Sugar and Bic both looked airborne.
His other friend I had never seen before but I knew exactly who and what he was. In the days when I was a bagman for Morty Lardino, I had to collect a cut from drug dealers. Bronco fit the mold perfectly: pale, acne-scarred face, straggly dirty hair. He was the kind of street trash who’d sell crank to kids with diseased needles as a bonus giveaway.
Morgan smiled radiantly when they left. “I’m so glad you and Bic finally will have a chance to get to know each other. I know you’ll like him when you know him better.”
I smiled politely and watched Bronco out of the corner of my eye. He had turned back and looked at me as they were walking away. It fanned the short hairs on the back of my neck. He spelled trouble with a capital T.
55
Our honeymoon was to bury myself in work at the club to reverse everything Morgan and Wonder Boy had done. First thing I did was get on the phone and call dozens of employees who had left, asking them to come back and help make the club a success. I ran ads in the L.A. and San Diego papers announcing that Halliday’s was back being the best bargain with the loosest slots in town. I offered comps for just spitting on the sidewalk in front of the place. I ran a million-dollar slot machine tournament, a million-dollar poker championship that was carried on national TV, and offered single-deck blackjack.
“Great buffet,” Con told me, walking back to his table with a plate heaped high with ham, potatoes, and corn bread. We also had a ninety-nine-cent breakfast buffet and had free coffee and donuts anytime.
It wasn’t a class act, but mama and papa started coming back to the club, parking out back in their campers or staying in one of our bargain rooms. The smartest thing I did was get to the tour operators and bribe them to bring junkets in by the busload.
In a month I had the place humming. Morgan worked with me, keeping Con out of my way, getting him to wander around the club entertaining the gamblers with his stories of the old days and country-fried charm.
Morgan went home to the kid every night, but I often hung around the club, watching it twenty-four hours a day, getting shut-eye in one of our hotel rooms, but waking up every couple of hours and checking out the action to make sure everything was okay.
I was shooting the bull with a pit boss when Bic, Sugar, Bronco, and a woman I recognized as a prostitute came in. They went directly to the lounge. They were loud and high, and not on life. Now they were going to add booze.
“Take some deep breaths, count to ten, and then go take a nap,” the pit boss told me. She was one of the returnees who left the Stardust to come back to work at Halliday’s.
A burst of coarse laugher and “Take it off!” came from the lounge. An elderly couple came out, shaking their heads.
“That’s it. They’re driving out my customers,” I said.
In the lounge, Sugar was grinding and bumping to the music. Her blouse was unbuttoned and pulled down off her shoulders so her naked breasts jiggled openly. “You move like this—and this—and this—” People were staring open-mouthed at the stripping lesson she was giving the whore.
“Pull your blouse up and get your ass out of here,” I said. I met Bic’s eye. “All of you. And don’t come back in here again. You’re eighty-sixed.”
Bronco grabbed my left arm. “Hey, pal, you don’t know who you’re dealing with.”
That’s when I lost it. From pure reflex action, my right elbow came around and smashed his nose. I felt the sickening crunch of cartilage under my forearm. He flew backward, blood spattering everywhere.
“It wasn’t my fault,” I told Morgan.
I sighed and stared out at the ninth hole. I had stayed the night at the club and came over to have breakfast with her and the kid and confess my sins.
“Do you think he’ll sue?”
“Sue? I’m not worrying about him suing. This is Vegas, the system’s stacked in our favor. I’m worried about your reaction.”
“My reaction? I’m sorry that Bic brought his friends to the club and caused trouble. He knows better. Or maybe he doesn’t. I’m worried about him. He’s losing weight and looks like roadkill. I can’t talk to him anymore. He needs to be in rehab, but he won’t listen to anyone. I asked Dad to cut off his money but I think he’s squirreled away a load of money that he skimmed from the club. It’s probably the only smart thing he ever did.”
