensable to him in all ways.”
She shrugged. “I don’t see what good that will do you. He will only be in China a week or two and then will return to America.”
“And you will return with him.”
She gaped at him. “To America?”
“I know how hard it would be for you to leave me.” Wan cackled so hard he started choking. A servant girl brought him a napkin and he used it to smother his cough. The girl was new but looked vaguely familiar to her.
She was always taken in by him, but his coughing spasm gave her mind a chance to catch up with her emotions. Wan gave nothing away. Nothing that he did not expect a much greater return from.
He wiped his mouth and got his breathing under control. She stared at him blank faced, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“I am giving Mr. Riordan everything he wants,” Wan said. “But it is only a loan. Someday I will take it all back, along with everything else he has.”
So that was it—a trap. And she was part of the cheese.
“I can’t accompany him to America, you know that. He’s married—”
“My sources in Vegas tell me that the marriage is, as the Americans put it, on the rocks. Besides, his marital status has nothing to do with his relationship with you.”
“What is it you want me to do?”
“Nothing, my child, nothing but enjoy yourself. And obey my instructions. All financial matters will be put into your name; you will be my surrogate. Naturally, your stay in America will be limited by how long I need to have my plan succeed. Then you will return here, to your home, your family. As your benefactor, your guardian, the master of your soul, you will pine until I send for you, but send for you I will.” He slurped noodles and then looked up at her, juice dribbling down his chin again. “I would be greatly disappointed if you failed to follow my instructions while you are away from me. You understand that I expect all my sons and daughters to be absolutely loyal to me. You have such loyalty, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Good, good.” He wiped his chin. “Ah, yes, Ming, please give me another napkin.”
A-Ma recognized the name. The young woman nicknamed “Ming” was a dealer at Mr. Wan’s casino. A-Ma gasped as Ming used her left hand to hand Wan a napkin. Her right hand was missing. The stump was nearly covered by her long sleeves, but A-Ma could see that it was still bandaged.
Wan padded his lips with the napkin and locked eyes with A-Ma.
“As you can see, Ming can no longer deal cards at the casino. I have taken pity on her and permit her to serve me in the household. Is that not the case, Ming?”
Ming lowered her eyes. “Yes.”
“It’s unfortunate,” Wan said, “some of my money had found its way into her hand while she worked in the casino. The hand that offended is now gone.”
64
A brain syndrome developed when someone took too many drugs. During her time in L.A., Janelle had gotten down and dirty with users and saw the effect of long-term use on them. After years of use, more and more brain connections ceased to work. People didn’t just stop thinking straight, they developed a skewed view of the world. The drugs did a frontal lobotomy on their emotions. People who normally wouldn’t harm the proverbial flea stared blank-faced at convenience store clerks as they fired .38 rounds into them for the price of a fix. She called the syndrome “fried brains.”
Bic Halliday wasn’t down to the 7-Eleven till-tap mentality, but he definitely was experiencing fried brains. Having an in-house drug supplier had sped up the deterioration. Janelle had taken Bic out of the mainstream, keeping him coddled in her arms with bigger and purer doses of heroin.
“Know where heroin comes from?” she asked Diego, when he arrived at the ranch with a preacher and a supply of the drug.
“Yeah, I got a contact—”
“No, not how you sneak it into the country, how they grow the stuff.”
“They grow heroin? No shit?”
“No shit. It comes from the poppy flower. They make morphine from the flower and make heroin from morphine. I read it in the encyclopedia. I’ve been stuck out on this goddamn godforsaken ranch for so long, I got desperate enough to read something.”
“You’ll be out of here soon, babe. I brought preacher man here to do his thing with you and Bic. He can notarize documents, too.”
