The men who came here looking were, I understood, looking for my father’s rainy-day stash, his get-out-of-town stash, his leave-the-furniture-behind-in-Vegas and get-going-quick stash, his portable version of Benny’s half-million-dollar Zurich bank account, the one Nate Stein had found out about in 1947 when Meyer Lansky sent him to the Flamingo to sniff around the losses, the bank account being Siegel’s final nail-in-the-coffin. To take a little from the skim was the norm. To take too much was a death knell. Nate, like Lansky before him, needed this money returned because with its return, the big boys regained what was more important to them than the actual cash—their authority and control—without which every casino in Vegas would be stolen blind. Like the Flamingo had been, opening night. Like the Flamingo had been earlier this year, when two armed men had robbed the counting room, and within a month both men were hunted down and shot dead by Jimmy Fratianno in Hollywood.
My father, nose to the ground, nervous as the racehorses he once bet on, must have picked up the scent, early, somehow, about tonight’s slaughter, and had run off to hide. Siegel. Cornero. Bioff. Berman. Greenbaum. Silver. My father clearly thought he could outsmart, out-survive them all. Because my father always believed in near escapes and miraculous transformations and second chances, always had faith that a bet would pay off, a horse would come in, his luck would turn. Magic Ike.
No winning horse this time. This one was going to be shot if I couldn’t fix this. Shot if he was lucky. If he wasn’t, he would die slowly, painfully, after which his body, or pieces of it, would be ferried out past Paradise Palms to a stretch of the Paradise Valley desert with mesquite scrabbling for life, put into ground just deep enough for a sandy covering.
This one was a bridge-jumper.
I climbed down the closet ladder and sat on the edge of my father’s mattress. Forlorn without a headboard, it floated aimlessly in the center of the room as if it didn’t matter at all where it was positioned, like that rubber raft lying askew in echo outside by the pool. I could hear the night insects, their chatter spiky and indecipherable, the low groan of the pool pump as caution. Think. Where would my father have stashed the skim. He wouldn’t have had time to come by here to get it. By the time he heard about Gus, he would have known men would be watching him, watching the house. My father was too smart. He hadn’t swum this long amongst these men without being smart. The pump throbbed. And then it came to me, stupid as my mother.
I went back to the living room, opened the sliding glass door and stepped outside, looked around. Concrete. Everywhere. A concrete-block fence enclosed the entire backyard. No grass. Just concrete. The concrete around the pool itself was all shadow, but the round lights set into the walls of the pool itself—like the camera portholes of Esther Williams’s Lot One saucer tank—glowed a gentle sickish yellow. One of them was out. An oddity. My father took care of this pool the way he took care of his Cadillac or my Ambassador, always waxed, always polished. The Silvers had to look sharp.
I knelt down, took off my shoes, and slid down into the pool, the water making quick work of saturating my dress and turning the skirt of it into a weight that held me back. But still I made the long, slow walk against it toward that broken light, my legs pushing forward through the heavy water. The water pushed back at me. But I got there, eventually, to the light. With my fingertips I grasped the aluminum frame around the glass cover and pulled. Stuck tight. I twisted. Pulled again. The frame and the glass bowl within it came suddenly and easily away from the pool wall, along with a tangle of wires all taped up blue and red. One wire was loose. I lowered my body, nose level to the water, until I could put my eye to the interior recess. A dark huddle of clear plastic bags. I reached in a hand and tugged at the first one, cautiously, as if it were a joke somehow and coiled fabric snakes might jump out at me. Nothing jumped out. No electric shock. The bag floated out, gently, the other eight of them following their leader like a school of obedient aquatic students. I peered at their translucent bodies as they floated by me. Each bag held stacks of bills, each stack bound with a paper band stamped “$10,000,” each group of stacks wrapped tightly in a plastic sheath of its own inside the outer bag. Which my father must have pumped full of air. Because the bags continued to float.
I’d been in casinos and credit cages and counting rooms, so stacks of hundreds had lost the ability to astonish me, but these stacks, packed here so tidily, did more than astonish me. They terrified me. There was easily a hundred thousand dollars in each bag. Maybe more. This had to be a couple of years’ worth of serious skim, from the Flamingo and from the Riv. Or maybe it was all from the Riv, all since my overdose, too much in way too short a time not to be noticed. Maybe my father and Gus Greenbaum had lost their minds in there together, dipping deep, too deeply, into the Riviera’s green swift-flowing river of cash, deeper, much deeper, than Lansky and company wrote off as the cost of doing business. Just look at the price Gus Greenbaum had paid for his green hands.
What price would my father pay for his. A similar one, certainly. Because nobody was allowed to steal from Nate Stein’s casinos and get away with it. Nobody. Not even Baby E’s daddy. House rules.
I looked at the light cover, dangling beneath the water now but kept from hitting bottom by the limits of the wires fastened to it.
What if.
I looked around the pool. Eight lights.
I had to know.
I slugged my way over to the next pool light, yanked on the cover with my glowing hands, looked inside the recess past the wires. Bags.
Of course.
There were bags behind every light in the pool.
