He’d been dozing all that afternoon and perhaps he was as naked as she was when he traipsed outdoors in the fading light and saw her there.
FAREWELL
It was evening and Ben wore a dark suit and a dark tie and he had showered recently enough that his hair was still a little damp at the sideburns. He lit a match whose gold tip slowly erupted in a flame so high he had to hold it away from his body. His hair was not only damp, Meyer saw, but starting to thin a little. He reached the ashtray toward him and inhaled.
“You’re still with Anne,” Ben said. “Still married.”
“She’s ill. You know that.”
“I’m just saying you should think of yourself a little.”
“Like you.”
Though still unfinished, the Flamingo was two million dollars over budget. You wondered how Ben could put himself in such a position, and then you remembered that his whole life was full of mistakes and embarrassments that he endured out of necessity and then forgot.
“I came out here because you asked me to,” he said. “I got invested in it, I don’t know why. All the details.”
“It seems like you’ve had a lot of fun ideas out here.”
“Don’t give me that look. The sad shtetl in that look.”
Virginia came in holding a bottle of Coca-Cola with a long straw tilting out of its neck. She had pushed her sunglasses back over the front roll of her hair — without the sunglasses her eyes were hazel and without mystery. She handed the bottle to Ben and he put it down on the desk and spread his arms, and she hesitated for a moment, as if about to come sit in his lap, but then she turned and left the room without ever quite looking at Meyer. Maybe the lack of refinement and depth made her sexy in a frank, resolute way. Maybe he saw it and it made him like her less each time he was with her. You left someone in a different part of the world, even for just a year, and he changed in so many ways that you could only mourn the loss. It was that the new place brought out what had always been latent inside him. Distance revealed his flaws.
THE OLD COUNTRY
Safe havens, places of refuge. Of course in Lansky’s case there was no such analogy as Lercara Friddi — there was no place to be sent back to. The place he had come from had disappeared, become judenrein. They’d taken his part of Grodno and deported it to Auschwitz and Treblinka.
BASEBALL
Buddy Lansky was at his usual table with the sports pages when the woman sat down across from him, her shoulders slanted a little to one side. His friend Sam had been watching from the bar, but when she came over Sam walked back toward his office. The woman wore dark lipstick and had faint wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, the collar of her yellow blouse jutting out over the lapel of her jacket. Not drunk, but drinking. The electric fans rattling in their cages at the corners of the room. She told him her name and he was about to tell her his, but she would have known, he was sure, there was no point. He looked back down at the blurred league standings, anchored there with the side of his swollen hand. The waiter brought the woman a beer and asked Buddy if he wanted anything and Buddy said no, he was fine. He went there almost every day — everyone knew whose son he was. Sometimes they played cards, sometimes he just listened to them talk.
“You’re not very good at this, are you?” the woman said.
“Good at what?”
“Good at chatting people up. Making them feel at ease. Letting them know what you want.”
She brought two fingers and her thumb to her glass of beer, then took a meditative sip, barely tipping the glass, holding it in that delicate way, but when she put it down, it hit the table harder than she expected.
“A baseball fan,” she said. “Isn’t that funny? I never understood a thing about baseball.”
She extended her hand across the table, a lazy form of beckoning, waiting for him to understand: he was supposed to clasp it. It was a dry, slender hand, the insides of the fingers lined and creased, but it was long, well formed. Her age was terrifying and alluring at the same time. Sam had made him a standing offer of the use of his apartment. That was the joke Sam always made.
They took a cab across town. At the entrance to the cement-fronted building on Lexington Avenue, a doorman stood inside the opened glass, nothing on his face. He mentioned the apartment number and gave Buddy an envelope with the key, and Buddy and the woman took the elevator to the fifth floor, not talking anymore. There were some old chairs and a yellow cloth couch and a radio, a kitchenette off to the side. She poured herself a drink at the little makeshift bar and Buddy stood there looking out the windows at the white sunlight between the buildings.
“We’ll just take it easy,” she said. “Go ahead and lie down. Do you like music or is it just baseball? I used to sing, believe it or not. Lee Sherman’s band. What I liked best, though, was to sing with just a piano, that intimacy. I never had a big voice. I wasn’t good for singing with a band.”
She switched on the radio, an ad for Lux soap, then she reached back and took the pins out of her hair, shaking it loose. She took off her jacket, then her blouse. He didn’t experience any of this as quite real. Not the sight of her in her brassiere, nor the sight of her stepping out of her heels and taking off her skirt. The brassiere and the girdle left lines in her flesh, and the sheer black stockings made her hips and thighs seem unusually broad. When she sat next to him, he was overwhelmed by the sudden fact of her warmth, the air she exhaled, the thin gold strand around her neck. Her touch made it clearer. The hard fact of her experience made it clearer. He tried to kiss her and she moved away with such professional skill that he felt his body recede into vagueness. She took off the brassiere, reaching behind her back for the clasp like an athletic girl, one foot tucked behind her on the couch. He saw her breasts swing free and for a minute or two he was no longer Buddy.
DECLINE AND FALL
On December 26, 1946, the still-unfinished Flamingo had its disastrous grand opening with Xavier Cugat and His Orchestra, Jimmy Durante, Rose Marie, and a few other entertainers playing to a half-empty room of mostly local Nevadans in ranch clothes. Robert Lacey recounts:
There were no bedrooms for guests. So on the night the Flamingo opened for business, it was the neighboring El Rancho Las Vegas and the Last Frontier which made the big money, as the guests from the Flamingo’s opening reception came back to their hotels, sent their wives off to bed, and decided to play for an hour or so with the winnings they had brought from the new casino down the road.
The same pattern continued through the entire Christmas week of 1946 and through the New Year’s celebrations of 1947…. Late in January 1947, the new Flamingo Hotel Casino closed its doors, less than a month after it had opened.
The week before this failed grand opening, Charlie Luciano’s lieutenant, Vito Genovese, had arrived at the Havana Conference four days early, as if already smelling blood. Genovese had been hiding in Italy, where during the war he’d allied himself with Benito Mussolini and begun smuggling narcotics. Before that, Genovese had murdered many people, including Joe “The Boss” Masseria, with the help of Luciano, Ben Siegel, Albert Anastasia, and Joe Adonis, all of whom, like Genovese, were now investors in Siegel and Lansky’s unfinished Flamingo. On the night of the failed grand opening, after the bad news came via a phone call from Las Vegas, Genovese demanded to speak in private with Luciano at their hotel in Havana. Luciano, via his biographer Martin Gosch, is made to recount the episode in The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano: