Sin City

by Harold Robbins

  Before leaving Vegas, I hired a private eye who did background checks for Halliday’s to run down Windell. The last I heard of Windell, he had left the state of Nevada and gone to work for a computer company in Silicon Valley after doing a year in a Nevada pen. I hadn’t seen Janelle, either, since she walked out of a Vegas bank after depositing a bag of stolen quarters. She did six months in county jail after copping a plea to an accessory charge, then disappeared from Vegas as soon as she was released.

  I had no hard feelings for Windell. He tried to screw me and got his nuts in a nutcracker. But I needed him in Macao to look over the computer system at Wan’s casino. Would Windell work with me if there was a buck involved? Do chickens have lips? I spoke to him on the phone and told him I’d arrange a plane ticket for a flight a week after mine. I wanted time to look over the operation before I brought Windell in.

  Chenza and I landed in Hong Kong and stayed overnight at the classy hotel she selected. Nothing but the best, she said. The town was a cultural volcano for someone like me who had spent his whole life in the desert. The place vomited people, cars, noise, and pollution. We left the next morning on a private jetfoil that skipped like a water bug across the forty miles to Macao in less than an hour.

  The wet-hot heat immediately pummeled us as we stepped off the jetfoil. You could fry eggs on Nevada rocks in July; in Macao, you could drown on a lungful of air. A large cockroach the size of my hand scurried near Chenza. She stepped on it—snap-crackle-pop.

  “Welcome to the tropics,” Chenza smiled. She wore white, the color of innocence, a deceptive color for her.

  Waiting for us at the bottom of the ramp was a woman. “Mr. Wan is waiting at a restaurant,” she said. A rickshaw driver was standing nearby and he muttered something to her in Chinese. She smiled at us. “He says the roach you killed would have made a champion. We have cockroach fighting matches. When a champion dies, the little creature is laid to rest in a handsomely carved wood coffin.”

  We climbed aboard the rickshaw, which took us down a line of sidewalk cafés along the wharf. Being pulled in a rickshaw down a street in exotic Macao almost made me feel like Robert Mitchum, but Chenza was no torch singer with a heart of gold—she had a heart of diamond with facets sharp enough to slice a pimp’s conscience.

  My first impression of the city was that it reminded me of a cheap whore. Everything Vegas hid, Macao flaunted: high-heeled prostitutes in red, yellow, and green silks; triad gangsters with black suits and fedoras; pimps and panhandlers putting on the hustle; blurry-eyed, cheerless gamblers heading for the boats back to Hong Kong after spending the night at smoky fan-tan tables.

  We stepped out of the rickshaw in front of umbrella-covered tables and walked past plates of pungent linguiça and chouriço sausages atop white rice and steamy bowels of cozido, a heavy stew of chicken, meats, and vegetables. All the tables had bottles of vinho verde, the green Portuguese wine, on them. Two guys who never went to Sunday school eyed us as we went in.

  “Wan’s bodyguards?” I whispered. Chenza shrugged.

  The restaurant inside was dark and cool with groaning ceiling fans and waiters shrieking orders in Chinese. Wan was at a corner table with his ever-present henchman, Ling, and another man.

  We took a seat at the table after a round of introductions. Luís Kang, the third man, was a startlingly handsome Chinese-Portuguese. Kang had movie-star looks and dressed like a roaring twenties gangster. Wan told me back in Vegas that the dress code came from dubbed American movies and Hong Kong rehashes of gangster film noir.

  “Luis has an interest in our gambling industry,” Wan said.

  I took notice of the strange description—not that Kang owned a piece of a casino but that he had an “interest” in the industry at large. The word that struck my mind was protection. The two Sunday school dropouts outside were probably his boys.

  Chenza ordered grilled shrimp with lemon-cognac butter, and I opted for the roast chicken with garlic sauce and a cold beer with no glass, since pouring it in a glass killed the fizz.

  “Good choice for the tropics,” Wan told me. “Spicy food that equalizes your body temperature and beer to replenish your body fluids.”

