by Mario Puzo
They gave him a futaba, a little hard square pillow on which to rest his head. And he immediately fell asleep. He slept until late afternoon, and then he took a walk through the countryside.
The inn was on a hillside overlooking a valley, and beyond the valley he could see the ocean, blue, wide, crystal clear. He walked around a beautiful pond sprinkled with flowers which seemed to match the intricate parasols of the mats and hammocks on the porch of the inn. All the bright colors delighted him, and the clear, pure air refreshed his brain. He was no longer worried or tense. Nothing would happen. He would get the money from Fummiro, who was an old friend. When he got to Hong Kong and deposited the money, he would be clear with Santadio and could safely return to Las Vegas. It would all work out. The Xanadu Hotel would be his, and he would take care of Gronevelt as a son would a father in his old age.
For a moment he wished he could spend the rest of his life in this beautiful countryside. So still and clear. So tranquil as if he were living five hundred years ago. He had never wished to be a samurai, but now he thought how innocent their warfare had been.
Darkness was beginning to fall, and tiny drops of rain pitted the surface of the pond. He went back to his rooms in the inn.
He loved the Japanese style of living. No furniture. Just mats. The sliding wood-frame paper doors that cut off rooms and turned a living room into a sleeping room. It seemed to him so reasonable and so clever.
Far away he could hear a tiny bell ringing with silvery claps and a few minutes after that the paper doors slid apart and two young girls came in, carrying a huge oval platter almost five feet long, it could be the top of a table. The platter was filled with every kind of fish the sea could provide.
There was the black squid and the yellow-tailed fish, pearly oysters, gray-black crabs, speckled chunks of fish showing vivid pink flesh underneath. It was a rainbow of color, and there was more food there than any five men could eat. The women set the platter on a low table and arranged cushions for him to sit on. Then they sat down on either side and fed him morsels of fish.
Another girl came in carrying a tray of sake wine and glasses. She poured the wine and put the glass to his mouth so that he could drink.
It was all delicious. When he finished, Cully stood looking through the window at the valley of pines and the sea beyond. Behind him he could hear the women take away the dinner and the paper wooden doors closing. He was alone in the room, staring at the sea.
Again he went over everything in his mind, counting down the shoe of circumstance and chance. Monday morning he would get the money from Fummiro and he would board the plane to Hong Kong and in Hong Kong he would have to get to the bank. He tried to think of where the danger would lie, if there were a danger. He thought of Gronevelt. That Gronevelt might betray him, or Santadio or even Fummiro. Why had Judge Brianca betrayed him? Could Gronevelt have engineered that? And then he remembered one night having dinner with Fummiro and Gronevelt. They had been just a little uneasy with him. Was there something there? An unknown card in the shoe? But Gronevelt was an old sick man and Santadio’s long arm did not reach into the Far East. And Fummiro was an old friend.
But there was always bad luck. In any case it would be his final risk. And at least now he would have another day of peace here in Yogawara.
He heard the paper wooden doors slide behind him opening up. It was the two tiny girls leading him back to the redwood tub.
Again they washed him. Again they plunged him into the vast fragrant waters of the tub.
He soaked, and again they raised him out and laid him on the mat and put the futaba pillow beneath his head. Again they massaged him finger by finger. And now, completely rested, he felt the surge of sexual desire. He reached out for one of the young girls, but very prettily she denied him with her face and her hands. Then she pantomimed she would send another girl up. That it was not their function.
And then Cully held up two fingers to tell them he wanted two girls. They both giggled at that, and he wondered if Japanese girls thrashed each other.
He watched them disappear and close the frame doors behind them. His head sank on the small square pillow. His body lustfully relaxed. He dozed into a light sleep. Far away he heard the sliding of the paper doors. Ah, he thought, they’re coming. And curious to see what they looked like, whether they were pretty, how they were dressed, he raised his head and to his astonishment he saw two men with surgeon’s gauze masks over their faces coming toward him.
