The Muses of Ruin

Sammie Leads Me into his casino and tells me to choose my table. Play is desultory at all of them; it is the middle of the Las Vegas dinner hour. The combo is serenading us with twangy country music: The harmonica and fiddle go into a wild hoedown finale and the kazoo rides after their medley like a posse of hornets.

I know the table I want. Eddie Reilly, that melancholy old veteran of the Mississippi gambling boats, is on the stick, and Rick Douglas is one of the dealers. I don't think Sammie will try switching dice on me--the casino license is worth 20 times my $50,000--but if he does try, I don't think Eddie will let him.

I am trembling, but not because I am having second thoughts about risking the entire $50,000 of the insurance money that came to me as my share of my father's estate. And not because I doubt my own capacity to ruin Sammie in this 15 minutes of nolimit play to which he so eagerly agreed in his office upstairs. No, I am trembling because I stand at the edge of the cataracts men fall off into madness, and because it is now too tempting, too tempting to take this route into oblivion. For through the roaring in my ears I can still hear my wife's shattered voice confessing the story of how Sammie had, on three different occasions since our marriage, forced her into bed with him.

Sammie relieves the box man at the table I've chosen and sits down. The diamond stickpin in his tie flashes like a beacon, and his cool smile is that of a man sure he knows the buttons to push to make the world spin backward. And sure, yes, that he can finish me. But I see him glance at Mark Humset, whose real job as casino executive vice-president is to ride herd on Sammie on behalf of the Chicago syndicate that now controls the operation, and the glance tells me what I needed to know: that Sammie will have to answer to Chicago, perhaps even with his life, for letting me play these 15 minutes with the sky the limit.

I take up a position opposite Rick Douglas has about him the swagger of a motorcyclist set to scream down the main street of a small town. His jet-black hair is japanned and his jet-black eyes spoil to brawl.

Sammie lifts a stack of yellow chips from the house's rack. They are stamped with the casino's identifying design, but they carry no legend of dollar amount.

The five or six other players are suddenly watching us. It is curious how quickly they have caught the scent. Like gazelles grazing downwind of a kill. Curious, too, that I should feel such extraordinary serenity. I hardly dare breathe; the slightest movement will shatter these exquisite intimations of omnipotence.

The man to my left has just sevened out, the dealers are collecting the bets, and Eddie Reilly brings the dice back to the center of the baize layout with the crook end of his stick.

"How much on each chip?" Sammie says.

I hand him my check. "Ten thousand dollars."

The stark hush that follows is as thrilling as the first seconds of a free fall. The sweet panic before the parachute keeps its promise. But Sammie's face is a steel mask: he gives me five yellow chips and pushes my check for $50,000 through the lockbox slot. "Your dice, kid."

Eddie Reilly slides the bowl toward me. No casino would ever risk using gaffed dice, and no one has touched the bowl since we came to the table. Still...

I take two dice and put a silver dollar on the pass line. One dry run to make sure they aren't loads.

"New shooter," Eddie says gloomily. "Coming out, coming out..."

The dice land. "Six," Eddie says, "six, the point."

Five more throws. Then the dice come up six. "Six, the winner. Pay the front line." Rick Douglas pays me off with a dollar, and self-disgust at my own caution gores me like a tusk. I knew the dice had to be honest. I knew, my God, I knew.

Sammie glances at his watch. Taps his cigar. Eddie holds the dice out of play in the center, tickles them with the stick.

I put down four yellow chips. "Forty thousand dollars," a woman hidden on the other side of Eddie's majestic embonpoint says in an awed stage whisper. Sammie dusts a speck of ash from his tie.

"Same shooter," Eddie says. "All bets down..."

I send the dice skimming toward the far backboard, they hit, bounce halfway down the table.

"Seven!" Eddie says. "Seven, a winner."

The 5 or 6 players have become 15, maybe 20--spectators are swarming like locusts out of the amber mist. They watch fascinated and I watch fascinated as Sammie impassively gives Douglas four yellow chips and Douglas then stacks them beside mine. Now the crowd waits to see what I will do with the $80,000, and because Sammie is the house and I am not, I am its hero, but the honor is dubious. Mixed with its good wishes there is a rodent whiff of malice, as thrill-hungry as the oestrus with which a speedway grandstand waits for the first flaming crack-up.

I build the two stacks into one stack of eight and leave it on the pass line. The length of the table, clawed hands immediately descend on that same narrow perimeter of charmed felt and erect little minarets of chips and silver, for it is part of the voodoo credo of every player since time began that the biggest bettor has juice with the slattern goddess. Next I give Douglas a $100 bill and buy four $25 chips. One of them I drop into his shirt pocket as a toke, another in Eddie's. It is the first time I have ever tipped housemen, and it astounds me that I should be doing it. The aberrant exhibitionist elations of playing on front-line clover. But the ceremony needs a crowning touch: I toss a third one to Sammie.