  The discussion was all small talk around the table. I had the distinct impression that Wan had met us at the restaurant to show me off to Kang. Something about the body language between the two … polite as hell, as the Chinese do so well, but nevertheless an undercurrent, as if neither man would ever turn his back on the other.

  “I have heard much about your abilities,” Luis said to me. “Perhaps you will be able to give me lessons that will prove useful.”

  “Which abilities are those?”

  He tapped his nose. “Smelling out crooks.”

  I could have told him that I smelled a couple right now, but instead saluted him with my beer bottle. “I’ve been lucky uncovering some scams in Vegas, but I don’t pretend to know anything about how scams are run in a place like Macao.” I asked him a question burning in my mind. “How does this postage-stamp place survive against Red China? Couldn’t their army just march in and take over any time they wanted?”

  I was told it was because Macao and Hong Kong were doors to the West through which technology and money could pass to the mainland. I changed the conversation to get out of the spotlight. I wanted to observe the dynamics between Luis Kang and Wan. If politeness could be canned, these two would have enough for an assembly line. Chenza’s attraction to Luís wasn’t lost on me, either. She was literally cooing as she asked him questions about Macao. Not that I blamed her. A Chinese babe on the other side of the room had caught my eye. If Chenza hadn’t been there, I would have tried to see what the fortune cookies had to say about the two of us.

  As we talked, a rider on a motor scooter stopped outside the restaurant and dismounted. He wore black biker pants and jacket, the kind of cheap imitation leather a real biker would never wear. For some reason, my eye was drawn to the figure in black. Maybe it was the deliberate way he got off his scooter, the slow, methodical removal of his gloves and helmet, adjusting a biker hat so it had a rakish tilt. He walked unhurriedly to the door, slow and cocky, like Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones, confident, arrogant, indifferent. After he stepped inside the restaurant, I watched him from the corner of my eye. The other people in the restaurant were either too busy eating or talking to pay attention to him.

  With a singular stride, he walked straight up to a table that was occupied by a heavyset Chinese man with large gem-studded rings on all of his fingers. The man was sitting alone, savoring the sticky orange duckling he was eating with his fingers. He looked up, licking his fingers, as the scooter rider approached his table. The rider paused in front of the large man and nonchalantly pulled out a pistol.

  Boom-boom-boom! Three shots in the chest. Deafening, paralyzing.

  The hubbub of voices and dishes rattling suddenly stopped. No one moved, no one spoke. Everyone of us stared, frozen in place, at the black figure and the dead man. The Chinese man still sat upright in his chair, red stains creeping through his cream-colored jacket, his eyes wide open. A trickle of blood ran down the side of his chin.

  The bored killer calmly leaned across the table and shot him between the eyes. The man’s head snapped back for a second before he fell facedown in his plate of orange sauce.

  It all happened in a matter of seconds. I sat fixed in my chair, unable to move.

  Without even looking around the restaurant, the black figure walked out, in no particular hurry, leaving behind a haze of acrid smoke and stunned silence. As soon as he closed the door, the restaurant reverberated back to its noise and activity level, as if nothing had happened.

  A waiter threw a tablecloth over the body.

  My face unlocked its shock and I met Wan’s eyes across the table. He giggled like a queer getting goosed.

  “Welcome to Macao, Mr. Riordan.”

  Besides witnessing a cold-blooded murder, something else bothered me.

  When
the gunman had walked in, I was almost certain he was headed for our table because he had glanced in our direction.

  Was he just saying hello to Wan or Luis?

  “Who’s the stiff?” I asked, keeping my voice from betraying my shock.

  Kang smiled. “A man who runs high-roller rooms in some of the casinos. He has committed the sin of not appreciating a friend’s financial assistance.”

  Chenza stared at Kang, her eyes glazed over with undisguised lust.

  Who says the female is not the cruelest of the species?

  46

  “Welcome to Indiana Jones’s den of iniquity.”

  The greeting came from Bert Regent, Wan’s London gambling consultant. Regent was a white-fleshed, corpulent Britisher with thin, slicked-back hair. He reminded me of one of those James Bond villains who carry white cats and use cigarette holders to smoke.

