Gronevelt said, “I never heard of him. Funny name.” He mused for a while, thinking it over. “That his real name?’
“Yeah,” Cully said.
There was a long silence as if Gronevelt were pondering something, and then he finally sighed and said to Cully, “Fm going to give you the break of your life. If you do your job the way I tell you to and if you keep your mouth shut, you’ll have a good chance of making some big money and being an executive in this hotel. I like you and I’ll gamble on you. But remember, if you fuck me, you’re in big trouble. I mean big trouble. Do you have a general idea of what Fm talking about?”
“I do,” Cully said. “It doesn’t scare me. You know I'm a hustler. But Fm smart enough to be straight when I have to.”
Gronevelt nodded. “The most important thing is a tight mouth.” And as he said this, his mind wandered back to the early evening he had spent with the show girl. A tight mouth. It seemed to be the only thing that helped him these days. For a moment he had the sense of weariness, a failing of his powers, that had seemed to come more often in the past year. But he knew that just by going down and walking through his casino he would be recharged. Like some mythic giant, he drew power from being planted on the life-giving earth of his casino floor, from all the people working for him, from all the people he knew, rich and famous and powerful who came to be whipped by his dice and cards, who scourged themselves at his green felt tables. But he had paused too long, and he saw Cully watching him intently, with curiosity and intelligence working. He was giving this new employee of his an edge.
“A tight mouth,” Gronevelt repeated. “And you have to give up all the cheap hustling, especially with broads. So what, they want presents? So what if they clip you for a hundred here, a thousand here? Remember then they are paid off. You are evened out. You never want to owe a woman anything. Anything. You always want to be evened out with broads. Unless you’re a pimp or a jerk. Remember that. Give them a Honeybee.”
“A hundred bucks?” Cully asked kiddingly. “Can’t it be fifty? I don’t own a casino.”
Gronevelt smiled a little. “Use your own judgment. But if she has anything at all going, make it a Honeybee.”
Cully nodded and waited. So far this was bullshit. Gronevelt had to get down to the real meat. And Gronevelt did.
“My biggest problem right now” Gronevelt said, “is beating taxes. You know you can only get rich in the dark. Some of the other hotel owners are skimming in the counting room with their partners. Jerks. Eventually the Feds will catch up with them. Somebody talks and they get a lot of heat. A lot of heat. The one thing I don’t like is heat. But skimming is where the real money is. And that is where you are going to help.”
“I’ll be working in the counting room?” Cully asked.
Gronevelt shook his head impatiently. “You’ll be dealing,” he said. “At least for a while. And if you work out, you’ll move up to be my personal assistant. That’s a promise. But you have to prove yourself to me. All the way. You get what I mean?”
“Sure,” Cully said. “Any risk?”
“Only from yourself,” Gronevelt said. And suddenly he was staring at Cully very quietly and intently and as if he were saying something without words that he wanted Cully to grasp. Cully looked him in the eye and Gronevelt’s face sagged a little with an expression of weariness and distaste, and suddenly Cully understood. If he didn’t prove himself, if he tucked up, he had a good chance of being buried in the desert. He knew that this distressed Gronevelt, and he felt a curious bond with the man. He wanted to reassure him.
“Don’t worry, Mr. Gronevelt,” he said. “I won’t fuck up. I appreciate what you’re doing for me. I won’t let you down.”
Gronevelt nodded his head slowly. His back was turned to Cully, and he was staring out the huge window to the desert and mountains beyond.
“Words don’t mean anything,” he said. “I’m counting on your being smart. Come up to see me tomorrow at noon and I’ll lay everything out. And one other thing.”
Cully made himself look attentive.
Gronevelt said harshly, “Get rid of that fucking jacket you and your buddies always wore. That Vegas Winner shit. You don’t know how that jacket irritated me when I saw you three guys walking through my casino wearing it. And that’s the first thing you can remind me of. Tell that fucking store owner not to order any more of those jackets.”
