by Mario Puzo
“I know all about you,” Gronevelt said. “You’re a countdown artist. You’re a good mechanic with a deck of cards. From the work you’ve done for me I know you’re smart. And I’ve had you checked out all the way down the line.”
Cully nodded and waited.
“You’re a gambler but not a degenerate gambler. In fact, you’re ahead of the game. But you know, all countdown artists eventually get barred from the casinos. The pit bosses here wanted to throw you out long ago. I stopped them. You know that.”
Cully just waited.
Gronevelt was staring him straight in the eye. “I’ve got you all taped except for one thing. That relationship you had with Jordan and the way you acted with him and that other kid. The girl I know you didn’t give a fuck about. So before we go any further explain that to me.”
Cully took his time and was very careful. “You know I’m a hustler,” he said. “ Jordan was a strange wacky kind of guy.
I had a hunch I could make a score with him. The kid and girl fell into the picture.”
Gronevelt said, “That kid, who the hell was he? That stunt he pulled with Cheech, that was dangerous.”
Cully shrugged. “Nice kid.”
Gronevelt said almost kindly, “You liked him. You really liked him and Jordan or you never would have stood with them against me.”
Suddenly Cully had a hunch. He was staring at the hundreds of volumes of books stacked around the room. “Yeah, I liked them. The Kid wrote a book, didn’t make much money. You can’t go through life never liking anybody. They were really sweet guys. There wasn’t a hustler bone in either of them. You could trust them. They’d never try to pull a fast one on you. I figured it would be a new experience for me.”
Gronevelt laughed. He appreciated the wit. And he was interested. Though few people knew it, Gronevelt was extremely well read. He treated it as a shameful vice. “What’s the Kid’s name?” He asked it offhand, but he was genuinely interested. “What’s the name of the book?”
“His name is John Merlyn,” Cully said. “I don’t know the book.”
Gronevelt said, “I never heard of him. Funny name.” He mused for a while, thinking it over. “That his real name?’
“Yeah,” Cully said.
There was a long silence as if Gronevelt were pondering something, and then he finally sighed and said to Cully, “Fm going to give you the break of your life. If you do your job the way I tell you to and if you keep your mouth shut, you’ll have a good chance of making some big money and being an executive in this hotel. I like you and I’ll gamble on you. But remember, if you fuck me, you’re in big trouble. I mean big trouble. Do you have a general idea of what Fm talking about?”
“I do,” Cully said. “It doesn’t scare me. You know I'm a hustler. But Fm smart enough to be straight when I have to.”
Gronevelt nodded. “The most important thing is a tight mouth.” And as he said this, his mind wandered back to the early evening he had spent with the show girl. A tight mouth. It seemed to be the only thing that helped him these days. For a moment he had the sense of weariness, a failing of his powers, that had seemed to come more often in the past year. But he knew that just by going down and walking through his casino he would be recharged. Like some mythic giant, he drew power from being planted on the life-giving earth of his casino floor, from all the people working for him, from all the people he knew, rich and famous and powerful who came to be whipped by his dice and cards, who scourged themselves at his green felt tables. But he had paused too long, and he saw Cully watching him intently, with curiosity and intelligence working. He was giving this new employee of his an edge.
“A tight mouth,” Gronevelt repeated. “And you have to give up all the cheap hustling, especially with broads. So what, they want presents? So what if they clip you for a hundred here, a thousand here? Remember then they are paid off. You are evened out. You never want to owe a woman anything. Anything. You always want to be evened out with broads. Unless you’re a pimp or a jerk. Remember that. Give them a Honeybee.”
“A hundred bucks?” Cully asked kiddingly. “Can’t it be fifty? I don’t own a casino.”
Gronevelt smiled a little. “Use your own judgment. But if she has anything at all going, make it a Honeybee.”
Cully nodded and waited. So far this was bullshit. Gronevelt had to get down to the real meat. And Gronevelt did.
