Fools die

by Mario Puzo

  In the Xanadu casino I changed the other casino chips into a cash receipt, which I stuck into my wallet. I now had nine receipts and only a little over ten thousand in cash to convert. I emptied the cash out of my Vegas Winner sports jacket and put it into a regular suit jacket. It was all hundreds and fitted into two regular long white envelopes. Then I slung the Vegas Winner sports jacket over my arm and went up to Cully’s office.

  There was a whole wing of the hotel tacked on just for administration. I followed the corridor and took an offshoot corridor labeled “Executive Offices.” I came to one of the shingles that read “Executive Assistant to the President.” In the outer office was a very pretty young secretary. I gave her my name, and she buzzed the inner office and announced me. Cully came bouncing out with a big handshake and a hug. This new personality of his still threw me off. It was too demonstrative, too outgoing, not what we had been before.

  He had a really stylish suite with couch and soft armchairs and low lighting and pictures on the wall, original oil paintings. I couldn’t tell if they were any good. He also had three TV screens operating. One showed a corridor of the hotel. Another showed one of the crap tables in the casino in action. The third screen showed the baccarat table. As I watched the first screen, I could see a guy opening his hotel room door in the corridor and leading a young girl in with his hand on her ass.

  “Better programs than I get in New York,” I said.

  Cully nodded. “I have to keep an eye on everything in this hotel,” he said. He pushed buttons on a console on his desk, and the three pictures on the TV’s changed. Now we saw a view of the hotel parking lot, a blackjack table in action and the cashier in the coffee shop ringing up money.

  I threw the Vegas Winner sports jacket on Cully’s desk. “You can have it now,” I said.

  Cully stared at the jacket for a long moment. Then he said absently, “You converted all your cash?”

  “Most of it,” I said. “I won’t need the jacket anymore.” I laughed. “My wife hated it as much as you do.”

  Cully picked up the jacket. “I don’t hate it,” he said.

  “Gronevelt doesn’t like to see it around. What do you think happened to Jordan ’s?”

  I shrugged. “His wife probably gave all his clothes to the Salvation Army.”

  Cully was weighing the jacket in his hand. “Light,” he said. “But lucky. Jordan won over four hundred grand wearing it. And then he kills himself. Fucking dumb bastard.”

  “Foolish,” I said.

  Cully put the jacket gently down on his desk. Then he sat down and rocked back on his chair. “You know, I thought you were crazy for turning down his twenty grand. And I was really pissed off when you talked me out of taking mine. But it was maybe the luckiest thing that ever happened to me. I would have gambled it away, and then I would have felt like shit. But you know, after Jordan killed himself and I didn’t take that money, I got some pride. I don’t know how to explain it. But I felt I didn’t betray him. And you didn’t. And Diane didn’t. We were all strangers, and only the three of us cared something about Jordan. Not enough, I guess. Or it didn’t mean that much to him. But finally it meant something to me. Didn’t you feel that way?”

  “No,” I said. “I just didn’t want his fucking money. I knew he was going to knock himself off.”

  That startled Cully. “Bullshit you did. Merlyn the Magician. Fuck you.”

  “Not consciously,” I said. “But way down underneath. I wasn’t surprised when you told me. Remember?”

  “Yeah,” Cully said. “You didn’t even give a shit.”

  I passed that one. “How about Diane?”

  “She took it real hard,” Cully said. “She was in love with Jordan. You know I fucked her the day of the funeral. Weirdest fuck I ever had. She was crazy wild and crying and fucking. Scared the shit out of me.”

  He sighed. “She spent the next couple of months getting drunk and crying on my shoulder. And then she met this square semi-millionaire, and now she’s a straight lady in Minnesota someplace.”

  “So what are you going to do with the jacket?” I asked him.

  Suddenly Cully was grinning. “I’m going to give it to Gronevelt. Come on, I want you to meet him anyway.” He got up out of his chair and grabbed the jacket and went out of the office. I followed him. We went down the corridor to another suite of offices. The secretary buzzed us in to Gronevelt’s huge private office.