Now the dice. Out into the world I send them again.

"Nine," Eddie says, "the point is nine."

A new combo is socking a torchy rumba. Douglas' hips sway with the insinuating tempo, brushing the table as if he were teasing a woman's thinghs. He looks sleek and greedy, like a purring cat. The dice are waiting, and so is the crowd. I feel my first prickle of fear, and I think Sammie is feeling his.

Then the incantatory dithyramb begins:

"Nine right back, dice!"

"Six, nine the number," Eddie says.

"Ninety days, dice!"

"Four," Eddie says, "four the easy way. The line is nine."

"Nina from Carolina, dice!"

"Eleven," Eddie says, "come and field. The point is nine."

"Quinine, dice, the bitter dose!"

"Twelve," Eddie says, "nine the number."

"Three times three, you charmers! Get hot!"

By now 50 people have crowded around the table. And Mark Humset has materialized behind Sammie like an assassin with a poisoned dagger. Sammie is grim, but his executive vice-president is grimmer. Humset bends over, whispers a terse question to Sammie. Sammie, his eyes never leaving my hands until the dice leave them and then never leaving the dice until they return to my hands, answers, "Ten thousand on each chip." The commissar from Chicago turns ashen.

Again and again I throw the dice, but too many overanxious parapsychologists are transmitting psychic instructions on the same frequency. Then Sammie glances for an instant at his watch, and, as if a spell had been broken, the dice spin into a dance of glory.

"Nine!" Eddie says. "Nine, a winner. Pay the line."

The crowd roars its approval. Douglas starts to pay off bets. But Sammie's hand chops down on his like a machete. The dealer winces with pain. Sammie scoops up the dice, checks the house markings, gives them the pivot test by lightly positioning and spinning diagonally opposite corners of each cube between his thumb and forefinger. I track each movement, but one hand casually covers the other and I cannot tell whether he is making a switch. "All right," he says, "pay off." He tosses the dice onto the table.

I look now at my 16 yellow chips and I feel the pure elixir of exaltation coursing in me like a divine brandy, sweet with promises of immortality. But I harbor a bookkeeper, too, a wretch of a timeserver who sits on a high stool entering nickels and dimes and suspender buttons into dusty ledgers, and now this crabbed old clerk with gravy stains on his vest and spectacles held together by dirty adhesive tape clears his throat for another plaintive lecture on the ant and the grasshopper. ($160,000, he says. Stop now, you will still be wealthier than you ever dreamed of being.) He is an old retainer, he has been with me for years, but he is getting on and his memory is failing. He forgets that I came to this room tonight for purposes unconnected with money. I have purposes that give me a power, and I now have much less than 15 minutes in which to accomplish them.

I leave the 16 chips on the pass line and pick up the dice. And again, the length of the table, arms and hands frantically reach out--as if to touch the robe of a passing holy man--toward that same charmed perimeter of felt. But I am not ready to shoot. There is a decision to be made. Whether to play with the same dice, because when dice win for you it is folly to try the patience of the goddess by changing them, or whether to demand new dice as a precaution against Sammie's sleight of hand.

A voice, Mark Humset's, says: "The house limit in this casino is five hundred dollars. As of this second, no higher bets go."

I put down the dice. "Then I'm cashing in."

Sammie taps his watch. "You still have eight minutes of no-limit play."

"Mr. Humset just said the limit was five hundred dollars."

"I heard him. I'm telling you, you still have eight minutes left."

From Humset: "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

The crowd is with Sammie. Someone starts to boo. The hooting spreads. On the pit side of the table, Sammie's (continued on page 179)Muses of Ruin(continued from page 148) personal bodyguard Hips Michalak, looms apelike from nowhere, edges close to Sammie. I am suddenly realizing what is going on in Humset's mind, and the ironic but absolutely ideal irrationality of it almost moves me to wild triumphant laughter: My God, Humset believes that Sammie and I are working together with educated cubes. The paranoia of syndicate brotherhood. No, Sammie cannot retreat at this point; more than his vanity and public reputation are at stake; his position in the hotel operation itself is on the block; his Chicago partners are never going to accept protestations of innocence from a man who in a few minutes has lost over $100,000 of casino money.

For an instant I luxuriate in the lovely peril of his predicament; he is that classic palooka, the poker player who has to stay in on a sick hand to protect what he already has in the pot. The bitter test of strength between Sammie and Humset goes on. The story will be all over Las Vegas in an hour.

