For a while after Fidel took over the casinos remained open and Bennie went to work as usual. There were still American tourists coming to Cuba, suckers willing to have their money taken while they drank themselves silly on daiquirís. Bennie’s job was to be a card dealer, not a priest. He’d see the Americanos at the table with a couple of gorgeous Cuban redheads wrapped around them and say to himself, Man, if I only had the money, I’d be right there next to them. Then one day two men came around asking if anyone wanted to go work in Las Vegas.
Las Vegas? Where the hell is that? Bennie asked. In the middle of nowhere, one of the guys said. But soon it’s going to be the next Havana. You schmucks want to stay here and rot? Schmuck was an English word Bennie had never heard. The guy doing the talking kept straightening his tie as he spoke. He looked like a movie gangster except that he was very young, maybe twenty years old, and he spoke in a reedy falsetto.
I have a wife, Bennie started to say, then he remembered he hated his wife. This was a perfect opportunity to escape the clutches of his lousy marriage, to escape all he sensed was coming to the island.
Six other dealers volunteered that day as well as eight cooks, twenty showgirls, and an unknown number of musicians. Two weeks later Bennie was at the Las Vegas airport, waiting for his bags and making small talk with Orlando and three of his culinary colleagues. The taciturn man with the scar led the five of them to a Ford station wagon and drove them to a motel off Rancho Drive. It was mid-July and the heat rose from the asphalt, turning the station wagon into a pressure cooker. The heat of Havana was nothing compared to this. Bennie mentioned his discomfort to the cooks but they, used to the infernal atmosphere of commercial kitchens, thought nothing of it. Paradise indeed.
Another man met them at the motel and gave each of them a room key. Bennie’s was number 207.
Good number to play, he said to Orlando. Number two is butterfly. Number seven is seashell.
Mine is 112. One is horse. Twelve is whore, Orlando responded. Not too good. That Chinese system is foolishness. There are better ways to make money.
Then the man announced that someone would be by for them the next morning at 7:30 and left.
For seven years Bennie lived in that motel, caught between a present substantially narrowed by a dead-end job and a suffocating nostalgia for the glories and joys of a past that was neither glorious nor joyous. His one friend, Orlando, was a man of limited intellectual capacity and no imagination to speak of. His conversations never strayed from the perfect demi-glace he’d concocted that morning or the bread he’d baked for lunch or the celebrity who’d entered the kitchen and offered his compliments on the salmon mousse. When Bennie tried to engage him in more expansive topics, such as baseball or women, a blank look came over Orlando’s face and at the first opportunity he’d switch the conversation back to kitchen matters. Bennie worked the graveyard shift because nights were hardest for him to spend alone. He’d sleep mornings as much as he could, until about noon or so. Then he’d shower, pick up the local paper, and go to a cafeteria on Sahara where he’d have two eggs fried over easy, bacon, toast, and bad American coffee. The rest of the time was his to do as he wanted. He napped, read the paper again, and, in the cool months, took long walks on streets that led nowhere but back into themselves. His shift began at 11 p.m. but more often than not he did a double, starting at 3 o’clock and going straight through until 7 the next morning.
Making money wasn’t the object; he simply had too much time on his hands and no way of whiling it away. The summer was too hot for anything but sitting in air-conditioning; the winter was high season and Joey, his pit boss, threw as much work at him as he could handle. His wife, who had since moved to Miami, sent him divorce papers, which he signed and sent right back. There was no ocean to look at like there was in Havana; only desert and fancy casinos where the tourists dropped their money. Mostly there was a lot of dust which got in his eyes and made him teary, as if he wasn’t teary enough already. There were plenty of women, beautiful ones, but none was accessible to him, a simple dealer from the tropics with a thick Cuban accent — like Desi Arnaz chewing on a raw steak, Joey once said — and the looks of a Galician grocer. The way to attract women, an uncle of his told him long ago, is to impress them with your power and your wealth. Good looks will only go so far. The woman needs to see you as a god, and those attributes are the closest we humans have to divinity. And just when Bennie had resigned himself to a life of celibacy, he met a woman, a round Mexican who cooked him fiery dishes and made love like a Zapotec beast. She always brought food — enchiladas, tacos, moles — enough for him and for Orlando who lived downstairs. Her name was Mercedes. She took care of both of them, in more ways than one, but she had her eye on Bennie. Barriga llena, corazón contento, she would say with a sparkle in her eye, expecting any moment he would say back to her the magic words.
As he sat outside his room on his day off, Bennie heard a commotion on the first level of the motel, followed by a woman’s voice that sounded very much like Mercedes screaming, Puto, cabrón, hijo de la chingada. He rushed down the steps to the first level and saw Orlando the cook on the floor, leaning against the brick outer wall of his room with a butcher knife stuck half-way into his chest. His eyes were glazed and a string of bloody saliva hung from his lips. Orlando babbled something about someone taking twenty thousand and said nothing else. He looked up at Bennie before letting out a long sigh like a balloon deflating; then his eyes lost their bearing and his head drooped softly to the side.
Bennie’s first instinct was to go back upstairs and forget what he had seen, let someone else deal with the situation. Instead, out of deference to his friend, he looked around to make sure no one else had witnessed the killing, maneuvered Orlando away from the wall with great difficulty — he was a bulky guy, as cooks tend to be — and dragged him back into the room. Bennie shut the door and turned the air-conditioning as high as it would go, figuring it would help preserve Orlando. He sat on the unmade bed and tried to light a cigarette. His hands were shaking so badly it took four tries before he could bring the match to the tip and take the first drag. Sure, he’d seen plenty of people die, like his mother and her sisters, and a cousin with leukemia, but never like this, with a knife sticking out of them and their last words about money. This would never happen in Cuba, he thought, then thought again. Of course it would. Still, at this moment he wanted to be back there in his old apartment on Lagunas Street where his parents had lived and their parents before them, now occupied by his revolution-crazed cousin Aleida, who had beautiful eyes but farted like a foghorn.
Bennie surveyed the room and spied a half-full bottle of Don Q rum on the dresser, which he could reach without having to stand up. Two healthy swigs settled him somewhat and he considered the situation. Calling the police was out of the question. They’d snoop and his bosses weren’t fond of snooping. So he called Joey, his pit boss at the casino — he’d know what to do — and waited for him to show up.
It took Joey three hours to get to the motel. When he saw the cook lying on the carpet, his first words were Holy fucking shit. Orlando’s face had acquired a blue pallor and rigor mortis was beginning to set in, no matter that it was damn cold in the room. Those were Joey’s second words: It’s damn cold in here, followed by, What was your fight about?