“My biggest problem right now” Gronevelt said, “is beating taxes. You know you can only get rich in the dark. Some of the other hotel owners are skimming in the counting room with their partners. Jerks. Eventually the Feds will catch up with them. Somebody talks and they get a lot of heat. A lot of heat. The one thing I don’t like is heat. But skimming is where the real money is. And that is where you are going to help.”
“I’ll be working in the counting room?” Cully asked.
Gronevelt shook his head impatiently. “You’ll be dealing,” he said. “At least for a while. And if you work out, you’ll move up to be my personal assistant. That’s a promise. But you have to prove yourself to me. All the way. You get what I mean?”
“Sure,” Cully said. “Any risk?”
“Only from yourself,” Gronevelt said. And suddenly he was staring at Cully very quietly and intently and as if he were saying something without words that he wanted Cully to grasp. Cully looked him in the eye and Gronevelt’s face sagged a little with an expression of weariness and distaste, and suddenly Cully understood. If he didn’t prove himself, if he tucked up, he had a good chance of being buried in the desert. He knew that this distressed Gronevelt, and he felt a curious bond with the man. He wanted to reassure him.
“Don’t worry, Mr. Gronevelt,” he said. “I won’t fuck up. I appreciate what you’re doing for me. I won’t let you down.”
Gronevelt nodded his head slowly. His back was turned to Cully, and he was staring out the huge window to the desert and mountains beyond.
“Words don’t mean anything,” he said. “I’m counting on your being smart. Come up to see me tomorrow at noon and I’ll lay everything out. And one other thing.”
Cully made himself look attentive.
Gronevelt said harshly, “Get rid of that fucking jacket you and your buddies always wore. That Vegas Winner shit. You don’t know how that jacket irritated me when I saw you three guys walking through my casino wearing it. And that’s the first thing you can remind me of. Tell that fucking store owner not to order any more of those jackets.”
“OK,” Cully said.
“Let’s have another drink and then you can go,” Gronevelt said. “I have to check the casino in a little while.”
They had, another drink, and Cully was astonished when Gronevelt clicked their glasses together as if to celebrate their new relationship. It encouraged him to ask what had happened to Cheech.
Gronevelt shook his head sadly. “I might as well give you the facts of life in this town. You know Cheech is in the hospital. Officially he got hit by a car. He’ll recover, but you’ll never see him in Vegas again until we get a new deputy police chief.”
“I thought Cheech was connected,” Cully said. He sipped his drink. He was very alert. He wanted to know how things worked on Gronevelt’s level
“He’s connected very big back East,” Gronevelt said. “In fact, Cheech’s friends wanted me to help him get out of Vegas. I told them I had no choice.”
“I don’t get it,” Cully said. “You have more muscle than the sheriff.”
Gronevelt leaned back and drank slowly. As an older and wiser man he always found it pleasant to instruct the young. And even as he did so, he knew that Cully was flattering him, that Cully probably had all the answers. “Look,” he said, “we can always handle trouble with the federal government with our lawyers and the courts; we have judges and we have politicians. One way or another we can fix things with the governor or the gambling control commissions. The deputy police chief’s office runs the town the way we want it. I can pick up the phone and get
almost anybody run out of town. We are building an image of Vegas as an absolute safe place for gamblers. We can’t do that without the deputy police chief. Now to exercise that power he has to have it and we have to give it to him. We have to keep him happy. He also has to be a certain kind of very tough guy with certain values. He can’t let a hood like Cheech punch his nephew and get away with it. He has to break his legs. And we have to let him. I have to let him. Cheech has to let him. The people back in New York have to let him. A small price to pay.”
“The deputy police chief is that powerful?” Cully asked.
“Has to be,” Gronevelt said. “It’s the only way we can make this town work. And he’s a smart guy, a good politician. He’ll be chief for the next ten years.”
“Why just ten?” Cully asked.
Gronevelt smiled. “He’ll be too rich to work,” Gronevelt said. “And it’s a very tough job.”
