JC2 The Raiders Page 8

  Jonas had experimented for two hours with his disguise and was now showing it to Angie and Nevada. With a toothbrush he had worked gray-white from a jar into his eyebrows and into the bit of his hair that showed below the edge of the toupee. The spectacles were astride his nose. The wax in his mouth puffed out his cheeks.

  "What th' hell is th' idea of that?" asked Nevada when he stopped laughing.

  "I'm going down and have a look at the casino operation," said Jonas. "A lot of money is moving down there. I want to see how."

  "Maurie'll tell you how."

  "I want to see how."

  He put on the suit he had worn on the flight from Bel Air gray with a white pinstripe, double-breasted. He wore a white shirt and a flowered necktie, the kind that was in style that year.

  "I'll go with you," said Angie.

  Jonas considered her offer for a moment, then accepted it. She would complement his disguise, the more so since her face was known in the casino.

  They went down in the private elevator and stepped out into the part of The Seven Voyages that Jonas had not yet seen. The casino floor was the hotel's reason for being. It was the focus of the entire operation, the source of the profit. Without the take from the casino floor, The Seven Voyages was a losing proposition.

  Jonas had gambled in other casinos and understood something about the layout. The casino offered only fast-moving games: roulette, craps, blackjack, and chuck-a-luck. The players stood or sat around solid tables with green covers, under bright lights. Jonas had played in French casinos, where the players dressed in formal clothes. Here they could wear almost anything, though The Seven Voyages would not admit cowboys in jeans. The house men wore white shirts with black bow ties and black trousers — with no pockets. Girls in thigh-high ruffled skirts and net stockings carried trays among the tables, offering free drinks to players, trying to avoid giving any to people just wandering through. The air was blue with tobacco smoke.

  The players stared and frowned at the tables or at their cards, and there was little conversation. When they talked at all, they talked quietly. No one cheered a win. No one groaned at a loss.

  Morris Chandler wanted the casino in The Seven Voyages to have the aspect of the casino at Monte Carlo, as much as practicable. Little was practicable, since he could not ask the players to wear evening clothes. But the croupiers at the roulette tables kept up a tradition by making two announcements in French. They called for the bets by saying, "Faites vos jouets," and they closed the betting just before they spun the wheel by announcing, "Rien va plus."

  Jonas understood that the games were scrupulously honest. The wheels were not weighted, the dice were not loaded, and the cards were not marked. The casino did not need to cheat to win. It could not lose, because it set the odds.

  The roulette wheels, for example, had a zero and a double zero — an American innovation; European wheels had only the single zero. When the ball landed on zero or double zero, the house won. At the black-jack tables, the house kept the deal — and the small advantage of the dealer — even when the player had a blackjack. And so on. An individual player might win, might in fact win heavily, but every day, over the whole operation, the house inevitably won. Knowledgeable players understood that; but, with the chronic optimism of gamblers, they believed they could beat the odds. Gamblers who played any way but knowledgeably, rationally, and unemotionally invariably lost — and often heavily.

  Two-way mirrors covered the ceiling of the casino. In a dark chamber above, supervisors prowled catwalks, observing the action below, looking for any possibility of skimming by the dealers and stick men. Though the house men could not have carried away the bulky chips in their tight pocketless clothes, sometimes one would cheat by shoving stacks of chips to confederates who had not actually won.

  They watched also for cheating players. Cheating by players was all but impossible. They could not touch the wheels. The oversized house dice, especially made for The Seven Voyages, carried the casino logo etched into the surface, so players could not substitute their own dice for the house dice. Just about the only serious problem the house had was with card counters at the blackjack tables. Card counters were prodigies of memory who kept track of what cards had been dealt and improved their odds greatly. To discourage them, the games were played with two decks of cards. Still, some were good enough to count even two decks. There were few who could do it, and they were generally recognized. The casinos had a blacklist of them. When a house man saw a known counter, or when he suspected a new counter, that player was taken by the elbow and gently expelled from the casino. Strictly speaking, card counting was not illegal. All the casinos hated the card counters, though, and tried to keep them away from the games.