At first he thought the girls misunderstood him. That comically inept, he had asked for a heavier massage. And then the gauze masks struck him with terror. The realization flashed through his mind that these masks were never worn in the country. And then his mind jumped to the truth, but he screamed out, “I haven’t got the money. I haven’t got the money!” He tried to rise from the mat, and the two men were upon him.
It was not painful or horrible. He seemed to sink again beneath the sea, the fragrant waters of the redwood tub. His eyes glazed over. And then he was quiet on the mat, the futaba pillow beneath his head.
The two men wrapped his body in towels and silently carried it out of the room.
Far across the ocean, Gronevelt in his suite worked the controls to pump pure oxygen into his casino.
Book VIII
Chapter 53
I got to Vegas late at night and Gronevelt asked me to have dinner in his suite. We had some drinks and the waiters brought up a table with the dinner we had ordered. I noticed that Gronevelt’s dish had very small portions. He looked older and faded. Cully had told me about his stroke, but I could see no evidence of it other than perhaps he moved more slowly and took more time to answer me when he spoke.
I glanced at the control panel behind his desk which Gronevelt used to pump pure oxygen into the casino. Gronevelt said, “Cully told you about that? He wasn’t supposed to.”
“Some things are too good not to tell,” I said, “and besides, Cully knew I wouldn’t spread it around.”
Gronevelt smiled. “Believe it or not, I use it as an act of kindness. It gives all those losers a little hope and a last shot before they go to bed. I hate to think of losers trying to go to sleep. I don’t mind winners,” Gronevelt said. “I can live with luck, it’s skill I can’t abide. Look, they can never beat the percentage and I have the percentage. That’s true in life as well as gambling. The percentage will grind you into dust.”
Gronevelt was rambling, thinking of his own approaching death. “You have to get rich in the dark,” he said, “you have to live with percentages. Forget about luck, that’s a very treacherous magic.” I nodded my head in agreement. After we had finished eating and were having brandy, Gronevelt said, “I don’t want you to worry about Cully, so I’ll tell you what happened to him. Remember that trip you made with him to Tokyo and Hong Kong to bring out that money? Well, for reasons of his own Cully decided to take another crack at it. I warned him against it. I told him the percentages were bad, that he had been lucky that first trip. But for reasons of his own which I can’t tell you, but which were important and valid at least to him, he decided to go.”
“You had to give the OK,” I said.
“Yes,” Gronevelt said. “It was to my benefit that he go there.”
“So what happened to him?” I asked Gronevelt.
“We don’t know,” Gronevelt said. “He picked up the money in his fancy suitcases, and then he just disappeared. Fummiro thinks he’s in Brazil or Costa Rica living like a king. But you and I know Cully better. He couldn’t live in any place but Vegas.”
“So what do you guess happened?” I asked Gronevelt again.
Gronevelt smiled at me. “Do you know Yeats’s poem? It begins, I think, ‘Many a soldier and sailor lies, far from customary skies,’ and that’s what happened to Cully. I think of him maybe in one of those beautiful ponds behind a geisha house in Japan lying on the bottom. And how he would have hated it. He wanted to die in Vegas.”
“Have you done anything
about it?” I said. “Have you notified the police or the Japanese authorities?”
“No,” Gronevelt said. “That’s not possible and I don’t think that you should.”
“Whatever you say is good enough for me,” I said. “Maybe Cully will show up someday. Maybe he’ll walk into the casino with your money as if nothing ever happened.”
“That can’t be,” Gronevelt said. “Please don’t think like that. I would hate it that I left you with any hope. Just accept it. Think of him as another gambler that the percentage ground to dust.” He paused and then said softly, “He made a mistake counting down the shoe.” He smiled.
I knew my answer now. What Gronevelt was telling me really was that Cully had been sent on an errand that Gronevelt had engineered and that it was Gronevelt who had decided its final end. And looking at the man now, I knew that he had done so not out of any malicious cruelty, not out of any desire for revenge, but for what were to him good and sound reasons. That for him it was simply a part of his business.