  Wan’s casino definitely had a taste of the exotic East. A huge atrium enclosed a tropical jungle. The screams of monkeys and jungle birds punctuated the hum and chatter of slot machines. A crocodile pond was in the center, no doubt convenient for gamblers who lost their shirts and decided to end it all—or who were caught cheating.

  Other than the jungle sounds, the casino was surprisingly quiet. Vegas gambling, especially craps and blackjack, rang with shouts and groans. The Chinese in Macao gambled with somber intensity, not unlike what you’d observe at a chess match. Old World Asians were always the most serious gamblers who came into Halliday’s, whether they were betting one dollar or a thousand.

  The setup was modern, but Wan had some special stuff for the Asian crowd. One was fan-tan, in which the croupier dumped an unspecified number of cubes on the table and then divided the pile into four parts until four or fewer were left. Before dividing the pile into four parts, the players bet on how many cubes would be left in the original pile when it got down to four or less cubes. There were only four possible bets: one, two, three, or four cubes.

  There was also a card game called dai siu, which involved whether certain cards added up to a large or small number. The odds were roughly even for either configuration, so the betting system was like playing odd-even, red-black in roulette. Hong Kong dollars and Macao patacas were the coins of the realm.

  “Quite a joint,” I said, trying to imitate Robert Mitchum.

  “Joint is right. I’m sure you have surveillance cameras and skywalks in Vegas, but have you ever seen a casino with gun ports? That should tell you something about the tenor of Macao’s gambling industry.”

  I already knew that arguments were settled here the same way Al Capone settled his differences with Bugs Moran in that Chicago garage on St. Valentine’s Day.

  “They’re jockeying for position—the triads and everyone else in town. The Portuguese have literally abandoned the colony because they know Macao’s nothing more than a pimple on a gorilla’s arse. The Chinese Communists can march in and take over Macao any time they like. When it goes down, the Reds will line up the crooks and shoot them. The fight is over who’s going to control gambling because the Reds won’t shut it down—it brings in too much money.”

  He began the casino tour by explaining the computer system. I listened to him but all I knew about computers was how to flip the on-and-off button. Finding the “bug” in the computer would be Windell’s job. And I was sure there was one, not a computer virus, but a bug similar to a mechanical gaff to rig slot machines and clips to hold cards under a table. Bert Regent smelled like a crook to me. Unlike Windell, who punched out quarter slugs, he seemed like a slick operator who’d steal millions with the stroke of a pen or the keyboard of a computer. I looked at the revenue printouts for the club and they stunk. However, why Wan didn’t come clean and admit he brought me in to find the bug was the big question. Last time I played this game with him I discovered he had more up his sleeves than a Rolex.

  Looking for exotic bargains, Chenza headed for the shops off the side streets of San Ma Lo, Macao’s main drive. We had some heated words about Luis Kang. I told her she did everything but bend down and give him a blow job at the table. Her reply was that whatever she did was none of my business. That was true. I wasn’t in love with her, but as long as we presented ourselves as a number in public, I expected her to act straight.

  I had lunch with Regent on the restaurant’s balcony outside the casino.

  “That’s Wan’s house up the hill,” he said. “Qianqinggong. Wan calls it Palace of Heavenly Purity, after the old imperial palace in Peking’s Forbidden City.”

  The “house” was almost as big as the hill it sat on. With peaked tile roofs that fanned down on four sides and lush gardens with bushes and trees carved into foreign shapes, the compound conveyed the magic of the exotic East to the Western eye. One thing I had developed a particular fondness for in the Far East, besides the women, was the architecture. It was a sharp contrast to the Vegas-style square towers of concrete and glass downtown and ranch-style tract houses in the suburbs. Other than Wan’s and Kang’s skullduggery, I was finding the Orient a feast to my eye—the buildings, the dress, and especially the beautiful women.

  As we ate, I couldn’t help but notice we were being watched by someone using a spyglass. It looked like a young woman, maybe in her teens, was watching us from a pavilion jutting out from Wan’s Heavenly Palace.

  “Wan’s daughter?” I asked.

  “A-Ma, one of Wan’s whores. His favorite one.”