  With Angie at his side, Jonas bought five hundred dollars' worth of chips. He played blackjack, the game where a smart player had the best chance, and in the course of an hour won a hundred twenty-five dollars. That was no big deal. When he cashed in, the cashier took no particular notice of him.

  They walked through the hall where ranks of slot machines swallowed half dollars and silver dollars, spun, clunked to a stop, and did not pay. Slot-machine players were more emotional than the gamblers on the casino floor. When they won, they whooped and yelled — which was good for business. Some of the payouts were big, but they were infrequent. A twenty-five- or fifty-dollar payout was more common. It kept the players happy, kept them at the machines. The slots were pure profit. There was no risk the house would lose on them, even temporarily.

  "The place is a license to print money," Jonas muttered to Angie as they returned to the top floor.

  7

  1

  JONAS ADOPTED A NAME FOR THE GRAY-HAIRED JOWLY man who played blackjack: Al String. It was a play on the name Cord. He gambled night after night for a week in The Seven Voyages and lost eighteen hundred dollars. He moved from there to the Flamingo, where he played four nights and won three hundred. He moved on to some of the older howdy-pardner gaming rooms. Angie went with him every night. Nevada, dressed in a suit that would have looked right on a Texas oilman, complete with champagne-colored Stetson, went with him to the old places.

  "I'm beginning to figure this thing out," Jonas said to Nevada and Angie one night when they sat down over a late supper in the suite. "The beauty of casino operations is that most of the money that passes through them is in cash. That's what attracts the kind of operators that are running this town. Think about it! Think of the opportunities."

  "Like?" asked Nevada — though he was not so innocent that he didn't know what Jonas was about to say. "The simplest element of it is tax evasion," said Jonas. "What part of the take do you guess they report? Fifty percent? Seventy-five percent? In those back rooms they count cash. How much of it slips out of the hotel without being accounted for?"

  "There's more to it than that," said Angie. "The casinos are owned by partners, most of them back East. They fly out here on junkets and gamble. They fly home with briefcases full of cash, which is their share of the partnership profits. If the tax boys happen to find out about their cash, they say they had good luck and won a lot of money. They never admit they own a part of the casino and get a regular distribution of the profits. The cash they get is skimmed off the take every night."

  Their late-night snack was club sandwiches. Angie and Nevada drank beer with theirs. Jonas drank bourbon. He had pulled off his wig and had of course pulled from his mouth the wax which for some odd reason made him thirsty.

  "A lot of the partners can't afford to be identified as partners," Angie went on. "They have criminal records, and the State of Nevada would lift the casino license if it were known that they own shares. So they come out here and play the tables, go home with 'winnings,' and no one's the wiser ... so they think."

  "It's a stupid risk to take with businesses that could make a hell of a lot of money without skimming," said Jonas.

  "There are partners they don't dare shove out," said Angie.

  "You know a
lot about this for a gal who's just a secretary," said Nevada.

  "If you're around here awhile and watch, you see a lot of things," she said.

  "I want to talk to Chandler," said Jonas.

  2

  Morris Chandler came up for lunch the next day. Angie was not asked to join Jonas and Nevada.

  Chandler stood at the window for a while, looking down at the swimming pool. He put his eye to the telescope and peered at something, probably an exceptionally bare girl. Then he swept the telescope up and began to look at something else. "You figured this out yet?" he asked Jonas. "Well, I've looked at some of the bathing beauties, but —" Chandler turned toward him and grinned slyly.

  "You're looking in the wrong direction. Take a look through it now."

  Jonas put his eye to the tripod-mounted telescope and looked at what Chandler had focused on. He saw naked girls.

