Sin City

by Harold Robbins

  I didn’t know if DeCicco was bullshitting or not. He was that kind of guy—smooth, made you feel important. Super Glue would slide off of him.

  “What did you want to see me about, Zack?”

  I looked at him, a little surprised. “Anthony, you called me. I was just returning the call.”

  He knew I called for a reason different from his, that something must have happened between the time of his call and mine, but I wanted to hear his proposition first.

  “I hear you’ve been borrowing heavily because of building overruns. Bottom line question, Zack, do you need money?”

  “Do chickens have lips?”

  He laughed. “I understand you and Morgan have hocked Halliday’s up to its gills. You may end up defaulting, could lose the old family spread.”

  “Halliday’s was Con’s dream, not mine.”

  “I know that. You could fit Halliday’s and most of the rest of Glitter Gulch on Forbidden City’s footprint. But I have a client, an investor, who’s interested in the old club, not to run it himself, but to see his investment grow.”

  “Who’s your client?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “I’d need to know; you can’t just sell an interest in the club. Your client would have to be someone who could qualify with the gaming board.”

  “You’ll just have to take my word that qualifications could be made. I’d get axed if I told you anymore.”

  He had already told me plenty. His “investor” would not qualify, thus someone else would front. And I got the hint about who his client was. Vinnie “the Ax” Farrara, the head of a New York Mafia family. The papers said he was the slick of slime that rose to the top in the aftermath of Gotti’s fall. He got his name from an incident in which he chopped up a partner who double-crossed him and then mailed the pieces to the guy’s brother.

  That Vinnie the Ax wanted into Las Vegas came as no surprise. Organized crime and Vegas had always had an illicit affair. Vegas was the whore that crime lords lusted after because of all the loose money in town, baskets of it, trainloads of it. Where else in the world would businesses have to weigh their daily receipts because there was too much of the stuff to count?

  It used to be guys like Vinnie the Ax wanted a piece of a casino because of the prestige, glamour, and tax evasion a casino offered, but now it was all laundering. The old mob, with its cut from prostitution, protection, hijackings, and fencing, dealt in millions. The new mob, with its drug connections, dealt in billions. And cleaning money became an art and science unto itself.

  DeCicco and I looked at each other for a long moment. Finally I said, “You know, Anthony, it’s a funny thing how great minds work alike sometimes. You called me. But I was going to call you, anyway. I’ve got a proposition your investor would be interested in.”

  “An offer he can’t refuse?”

  “Yeah, and no horse’s head in the deal. But there is a horse’s ass.”

  80

  George chattered nonstop as he kneaded Morgan’s naked buttocks. She had disobeyed Zack’s instructions to stay around Forbidden City and had sneaked over to the gym because George was her favorite masseur.

  “She’s completely phony, manufactured,” George said. “My friend Joey does her hair, and he would know.”

  “She” was the movie star on this week’s issue of People magazine. Morgan was only half listening to his nonstop chatter. Her mind was on Zack. Forbidden City would open soon and she would no longer have an excuse to stay around Vegas. She told Zack she was staying until the opening because she wanted the children to experience the historic moment. That was true. But there was another half to the story—Zack. No man ever stirred her blood—or caused it to boil—like he did. What was she going to do when the casino doors opened and she no longer had an excuse to stay? How was she going to take the place of the memory of a movie star who was already being mourned as a legend?

  “Joey has seen her ‘before’ pictures when she was Plain Jane,” George said. “Then she went plastic and now look at her.”

  Morgan glanced down at the magazine where she had dropped it on the floor. Plastic or not, Morgan wished the hell she looked like the woman on the magazine cover. But she had to admit that the woman, who was British, lacked the sensuality that A-Ma had had. That’s my problem, she thought, I’m not manufactured, I have all of my original parts. Maybe Zack would love me more if I added a little Chinese to my features.

  It was tough enough competing with the woman when she was alive. Morgan wondered if it was going to be impossible to connect with Zack emotionally now that there was a ghost between them.