And so we shook hands and Gronevelt said, “Stay as long as you like. It’s all comped.”
“Thanks,” I said. “But I think I’ll leave tomorrow.”
“Will you gamble tonight?” Gronevelt said.
“I think so,” I said. “Just a little bit.”
“Well, I hope you get lucky,” Gronevelt said.
Before I left the room, Gronevelt walked me to the door and pressed a stack of black hundred-dollar chips in my hand. “These were in Cully’s desk,” Gronevelt said. “I’m sure he’d like you to have them for one last shot at the table. Maybe it’s lucky money.” He paused for a moment. “I’m sorry about Cully, I miss him.”
“So do I,” I said. And I left.
Chapter 54
Gronevelt had given me a suite, the living room decorated in rich browns, the colors over coordinated in the usual Vegas style. I didn’t feel like gambling and I was too tired to go to a movie. I counted the black chips, my inheritance from Cully. There were ten of them, an even thousand dollars. I thought how happy Cully would be if I stuck the chips in my suitcase and left Vegas without losing them. I thought that I might do that.
I was not surprised at what had happened to Cully. It was almost in the seed of his character that he would go finally against the percentage. In his heart, born hustler though he was, Cully was a gambler. Believing in his countdown, he could never be a match for Gronevelt. Gronevelt with his “iron maiden” percentages crushing everything to death.
I tried to sleep but had no luck. It was too late to call Valerie, at least 1 A.M. in New York. I took up the Vegas newspaper I had bought at the airport, and leafing through it, I saw a movie ad for Janelle’s last picture. It was the second female lead, a supporting role, but she had been so great in it that she had won an Academy Award nomination. It had opened in New York just a month ago and I had meant to see it, so I decided to go now. Even though I had never seen or spoken to Janelle since that night she left me in the hotel room.
It was a good movie. I watched Janelle on the screen and saw her do all the things she had done with me. On that huge screen her face expressed all the tenderness, all the affection, all the sensual craving that she had shown in our bed together. And as I watched, I wondered, what was the reality? How had she really felt in bed with me, how had she really felt up there on the screen? In one part of the film where she was crushed by the rejection by her lover, she had the same shattered look on her face that broke my heart when she thought I had been cruel to her. I was amazed by how strictly her performance followed our most intense and secret passions. Had she been acting with me, preparing for this role, or did her performance spring from the pain we had shared together? But I almost fell in love with her again just watching her on the screen, and I was glad that everything had turned out well for her. That she was becoming so successful, that she was getting everything she wanted, or thought she wanted, from life. And this is the end of the story, I thought. Here I am, the poor unhappy lover at a distance, watching the success of his beloved one, and everybody would feel sorry for me, I would be the hero because I was so sensitive and now I could suffer and live alone, the solitary writer making books, while she sparkled in the glittering world of cinema. And that’s how I would like to leave it. I had promised Janelle that if I wrote about her, I would never show her as someone defeated or someone to be pitied. One night we had gone to see Love Story and she had been enraged.
“You fucking writers, you always make the girl die in the end,” she said. “Do you know why? Because it’s the easiest way to get rid of them. You’re tired of them and you don’t want to be the villain. So you just kill her and then you cry and you’re the fucking hero. You’re such fucking hypocrites. You always want to ditch women.” She turned to me, her eyes huge, golden brown going black with anger. “Don’t you ever kill me off, you son of a bitch.”
“I promise,” I said. “But what about your always telling me you’ll never live to forty? That you’re going to burn out.”
She often pulled that shit on me. She always loved painting herself as dramatically as possible.
“That’s none of your business,” she said. “We won’t even be speaking to each other by then.”
