No House Limit

by Steve Fisher

  “Just looking,” Mai said.

  Bello had reached the table now and was offered a stool to sit on—a standard concession to big-time players, but he disdained it, and his girl with the angel-waif face took it instead. Bello scanned the faces on the house side of the table—stickman, moneyman, pit boss, croupier and two security agents. He was waiting for the offer to lift the house limits on bets. At last he said:

  “Is Joe Martin here?”

  “I’ll get him, sir.”

  But Joe was already on his way over. He had deliberately waited a beat. On the house side of the table now, his eyes met Bellos.

  “Something I can do for you?”

  Bello scowled, he didn’t like it. Joe knew damned well what it was he wanted, but he was going to make him ask. “What is the house limit on a single bet?”

  “Two hundred,” Joe said.

  Bello shrugged genially. “Can it be raised?”

  “Why?” Joe asked, as if he didn’t know the man, “you somebody special?”

  “No, nobody special,” Bello murmured. And now Joe felt the crowd’s resentment toward him, but he went on coldly:

  “If two hundred a shot isn’t enough, why don’t you go somewhere else?”

  “You afraid of real action, Mr. Martin?”

  “There’s no action in the world I’m afraid of!”

  “Then why be a piker?”

  “You want my money,” Joe said, “all right. You take it the hard way—just like anybody else.”

  Bello’s face was slowly draining of color. He made a slight movement as if to turn and stalk out; and if that happened Joe knew the name “piker” would stick to him forever, probably destroy the casino in time. But, if Bello was being paid to stage a siege, he couldn’t afford to leave. He would have to stay and accept Joe’s terms no matter what they were.

  Bello remained. The table had gone silent, the dice had stopped.

  “What’s the matter here?” Joe snapped. “Get going. Who’s the next shooter?”

  “I’m the next shooter,” Bello said.

  Joe’s eyes flashed. “That’s all I wanted to know. You’re staying, after all?”

  “Yes, I’m staying.”

  Joe nodded. “My apologies, Mr. Bello. Yes, I know who you are. And the limit is off to you, of course. You play it your way.”

  Bello didn’t ask what the initial delay had been; he knew.

  Professional gamblers have their own unbreakable rules, and Joe had no choice but to lift the limit for Bello. It was a matter of courtesy, just as accepting his I.O.U.’s would be. To violate this practice could have earned him a world-wide reputation as a skinflint who runs a hall strictly for small-time suckers.

  Dice were pushed to Bello. He selected two of the several offered. The others were drawn back by the stick-man, and now the chant started. “The dice are coming out. Brand-new shooter. All bets down. Who wants insurance against any craps? Get the odds on eleven!”

  The crowd of onlookers around the table was now three or four deep. But there were no new bets on Bello’s first roll. Joe watched closely as he exchanged an I.O.U. for the special yellow, white and blue chips. He placed two white ones—two thousand dollars’ worth—on the no come line, then threw the dice against the far backboard of the table.

  “Three craps—loser!”

  But Bello hadn’t lost, not on the no come line; he’d bet against himself on the first roll—a precaution against the possibility he had been given fixed dice. Now he reversed his bet, pushing the two white chips, plus the two he had won, over to the come line, and rolled again.

  “Seven, winner! Pay the front line!”

  Bello’s two one-thousand dollar chips had grown to eight, and he left them all on the come line. Others around the table were plunging money in now, most of them following his action. Joe tried to watch all this without emotion; but couldn’t. Even now, when it was just beginning, each roll of the dice was dramatic.

  Bello’s third roll was:

  “Five, five a number.”

  The famed gambler showed no expression, but did not seem displeased. He took time out and carefully made place bets of one thousand dollars each on even number from four to ten except seven. If the five was a long time in appearing, he’d reap a harvest on any of these numbers that turned up outside of seven.

  Neither a five nor a seven showed for the next twelve rolls, and Joe began to worry. The whole room was in an uproar now; people tried to fight their way in close to the main table. In the first twenty-five minutes, Bello was already burrowing into the till. The twenty-year old girl seated on the stool next to him yawned, stretched her pretty arms. No one crowded in too close to her. The rumor was that if a man even looked at her, Bello had people planted around who’d take care of him.