  The penthouse atop the newest hotel had a terrace surrounded by potted shrubbery that shielded the girls from the view of everyone below. The top floor of The Seven Voyages had the only windows within a mile that were high enough to afford a view of the sunbathers. Several hundred yards separated the two hotels, and apparently the owners of the penthouse and their girls thought the distance was great enough to protect the girls' privacy. Morris Chandler had bought the astronomy-class telescope to give his fifth-floor high rollers a little something extra for their money. "The girls work there," said Chandler. "That's their job: to sit around naked."

  "Tricks of the trade," said Jonas. He returned to the table and their lunch. He sat down. "The first night I was here, you started to give me some basic lessons in the casino business. Nevada says you'd be willing to give me more."

  "What do you want to know?" asked Chandler.

  "How much do you skim?" asked Jonas.

  Chandler's face stiffened. He hesitated for a moment, then asked, "What if I say we don't?"

  "Say it."

  Chandler glanced at Nevada, who was watching him gravely, interested in his answer. He took a deep breath and blew it out. "I give you lessons," he said. "You should give me. You know too much already."

  "Well, I'm hardly a government spy," said Jonas. "Hardly an informer."

  "What was strictly illegal a hundred years ago is absolutely legal now," said Chandler. "What was immoral fifty years ago is acceptable now. And some things that used to be legal and moral are illegal and immoral now. Some big American families built their fortunes doing things the keepers of the public morality don't tolerate today. Like importing slaves. Like keeping whorehouses. It's just a matter of time. What goes around, comes around. Now we got these crap politicians, like Kefauver, making hysterical accusations for whatever political profit they can get. It's — "

  "Who owns The Seven Voyages, Morris?" Jonas interrupted.

  "I own eighteen points," said Chandler. "On the record I own sixty-one points, but all except the eighteen I hold for men who don't want their names associated."

  "Men whose names you can't afford to have associated with the operation," said Jonas.

  "Have it your way. A point, you understand, is one percent."

  "Does Lucky Luciano own any points, directly or indirectly?"

  "Are you kidding? Luciano? No way."

  "Frank Costello? Jimmy Blue Eyes?" Jonas asked.

  Chandler shook his head emphatically.

  "Meyer Lansky?"

  "No. Meyer doesn't own any points. But he has a consulting contract with us."

  "What's he consult about?"

  "The contract is in writing and has been looked at by Justice Department snoops. It says he advises us on how to do our accounting and keep the casino honest. Everyone acknowledges he'd know. He's run plenty of illegal joints in his day. The Justice Department found nothing wrong with the contract, nothing wrong with our hiring him as a consultant. I don't know if you understand this, but Meyer Lansky has no criminal record."

  "In point of fact," said Jonas dryly, "he tells you how to skim."

  "In point of fact," said Chandler, "he tells us how to distribute the profits."

  "Officially a corporation owns The Seven Voyages," said Jonas. "Seven Voyages Corporation owns the gaming license. You own all the stock."

  "You checked," said Chandler. "Okay. Officially, legally, I own everything," said Chandler. "I'm like Meyer Lansky in one respect. I'm clean. I have no criminal record. So I make a perfect front man."

  Nevada grinned. "Why, Maurie has never even had a ticket for jaywalking."

  "I'm not going to ask you who really owns the points," said Jonas. "But I am interested in one thing. What does it cost to put up a casino hotel in Las Vegas?"

  Chandler sipped wine. "When we first came out here, say in 1946, there was a rule of thumb," he said. "To set up a decent-size hotel and casino, you spent one million dollars, max — including the price of the land. By the time Siegel and his partners got the Flamingo into operation, they had three million in it. It cost five and a half to open The Seven Voyages."

  "What would happen if you didn't skim?" Jonas asked.

  Chandler shook his head. "You couldn't pay off your investors. Banks would never have put up five and a half million dollars to build a casino hotel in Las Vegas. We had to have investors."

  Jonas nodded. "If you had the five and a half million, you wouldn't need to sell points, and then you wouldn't need to skim. You could run strictly legal and make a good profit."

