by Adrian White
It was a strange time. Katie and Mike avoided the celebrations on the day of Charles and Diana’s royal wedding. They escaped in the Jag, up into the hills, as far away as possible from the madness of the street parties. It was hard to believe that in another part of the United Kingdom, men were deliberately starving themselves to death for the right to wear their own clothes in prison.
Towards the end of that day, Katie and Mike sat in the car, high in the Pennines above Manchester, and looked out over a reservoir. Katie was in the driver’s seat, Mike in the passenger’s.
“Mike?” asked Katie. “Why do you spend all your free time with me?”
Mike didn’t reply.
“What’s the point,” she asked, “when there’s nothing in it for you?”
Mike looked away, down to where the evening sun was reflected in the water of the reservoir.
“Because,” said Katie, “if you’re hoping that some day there might be, then I have to tell you – there won’t.”
“I know,” said Mike. “You’ve made that clear enough, often enough. I know nothing will ever happen between us.”
“Then why bother – where’s the return on your investment?”
“Can’t I just enjoy spending time with you?”
“Yes, if that’s all,” said Katie, “but I don’t think it is.”
“That’s a little presumptuous, isn’t it?” asked Mike.
Katie shrugged.
“It’s just what I see,” she said, “that’s all. The way you look at me sometimes.”
“Don’t you like me looking at you?” asked Mike.
“Yes, I do, but not if it’s going to lead to . . . complications. I don’t want us to fall out over it.”
“We won’t,” said Mike. “I promise you.”
“But you should be off with someone else,” said Katie, “someone who can give you what I can’t.”
“You mean sex?”
“I mean, someone who can be close to you in a way that I can’t.”
“I don’t want to be close to anyone else,” said Mike. “I’m in love with you.”
“Yes, I know,” said Katie, “and I love you – in my own way. It’d kill me if . . . if we had to be apart, but that’s just it – we can’t stay together because this thing will never go away.”
“It might, with time – ”
“No, Mike, it’ll never go away. I’ll never be close to anyone in that way – physically, I mean. And if you’re hoping that one day maybe, then eventually it’ll drive you crazy, and you’ll start to hate me.”
“And you can’t tell me why?” asked Mike.
“No,” said Katie.
They sat in silence for a while.
“I even love you partly because you never ask me why,” said Katie. “But I can’t tell you, and this will never change.”
Mike looked out over the water.
“That’s pretty final,” he said, after a minute or so.
“I’m sorry, Mike.”
“And if I’m good?” he asked. “If I promise not to hope – can we still be friends?”
“You know we can,” said Katie, “if that’s what you want.”
“Well,” he said, and smiled. “I’d better learn to give up hope.”
But of course it killed him and that was how, or why, over the next two years, Mike came up with the Vegas Plan.
By the time of their Finals, it was obvious that Katie was going to go into investment banking, in London though and not in Manchester. It was equally obvious that Mike wasn’t; he had nothing definite in the pipeline, only that he was going to move back to Belfast for a while. Katie knew Mike would land on his feet, whatever he chose to do, and she suspected there was more for him in Belfast than he was letting on about. That left Bruno alone in Manchester – another factor in Mike coming up with the Plan.
“I want the three of us to do Vegas,” he said. “One final trip together to really set us up for the future.”
Katie and Mike were in the White Horse. It was beginning to feel like the end of things. The buzz wasn’t the same on a Saturday night; the resident DJ was replaced by a succession of bands that provided a cover for more and more drug dealing, and this was destroying the pub. It was one thing to opt out of society, but the White Horse was no longer the happy place it used to be. In the past year, the mood had changed to match that of the country as a whole. It was impossible to believe that Thatcher’s war in the Falklands had resulted in her winning a landslide election; she’d be around for a few more years, and you could tell she was just itching to finish what she’d started. Well, it suited some people obviously, but it didn’t suit most of the customers in the White Horse.
“Mike,” said Katie, “when are you going to learn? You’re never going to win a fortune in Vegas. Besides, I don’t even have a passport.”
“Well, apply for one,” said Mike, “because we’re going – I have funding.”
“What do you mean – you have funding?” asked Katie.
“It’s not worth our while,” said Mike, “unless we have enough money to stick around for the really big hands; so I’ve found a partner to help bankroll the trip.”
“Who – and is Bruno going?”
“Yes,” said Mike, “Bruno’s going; he’s a major reason for doing this.”
“You mean to soften the blow that you won’t be around from now on?”
“And neither will you,” said Mike. “He’ll miss you too.”
“And you’re feeling guilty about leaving him,” said Katie.
“Aren’t you?”
“No, not at all. I’ll be happy never to see him again.”
“You don’t mean that,” said Mike.
“I certainly do,” said Katie. “And I think that secretly you’re relieved too, and that’s why you feel guilty. Who have you found to bankroll a trip to Vegas?”
“Remember the Chinese casino in town that we were thrown out of?”
“How could I forget?” asked Katie.