After Cully left, Gronevelt prepared to go down to the casino floor. It was now nearly two in the morning. He made his special call to the building engineer to pump pure oxygen through the casino air-conditioning system to keep the gamblers from getting sleepy. He decided to change his shirt. For some reason it had become damp and sticky during his talk with Cully. And as he changed, he gave Cully some hard thought.
He thought he could read the man. Cully had believed that the incident with Jordan was a mark against him with Gronevelt. On the contrary, Gronevelt had been delighted when Cully stuck up for Jordan at the baccarat table. It proved that Cully was not just your run-of-the mill, one-shot hustler, that he wasn’t one of your fake, scroungy, crooked shafters. It proved that he was a hustler in his heart of hearts.
For Gronevelt had been a sincere hustler all his life. He knew that the true hustler could come back to the same mark and hustle him two, three, four, five, six times and still be regarded as a friend. The hustler who used up a mark in one shot was bogus, an amateur, a waster of his talent. And Gronevelt knew that the true hustler had to have his spark of humanity, his genuine feeling for his fellowman, even his pity of his fellowman. The true genius of a hustler was to love his mark sincerely. The true hustler had to be generous, compassionately helpful and a good friend. This was not a contradiction. All these virtues were essential to the hustler. They built up his almost rocklike credibility. And they were all to be used for the ultimate purpose. When as a true friend he stripped the mark of those treasures which he, the hustler, coveted or needed for his own life. And it wasn’t that simple. Sometimes it was for money. Sometimes it was to acquire the other man’s power or simply the leverage that the other man’s power generated. Of course, a hustler had to be cunning and ruthless, but he was nothing, he was transparent, he was a one-shot winner, unless he had a heart. Cully had a heart. He had shown that when he had stood by Jordan at the baccarat table and defied Gronevelt.
But now the puzzle for Gronevelt was: Did Cully act sincerely or cunningly? He sensed that Cully was very smart. In fact, so smart that Gronevelt knew be would not have to keep a check on Cully for a while. Cully would be absolutely faithful and honest for the next three years. He might cut a few tiny corners because he knew that such liberties would be a reward for doing his job well. But no more than that. Yes, for the next few years Cully would be his right-hand man on an operational level, Gronevelt thought. But after that he would have to keep a check on Cully no matter how hard Cully worked to show honesty and faithfulness and loyalty and even his true affection for his master. That would be the biggest trap. A true hustler, Cully would have to betray him when the time was ripe.
Book III
Chapter 11
Valerie’s father fixed it so that I didn’t lose my job. My time away was credited as vacation and sick time, so I even got paid for my month’s goofing off in Vegas. But when I went back, the Regular Army major, my boss, was a little pissed off. I didn’t worry about that. If you’re in the federal Civil Service of the United States of America and you are not ambitious and you don’t mind a little humiliation, your boss has no power.
I worked as a GS-6 administrative assistant to Army Reserve units. Since the units met only once a week for training, I was responsible for all administrative work of the three units assigned to me. It was a cinch racket job. I had a total of six hundred men to take care of, make out their payrolls, mimeograph their instruction manuals, all that crap. I had to check the administrative work of the units done by Reserve personnel. They made up morning reports for their meetings, cut promotion orders, prepared assignments. All this really wasn’t as much work as it sounded except when the units went off to summer training camp for two weeks. Then I was busy.
Ours was a friendly office. There was another civilian named Frank Alcore who was older than I and belonged to a Reserve unit he worked for as an administrator. Frank, with impeccable logic, talked me into going crooked. I worked alongside him for two years and never knew he was taking graft. I found out only after I came back from Vegas.
The Army Reserve of the United States was a great pork barrel. By just coming to a meeting for two hours a week you got a full day’s pay. An officer could pick up over twenty bucks. A top-ranking enlisted man with his longevity ten dollars. Plus pension rights. And during the two hours you just went to meetings of instruction or fell asleep at a film.