  Gronevelt rose from his chair. He looked older than I remembered him. He must be in his late seventies, I thought. He was immaculately dressed. His white hair made him look like a movie star in some character part. Cully introduced us.

  Gronevelt shook my hand and then said quietly, “I read your book. Keep it up. You’ll be a big man someday. It’s very good.”

  I was surprised. Gronevelt went way back in the gambling business, he had been a very bad guy at one time and he was still a feared man in Vegas. For some reason I never thought he was a man who read books. Another cliche shot.

  I knew that Saturdays and Sundays were busy times for men like Gronevelt and Cully who ran big Vegas hotels like the Xanadu. They had customer friends from all over the United States who flew in for weekends of gambling and who had to be entertained in many diverse ways. So I thought I would just say hello to Gronevelt and beat it.

  But Cully threw the bright red and blue Vegas Winner sports jacket on Gronevelt’s huge desk and said, “This is the last one. Merlyn finally gave it up.”

  I noticed that Cully was grinning. The favorite nephew teasing the grouchy uncle he knew how to handle. And I noticed that Gronevelt played his role. The uncle who kidded around with his nephew who was the most trouble but in the long run the most talented and the most reliable. The nephew who would inherit.

  Gronevelt rang the buzzer for his secretary, and when she came in, he said to her, “Bring me a big pair of scissors.” I wondered where the hell a secretary for the president of the Xanadu Hotel would get a big pair of scissors at 6 P.M. on a Saturday night. She was back with them in two minutes flat. Gronevelt took the scissors and started cutting my Vegas Winner sports jacket. He looked at my deadpan and said, “You don’t know how much I hated you three guys when you used to walk through my casino wearing these fucking jackets. Especially that night when Jordan won all the money.”

  I watched him turn my jacket into a huge pile of jagged pieces on his desk, and then I realized he was waiting for me to answer him. “You really don’t mind winners, do you?” I said.

  “It had nothing to do with winning money,” Gronevelt said. “It was so goddamn pathetic. Cully here wearing that jacket and a degenerate gambler in his heart. He still is and always will be. He’s in remission.”

  Cully made a gesture of protest, said, “I’m a businessman,” but Gronevelt waved him off, and Cully fell silent, watching the cut patches of material on the desk.

  “I can live with luck,” Gronevelt said. “But skill and cunning I can’t abide.”

  Gronevelt was working on the cheap fake silk lining of the coat, scissoring it into tiny strips, but it was just to keep his hands busy while he was talking. He spoke directly to me.

  “And you, Merlyn, you’re one of the worst fucking gamblers I have ever seen and I’ve been in the business over fifty years. You’re worse than a degenerate gambler. You’re a romantic gambler. You think you’re one of those characters like that Ferber novel where she has the asshole gambler for a hero. You gamble like an idiot. Sometimes you go with percentages, sometimes you go with hunches, another time you go with a system, then you switch to stabbing in thin air, or you’re zigging and zagging. Listen, you’re one of the few people in this world I would tell to give up gambling completely.” And then he put down his scissors and gave me a genuinely friendly smile. “But what the hell, it suits you.”

  I was really a little hurt, and he had seen it. I thought myself a clever gambler, mixing logic with magic. Gronevelt seemed to read my mind. “Merlyn,” he said. “I like th
at name. It sort of suits you. From what I’ve read he wasn’t that great a magician, and neither are you.” He picked up the scissors and started cutting again. “But then why the hell did you pick that fight with that punk hit man?”

  I shrugged. “I didn’t really pick a fight. But you know how it is. I was feeling lousy about leaving my family. Everything was going bad. I was just looking to take it out on somebody.”

  “You picked the wrong guy,” Gronevelt said. “Cully saved your ass. With a little help from me.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “I offered him the job, but he doesn’t want it,” Cully said.

  That surprised me. Obviously Cully had talked it over with

  Gronevelt before he offered me the job. And then suddenly I realized that Cully would have to tell Gronevelt all about me. And how the hotel would cover me if the Feds came looking.