“Well, I went back to them and explained the card counting thing. They knew we were watching the cards but they didn’t understand the maths.”
“And now they do?”
“Yes,” said Mike, “and I’ve persuaded them to invest in this trip.”
“So whatever we win,” asked Katie, “we have to give right back to them?”
“They want a fifty percent return on their money.”
“Fifty percent! We’ll never do that; the best we ever made was about thirty.”
“But we’ve never had access to these kinds of funds before.”
“How much?”
“A hundred grand.”
“They’re giving you a hundred grand to gamble with in Las Vegas?” asked Katie. “And you have to come home with a hundred and fifty?”
“I’m not coming home,” said Mike, “at least not to Manchester. “But I do hope to pay them back, yes. I think they’d find me, even in Belfast.”
“But what security have you given them?”
“The magazine,” said Mike. “If they don’t get their hundred and fifty then I sign the magazine over to them. I could simply have sold my part of the magazine but it wasn’t enough and besides, I needed them to get the money into the country. You can’t just walk into the States with that kind of money on you.”
“So what, you meet a contact who hands you over the money?”
“And who keeps an eye on me while I’m in Vegas,” said Mike. “And of course, who I give the one-fifty back to when we’re done?”
“But what if you lose?” asked Katie. “Or, what if you don’t win that amount – ”
Katie stopped and did the maths in her head. She looked at Mike.
“You have more than the hundred grand from the Chinese,” she said. “You’ve sold the magazine anyway – Jesus Christ, Mike!”
“It’s a risk, I admit,” said Mike, “but it won’t be a problem so long as I get them their one-fifty back.”
“Mike,�
�� said Katie. “All this, just so you can prove some card-counting theory of Eugene’s might work?”
“We know it works; we’ve just never done it on this scale before. And you know that’s not why I’m doing it – okay, I’ll admit that’s part of the reason, but you know the real reason is Bruno.”
“But you don’t owe him anything,” said Katie. “He’s an adult – he has to learn to look after himself.”
“You know he won’t last two minutes once I’m gone from Manchester. He won’t keep his job now I’ve sold the magazine – he’s unemployable in a world of unemployment. I don’t owe you anything either, but I want to do this one last thing – the three of us together.”
“Well, count me out,” said Katie. “I’ve always known you were mad but this fucking takes it. You can’t earn that amount in the casinos and it’s not like it is here, you know – it won’t be baseball bats they come at you with.”
“Vegas isn’t like that any more,” said Mike. “It’s all big-business, huge corporations; they can’t afford to have their customers rough handled in public.”
“Exactly,” said Katie, “in public! They’ll take you to some back room and shoot you. You’re fucking crazy, Mike.”
“They can’t touch us,” said Mike. “What we’re doing isn’t illegal. And if there’s any trouble, we just walk – with our winnings, of course.”
“But don’t you think they’re wise to card counting over there too?” asked Katie. “And they have much better monitoring systems, hidden cameras – everything!”
“That’s why I need you and Bruno to help play the tables,” said Mike. You two can distract them before I step up with the big money.”
“No,” said Katie, “you can forget about me; I won’t do it.”
They sat in silence for a while, their own silence amidst the noise of the pub. Katie knew this was as much about her as it was about Bruno; it was Mike’s way of coping with it coming to an end. He’d spent four years trying to reach Katie and now he was accepting defeat. Well, if he couldn’t help her in that way, at least he could set her up with some money – he could always do that. She wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Mike intended splitting the money equally between Katie and Bruno.
“You don’t have to prove anything, Mike,” she said. “You’re right – you don’t owe me a thing. In fact, you’ve done more for me than I had any right to expect. But we both know – and Bruno knows – that we each have to make our own way from here.”
Katie knew that she and Bruno could quite easily lose it out there, alone in the world, and that Mike hoped somehow to be always there for them. But it was unrealistic to believe he could protect them forever.
“I’ll get some drinks,” said Katie, and went up to the bar. When she returned, Mike had placed two magazines on the table, one his own and the other a university medical periodical.
“What are these?” asked Katie.
“Would it help if I told you the casinos were only a part of what I have in mind?” said Mike.
Katie looked at the two magazines.
“What?” she asked.
“Here,” said Mike, and pointed to the university periodical. “This article on research being carried out at the University, funded by Halibro.”
“I’ve never heard of them.”
“I’m not surprised – they’re an American pharmaceutical firm.”
“From San Diego?” asked Katie. The article mentioned similar research into heart disease in San Diego. “What of them?”
“Well, the research doesn’t exist.”
“So, why the article?” asked Katie. “And why follow it up in your own magazine?” Mike’s piece – written by one of his staff – was presented as a scoop of investigative reporting. “Won’t the company simply deny it?”
“They already have,” said Mike.
“So what’s the point?”
“No point, unless someone starts investing large sums of money in Halibro, and then the more they deny it, the more people will think it’s true.”
“And their share price will rise – ”
“From a current low of just below two dollars per share,” said Mike.
“But nobody’s going to find these articles,” said Katie. “They’re too obscure for the American stock market to care about.”