It took me only a short while to pry off all the covers, which then hung like tentacled octopi down the pool walls. I stood there a long time in the water, very cold, breathless, my back against the cement wall of the shallow end, watching as the scores of bags bobbed and turned, stupid, oblivious, on the surface of the blue-black water.
56
I rolled slowly across the Desert Inn parking lot at the side of the hotel, sending my Ambassador stuffed with my father’s stolen booty past all the white lines marking parking spaces for all the guests the DI hosted and all the guests the DI one day dreamed of hosting, certain the appeal of Las Vegas would only grow greater and greater, stratospheric. And who’s to say Nate and the rest of the big boys weren’t correct in their assumptions? More guests. More money. Into infinity. When I arrived at the lot’s most deserted section, the farthest corner of it, I parked by the low concrete-block wall that separated civilization from the undeveloped valley. From this vantage point, I could see nothing of the Strip. It was still dark, but in another couple of hours it would be dawn, and my father would be exposed, caught, made visible by the rising winter sun. Whatever could be settled needed to be settled tonight. Whatever strings still bound Nate to me needed to be tugged on tonight.
Happy birthday. Where’s your daddy?
Why had Nate ordered that big cake for me on exactly the evening he was hunting down my father? To distract and disarm me? Because even as he had wished me a happy birthday, even as he bid the candles be lit up on my cake, he knew his note in all its dark unpleasantness was waiting for me in my dressing room, and he knew I wouldn’t be happy for long.
My father. To know him, to know the full dimensions of his folly, could not erase my love for him. Nate had once told me my father reminded him of his own, which was not a compliment, each man being a bit of a talker, a flashy dresser, good-looking, full of swagger but not in possession of that many smarts, ultimately small-time. I had protested, but Nate had held up his hand. No arguing. My father was small-time. Always and forever. And the paper doll of my father turned and twisted in my mind’s eye, not that his image hadn’t already been diminished by our years together in Vegas, by his demotions from floor man to box man to credit cage and then his slow, creepingly slow, rehabilitation back to the counting room, courtesy of me. How much mercy would Nate be likely to grant his father’s doppelgänger?
I stayed in my car, motor on, so I could run the heater against the December cold, the radio playing holiday tunes.
Remember Christ our Savior
Was born on Christmas day
To save us all from Satan’s power
When we were gone astray
December. Christmas. Where would my father and I find ourselves in twenty-two days?
The song ended, and shortly thereafter, I saw in my rearview mirror Nate’s Cadillac making a dark crawl across the lot toward me, and I panicked, suddenly, wondering if I had done the right thing in calling him. Too late now. But who else could help me untangle the nightmare my father had gotten himself into? No one. Well, maybe it was a good thing my father hadn’t been able to get to these plastic bags, maybe I could still fix everything.
Nate pulled up in the parking space beside me as if we needed to be slotted in an orderly fashion here at the end of the world. I almost laughed. But wasn’t that exactly what was happening here, the orderly process of exchange and restoration? Nate rolled down his passenger-side window. He was hatless, the wind now blowing through his car and tugging at his dark overcoat and his thatch of wild hair. Dark meadow. He gestured. I didn’t move. So he got out of his car and walked around to my window, motioned for me to lower it while he looked first into the backseat, then over me to the passenger side of the front seat, as if he might have missed what he wanted to see at first glance. My father.
Well, I was bringing him my daddy, or the part of my daddy Nate and the big boys wanted. And in exchange, I wanted the part they didn’t care about. The actual man.
“E?” He raised his gloved hands in question. Impatiently.
No more birthday wishes. This was business.
I got out then in my heels and my cape coat, my short hair blowing around me, blond gossamer, what was left of my kleine kinder hair, now, over the past year, slowly growing in. I walked around to the back of my car. How could it be getting colder as we edged toward sunrise? Maybe it was going to snow. The hem of my cape flew up around me, the petals of a day lily closing up to wilt, wool cloth slapping at my chin, hitting the back of my head. Nate looked at the crazy spectacle of me and smiled. Thank God. For a minute, we stood there looking at each other, wind whipping debris across the lot, across our bodies, twigs, sand, dust, the two of us alone here together. We two had not been alone together for some time. He took a step closer, used two hands to batten down my cape. I could smell the wool fibers of his winter coat, the leather of his gloves, the scent of his skin. He bent his head toward me just a moment, then pulled back. A kiss, rethought?
He released me and stepped back, and I took my keys and opened the trunk, then the brown leather suitcase, my father’s suitcase, into which I had dumped the bags holding the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars, the deep trough of the trunk illuminated by the stars, the moon, the Milky Way, the white bald light of the parking lot lamps.
Nate looked down, unsurprised, at the stacks of cash wrapped in plastic. “Why is it wet?” So, apparently, something about this had the ability to surprise him.
I made a gesture, Who knows?
“Is this all of it?”
“Yes.” And then I decided to qualify my answer, just in case. “I think so.”
Nate looked up at the black sky. “So where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
Nate looked down and studied my face as if he could read every calculation that crossed it, and who’s to say he couldn’t after all his years in the casino pits reading the faces of every gambler and cheat, deciding who got an additional line of credit, a thumbs-up, and who was cut off, a thumbs-down, who got another drink and who was thrown out of the casino on his ear. He read my face and then his own face relaxed.