Bic was in the bedroom asleep. He spent much of his time sleeping now. She no longer gave him cocaine or crank—he was now strictly a heroin addict, the big leagues. Bic was isolated now at the ranch, and she kept him drugged and under her control. Life for him had now come down to long periods of sleep with short periods of ecstatic moments awake. After he would come out of a deep sleep, she would give him an intravenous injection of heroin that spread a warm, glowing sensation over his body. He’d grin like the Cheshire cat when the rush hit him. Then he’d go into a drowsy state of relaxation before falling into a deep sleep.
His tolerance for the drug quickly built up and she had to give him more and more injections to keep him in the revolving state of quiet ecstasy and sleep. Heroin was usually diluted from two to five percent purity and she had avoided increasing the purity of the drug, preferring to give him more injections. She had her own reasons for not building up his tolerance for higher purity.
She was using more and more drugs herself. Having a big supply available and preparing the drugs for Bic helped feed her own habit. Down deep she knew that the drugs were affecting her judgment, but all that mattered was the glorious kick she got when she took a hit.
“Did you get the papers signed?” Diego asked.
“Right here.” Janelle handed him a marriage form and a will. “We need to finish off the will with witnesses and a notary.”
“Preacher here is a notary. He can also witness the will. I’ll witness it, too.”
“Preacher” was a typical Hollywood Boulevard scumbag, Janelle decided. He had a soiled look—not physical dirt, but the type of veneer people get when they’ve spent most of their adult lives as trash hanging out with trash. She didn’t doubt he had some sort of real credential as a preacher man; Diego was a smart businessman—he wouldn’t screw up by using a phony, not with so much at stake.
Preacher stood at the door to the bedroom and stared at Bic. Bic was sleeping soundly.
“This is highly unusual,” Preacher said.
“That’s why you’re getting paid plenty,” Diego said.
“Well, I’ve thought about that. I agreed to perform the marriage and apply my notary stamp. Now you want me to witness the will. I’m going to need another ten thousand dollars.”
“Fuck you,” Janelle said.
“Now, let’s not get excited,” Diego said. “Preacher’s performing some real deep shit here and there’s plenty to go around. I don’t see anything wrong with kicking it up a notch. I agreed on ten and now we’ll make it twenty. It’s as simple as that.”
Diego pulled Janelle aside as she started cussing again.
“You’re going to let that pig take us—”
“Quiet, babe. You think I’d trust that turd with millions of dollars at stake? There’s a couple hundred miles of desert back to L.A. He’s going to disappear somewhere along the way. Ever heard that old American expression ‘Loose lips sink ships?’ Babe, dead lips don’t say nothing.”
She kissed Diego. “You’re a genius.”
“Yeah, that’s why I get the big dinero. Don’t forget who set this up. There’s plenty of room in the desert for one more.”
She grabbed his crotch. “If you kill me, bury me with this in my mouth.”
“You have any problems getting your friend’s signatures on the will?”
“None. I
told him he was signing a letter to his lawyer to sue Zack Riordan for his interest in the casino. He’d sign the Declaration of Independence if I told him it would screw Zack.”
65
“This is the royal palace, encased by the Great Wall of China, and mounted on the Great Wall is a Red Dragon roller coaster. It will be the fastest and scariest roller coaster in the world,” I told the fifteen bankers and state and federal officials assembled in my Strip conference room. As I spoke, I pointed out the features on a five-by-five-foot model of Forbidden City.
We were in a fifth-floor conference room of my temporary headquarters, which was an old casino-hotel I had bought next door to where my super casino was being built. I needed a place to train the employees of the new casino, and having a real operation for the staff of thousands, from chefs and dealers to maids and security, worked out great.
When the super casino was finished, I planned to knock the old club down and make it part of the parking lot. A-Ma and I had taken up residence in a suite on the tenth floor of the old building. Like the conference room, the suite overlooked the building project.
There was caviar, goose pate, hundred-dollar bottles of champagne, and thousand-dollar a night “show” girls on hand to sweeten the presentation. I imported the girls from Hong Kong to “entertain” backers and critics of the project. I introduced them as one of the Oriental acts that would play after the casino opened, but never got specific about what their routine would be. Naturally, these particular girls did their best moves in bed.