  “After I read your book, I thought we could use you as a PR man,” Gronevelt said. “A good writer like you.”

  I didn’t want to tell him that they were two absolutely different things. “My wife wouldn’t leave New York, she has her family there,” I said. “But thanks for the offer.”

  Gronevelt nodded. “The way you gamble maybe it’s better not living in Vegas. The next time you come into town let’s all have dinner together.” We took that for our dismissal and left.

  Cully had a dinner date with some high rollers from California that he couldn’t break, so I was on my own. He had left a reservation for me for the hotel dinner show that night, so I went. It was the usual Vegas stuff with almost nude chorus girls, dancing acts, a star singer and some vaudeville turns. The only thing that impressed me was a trained bear act.

  A beautiful woman came out on the stage with six huge bears, and she made them do all kinds of tricks. After each bear completed a trick, the woman kissed the bear on the mouth and the bear would immediately shamble back into his position at the end of the line. The bears were so furry they looked as completely asexual as toys. But why had the woman made the kiss one of her command signals? Bears didn’t kiss as far as I knew. And then I realized the kiss was for the audience, some sort of thrust at the onlookers. And then I wondered if the woman had done so consciously, as a mark of her contempt, a subtle insult. I had always hated the circus and refused to take my kids to see it. And so I never really liked animal acts. But this one fascinated me enough to watch it through to the end. Maybe one of the bears would pull a surprise.

  After the show was over, I wandered out into the casino to convert the rest of my money into chips and then convert the chips into cash receipts. It was nearly eleven at night.

  I started with craps, and instead of betting small to hold down my losses, I was, all of a sudden, making fifty- and hundred-dollar bets. I was losing about three thousand dollars when Cully came up behind me, leading his high rollers to the table and establishing their credit. He took one sardonic look at my green twenty-five-dollar chips and my bets on the green felt in front of me. “You don’t have to gamble anymore, huh?” he said to me. I felt like a jerk, and when the dice sevened out, I took the remainder of my chips to the cashier’s cage and turned them into receipts. When I turned around, Cully was waiting for me.

  Let’s go have a drink,” he said. And he led me to the cocktail lounge where we used to booze with Jordan and Diane. From that darkened area we looked out at the brightly lit casino. When we sat down, the cocktail waitress spotted Cully and came over immediately.

  “So you fell off the wagon,” Cully said. “That fucking gambling. It’s like malaria, always coming back.”

  “You too?” I asked.

  “A couple of times,” Cully said. “I never got hurt, though. How much did you lose?”

  “Just about two grand,” I said. “I’ve turned most of the money into receipts. I’ll finish it up tonight”

  “Tomorrow’s Sunday,” Cully said. “The lawyer friend of mine is available, so early in the morning you can make your will and have it mailed to your brother. Then I’m sticking to you like glue until I put you on the afternoon plane to New York.”

  “We tried something like that once with Jordan,” I said jokingly.

  Cully sighed. “Why did he do it? His luck was changing. He was going to be a winner. All he had to do was hang in there.”

  “Maybe he didn’t want to push his luck,” I said. I had to be kidding, Cully said.

  The next morning Cully rang my room, and we had breakfast together. After that he drove me down the Vegas Strip to a lawyer’s office, where I had my will drawn up and witnessed. I repeated a couple of times that my brother, Artie, was to be mailed a copy of the will, and Cully finally cut in impatiently. “That’s all been explained,” he said. “Don’t worry. Everything will be done exactly right.”

  When we left the office, Cully drove me around the city and showed me the new construction going on. The tower building of the Sands Hotel gleamed newly golden in the desert air. ‘This town is going to grow and grow,” Cully said.

  The endless desert stretched out to the far outlying mountains. “It has plenty of room,” I said.

  Cully laughed, “You’ll see,” he said. “Gambling is the coming thing.”

