"Say, Angie," he whispered to her one night during their second week together. "You're great in bed, but — "
"But?"
"No, not 'but.' You're great. I wondered, though, if you ... if you'd take me into your mouth."
She lifted herself up on one elbow. "Seriously? I don't know. I don't really know. I've never done it." She reached down and lifted his penis in her hand. "I could never get all that in. I'd gag."
"Getting it all in is not the point," he said.
"What is the point? How would I do it?"
"Like eating a lollipop," he said.
She laughed. "Like eating a lollipop! Well ... Is it a big deal for you?"
He drew a deep breath. "I'd like it. I don't demand it."
She stared at his crotch for a few seconds. "Will you wash it first?"
"For sure."
"Well, then ... I'll try."
She was telling the truth. She had never done it. She had heard it called ugly names, heard women who did it called ugly names. But — He was worth it.
When he came back from the bathroom he smelled of soap and of shaving lotion he had splashed on his upper body. He plumped up pillows and put them against the headboard of the bed, then sat and leaned back against them — and waited.
She took a moment to firm up her courage. She smiled at him, then lowered her face, opened her mouth wide, and sucked his throbbing organ into her mouth. She held it there and massaged his puckered foreskin with the tip of her tongue. Then she pulled back, seized the thick stalk in her left hand, and began to lick it, taking long strokes from the base up to the tip. He whispered a suggestion that she lick what was below, too: his dark, wrinkled pouch the size of two fists. She did that for a moment and returned to it briefly now and again, but mostly she alternated between holding the upper half of his penis in her mouth, manipulating his foreskin with her tongue and lips, and pulling it out and licking its full length.
He began to gasp and moan. She was giving him ecstasy. She was surprised; she hadn't imagined a man would experience utter bliss under such ministration. So ... He would love her for it. Well — not love. He would treasure her for it. She had heard women denounce it as debasing, abnegating. They might consider that she was in control of this, as she was never in control when a man was on top of her, pounding himself into her in his final stage. Of this, she was the manager and could bring him along or slow him down, as she wished. No way at all did she feel degraded.
She found nothing unpleasant about it, though she was nervous about his ejaculation, wondering what she would do with his fluid, wondering if it was nasty-tasting stuff. She worked to bring it, but it took some time, five or six minutes anyway. When the abrupt gush came, she discovered it had almost no taste at all. Certainly it was nothing offensive. The word for this was sucking, so she guessed she was supposed to suck when he climaxed, so she closed her lips around his shaft and drew the stuff from him. Some of it went down her throat. She swallowed. Some accumulated in her mouth. She swallowed that, too.
"Oh god, Angie!"
She smiled gently. Some of his ejaculate gleamed on her chin. "You like that, huh?" she whispered.
He reached for her and drew her into his arms.
4
Nevada and Angie gaped at Jonas. They laughed, and yet they knew he was serious.
Clint McClintock, on a trip to Los Angeles, had gone as ordered to a costume shop in Culver City and had come back with a number of items Jonas had specified. One was a gray, almost white toupee. Another was a pair of silver-framed eyeglasses, with ordinary glass, not lenses, in the round frames. Another was a can of wax an actor could mold by hand into the desired shape and then work into place in the mouth between gums and cheeks, shoving out the cheeks and making a man's face look fatter, even jowly.
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.