Most civilian administrators joined the Army Reserve. Except me. My magician hat divined the thousand-to-one-shot kicker. That there might be another war and the Reserve units would be the first guys called into the Regular Army.
Everybody thought I was crazy. Frank Alcore begged me to join. I had been a private in WW II for three years, but he told me he could get me appointed sergeant major based on my civilian experience as an Army unit administrator. It was a ball, doing your patriotic duty, earning double pay. But I hated the idea of taking orders again even if it was for two hours a week and two weeks in the summer. As a working stiff I had to follow my superior’s instructions. But there’s a big difference between orders and instructions.
Every time I read newspaper reports about our country’s well-trained Reserve force I shook my head. Over a million men just fucking off. I wondered why they didn’t abolish the whole thing. But a lot of small towns depended on Army Reserve payrolls to make their economies go. A lot of politicians in the state legislatures and Congress were very high-ranking Reserve officers and made a nice bundle.
And then something happened that changed my whole life. Changed it only for a short time but changed it for the better both economically and psychologically. I became a crook. Courtesy of the military structure of the United States.
Shortly after I came back from Vegas the young men in America became aware that enlisting in the newly legislated six months’ active duty program would net them a profit of eighteen months’ freedom. A young man eligible for the draft simply enlisted in the Army Reserve program and did six months’ Regular Army time in the States. After that he did five and a half years in the Army Reserve. Which meant going to one two-hour meeting a week and one two-week summer camp active duty. If he waited and got drafted, he’d serve two full years, and maybe in Korea.
But there were only so many openings in the Army Reserve. A hundred kids applied for each vacancy, and Washington had a quota system put into effect. The units I handled received a quota of thirty a month, first come, first served.
Finally I had a list of almost a thousand names. I controlled the list administratively, and I played it square. My bosses, the Regular Army major adviser and a Reserve lieutenant colonel commanding the units, had the official authority. Sometimes they slipped some favorite to the top. When they told me to do that, I never protested. What did I give a shit? I was working on my book. The time I put into the job was just to get a paycheck.
Things started getting tighter. More and more young men were getting drafted. Cuba and Vietnam were far off in the horizon. About this time I noticed something fishy going on. And it had to be very fishy for me to notice because I had absolut
ely no interest in my job or its surroundings.
Frank Alcore was older and married with a couple of kids. We had the same Civil Service grade, we operated on our own, he had his units and I had mine. We both made the same amount of money, about a hundred bucks a week. But he belonged to his Army Reserve unit as a master sergeant and earned another extra grand a year. Yet he was driving to work in a new Buick and parking it in a nearby garage which cost three bucks a day. He was betting all the ball games, football, basketball and baseball, and I knew how much that cost. I wondered where the hell he was getting the dough. I kidded him and he winked and told me he could really pick them. He was killing his bookmaker. Well, that was my racket, he was on my ground-and I knew he was full of shit. Then one day he took me to lunch in a good Italian joint on Ninth Avenue and showed his hole card.
Over coffee, he asked, “Merlyn, how many guys do you enlist a month for your units? What quota do you get from Washington?”
“Last month thirty,” I said. “It goes from twenty-five to forty depending how many guys we lose.”
“Those enlistment spots are worth money,” Frank said. “You can make a nice bundle.”
I didn’t answer. He went on. “Just let me use five of your spaces a month,” he said. “I’ll give you a hundred bucks a spot”
I wasn’t tempted. Five hundred bucks a month was a hundred percent income jump for me. But I just shook my head and told him to forget it. I had that much ego. I had never done anything dishonest in my adult life. It was beneath me to become a common bribe taker. After all, I was an artist. A great novelist waiting to be famous. To be dishonest was to be a villain. I would have muddied my narcissistic image of myself. It didn’t matter that my wife and children lived on the edge of poverty. It didn’t matter that I had to take an extra job at night to make ends meet. I was a hero born. Though the idea of kids paying to get into the Army tickled me.