“You know your father’s finished in Vegas.”
“I know.”
“He has to leave.”
I nodded.
“Tonight.”
Yes. So the strings that bound us, whatever was left of them, were worth a travel pass. For immediate use.
He sighed. “All right. Well, give me a hand with this.”
And so Nate and I ferried the plastic bags from the heavy leather suitcase in my trunk to his trunk, and I noticed not for the first time the flinty gold monogram stamped between the handle and the latches, IS—my God, he had taken the trouble to have that done—and I felt as if I were digging down into my father’s grave to exhume him, where I would find him somewhat diminished but still alive, possibly furious, but, hopefully, grateful. Thank you, thank you, E.
Because the question now, of course, was had I saved him and his monogrammed valise for a life he could stand to live?
For this life must now be played out in some other city and in some other world, the world of civilians, not the world my father knew, not at all, but the world of humble office workers and shopkeepers, my grandfather’s world, the world he and my mother had always thought too dull to ever want to join. My mother had operated in a world of backlots and soundstages, dreams and pretend, and my father’s world, the one I had to operate within, the one my father had brought me to, was a world of greed, violence, and death. And so the upshot of all of that was here I stood, Esme Wells, headliner of the Stardust’s Lido de Paris C’est Magnifique, in this parking lot, with Nate, mobster king, his car full of money.
Nate shut the trunk of his car, then mine. “Take a ride with me, E.”
So we weren’t finished here.
I had never felt frightened of Nate before, but neither had my father nor I ever taken anything from him before. Or taken this much. Nate liked to give, liked to offer patronage. He didn’t like to find his cupboards forced open.
Nate unlocked the passenger door of his car for me, then got into the driver’s seat, leaving that other door open as if there was no question but that I would do what he said. And when had I not?
Where’s your daddy?
Which one.
I got into his car.
He turned it around and drove through the parking lot and around the back of the hotel and from there onto the golf course he had built, black tires crushing the beautiful fairways over which no one but Nate would ever dare to send a car, until we reached the finishing hole on the course, Hole Eighteen, with its long 400-yard green from which we could see the back of the hotel and beyond it, the Strip.
It was a beautiful course, not that any of the big boys could play well enough to even enjoy it.
They hated to lose at anything and they had no patience, no skills. They’d come from the streets, not the country club. They rode slowly around in their carts with their caddies, growing redder and redder-faced with fury at their terrible swings and disobedient balls until somewhere around the tenth hole, they’d erupt, throwing their clubs into the sandpits, across the greens, into the rock-faced artificial waterfalls, up a palm tree, cavemen bellowing and throwing jawbones. Or else they’d break their wood clubs over their knees. And when they played cards with each other, even a genial game of gin rummy, it was worse.
Nate rolled down his window a crack to an instant sliver of ice served us on its icy plate and lit one of his noxious cigars, looking outward beyond the tip of it as if he could see something. The future. Maybe if I squinted I could see it, too, in it my father, running, hunched over, running for his life, like all the little ground animals at the Nevada test site, the field rats and raccoons and snakes, the lizards and ants. Did the first great tremor of the bomb, the sudden bright crack in the dark world, give them warning enough to run, burrow themselves safely away? Or did they melt in an instant, turned to fat and ash. Gone.
&nbs
p; “Can you see them?” he asked.
I turned to him, startled, then understood what he was asking me. Before us, in the dark, lay the neighborhood of fancy new homes Nate had constructed right in the center of the golf course, with its perpetually tended grass and its ten thousand imported trees, new homes for the casino managers and hotel management and their families. These golf course homes were almost finished, and all the DI brass were preparing to move out of the hotel rooms and suites they had made their temporary homes and into this new neighborhood that would offer all of them greater respectability, a bit of burnishing. A respectable neighborhood with a capital R. Compared to these fancy houses, Paradise Palms was worker-housing.
Nate gestured toward the homes, a half wave.
“You’ll be alone, now,” Nate said. “So you’ll live here with me.”
So. If this was the time for all trades and exchanges, it looked like it was also the right time to trade in the executive secretary for the showgirl, to whom he felt better suited, after all, now that I was walking and talking again and was, for all he knew, Miltown free. It would be an easy exchange. I was as vulnerable for a takeover as the Stardust or the Riviera.
So.
Was it possible Nate still loved me, despite everything, despite what he’d done to me, despite the fact that a man like him shouldn’t be able to love and that he didn’t deserve to be loved in return?
And was it possible that I still loved him, that I could love someone I didn’t trust?
It was possible. I’d been doing that my whole life.
Nate was looking at me. What could he read in my face now?
“So, Esme. Tell me. Who have you been with since me?”
No one. But he knew that. Because he made it his business to know everything about me.
“Who have you been with?” I said.
He laughed.
And then the sprinklers went off suddenly around us, set by timers to water the course religiously, day and night, summer, winter, spring, and fall. We were pelted with droplets. I sank down and used my arms to belt my cape more closely around me.
The Magnificent Esme Wells Page 28