I was relieved that Morgan was getting more insight into Bic’s problems.
“I have some other news,” Morgan said.
“Yeah?”
“I missed my period.”
“You did? Think you should see a doctor?”
“You’re not getting it.”
“Getting what?”
“You’re trying to avoid it.”
“How the hell could you be pregnant?” I groaned.
“We’ve been married two months.”
“Aren’t you on the pill?”
“I wasn’t the night you raped me.”
“Morgan—”
“Don’t even think about it. I’m having the baby.”
Jesus. For a guy who never had a family, I was making up for it quick. I had a father-in-law who thought he was Wyatt Earp, a brother-in-law who was a crackhead, a wife who had threatened to kill herself at the thought of marrying me, and a kid who had another man’s name. Now I was going to be a father again. It scared the hell out of me.
My karma had more twists than a licorice stick.
A hectic week passed at the club while I worked day and night to make a success of a million-dollar poker playoff. It was late, after midnight: I was dead tired and heading for my room to sack out when a cocktail waitress stopped me.
“Zack,” she whispered, “a guy just told me that he knows someone who’s cheating in the tournament.”
That’s all I needed, a cheating scandal just when I had the club back on its feet.
“He said he’d wait for you out back.”
“Call Cross,” I told her, referring to the shift supervisor for security. “Tell him to meet me out back.”
Things like this were bound to pop up. Probably just someone with an axe to grind, but better he informed me than calling the news people or the gaming board. I was so tired and rummy, not even the adrenaline pumped out by the allegation perked me up.
I went out the back door and looked for the man who wanted to ruin a good night. He had his back to me.
“What’s the deal, guy?” I asked, coming up behind him.
If I hadn’t been so rummy, I never would have walked out the back by myself—it wasn’t something I even permitted my security people to do.
As he turned around, I saw the gun jump in the man’s hand and a powerful blow struck my chest. Then there was nothing.
Part 10
“HERE’S CHEVY!”
56
HONG KONG, 1985
Lin Piao stood in a circle of people watching Jackie Chan direct himself as he performed a stunt on the back lot of a Hong Kong studio compound. Chan defied the laws of gravity as he crawled up a wall like a spider.
“Amazing,” Lin said to a script supervisor of the Chinese-language film. Lin was not producing this movie, but his mouth watered at the idea of casting a major star like Jackie Chan in the low-budget action films his company was cranking out.
During a break in the shooting, Mr. Wan entered the studio. The crew had been informed that he would be visiting the set and several of them took covert looks at the man who was notorious in the British and Portuguese colonies. In the Far East, a figure like Wan received the same cautious respect that a Mafia don received in America. His shadow, Ling, and companion, A-Ma, trailed behind him.
“Mr. Wan, so good to see you,” Lin said. It had taken a great deal of manipulation to get the famous man to the set. Now that he was there, Lin was a little nervous. He was playing the game of puffing up his small production company with potential backers, but one could not sell too much “air” to Wan. “Is this one of your movies?” Wan ask
ed.
“No, not this one, I just dropped by to talk to Jackie about another project I have under development.” He had deliberately set up this meeting with Wan to leave the impression he used actors of Chan’s caliber. Actually he was struggling to put together his third low-budget film. Neither of his first two films had received any critical acclaim or captured any significant box office reward. But making movies was like a treasure hunt—you never knew what would happen when you turned over the next rock.
Lin noticed A-Ma for the first time. “Who is this beautiful woman?”
“My secretary,” Wan said.
Lin immediately understood that Wan’s “secretary” performed more than dictation. He was so busy staring at her, he didn’t hear Wan speaking to him. “Sorry, I am captivated by your secretary. She should have a screen test.”
Wan raised his eyebrows to A-Ma. “Are you interested in becoming an actress?”
“I have no talent for acting.”
Wan shrugged. “You see? Young people today think they have to be born with talent. In my day we knew that talent came from hard work.”