  “Why don’t men get cellulite?” Morgan asked, deliberately changing the subject George had been going on and on about. “Women are expected to stay attractive and desirable, regardless of their age or how many kids they’ve had, but a bald, toothless, beer-bellied man with a big bank account can get any woman. It’s not fair, George; they should at least get cellulite.”

  On that note, she got up and went to the showers.

  She stood under the hot water and let it flow down her body, from the top of her head down to her feet. She got the massage as much for her tight muscles as her real and imagined cellulite. Coming back into Zack’s life had ripped open old wounds, hurts that had never healed.

  Todd was gone, out of her life. She knew she could never love him, especially if she had to think of Zack during their lovemaking to get excited. He would have made a good father to the kids, but she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life with him. And it wasn’t fair to keep Todd dangling.

  She didn’t want to go back to Martha’s Vineyard. The place was beautiful. She loved the different seasons, the harshness of the winters tempered by the surrounding water … but it wasn’t for her. She missed the desert, missed the crisp mornings and warm sun in January, the fierce dry heat in summer. And most of all she missed Zack. She wanted to be a part of his life again. She only hoped Zack felt the same way.

  “Damn, men,” she said out loud.

  A woman in the next shower stall overheard her.

  “I know what you mean, honey. You can’t live with them and you can’t live without them,” she said. “But you know what a girl’s best friend is? Her vibrator. They don’t make you cook for ’em, pick up after ’em, do their dirty laundry, and listen to their hard day at the office routine after you’ve worked your ass off all day. And you know the best part? It gives you all the foreplay you want—and never prematurely ejaculates!”

  81

  Betty was buried in the municipal graveyard. I toyed with the idea of moving her to a private graveyard, but it didn’t seem right to disturb her. I wanted to make sure she had the best grave in the place so I had the interior decorator who was buying marble for my VIP suites send me a slab of the best rose marble money could buy in Italy. He tried to send me a freebie from our supplier and I said nuts to that, no comp crap. I wanted the best for her and only money exchanging hands could buy that.

  I went out to the grave the day Forbidden City opened its doors. Yeah, there were a million things still to do at the casino, half the goddamn toilets in the place were backing up—what kind of engineering nerd would connect one thousand toilets together electronically? —a whole bank of slot machines had a nervous breakdown during the trial tests and paid nothing but thousand-dollar jackpots, a fire in the buffet kitchen cooked the goose of a chef, you name it. If it walked or talked, it threatened to quit, or was so butt-dumb it didn’t know how to flush an electronic toilet. And if it was supposed to work mechanically, the ghost in the machine made sure it ran backward or not at all.

  But when the doors opened, I wanted to be with Betty. I never thought I’d be standing in a graveyard on the day my dream came alive. You just couldn’t plan everything in life. You had to live each day because you never knew if there was going to be a tomorrow.

  I had so many plans for Betty, so many things I wanted for her. I used to lie awake in bed at night
and think about the things I’d do for her. My favorite dream was to buy her a little greasy spoon to run so she could stand at the end of counter and drink coffee, smoke, and talk to the customers. But it didn’t work out that way because you can’t plan the way things turn out. There was always a surprise. Like the people who put their nickels and dimes away for their “golden years,” then found out one day they had the big “C” or met a drunk driver head on. You just couldn’t wait until tomorrow; you had to grab what you could today and hoped tomorrow took care of itself.

  “Hey, Betty, I did it. You would really be proud of me,” I said out loud.

  I wanted to share the day with her. “I only wish you could be here. I can just see you, walking into the casino like a queen, people calling you ‘Mrs. Riordan’ and kissing your feet with every step you take …”

  Betty was the real McCoy, nothing phony or pretentious about her. I hoped that bastard Kupka was on his back in that cold water on the other side of the dam, staring up at the bit of blue sky and not being able to move an inch to feel its warmth.

  I wished I could kill him again. Once was not enough.

  I said good-bye to Betty and headed back into town to tell someone else I loved—and lost—about the opening.