“OK,” Cully said.
“Let’s have another drink and then you can go,” Gronevelt said. “I have to check the casino in a little while.”
They had, another drink, and Cully was astonished when Gronevelt clicked their glasses together as if to celebrate their new relationship. It encouraged him to ask what had happened to Cheech.
Gronevelt shook his head sadly. “I might as well give you the facts of life in this town. You know Cheech is in the hospital. Officially he got hit by a car. He’ll recover, but you’ll never see him in Vegas again until we get a new deputy police chief.”
“I thought Cheech was connected,” Cully said. He sipped his drink. He was very alert. He wanted to know how things worked on Gronevelt’s level
“He’s connected very big back East,” Gronevelt said. “In fact, Cheech’s friends wanted me to help him get out of Vegas. I told them I had no choice.”
“I don’t get it,” Cully said. “You have more muscle than the sheriff.”
Gronevelt leaned back and drank slowly. As an older and wiser man he always found it pleasant to instruct the young. And even as he did so, he knew that Cully was flattering him, that Cully probably had all the answers. “Look,” he said, “we can always handle trouble with the federal government with our lawyers and the courts; we have judges and we have politicians. One way or another we can fix things with the governor or the gambling control commissions. The deputy police chief’s office runs the town the way we want it. I can pick up the phone and get almost anybody run out of town. We are building an image of Vegas as an absolute safe place for gamblers. We can’t do that without the deputy police chief. Now to exercise that power he has to have it and we have to give it to him. We have to keep him happy. He also has to be a certain kind of very tough guy with certain values. He can’t let a hood like Cheech punch his nephew and get away with it. He has to break his legs. And we have to let him. I have to let him. Cheech has to let him. The people back in New York have to let him. A small price to pay.”
“The deputy police chief is that powerful?” Cully asked.
“Has to be,” Gronevelt said. “It’s the only way we can make this town work. And he’s a smart guy, a good politician. He’ll be chief for the next ten years.”
“Why just ten?” Cully asked.
Gronevelt smiled. “He’ll be too rich to work,” Gronevelt said. “And it’s a very tough job.”
– -
After Cully left, Gronevelt prepared to go down to the casino floor. It was now nearly two in the morning. He made his special call to the building engineer to pump pure oxygen through the casino air-conditioning system to keep the gamblers from getting sleepy. He decided to change his shirt. For some reason it had become damp and sticky during his talk with Cully. And as he changed, he gave Cully some hard thought.
He thought he could read the man. Cully had believed that the incident with Jordan was a mark against him with Gronevelt. On the contrary, Gronevelt had been delighted when Cully stuck up for Jordan at the baccarat table. It proved that Cully was not just your run-of-the mill, one-shot hustler, that he wasn’t one of your fake, scroungy, crooked shafters. It proved that he was a hustler in his heart of hearts.
For Gronevelt had been a sincere hustler all his life. He knew that the true hustler could come back to the same mark and hustle him two, three, four, five, six times and still be regarded as a friend. The hustler who used up a mark in one shot was bogus, an amateur, a waster of his talent. And Gronevelt knew that the true hustler had to have his spark of humanity, his genuine feeling for his fellowman, even his pity of his fellowman. The true genius of a hustler was to love his mark sincerely. The true hustler had to be generous, compassionately helpful and a good friend. This was not a contradiction. All these virtues were essential to the hustler. They built up his almost rocklike credibility. And they were all to be used for the ultimate purpose. When as a true friend he stripped the mark of those treasures which he, the hustler, coveted or needed for his own life. And it wasn’t that simple. Sometimes it was for money. Sometimes it was to acquire the other man’s power or simply the leverage that the other man’s power generated. Of course, a hustler had to be cunning and ruthless, but he was nothing, he was transparent, he was a one-shot winner, unless he had a heart. Cully had a heart. He had shown that when he had stood by Jordan at the baccarat table and defied Gronevelt.