  “Five—five the winner! Same lucky shooter coming out again!”

  “Place bets off on the come-out,” Bello said. The eight one-thousand dollar chips he had on the come line had grown to sixteen and he now removed all but two of them. He rolled again.

  “Six—six a number!”

  Joe watched, waiting for the first reverse to hit Bello. And he knew that no matter what happened, he’d be glued here from now on. The war had begun. Bello was fresh, fit. Joe hadn’t slept more than four hours the night before. But as long as Bello stood here, so would he. It was a compulsion.

  “Eight . . . eight, the number is six. Get your field bets down. Nine. Nine, the point is six . . . ”

  Seven

  In a Las Vegas casino, the wheels never stop, the dice never rest. There are no windows in the vast, low-ceilinged room to inadvertently reveal whether it is daylight or nighttime, no telltale clocks on the walls to point out an hour. So it is never day or night or any particular hour or time. The action is incessant. In the gambling pit there is nowhere to rest—no place to sit except at a blackjack or roulette table. If you venture outside, there are no diversions other than on summer days when you can swim. But at night, except to see a floor show, there are only three things to do—as all of the comedians and M.C.’s playing here tell you: two of them are gambling and drinking.

  It was going on 5 a.m. and Mai was seated at a table near the buffet counter with Kiki and one of the other showgirls—Georgette. They had found her at the bar, very drunk and crying bitterly. A tiny redhead, one of the two ponies in the chorus line, she had a sweet healthy face with just a trace of freckles that had influenced him to think of her as the clean-cut all-American ingénue. But a little while ago, at the bar, she had gone to pieces: into a complete, hysterical frenzy. Kiki and Mai had managed to get her over here for coffee and food before the scene became violent enough to cause serious attention.

  Georgette wouldn’t touch her food, but sipped at black coffee; and Mai, as he munched a turkey and cheese sandwich, looked over at the pit. The large crowd had thinned considerably, but there was heavy action at three of the crap tables, and the last word was that Bello was a hundred thousand dollars ahead of the house. Mai half listened to what was going on a few feet away in the pit:

  “Coming out, do or don’t come . . . Eight, easy eight. Eight a point . . . Four, eight a number.” (“Strip the board, a thousand on each.”) “Six, hard way, six. Eight a number.” (“Hard eight. Four and four, shooter!”) “. . . Five, eight a point. Two, snake eyes. Fay the field. Eight a number . . . Twelve. Pay that fertile field again. Eight a point . . . ”

  Georgette pushed the coffee away. “I’ve had it,” she said, “had it, had it, had it, all the way up to here! I’m leaving on the first bus East without even giving notice! I’m through with Las Vegas, and all the phony-baloney jerks that go with it—and I just thank God I caught myself in time! Oh, what a beautiful bitch I was growing to be. Know where I’m headed? To Omaha. Dull, insipid, respectable and decent Omaha, the city of squares; I’m going to stay there for a month with my folks, sleeping in the clean virgin bed I slept in when I was a sophomore in high school; then I’m going back to the airlines
where I started in the first place and where I belong. A nice blue uniform, and good pay, and respect. Goodbye to Las Vegas for this redhead; goodbye and good riddance—to the dirtiest town on the face of the earth! Or maybe I’m just not tough enough. Though I almost was. Tonight I was almost tough enough for Las Vegas.”

  “I wish I knew what the hell you are talking about,” Mai said.

  “Listen, Mai,” Georgette answered, being in a particularly revealing mood, “every woman born is a bitch to one degree or another; if they think they can get away with it, they’ll do everything a man will, and probably a lot more; they’re more insatiable, more corrupt and have far less conscience than men. They’re more human than men. Actually, they have a secret contempt for most men—who are bungling, or think they’re Big Deals, or are just plain stupid. When they go to bed with these oxen they take an objective, impersonal, clinical view of his animal satisfaction, but it’s ten to one they haven’t been satisfied. Because with women nothing beats love, and loving for love. If it isn’t love it’s no good. Never, no matter how good or how great it is, it isn’t really any good unless it’s love. But where is love—I mean love—any more in this world?”