A hundred yards from where we stood in my temporary headquarters, the actual casino was rising in the desert. I was overbudget, but that was inevitable for a project this size. But I had to keep the bankers onboard and the regulatory people off my back to stay afloat.
“As you might have read, I got the inspiration for the casino’s Chinese imperial theme from a visit I made to China with Ms. A-Ma.” I told myself they better have read it; it cost me plenty to have the most expensive PR agency in the country plant that and a dozen other stories about the project. “I visited Beijing with Ms. A-Ma six months ago when she was filming in the Far East, and I marveled at the artistic beauty of the former imperial complex called the Forbidden City and the summer palace outside the city. I trekked on the Great Wall, the over four-thousand-mile-long fortification the Chinese called Wanli changcheng, the Ten Thousand Li Wall. Li is an ancient Chinese measurement like miles and meters.”
Hot damn, was I full of culture and knowledge. I almost was tempted to tell them about the Gesar of Ling and the Opium Wars, but reined in my enthusiasm to show off. One thing I learned the hard way in my hustling days, never talk past the close—when you’ve hooked a sucker and you’re reaching for his wallet, you stop selling and shut your mouth because you might say something that quenches the sale.
The casino model showed a tall, central building with pagoda roofs scaled after the imperial palace. The Great Wall, with periodic “forts,” completely wrapped around the building. The elevated red dragon roller coaster used the wall as a track. It was a nice, compact design. When finished, it would be the size of a square block—Manhattan style. Stretching out from the backside of the casino were the carnival games and rides. On each side of the amusement park were parking lots.
The interior was laid out in paintings and smaller structures around the conference room. Exotic Chinese statues, works of art, and animals in a rain forest—like setting would be scattered throughout the exterior and interior of the casino. There were slot machines in Chinese themes; ceramic elephants; the emperor’s terra-cotta army; a zoo with tigers, lions, elephants; the irresistible pandas as well as dragons; Chinese dancers; firecrackers; kites; and lots of lakes and ponds, with real Chinese junks and tough-looking pirates holding tourists for ransom. I wanted it to look authentic.
“Despite a couple of half-hearted previous attempts at a family-oriented casino, Forbidden City will be the first casino where parents can enjoy gambling while their children of all ages can have wholesome entertainment. We’ll even have a daycare center for employees and guests.” I beamed with social consciousness. “We have a three-thousand-room hotel, and for those guests who get tired of dumping their money into the casino, we have a complete retail shopping center they can make deposits at.”
“That’s what worries us most,” an investment banker from New York said. “There’s a lot of doubt that you can fill a three-thousand-room hotel in Vegas. That’s a convention hotel scale, not a tourist venue.”
“Nobody’s done it because no one’s tried it,” I said, smiling to dull the sharp edge I was accused of using on idiots. “People said Bugsy Siegel was wrong when he wanted to put a two-hundred-room hotel on the Strip, that Walt Disney was crazy because no one would bring their kids thousands of miles to see Mickey and Donald, when the Mexicans started putting high-rise hotels along a sandbar called Cancún. Hey, come on, people, the fact that it’s never been done only means that we’ll make more money than anyone else ever did.”
“You give people something they want, and they’ll come,” Betsy Meyers, my PR person said.
“What about all of the cost overruns—”
“You know, you get what you pay for. I’ve been criticized—”
“Zack, you’ve bought a solid-gold throne that once belonged to an emperor, a treasure that the Chinese government says was stolen during the Japanese invasion of China. And you’ve hauled in real Chinese junks, acquired a private passenger jet, and literally bought a zoo to rob their pandas—”
“Yeah, and I’ve got some five-thousand-square-foot VIP suites with Italian marble and gold fixtures. Every one knows what the Great Wall is, but did you know that some parts of it were built with such perfection that a single inch was a day’s labor for several men? That’s part of the perfection that will make Forbidden City the most talked about casino in the world.”