I left the theater and started the long walk back to the Xanadu. It was a long walk. I started at the bottom of the Strip and passed hotel after hotel, passed through their waterfalls of neon light and kept walking toward the dark desert mountains that stood guard at the top of the Strip. And I thought about Janelle. I had promised her that if I wrote about us, I would never show her as someone defeated, someone to be pitied, even someone to be grieved. She had asked for that promise, and I had given it, all in fun.
But the truth is different. She refused to stay in the shadows of my mind as Artie and Osano and Malomar decently did. My magic no longer worked.
Because by the time I had seen her on the screen, so alive and full of passion I fell in love with her again, she was already dead.
Janelle, preparing for the New Year’s Eve party, worked very slowly on her makeup. She tilted her magnified makeup mirror and worked on her eye shadow. The top corner of the mirror reflected the apartment behind her. It was really a mess, clothes strewn about, shoes not put away, some dirty plates and cups on the coffee table, the bed not made. She would have to meet Joel at the door and not let him in. The man with the Rolls-Royce, Merlyn had always called him. She slept with Joel occasionally, but not too often, and she knew that she would have to sleep with him tonight. After all, it was New Year’s Eve. So she had already bathed carefully, scented herself, used a vaginal deodorant. She was prepared. She thought about Merlyn and wondered whether he would call her. He hadn’t called her for two years, but he just might today or tomorrow. She knew he wouldn’t call her at night. She thought for a minute of calling him, but he would panic, the coward. He was so scared of spoiling his family life. That whole bullshit structure he had built up over the years that he used as a crutch. But she didn’t really miss him. She knew that he looked back upon himself with contempt for being in love and that she looked back with a radiant joy that it had happened. It didn’t matter to her that they had wounded each other so terribly. She had forgiven him a long time ago. But she knew he had not. She knew that he had foolishly thought he had lost something of himself, and she knew that was not true for either of them.
She stopped putting on her makeup. She was tired and she had a headache. She also felt very depressed, but she always did on New Year’s Eve. It was another year gone by, another year that she was older, and she dreaded old age. She thought about calling Alice, who was spending the holidays with her mother and father in San Francisco. Alice would be horrified at the mess in the apartment, but Janelle knew she would clean it up without reproaching her. She smiled thinking of what Merlyn said, that she used her women lovers with a brutal exploitation that only the most chauvinistic husbands would dare. She realized now that it was partly true. From a drawer she took the r
uby earrings Merlyn had given to her as a first gift and put them on. They looked beautiful on her. She loved them.
Then the doorbell range and she went and opened it. She let Joel come in. She didn’t give a shit whether he saw the mess in the apartment or not. Her headache was worse, so she went into the bathroom and took some Precedent before they went out. Joel was as kind and charming as usual. He opened the door of the car for her and went around the other side. Janelle thought about Merlyn. He always forgot to do that and the times he remembered he looked embarrassed. Until, finally, she told him to forget about it, relinquishing her own Southern belle ways.
It was the usual New Year’s Eve party in a great crowded house. The parking lot was filled with red-jacketed valets taking over the Mercedes, the Rolls-Royces, the Bentleys, the Porsches. Janelle knew many of the people there. And there was a good deal of flirting and propositioning, which she courted gaily by making jokes about her New Year’s resolution to remain pure for at least one month.
As midnight approached, she was really depressed and Joel noticed it. He took her into one of the bedrooms and gave her some cocaine. She immediately felt better and high. She got through the stroke of midnight, the kissing of all her friends, the gropings, and then suddenly she felt her headache come on again. It was the worst headache she had ever had, and she knew she had to get home. She found Joel and told him she was ill. He took a look at her face and could see that she was.
“It’s just a headache,” Janelle said. “I’ll be OK. Just get me home.”
Joel drove her home and wanted to come in with her. She knew he wanted to stay hoping that the headache would go away and at least he could spend a nice day tomorrow in bed with her. But she really felt ill. She kissed him and said, “Please don’t come in. I’m really sorry to disappoint you, but I really feel sick. I feel terribly sick.”
