“Come along,” he said. “Beautiful! Come along and we’ll make it a party, the three of us—you, me, and Francis Carrington Shaw. Maybe bring some beer and hot dogs. Go for a picnic out in the desert. Have a couple of laughs.”
He sprang up from the chair and began to pace, talking but not looking at me, nervous energy forcing the words out at a rate that seemed more for his own ears than for mine. Part of a monologue that I thought might have been going on internally for some time.
“Nobody,” he said, “but nobody sees Francis Carrington Shaw without an invitation. Take me along? Preacher, you crazy son of a bitch, I been working for Francis Carrington Shaw ever since I moved to this goddam town, and I never met him yet!”
I sat still and listened.
Manny had a lot to say, and I had a feeling I might be the first one who’d heard it. Not exactly True Confessions time; he had done what he thought was the best thing, and he wasn’t the type to have regrets. But now things were happening that he couldn’t understand. Or control.
“The whole thing,” he said, “was going to work for a guy I only knew on the phone. That was dumb. All right?”
I kept still, and that seemed to suit him.
“I was out, back east. On my ass. A little money, yeah. But out, and I wasn’t used to being out, you know?
“I came out here and I got drunk and I stayed that way for maybe three weeks and the boys who’d come with me were starting to wonder if I was really washed up like everyone said and by the time I sobered up and looked around and smelled the coffee, you know, it was, like, endsville. Another day or two, I’d’ve been alone.”
And then, he said, the telephone rang.
“And everything turned around. One call. Shaw sounded different back then. Like the way he used to in those television news things where he’d just set a new speed record for airplanes or bought or sold a movie studio or testified in front of the Senate and told them politicians to go fuck theirselfs. A mensch!
“He had just started buying hotels here in Vegas, and he said he’d heard I was at liberty. At liberty! How about that! Class, you know? Everything with a kiss. Said he needed someone with local savvy—what bullshit; he knew I was as new in town as he was. But I knew what he meant. He wanted me to...handle things for him. Understand, he didn’t mean be the front man. That was Judge Apodaca, old Happy-the-Hand, even back then. He was already in Shaw’s pocket and the word was anything Judge Happy Apodaca said, it was like Shaw himself saying it.
“But there were other things...”
Manny came back to the table and poured himself another cup of coffee, and I barely managed to keep him from putting the fly-repellent sugar cubes into it, but he didn’t seem to notice and went back to pacing and talking as though there had been no interruption.
“You fill in the blanks. And then double whatever you thought. Not just muscle stuff, either: For a guy who’s sailed as close as he has all his life, there’s still a hell of a lot of things that old Happy don’t like to mess with.”
“For instance?”
It was the wrong thing to ask. Any question at all would have been wrong. But Manny hardly seemed to notice, and he answered without hesitation.
“For instance,” he said, “the counting rooms. At the casinos...”
One of the running battles between the federal government and the state of Nevada is the counting rooms of the gambling casinos, and the laws that govern them. They are the last bastion of truly free enterprise. Casinos pay federal income tax like any other business, and the Internal Revenue Service always insists on the right of audit—whch means the right to see everything, right down to the contents of the cash registers at any given time of the day or night. How else, they ask, can they be sure of just how much profit the casino is making?
The state of Nevada is sympathetic.
Big problem. Yes.
But all the same, the legislature has never really considered repealing or even amending the law that makes it illegal for anyone except certain casino employees to be in the room where the cash boxes from the various games are counted. And if that seems to exclude snoops from the IRS, well, those are the breaks.
Big problem. Yes...
“You got to understand,” Manny said, “when Shaw moved in here and took over the hotels and casinos like he did, that didn’t mean the people who sold them were really going to let go of their money machine. Hell—how could they?
“A big cash-flow business like that, it’s one of the few places left inside the country where you can move dough around without attracting attention.”
“You mean the skim?”
He shrugged. “That,” he said. “Yeah. The skim is part of it. Understand—there’s nobody robbing anybody here. Francis Carrington Shaw, he’s an investor, right? Right. He puts money into something, it turns him a good profit, he’s happy, okay?
“Ten percent, maybe eleven. Even twelve, you got a good year. That’s an okay profit, right? Not as good as drilling an oil well for a hundred grand and find a billion-dollar pool down there, or making a three–million–dollar movie that grosses back fifty. But how often does that happen, and how often do you drill the same hole and it’s dry or make the movie and it’s a dog?
“Ten’s okay. He’s satisfied. So he don’t give a shit that the guys who used to own the casino still run it. Call it a kind of, like they say, lease-back deal. Nothing new in Vegas. Every casino on the Strip, there was always inside points and outside points, with the outsides just fronting for the insides and not even getting paid much for it, usually. Something you give a brother-in-law you can’t find nothing else for him, okay?
“So after he bought in and got the gaming licenses in his name, he made sure he never looked too close at what was going on, because he knew he would’ve kissed his own ass before he’d’ve had a chance to buy into anything otherwise. The skim went on and the laundry went on just like before—and he got his profit just like if he’d bought a steel mill or a carmaking company or something. Only surer...”