  We had a light lunch, and then for old times’ sake we went down to the Sands and went partners for two hundred bucks each and hit the crap tables. Cully said self-mockingly, “I have ten passes in my right arm,” so I let him shoot the dice. He was as unlucky as ever, but I noticed he didn’t have his heart in it. He didn’t enjoy gambling. He sure had changed. We drove to the airport, and he waited with me at the gate until boarding time.

  “Call me if you run into any trouble,” Cully said. “And the next time you come here we’ll have dinner with Gronevelt. He likes you and he’s a good guy to have on your side.”

  I nodded. Then I took the cash receipts out of my pocket. The receipts good for thirty thousand dollars in the casino cage of the Xanadu Hotel. My expenses for the trip, gambling and air fare came to about the other three thousand. I handed the receipts to Cully.

  “Keep these for me,” I said. I had changed my mind.

  Cully counted the white slips. There were twelve of them. He checked the amounts. “You trust me with your bankroll?” he asked. “Thirty grand is a big number.”

  “I have to trust somebody,” I said. “And besides, I saw you turn down twenty grand from Jordan when you were flat on your ass.”

  “Only because you shamed me into it,” Cully said. “OK, I’ll take care of this. And if things get real hot, I can loan you cash out of my roll and use these as security. Just so you don’t leave any traces.”

  “Thanks, Cully,” I said. “Thanks for the hotel room and the meals and everything. And thanks for helping me out.” I felt a real rush of affection for him. He was one of my few friends. And yet I was surprised when he hugged me goodbye before I got on the plane.

  And on the jet rushing through the light into the darker time zones of the East, fleeing so quickly from the descending sun in the West, as we plunged into darkness, I thought about the affection Cully had for me. We knew each other so little. And I thought it was because we both had so few people we could really get to know. Like Jordan. And we had shared Jordan ’s defeat and surrender into death.

  I called from the airport to tell Value I had come home a day early. There was no answer. I didn’t want to call her at her father’s house, so I just caught a taxi to the Bronx. Vallie still wasn’t home. I felt the familiar irritated jealousy that she had taken the kids to visit their grandparents in Long Island. But then I thought, what the hell. Why should she spend the Sunday alone in our project apartment when she could have the company of her happy-go-lucky Irish family, her brothers and sisters and their friends, where the kids could go out and play in fresh air and on country grass?

  I would wait up for her. She had to be home soon. While I waited, I called Artie. His wife came to the phone and said Artie had gone to bed early because he wasn’t feeling good. I
told her not to wake him, it wasn’t important. And with a little feeling of panic I asked what was wrong with Artie. She said he just felt tired, he had been working too hard. It wasn’t anything even to see the doctor about. I told her I would call Artie at work the next day, and then I hung up.

  Chapter 15

  The next year was the happiest time in my life. I was waiting for my house to be built. It would be the first time I’d own a house of my own, and I had a funny feeling about it. That now finally I would be just like everybody else. I would be separate and no longer dependent on society and other people.

  I think this sprang from my growing distaste for the housing project I was living in. By their very good social qualities blacks and whites moved up in the economic scale and became ineligible to stay in the housing project when they earned too much money. And when they moved out, their places were taken by the not-so-well-adjusted. The blacks and whites moving in were the ones who would live there forever. Junkies, alcoholics, amateur pimps, small-scale thieves and spur-of-the-moment rapists.

  Before this new invasion the housing project cops beat a strategic retreat. The new kids were wilder and started taking everything apart. Elevators stopped working; hall windows were smashed and never repaired. When I came home from work, there were empty whiskey bottles in the hallways and some of the men sitting drunk on the benches outside the buildings. There were wild parties that brought in the regular city cops. Vallie made sure she picked up the kids at the bus stop when they came home from school. She even asked me once if we should move to her father’s house until our own house was ready. This was after a ten-year-old black girl had been raped and thrown off the roof of one of the project buildings.

  I said no, we’d sweat it out. We would stay. I knew what Vallie was thinking, but she was too ashamed to say it out loud. She was afraid of the blacks. Because she had been educated and conditioned as a liberal, a believer in equality, she couldn’t bring herself to accept the fact that she feared all the black people moving in around her.