  Chandler grinned. "You thinking of building a casino hotel, Jonas?"

  Jonas lifted his eyebrows and shrugged. "Well ... Suppose I offered package tours from LA and Frisco. Round-trip flight to Las Vegas, accommodations at a Cord hotel, with meals, at a fixed price. I —"

  "Your people will fly in here, swim in your pool, eat your food, see your shows, and wouldn't gamble. Hell, they'll bring the kids."

  "Okay. The price includes a chit, redeemable only in chips. Say a hundred dollars' worth. So they've paid for their gambling in advance."

  "Smart guys will turn in their chits for chips, walk around the room, and come back and turn in their chips for cash."

  "Junketeers can always do that," said Jonas. "The remedy is, you watch out for them. You don't let them do it to you twice. But the great majority will gamble with their chips, lose them, and buy some more. You get somebody hooked on casino gambling, they stay hooked. The junket is an investment."

  Chandler laughed. "I see why you're a multimillionaire. I also see why you're holed up in The Seven Voyages ducking a subpoena."

  When they had finished their lunch and conversation, Morris Chandler left the suite. Angie came in. Jonas's four young men, who had been working in the living room of Nevada's suite, came in.

  Nevada stood with Chandler as he waited for the elevator.

  "A word to the wise, Max," said Chandler quietly. "Your boy's awful sharp. Too sharp. I hope he has sense enough not to talk to other guys."

  "Jonas has got brains he hasn't used yet," said Nevada. "Well, tell him to use them. I like the guy. I don't want him to get hurt."

  3

  The telephone rang as Jonas, Angie, and Nevada sat together on a sofa and sipped bourbon as the sun set in the desert. She picked it up. "Morris Chandler," she said.

  "Problem," said Chandler grimly. "Guess who just checked into the hotel? Mrs. Jonas Cord!"

  "Damn," Jonas muttered.

  "She had a reservation. My guys took it. They don't know you're here. I couldn't refuse to accommodate her. She's in a room on the fourth floor, right under you. How the hell did she find out you're here?"

  "Uh ... Maybe she didn't. Maybe she doesn't know."

  "Even so, you can bet she's been tailed. If those subpoena hounds really want you, they'll be tailin' your wife. The way their minds work, they figure the divorce is just a cover."

  "All right. We'll have to play it as smart as possible. My crowd has got to stay in their rooms, out of sight. She'd recognize any one of them."

  "And so would the subpoena houn
ds, right?"

  "Right. I'll get off the phone and get to each one of them."

  4

  Monica stripped and hurried into the shower. Alex followed her, dropping his clothes on the floor. In a moment he was under the shower with her, and they washed each other, running their soap-slick hands over each other's bodies, hardly able to finish and dry before their out-of-control carnal fervor overwhelmed them. They went half dry to the bed, and in a moment he was on her and rammed himself into her. Alex was like Jonas, she reflected for a moment — when he was aroused he was in a hurry. But he never failed to satisfy.

  They lit cigarettes when they were finished and lay on the bed, satiated to exhaustion — never guessing that the management of the hotel on which Chandler's telescope focused had returned the favor, so that half a dozen men and women in the high-roller suite of that hotel had amused themselves immensely by watching Monica and Alex in their frenetic labors, through the window they had supposed was too high and remote to give anyone a look into their room.

  "The casino's gonna lose money on us," said Monica. "I don't think I'll be able to spare five minutes after din-din before we come back up here and do it again."

  "It's a great place, isn't it?" said Alex.

  "How'd you know about it?"

  "It's got a reputation as a place where people can go that want to be discreet."

  "Well, we've been discreet. The reservation is in my name. The room is in my name. Your wife will never know."

  5

  The phone rang again. Morris Chandler. "It may be nothing but a coincidence," he said to Jonas. "She's got a man with her. No big stud, I'd guess. But not a bad-lookin' guy."