More coffee, but this time I just sat still and waited for him to go on.
“So where does Manny Temple come in?” He grinned, but there was no warmth in it. And no joy.
“I was the handler. The trouble-mechanic. Every operation needs one, baby, and his setup in Vegas was sure as hell no exception. You got different families—mobs—in charge of different casinos, you got a different problem in every single case. Someone gets too greedy, I handle it. Someone gets too sloppy, I handle it. Someone comes to town needs the kid-glove treatment and the sweet, happy ride, I handle it. Make sure they go home with a big smile...and who knows, maybe a couple of stills or even a videotape to look at now and then and remember that one hand washes the other. Right?
“So what’s wrong with that?
“Believe me, Preacher, a guy can’t operate very long in a town like Vegas without a hard boy somewhere in the neighborhood, handling. Shaw and me, we had a good even deal.
“And that’s the way it stayed, until late last year. That’s when it started going wrong—last year. In August. That’s when he started talking in that funny whispery voice you heard on the phone, and that’s when I started hearing about how he was getting other people to handle things for him. Without even telling me.
“And then he quit calling at all.”
He stopped pacing and looked at me with an expression that I suddenly realized was far too close to supplication to be anything but genuine. The man was actually suffering.
“Preacher,” he said, “that call just now—the one for you—that was the first time I’ve spoken to Francis Carrington Shaw, even over a phone, this year. I don’t know what went wrong. I don’t know shit.
“All I know, I know what happened up in the penthouse this morning was something he set up. To put me out, along with all the others.”
There might have been more.
I think there was; Manny’s face didn’t have that “I’m done, now tell me what
you think” look. But if so I never got to hear any of it, because we were interrupted by a knock at the door to the hallway.
Manny started to ignore it; his mouth had formed itself around the beginning of a new sentence and his eyes said the only sound he wanted to hear was his own voice. But the knock came again and the breath he had taken whooshed out in a non-sound that might have been a dirty word.
He yanked the door open and gave the beefy man standing there a stare that said he had better have a damn good reason for pounding on the wood.
“This come for you...”
There was an envelope in the door-pounder’s hand, and for a moment I thought Manny was going to make him eat it. The door-pounder thought so, too, and looked ready to cry. But at the last moment something on the face of the envelope seemed to catch Manny’s interest. He snatched it and took a closer look.
“How’d it come?” he demanded.
The letter-bearer didn’t understand and seemed even nearer to tears than before, but Manny took pity on him and spelled it out. “In the mail?” he said. “By messenger? Carrier pigeon...?”
That seemed to get through at last, and the caller’s face brightened with understanding. “I dunno,” he said. “Vince took it from some guy who come to the door and give it to me and he said for me to—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Manny said, cutting off the explanation with a wave of his hand. “Okay, awready. You done fine, baby. Just fine. Go back and tell Vinnie I said give you a drink and for him to run his own errands from now on. Okay?”
The words seeped in slowly.
But they arrived. The door closed on a smiling and almost worshipful face. No wonder Manny had survived for so long.
He came back to the table holding the envelope by its lower edge and looking at it with a mixture of curiosity and disbelief.
“Maybe,” he said, sitting down across from me again, “I ought to call the Guinness Book of World Records or something. What we have got here is a real first...”
I didn’t understand and waited for whatever explanation he might decide to offer. Instead, he showed me the face of the envelope itself.
The words “M. Temple,” “Personal,” and “Hand Deliver” were typed and centered on the white rectangle. The only other adornment was a set of three italic initials, embossed on the upper left corner: FCS.
“Yeah,” Manny went on when he was sure I’d seen all there was to see and understood whatever there was to understand. “The Guinness Book. All these years—all these years—I been working for that old son of a bitch. Never met him once; just his voice on the phone and not even that lately. And now this.”
He flapped the envelope and slapped it down on the table between us.
“Everybody knows these damn things,” he said. “Everyone knows the raised-up initials at the corner. Knows they get first-cabin treatment: FCS—Francis Carrington Shaw. The mother don’t even need to use his whole name. Just the initials and everyone snaps shit. But in all this time, Preacher baby, in all this time, you know I never got one? Never!”
He drew a breath, looking at the envelope.
“It was one of the few good things, you know? All this time and nothing on paper, ever, between us. It worked. I never got one of these goddam envelopes and I was proud of that because it showed we could trust each other—even without we ever, like, met face to face, right?
“Yeah. Well, then, fuck it. Just fuck it! We going to do business through the mail from now on, fuck it and fuck him and let’s see what the mother has to say...”
He snatched the envelope up and used a table knife to slit it open at the top, and suddenly I wanted to stop him; tell him to forget it and throw it away. Suddenly the envelope didn’t matter anymore, and it was as though I could see through it and I knew what was inside.
But it was too late.