Wan was considered a potential “angel” who could finance movies and A-Ma was obviously one of his stable of women, so the idea of a screen test was not taken seriously by anyone but Lin himself. He was struck by an essence emanating from the young woman, different from the raw sex portrayed so often it became shopworn from overuse and abuse. A-Ma radiated something more sensuous and exotic. But people often appeared different on film than in person. The camera had a love affair with a truly charismatic movie star, reproducing not just a naked reflection of the person on the screen but also some of the essence that made them charismatic.
During their break, Lin escorted Wan over to meet Jackie Chan. While Wan talked to the always smiling, amiable actor, Lin slipped over to a cameraman who had the job of shooting the production on video so the director had an instant replay of filmed scenes.
“See the young woman over there,” he indicated A-Ma, “shoot her for me.”
“Doing what?”
“Just shoot her as she’s standing there. It’s an impromptu screen test.”
That night Lin played the video to an up-and-coming director and a Hong Kong rep for an international film distributor.
“Look at this girl, she’s only about eighteen or nineteen, but she has an ageless quality to her. And she has a great screen presence. The moment I saw her I realized she was something special.”
“She’s looks wonderful,” the director said. “At least on video. But we’ll have to shoot her in 35mm to get a true reflection of her camera quality. She has that agonizingly unattainable look. It’s something the great stars have, a mystery about them that you can’t grasp. Charismatic women aren’t just pretty objects. They’ve got something that we can feel but just can’t define.”
“This is Wan’s girlie?” the distributor asked.
“Yes,” Lin said.
“What makes you think he’d let her star in a movie?” the director asked. “I’m not so sure he wants to share her with the world. Wan is not a person you want to antagonize by taking away his girlfriend.”
Lin rubbed his fingers together in the universal gesture indicating money. “He’ll not only let her play, he’ll pay. Wan’s heart ticks with the same rhythm as the money press at the government mint. With the Reds breathing down our necks, he’s always looking for ways to get money out of Hong Kong and Macao. A movie brings in money all over the world and his share can stay in the countries where it’s earned.”
“But can she act?” the distributor asked.
“She has to pretend to like that old lizard, doesn’t she? That has to be worth an Academy Award all by itself.”
57
A-Ma sat at the dressing room table and examined her reflection in the mirror while the makeup artist put the finishing touches on her face.
“You have to rub the body oil all over,” the artist said. “All over. We want water to bead up on you when you come out of the river. The director wants to see not only wetness but drops of water on your skin.”
As soon as the makeup artist left, A-Ma took off all of her clothes and applied the oily lotion to her body. The reality that she was actually acting in a movie finally struck her. She had seen hardly any movies in her life, reinforcing the fact that her acting seemed even more fanciful than anything she had ever imagined. Mr. Wan not only had given his blessing, he had insisted she take the opportunity. She knew nothing about the financial arrangements, had no interest in money or money matters, but knew that Mr. Wan did very little that was not related to increasing his wealth.
Wang Su, the director, came in without knocking.
She pulled on a robe. “Please knock before you enter.”
“Sorry. But you’ll find that there isn’t much time or need for modesty on a movie set.”
He knew when he hired her if she hadn’t been Mr. Wan’s property, he would have insisted she audition for the role on the casting room couch. During their first rehearsal session alone, he had tested the waters by touching her buttocks. She had stopped him cold from any further familiarities with her body. Besides her “guardian” there was something else that kept him from trying again, an almost elusive quality about her that made her untouchable.
“I just want to go over some things. I want you to be yourself,” he said. “You are very lucky because you have not been hired to play a role. In a sense, the part has been written expressly for you. We are so impressed with your natural style that we want to film you as you are rather than having you assume a role.”
“Since I can’t act, that works out nicely for all of us.”