“Wasn’t that what got Bugsy Siegel a bullet in his eye?” a banker from Chicago asked. “Perfectionism?”
“Is that a hint about what you people are going to do to me if we’re not in the black pretty soon?” I asked.
I was pretty proud of the way I had spent tens of millions of dollars to get real antiques and fixtures. My looting of Oriental art and antiquities had been compared to the rape of European works done by William Randolph Hearst nearly a century ago.
Betsy slipped beside me. “You’re starting to show your irritation. Back away while I work the room. You’re like a man with a chip on his shoulder who’s been threading a sewing machine—while the machine’s running.”
Bill Peel, managing partner of Vegas’s biggest law firm, the one I hired to represent the project, edged up to me.
“Those Oriental babes and the booze should do more to grease your relationship with the male bankers than your dog-and-pony show.”
“I wish someone would grease my relationship with the governor. He refused to attend.”
“He had a church meeting to attend. But I gave him your invitation for golf, dinner, and an overnight at your country club home. He’s a funny guy, you know: the governor of the most corrupt state in the nation, if you don’t count New Jersey as part of America, and the man acts like he’s one of the Puritan fathers.”
“If you ask me, he acts like a guy who hasn’t gotten laid enough. Men get real mean when they’ve been horny for so long their dicks have shriveled.”
“I wouldn’t blame him,” Peel whispered, “his wife makes Phyllis Diller look like a beauty queen. Not to change the subject, but have you given thought about the finance committee the bankers are asking for?”
“Yes and no. Yes I’ve given it thought and no they’re not going to get it. They want to control the purse strings and choke me with them. Committees don’t do things; they’re designed not to make decisions until everything goes to hell. Haven’t you heard that a giraffe is a horse made by a committee?”
“Wasn’t that a camel?”
“Whatever it is, I’m not
letting them turn Forbidden City into sushi. No committee.”
“They’re threatening—”
“Fuck their threats. I’m in so deep into their pocketbooks that they have to keep me afloat. It’s bad enough I have to fight the unions, the building contractors, architects, engineers, inspectors—Jesus Christ, every day I have to wade in and punch it out—”
“I wish you’d make more of your fights verbal and less physical. That guy you hit and threw down a flight of stairs last week is hollering lawsuit.”
“Let him. He was trying to extort money from me, telling me I’d have ‘union troubles’ if I didn’t pay him off.”
“Next time send him to me.”
I let Peel intercept a guest who wanted reassurance about the project while I floated to the back wall with a drink. Betsy’s remark about me threading a sewing machine that was running was right on the nose. That’s how I felt since the project started. When I wasn’t moving fast enough to thread the machine, I was stamping out fires with my bare feet. Deep down I had a sense of panic I had to keep smothered. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night and think, Christ, what a fool I was, to think that I could really pull this thing off, to go from a street kid running a Glitter Gulch grind joint to the biggest casino in the world. I realized I had some of Betty’s fatalism in me—trying for the jackpot but knowing I’d never really get it. I had never realized that deep down I had some of that attitude. I had to fight it; I was running with wolves and if you showed any weakness, they turned and devoured you.
Watching Betsy and Peel work the room, I started to relax a little until a piece of ugly memory from my past strolled over—Charles Ricketts, the dump-truck deputy DA at the Kupka proceeding, who was now in charge of investigations for the state gaming control board. He was thrown out of the district attorney’s office a few years after he dumped Betty’s case because he blew a murder case. He was so bad at doing his job, he let a guy who chopped up his girlfriend’s body and put her in a trash bag in the trunk of his car go free. Ricketts couldn’t make it in private practice as a lawyer, even with a rich father-in-law, and ended up with the state job because his wife’s father got elected to the state legislature.
Sin City Page 28