  A-Ma was otherworldly even in death. Her beauty was so rare, so unique, I often felt as if she was only a visitor to our world. Maybe she came from the world of Gesar of Ling, with its heroes and monsters. Or fell to earth from another planet, like Venus, where all the women were goddesses.

  I kissed her cold lips.

  “I wish I could breathe life into you,” I whispered.

  I wished she had loved life more.

  Rolling down the Strip in my Jag, I could see where all the action was. Forbidden City. A magic kingdom. And I was the king.

  A line of limos were dropping off people in front of the club, not ordinary people, but Hollywood people, a planeload of them, all dressed like it was Academy Awards night. Camera crews from three major networks were covering the opening, beaming the gala event around the world. The stars and cameras had a symbiotic relationship. The stars came for the big comps they pocketed. The cameras came because of the stars.

  Besides the Hollywood crowd, I made up a list that had to be filled opening day: last year’s Cy Young winner, who came from the Yankees; the heavyweight champ, fresh from another beef with the law for smacking his wife; and tennis and football notables as well as the court king of basketball. I didn’t care about the cost—I figured most of them would be stupid enough to drop what I paid them and more at the tables before they left.

  I wanted to play it cool, be Mr. Big Shot, act like opening the biggest casino in the world was just another turn of the cards for me, strut into the club with a cigar, surrounded by sycophants, cracking orders … instead I got a case of stage fright. I avoided the camera crews and celebrities out front and pulled up to the valet parking in back.

  When the parking attendant ran up to get my car, I almost hit the gas and drove off. Jesus, this was it. My knees were weak and my underarms perspired when I got out of the car. And I was all choked up.

  Tough guys don’t cry.

  Rather than enter through the back, I went back around front, but snuck in like the common folk as the lesbian star of a popular sitcom got out of a limo accompanied by her significant other.

  As I went across the moat to the main “gate,” the Red Dragon roller coaster rumbled overhead on the Great Wall, and I listened to the people shrieking and screaming as the serpent made a deep dive that took it under the club. Pirate junks plied the lake inside the gate. A pirate ran up to drag me aboard one of the vessels and hold me for “ransom,” and I shook him off.

  “Save that for the paying customers.”

  He didn’t know who I was. Neither did I.

  I had borrowed one of Walt Disney’s most significant innovations—motion. The “palace” courtyard was alive with life. Besides the bloodthirsty pirates, I had characters from Chinese history running around making people smile and laugh—not Mickey and Donald, but all twelve animals of the Chinese calendar: rat, ox, tiger, hare, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, fowl, dog, and pig.

  Overhead the Red Dragon roller coaster spit fire every few seconds as it roared around the Great Wall while another dragon, a fifty-foot Drunken Dragon, snaked through the crowd.

  But this was no Disneyland. Hell, it looked more like a scene from Guys and Dolls: Mingling with ma and pa from L.A. and Philly were gamblers and hookers, guys with Stetsons and guys with tuxes, women letting it all hang out of tank tops and short-shorts as well as sequined gowns.

  I moved through the casino in a daze. Forbidden City was a giant slot machine, all lit up, its reels spinning, lights flashing, bells ringing, money sliding in, pouring out the bottom.

  Christ, the place swarmed with people, big and small, short and tall, all the colors of the human rainbow. They gambled, they drank, they ate, they laughed at the Chinese pirates trying to drag them into junks, and lined up by the hundreds to get comps, greedily dropping the Forbidden City “souvenir” silver dollar into a dollar slot. What a bunch of suckers! Had they just put the dollar in their pocket and walked out, they would have made a profit, but when that dollar went into a slot, another hundred followed it—which was exactly the idea. Always give a sucker a break, was my motto, just enough rope to hang himself.