He grinned. “Your lack of acting experience had occurred to us when we rewrote the script to add a small part for you.” He sat on the makeup artist’s stool and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “To give a convincing performance, an actress must walk in the shoes of her character. She must think, feel, and act as the character would. That means not just putting on a mask and pretending you are the person in the role, but living the part. It’s like a spirit enters your body and takes it over, and it’s the soul of the spirit that the audience experiences. Am I making any sense?”
“Yes.”
“In your case, though, we want you to be yourself. It’s your own soul we want to expose to the audience. The woman you are playing has been wronged. Her soul has been bruised. Ask yourself how you would react. Don’t think about how the character in a movie would act. The harm was done to you, you personally.”
She closed her eyes for a moment. “We have been over this many times.”
“And we’ll do it again and again. Movies are very expensive products. Millions of dollars go into what ends up on a roll of film. I’m sure you are as anxious as I am to ensure that Mr. Wan gets a fair return on his money. Do you understand the scene?”
“What is there to understand? I take off my clothes and walk into a river to wash. I have washed many times in rivers, so that much will come naturally to me. But I never did it to entice the men who watch the movie. Or move the hearts of women who might sympathize with my predicament. If you want me to twist myself into a sex symbol or an object of pity, my performance will not satisfy you. I am nothing more, nor nothing less, than what you see before you. I am not an actress. You say you want me to be myself, but each time you say it, I hear doubt in your voice.”
“This movie is important to me and many other people. The producer was so eager to get Mr. Wan’s financing, he would have cast Godzilla in a role. Not that I’m not happy to give you a chance—your screen test was excellent. I just want to make sure you are comfortable with your part. You must relax completely. And have confidence in yourself.”
“As you have told me many times. I will be myself, Mr. Wang. Is there anything else we need to discuss? I have to finish my preparation.”
“No. I can see you’re shy by the way you covered up when I came in. Remember you’ll be
exposing your breasts today to the whole cast, crew, and bystanders?”
“I am not shy, just particular.”
Heaven’s Warrior was a film about a young warrior’s odyssey through China’s countryside at the time when the Manchu armies broke through the Great Wall and were at the gates of Beijing in the seventeenth century. A-Ma only had a few minutes of screen time as a woman brutalized by bandits. The hero-warrior single-handedly takes on a dozen bandits with his bare fists and feet, kills the bandits, and makes love to her before moving on. Her pivotal scene was to go into a river and cleanse her body and soul, washing off the filth of her attackers. The scene was difficult because there was no dialogue—like a star of the silent movies, she had to capture and hold the audience’s attention without speaking a word.
She was naked up to her waist in the river scene. When the makeup artist tried to stimulate her nipples with a piece of ice, A-Ma pushed away her hands. “I am already cold and shivering.”
“Let’s get some angles on her breasts,” the director told the cameraman. “They’re not very large, we need to increase the impression of their size. A-Ma, can you arch your back a little to make your breasts strut out more?”
“No, I am sick and tired of the focus on my breasts. Breasts, breasts, breasts. What is it about a woman’s breasts that so fascinates you men? I am not a side of beef to be touched and poked and examined.”
“All right, let’s shoot the scene. Our actress is getting antsy.”
She went into the river wearing nothing but a ragged piece of cloth around her waist. Her breasts were bare, nipples tense, and her body shivering. She stood in knee-deep water and instead of thinking what was supposed to happen to her by make-believe bandits, she thought about the first time she had been alone with Mr. Wan.
She was thirteen years old and new in his house when she was instructed by a servant to present herself at his bedside late one winter night. As she came up to his bed, he instructed her to take off her robe. She let her robe slip down to her feet and stood shivering in the cold room. Her body had not completely filled out yet and it was still girlish and bony. When he threw open the blankets, he was naked as well, skinny and ill-formed, his small penis buried in a burr of black hair. “Get on the bed, child. Not next to me, down at my feet.” He had her sit with her back to the end of the bed and then spread her thighs open. Her recent growth of pubic hair had been shaved by a servant before she was called to Wan’s room.
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