  “Must be some place,” Mai said; but he honestly didn’t know where. He had believed in love for a long time but had never found it the way he had dreamed it. Now at thirty-six he had given up. Infatuation and great emotion existed, but a lasting love—no.

  “Georgette, what’s really eating you?” Kiki asked.

  Georgette was drunk enough to level with her. “For years, ever since I started working, I’ve sent money home to my folks once a week. They’ve grown to depend on it—for bills, for everyday living. Well, lately, in fact for a couple of months now, I’ve been gambling. I haven’t sent anything home. Then tonight a guy offered me five hundred dollars if I’d show up at his room at a quarter after three.”

  “The General?”

  Georgette nodded, her face breaking a little now. “It sounded so easy—so quick and easy. So quick and painless, and all I’d have to do afterward was blot it out of my mind. Five hundred dollars for something I sometimes do here and there for nothing. ‘Baby,’ I said to myself, ‘wake up—it’s just this once, and your folks’ll be squared away again.’ I suppose that isn’t a very sad story as whore stories go, but anyway, I showed up, trembling like a fool, and so scared and ashamed I was going to run away, when all of a sudden the door opened. I hadn’t even rung the bell, but he’d been waiting and saw me from the window. And the awful thing is, before I could say a word, he was pressing a bill into my hand and talking to me in a low voice, saying he just wanted to see if I’d show up.”

  Kiki asked: “You mean that’s all there was to it?” She was skeptical.

  Georgette took a bill from her purse, a fifty, and tossed it on the table; then began to cry again.

  “It’s more degrading than if I had gone inside. Don’t you understand? He wanted the mental satisfaction of making a prostitute out of me. Me—the tomboy from Omaha who played sand-lot baseball until she was sixteen. Straight as a die, that girl; clean as soap, sweet as candy—if you even say ‘Boo’ to her she blushes.”

  “That son-of-a-bitch of a General,” Mai said.

  “I’m glad,” Georgette told him. “Now I know how low it’s possible to be, and I’ll never get down that low again. I’m leaving forever. Nothing can stop me. My love games from here on will be strictly platonic, and for much bigger stakes. You meet more millionaires in airplanes than you do in Las Vegas, and nicer ones. And remember this as long as you live—I don’t care who says otherwise, you can’t beat decency. You can’t beat being clean.”

  That’s right, Mai thought; please, God, grant us a favor: put us all back in high school, and let us start again—clean; we who were so wise then and are so weary now.

  The cocktail waitress appeared at the table and Georgette said: “Give me a triple C and C.” When the girl was gone, she looked up, brushing at her tears. “I don’t know what I’m crying about.”

  “I do,” Mai said. “You’re proving that what you said is wrong—women really are better than men. You’re the living example.”

  She gazed at him and wanted to burst into tears all over again because he had said that. “What a great guy! What a great guy you are, Mai.”

  The waitress returned with a triple Canadian Club mixed with soda, and Mai ordered drinks for himself and Kiki, and when they too were delivered, the three of them didn’t say much. Georgette was relaxed now, and the drink was relaxing her even more. Mai said that sometime when he was flying to New York he hoped he would discover that she was the hostess; but she told him she’d probably be working for Pan Am on the L.A.-to-Honolulu hop. She was getting sleepy. Mai glanced over at Kiki.

  “Better take her to her room.”

  Kiki nodded. “Want me to come back?”

  “The mood I’m in?” He indicated Georgette. “And after all this?”

  Kiki looked uneasy. It was to her credit, he thought, that she hadn’t told Georgette the General had also pro-positioned her. But she probably would later, when Georgette was too knocked out to give a damn. Kiki helped the little redhead to her feet.

  “See you tomorrow, Mai.”

  Mai said; “Good luck, Georgette,” and started over to the bar.