  Hot damn, but it wasn’t raining on my parade. They were all here, young and old, from Glendale to New York, thousands of them. The casino was pressed with people, shoulder to shoulder at the slots, elbow to elbow at the gaming tables, knee to knee in the lounges. Happy people, excited people. A captive audience. Like all the other casinos in town, there were no clocks, no windows—and no place in the gaming area to sit. Keep ’em on their feet, pulling out their dough. Don’t let them stop and think about what they’re losing. Keep the booze flowing and that narcotic song of money singing.

  I listened to the song of money as I floated through the casino in a daze, the same song that I heard when I was twelve years old and saw the Strip for the first time. This time it was playing for me, but it was the same music Bugsy Siegel must have thought he heard the day he drove down a black ribbon strip of highway and imagined a glittering casino rising from the sagebrush. The words to the song were the stickmen calling out the numbers at the dice tables; the one-armed bandits dropping silver; the dance of roulette balls; people screaming, laughing, shouting for joy, begging for divine intervention.

  Back in the sixties, when the government was financing dime-story psychology studies of the sex life of gnats and how long a cockroach’s dick is, one of those behaviorist rocket scientists figured out that if you played fast music in supermarkets, people would shop faster; with slower music, they’d take their time. The song of money was like that—it sent a subliminal message to people, manipulated them without their knowing. It was seductive, numbing, guaranteed to create a dream state and rob you of your senses—and your money. The more slot reels spun, the more sweaty hands dropped coins in, the louder the screams and shouts at the gaming tables for the throw of dice or the turning of a card, the more feverish people who could hear the song gambled. The law of physics in the gaming pit was simple: The more action in the area, the more hurried the tune sounded, the bigger the bets, the faster they went down.

  All those sounds of money in the casino weren’t accidental. If it didn’t come naturally, I’d have a team of Hollywood sound-effects editors pipe it in. Hustlers who used shills to sound excited about winning could have told those supermarket people a long time ago that the best way to part people from their hard-earned dough is to show someone else winning. That’s what the song of money was, the biggest shill in the world. It said, “Com’on down, you can be a winner, too!”

  I soaked it all in, rolled in it, swam in it, listened to the slot reels singing, cards shuffling, a chorus of yeahs!!! at a craps table. I felt my own blood thickening as the seductive tune crept in, felt the r
ush of adrenaline as it shot through my veins. On impulse, I shot over and stuck a quarter in a slot. The reels rolled and came up one at a time: bell, cherry, red dragon. No win. But two more red dragons showed on the no-win line. That wasn’t any accident. The slots were programmed to frequently show jackpot emblems on the no-win lines. Slots were prick teasers.

  The place was like New Year’s Eve in Times Square, the elephant parade when the circus came to town, Mardi Gras in New Orleans, the Kentucky Derby and Super Bowl. It was mine. I had created it. Every brick, every nail, every goddamn roll of toilet paper in the place.

  I got down on my hands and knees and kissed the floor. Some of the pit people recognized me and caught the scene. They whistled and cheered. Strangers patted me on the back—some of them worked for me.

  “Good going, Mr. Riordan.”

  “Terrific place, Lucky.”

  I don’t know where the hell the guy got my nickname, but unlike Siegel, who kicked some poor bastard in the ass for calling him Bugsy, I wasn’t that temperamental.

  I just kept trucking through the casino, out the back to the biggest little amusement park in the world. Lights were everywhere; overhead, in front of me, to each side, blue, red, green, white, so many, they all became a blur to me. Chinese firecrackers going off, a series of bangs, one after another, sending off smoke and the smell of sulfur. A fire-breathing dragon chasing screaming kids. Motion, life, action. Everything was a feast for the eyes. Walt Disney would have loved my vision.

  I felt as if I was back in Hawthorne, twelve years old, and at the carnival, the music of the merry-go-round spinning in my ears. Chant of the hustlers at the dime throw, guess-your-weight, knock-over the milk bottles. Yeah, sure, like Dizzy Dean could have pitched a ball just right to knock over those bottles. A Gypsy fortune teller giving me a dark look and gesturing for me to come to her tent. “What’d I tell you, lady, I wanted everything.”