“You know as well as I do that if there’s a large enough investment from somewhere then traders will find out why.”
“And this is what you intend to do with the hundred thousand, or two hundred thousand?” asked Katie.
“A bit of both, actually,” said Mike, and smiled. “I want to increase our stake money in the casinos, and then shock the stock market into reacting.”
“You’re mad!”
“I know, but it’s so much more fun than being sane.”
“Seriously, Mike. You’ll never trade again – or they could arrest you. What if the share price doesn’t rise?”
“It will,” said Mike, “you know it will. People are so greedy, and by then I’ll have sold my shares and left the country.”
“You’re mad,” said Katie again. “They’ll never let you back in the States.”
Mike shrugged.
“I was only born there,” he said. “I’ve no particular ties to the States, but my citizenship does allow me to own shares in their stock market.”
“Everything about you is crazy,” said Katie. “How can you be a citizen of three countries? It’s impossible!”
Mike smiled.
“It’s too good not to try, isn’t it?”
Katie smiled at the thought of what she was doing: driving a Lincoln Convertible from Phoenix to Las Vegas.
She’d come a long way. She wasn’t being entirely truthful when she told Mike when they’d first met that she’d never been out of Manchester, but she wasn’t going to mention her annual trip to Blackpool for fear he might understand it meant she’d once been in care. This though – this was something different, and it was a measure of how much she’d achieved since leaving care at the age of eighteen. Six years later and she had a first class degree in law, a job lined up for the end of the summer in London and – if this trip went according to Mike’s plan – she was about to become financially independent for the rest of her life.
The moment wasn’t entirely perfect. She wouldn’t have chosen to have Bruno as a passenger in the car, for example; it would have been nice to be with Mike or, even better, alone. And she wouldn’t necessarily have chosen this destination for her first trip to America, but then she wouldn’t have been here at all if it wasn’t for Mike, so here she was.
Las Vegas was the obvious destination for Mike, but it took him the four years of college before he got there. He was itching to try out Eugene’s card counting theory in Vegas, but couldn’t before he was twenty-one. It killed Mike to wait. He’d often been refused entry into casinos in Manchester – some had a door policy of twenty-one rather than eighteen, and Mike still looked very young to be out gambling. Unlike Katie, who was a couple of years older than most of their class, Mike was a year younger.
“Maybe that’s why they sometimes call blackjack twenty-one,” suggested Katie.
“Very funny,” said Mike. “It must be wonderful to be so mature and grown-up.”
Mike hadn’t been able to let go of the idea that the casinos could be beaten, that it was possible to take their money by using his brain. If any one thing had dominated his time in college then it was this idea, yet to be fair Mike hadn’t allowed it to take over his life. He too was about to graduate – not with the same scarily high marks as Katie, but it was a law degree all the same. Mike had too many wide-ranging interests and ideas for gambling to have become an obsession. Yet he knew, and Katie knew, that he’d never rest until he’d tried it in Vegas.
Well, thought Katie, Mike’s time had come. He was about to find out if it could be done.
The three of them – Katie, Mike and Bruno – flew together to Newark and spent a few
days in Atlantic City. The idea was to become accustomed to the gambling scene in the States; they made a little money, but viewed it as a holiday. From there they flew separately on internal flights – Katie and Bruno to Phoenix where they hired the car as a couple, and Mike to Vegas.
“From the moment we leave Newark,” said Mike, “the fewer connections they make between us, the better. You and Bruno check into the MGM Grand and I’ll see you at the tables.”
They’d chosen the MGM Grand because it was due to close down, or relocate, in a year or so, and Mike thought their surveillance systems might be less sophisticated than some of the newer hotels. Katie and Bruno were to play the tables and signal to Mike when the count was good; this way Mike didn’t waste time and money on playing losing hands. They were also to act as a distraction – Bruno was to make as much trouble as he could, playing the part of the unhappy loser, and Katie was to be Bruno’s long-suffering girlfriend. Katie and Bruno were to bet with only small amounts, so the priming of the tables would actually cost them relatively little – for all Bruno’s noise and complaints. Mike was to check in separately to a motel out by the airport in Vegas, and they were all to meet up there once they’d finished playing; there was no way Mike was hanging around the MGM Grand having taken so much of their money. Katie and Bruno were to act pissed at losing and check out early; they hoped that with over two thousand rooms in the hotel, nobody was likely to notice, let alone care.
That was the plan and that was how Katie came to be on the highway from Phoenix to Vegas. The sun was scorching her arms but it seemed crazy not to have the top down. She looked across at Bruno; his skin seemed to be fine, as though it suited the sun. He wore a simple black T-shirt and Katie had to admit he looked good – if only he wasn’t wearing a huge cowboy hat down over his face. Even this though seemed to make sense in the sun and she envied him his ease with the heat. She pulled the car over to the side of the highway and the sound of the gravel beneath the tyres disturbed Bruno. He pushed the hat up with a single finger and looked across at Katie.