  Eight

  The security watch in any big gambling pit is airtight. In addition to regular uniformed casino police, and teams of deputy sheriffs from the county who constantly come and go, there are top-level guards in plainclothes who are so inconspicuous that even the other employees have difficulty identifying them. Yet they are always on hand, eagle-eyed, efficient. Their principal function is to protect the place from armed robbery and they are trained to sense such trouble before it can start. But the subsidiary chores are what keep them busy: spotting known criminals, grifters, con men, card sharps, cold dice men, counterfeiters and even stray prostitutes and seeing to it that the casino police roust them out. Or, if the case warrants it, they turn the offender over to the sheriff, who forcibly escorts him out of town. Each big gambling establishment employs at least twelve of these well-paid undercover men who work in shifts. Some are former city police detectives; several are ex-agents of the F.B.I.

  Sprig had taken over Joe’s private office for the duration of the siege, and now at 5:20 a.m. was still on the telephone trying to get more help. He had managed to double the usual security watch, but was a long ways from keeping his promise of tripling it. He’d stay at the job, though; from now on he’d be on constant duty until the tension eased, no matter how many days or nights it might take.

  The trouble was, he couldn’t get the ace people he knew from the other casinos. Joe was an individualist. Years ago when he’d first come to this town after achieving a reputation as the top G.I. gambler of the Armed Forces, he’d consistently backed away from offers of the syndicate to protect him. “Pay seven percent,” he’d said, “for what? I’ll protect myself.”

  At the beginning, when he was operating a small-time joint on the edge of town, the syndicate itself had tried to break Joe. Six casino owners came in and bucked heads with him over a dice table for five days and nights. Sprig had only worked for Joe a few days at the time, but he’d seen the whole thing. Joe didn’t break easy, and that time didn’t break at all. The six men left the place with five-days’ growth of beard and minus enough money for Joe to start work on his own Strip casino where from then on he’d really bucked heads with them for every customer that rolled into town.

  They could have killed him. But the syndicate was not made up of hoodlums. They were businessmen who had long ago voted that there would be no gangster-style violence in this town. Anyway, publicity of that nature would frighten people into staying home. This combine of men, moreover, was determined to keep hoodlums out. And Joe wasn’t a hoodlum. He qualified as a gambler. No side lines or rackets. So they’d taken the beating he gave them and walked quietly away.

  “All right, a
ll right,” Sprig was saying on the phone, “so you can’t do it. That’s all I wanted to know.”

  He hung up and referred to a list of names in front of him. The door opened and two uniformed casino policemen escorted in a pudgy, frightened man who was wearing horn-rimmed glasses. Clarence Henry followed them. He walked over to Sprig and dropped a handful of ten dollar chips on the desk.

  Sprig picked one up. “The phonies?”

  Clarence Henry indicated the pudgy man. “He was pushing them.”

  “Pushing what?” the customer wailed.

  Sprig stood up, dwarfing the man in the glasses, and looking lean, his back like a ramrod. “Phony chips,” he said.

  “I got them right there at the table!”

  “Oh, sure,” said Sprig.

  “But I did, I tell you! That big guy in the green apron—the one with the little mustache. He gave them to me for a hundred dollar bill.”

  Sprig’s eyes met those of the floor manager, and Clarence Henry quickly left the room. It was possible the little man was telling the truth.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Todd. Dwight Todd. I’m from Salt Lake City, just came down for the weekend. I’m in the realty business.”

  “You come here often, Mr. Todd?”

  “Yes, sir. Why, I have a credit card.”

  “It’s possible there’s been some mistake.”

  “The chips looked all right to me.”

  “You mind being seated for a moment, sir?”

  Dwight Todd sat down nervously, and Sprig nodded dismissal to the casino police. They were walking out the door when Clarence Henry returned. A six-foot mustached croupier was with him, carrying his apron in his hand.

  “He was just going off duty,” Clarence Henry explained. Sprig looked right through the employee. “Carpenter. Ed Carpenter. That right?”

  Carpenter nodded.

  “Mr. Todd, you may go,” Sprig said.

  The pudgy customer jumped to his feet and hurried out. Sprig kept staring at Carpenter now without saying another word. His eyes slowly melted him. The croupier began to fidget. Silence. A minute passed and Carpenter was shaking. The guilt was oozing out of him in great blobs of sweat. Sprig at last came around from behind the desk.