The single trifold sheet of paper was blank; no message, not even a visible watermark. It served merely as a secondary wrapper, concealing the real message contained in a set of five playing cards from one of the Scheherazade’s own decks.
Aces and eights.
Manny looked at the cards for a long moment. And then at me. And then back at the cards.
“Look,” I said, trying to interrupt a sequence of thought that was plainly visible behind what he probably thought was a blank face, “let’s don’t ride off into the heat of the day. The cards don’t have to mean—”
“Bullshit.”
The word that cut me off was quiet and the voice under control, but a fire of panic was growing in the place where he lived and he was feeding it personally and it wasn’t something that could be contained with such puny tools as logic and common sense.
“You think I don’t know what this is?” he said. “Hey, baby, I was there. Remember? The dead man’s hand. You dealt it out to Holy Joe, but it was over there lying on Danny Dimples’s chest when the shooting stopped, and he was the one who was taken suddenly dead.
“And then, later, I hear things.
“Like how Goines died. What do you think, I got to wait for the television or the newspapers to tell me things? Sam went out with the same cards fanned out on his chest, and then out there at Holy Joe’s place later, the same thing like we got here. An envelope. With the cards in it. No, baby! No way—fuck it. Manny’s mama didn’t raise no stupid kids.”
The cards dropped from his fingers as he picked up the telephone and snapped out a series of orders to whoever was on the other end. The one about getting new tires on the car and having it filled with gas and having fifteen minutes to get it done seemed to draw some kind of protest, but Manny wasn’t listening.
He slammed the receiver down and took a deep, shuddering breath.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay! That’s the way the old bastard wants it—okay, awready!”
“It doesn’t have to have come from him,” I said. “The envelope—”
But he was already shaking his head, and the look that went with it was full of pity.
“Preacher,” he said, “I don’t care. You know? It’s him, okay. If not, still okay. Manny is out. He’s going. Now. Mexico, Canada, somewhere—who gives a fuck?
“And if you got as much sense as I always thought, you’ll come with me.”
A SERMON
(CONTINUED)
The confusion also spilled over into real life. We discovered—as countless generations have done, century after century, in all the ages before our own—that human beings are never entirely one thing or entirely another. That we are all an amalgam of positive and negative qualities...
TWENTY-THREE
Not all trappers wear fur hats.
The only real flaw in Manny’s poker game, one that I’d spotted at our first meeting years ago, was an expensive tendency to accept a well-constructed bluff at face value, to fold a potential winner without seeing the other hand. And now he was doing it again.
But there seemed to be nothing I could say to make him see it that way, no words I could use to make him understand that sudden flight might be just the reaction someone wanted, and by the time I left the suite, the door behind me closed on the uproar of imminent departure. Play your own cards; let the other guy play his. Am I my brother’s keeper? (And why does my brother need a keeper, anyway...?)
No use at all, of course.
I was still picking at the problem, worrying it to death, when I went off to keep my appointment in the VIP parking garage.
Here, at least, there was no room for argument or error.
Most visitors to the Scheherazade, VIP or otherwise, hand their wheels over to the ultra-efficient valet parking service at the front entrance; elegance is elegance and nobody is immune to the subtle flattery of conspicuous consumption. Even when it has to be accompanied by a five–dollar tip.
So my rented chariot was alone on this floor of the VIP garage.
Or had been when I parked it there.
No more.
Beside it, now, was an ominous-looking item that I coul
d see had gone through more than a few changes since the day it rolled off the assembly line at Cadillac.
Limousines are nothing to stare at in Las Vegas. The ambience of the town supports several prosperous auto livery services, and private ownership of luxury vehicles is merely one of the perks of the average casino manager—like the sticker that confers special street-parking privileges on those with local political clout.
But even in such company, a discerning eye might linger on the car Francis Carrington Shaw had sent for me.
It was black and long, and the dark-tinted glass in the windows was standard-issue. But the car’s suspension system was not; chrome was understated, almost stinted, serving to deemphasize the fact that the vehicle it adorned was closer to the ground than most. Not chopped or underslung like some street racer’s candy-apple baby, but simply an inch or so nearer the ground than most...and making a real effort to disguise the difference that could only be the result of armor plating in the doors, ceilings, and other sides of the passenger compartment. And probably around the engine as well.
Black paint and restraint in ornamentation also failed to disguise the air scoops faired into the front fenders; air scoops that were not for show. I wondered if the engineers back in Detroit would have recognized any part of the power plant—or admitted it if they had.
Moving closer, I noticed that not even the tires of the limousine were standard–issue. No flash-white sidewalls, and I would have given odds that these were not only self-sealing but actually proof against anything less powerful than an antitank missile. Nice wheels.
Drag ya for pink slips...?
I was ten feet away when the right front door opened and something just as expensive—and customized—got out to open the back door; six feet two inches tall, complete with white shoes, slacks, T-shirt, and clear blue-white eye coloring. Every thing but a “Product of Salt Lake City” stamp on the forehead, and I decided I didn’t want to bet on that, either.
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