  I squinted at the figure in the distance. “She couldn’t be more than fourteen or fifteen.”

  “Sixteen and he’s had her for several years.”

  “The dirty old prick.”

  “You’re in the Far East, old man: Life’s cheap here, and the sex is even cheaper. There are places in Asia where baby girls are buried alive or thrown into rivers to get rid of them. From what I’ve heard, A-Ma would have ended up a floater in the Pearl River Estuary if Wan hadn’t taken her in.”

  “I’ve heard the name A-Ma before.”

  “You’ll see it around the city. It’s the name of a goddess. I don’t know the whole story, something about fishermen and how Macao got its name.”

  After lunch, I wandered around the casino, just checking out the action and getting a feel for the style of laying down bets. I went up to a balcony overlooking the casino floor. The balcony, which wrapped around the entire interior of the main room, was covered with tropical plants. I didn’t know if its purpose was to display the monkeys and birds scattered around it, or to get a better aim if there was trouble below.

  I sat on a folding chair with my arms on the banister and watched the action below. I soon realized that I was being watched again. On the other side of the atrium a beautiful Chinese face was poking out of the dense vegetation, the same face that had been spying on me with a telescope from Wan’s house.

  She was truly beautiful, not in the glamorous sense of a modern movie star or magazine cover model, but in a mysterious, erotic sense, the sort of languid sensuality of Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo. Her warm sex appeal radiated down to my groin. My phallus was immediately thinking about making love to this goddess.

  “Hungry for some yellow cunt?”

  I almost jumped out of my skin.

  Chenza had come up behind me. She had a woman with her who looked like a product of Chinese-Portuguese mating. In fact, she looked a little like a gorgeous version of Luis the gangster.

  “Maria is Luís’s sister. Come upstairs, I want to show you something.”

  Once we were inside our suite in Wan’s hotel wing, Chenza set down her shopping bags and walked up to Maria and kissed her on the mouth, a long, wet kiss. She reached down and pulled Maria’s dress off over her head. She wore nothing underneath except black bikini panties that accentuated her hips. Her breasts were much fuller than Chenza’s, her thighs and hips generous but lush.

  I watched as Chenza caressed each breast with her hand, then bent down to suck the rose-colored nipples with her wet mouth. I was getting totally ar
oused watching them. Maria slowly began to take off Chenza’s clothes and ran her hands down the sinuous body. They both stood stark naked in front of me. I couldn’t hide the bulge in my pants.

  “Fuck us,” Chenza ordered.

  “It’s called the Dance of the Phoenix Birds,” Maria said.

  She lay naked on her back with Chenza spread on top of her. They were positioned so both their naked buttocks were at the edge of the bed. She paused as they kissed each other. “You enter Chenza’s secret garden with your jade peak.”

  My “jade peak” was red and throbbing. Chenza was pressed breast to breast with Maria and had her buttocks up in the air with the secret garden between her legs already watered by Maria’s tongue. It was the Tao Way of lovemaking. For sure, Maria hadn’t learned it from a book.

  Standing next to the bed, I slowly put my penis in Chenza’s opening, feeling her wet hole suck me in.

  “Now thrust slowly,” Maria cooed. A few moments later she said, “Remove your jade peak and put it into my secret garden.”

  I went back and forth between the two of them, taking turns fucking Chenza doggy style and then Maria.

  I had a rhythm going when I got that feeling again that someone was watching us. I looked up at the ceiling and saw the unmistakable small round lens of a video camera.

  Good old Mr. Wan.

  I laughed and gave the camera the finger.

  THE GOLDEN GODDESS

  The storm came like a crouching tiger, suddenly springing.

  47

  CANTON, CHINA, 1974

  A fisherman untangling a net in his sampan looked up as a young voice addressed him.

  “There,” a little girl about nine said. “There” was the peninsula and two islands that formed the Portuguese enclave of Macao eighteen miles across the Canton delta. The little girl was a mudlark, one of the hundreds that hung around the wharf—the lucky ones helping their parents handle fish, the others surviving on garbage until they’re swept away by disease.