From Sammie: "Now get this straight! I'm running this casino, and right now I'm running this table."

Humset is simultaneously trying to stare Sammie down and keep his distance from Sammie's nervous pet gorilla. It is a field problem hard on vice-presidential dignity; his eyeballs wamble in the ludicrous nystagmic orbits of a dog trying to catch its tail. But he is licked--temporarily--and knows it. The field problem now is to withdraw with whatever face he can salvage. My problem is different. It is to win...twice more. Twice more will not break the Blue Lagoon, but it will break Sammie. Twice more...and in return for victory, a row to the goddess: I will never gamble again.

Humset stalks toward the bank of telephones on a table in the center of the pit area. "Make your bet, shooter," Sammie says.

"I want new dice."

Eddie slides me the bowl. I choose my dice, but I haven't been watching the bowl, I have been watching Humset, and there is too much at hazard to trust new dice without one trial. I draw my yellow chips from the pass line--the other players draw their money--and put down a dollar.

The dice skitter across the layout, carom off the far wall, pirouette, stop.

"Eee-o-lehven!" Eddie says. "Pay the line. Pay the field."

Sammie grins around his clamped cigar. I want to weep, gouge my eyes. But Sammie's ticking watch and the drill-sergeant cadence of the slots and the seething hungers of the crowd grant no indulgences. I take one yellow chip from my pile of 16 and put it in my rack--a toke, along with the first chip I set aside, to quiet the old bookkeeper. Then I divide the 15 into a stack of 8 and a stack of 7, because this time I am going to make two bets: Whenever you have a bet on the pass line, you are allowed, after the come-out, to bet up to that same amount that you will make your point--it is the only bet on the board where the house pays off at true mathematical odds.

The stack of eight goes onto the pass line. The dice come up ten. I bet the stack of seven behind the line to take the two-to-one odds on the ten.

"Four," Eddie says, "four, soft and easy."

"Big Dick, dice!"

"Five," Eddie says,"five, and no field.

Ten will win it."

"Pair of fives, dice!"

"Six," Eddie says, "six the hardest way."

Four...five...six...like steps. And the fatal seven next on the staircase. The gambler who is not superstitious does not exist. Who expects a golf ball or hockey puck to be influenced by psychokinetic prayers? But what crapshooter ever throws the devil's-bones without a secret plea to the goddess? I close my eyes, kiss the dice nested tenderly in my hand. All I ask is, no seven. Please...please...

"Nine," Eddie says, "winner in the field. Come bets, field bets...who wants any?"

Humset is on the phone, probably the direct line to Chicago. Sammie, his eyes riveted to the dice, cups his hands to relight his cigar. Eddie chants calls. From the combo: wah-wah wail of the slip-stick, raw moan of the sax.

"Ten!" Eddie says. "Ten, winner the hard way."

The coliseum roar of the crowd.

Humset is back at the table. Sammie is staring at the dice with the glazed look of an animal locked into paralysis by on-rushing headlights. But his is the paralysis known as loser's catalepsy. It manacles him to this table like a prisoner. At last he nods to Douglas; Douglas pays off my two bets. Five stacks totaling 37 chips; $370,000. I recite the sum to myself, nearly bewitched by its poetry and the ambrosia of elation.

"Make your bet, shooter," Sammie says.

"If he bets again," Humset says, "he bets like everybody else." Humset jerks his head toward the pit telephones. "I'm passing on an order, Sammie."

The catcalls of the crowd drown Sammie's answer. But it is spit out like a curse. Humset is handicapped by his awareness of Hips' menacing presence and the jeering hostility of the crowd--he is as tense as a sheriff's deputy standing off a mob at the door to the jail.

Sammie gestures to Eddie to give me the dice. "Make your bet, shooter."

"This casino," Humset says, "isn't covering any bet over five hundred dollars."

"Make your bet, shooter. I'm covering it."

I have him! Thanks to Humset, now I have him. I nod toward my five stacks of chips. "My money's on the board. Where's yours?"

"What are you betting?"

"I'm betting three hundred and seventy thousand dollars."

Sammie takes out his wallet and writes a check. He tosses it onto the table. "You're faded!"

This is too beautiful, too beautiful. Because Sammie doesn't have that kind of money in the bank. Of that I am sure. And he will not be able to raise it, not all of it, not with Chicago after him, as it will be now, for the $300,000-plus of house money he has already lost to me tonight. And so all I have to do is win one more time, and then I will have the check, and after the bank refuses payment because of insufficient funds, I will go to the district attorney and sign a complaint, and Sammie will go to prison--if Chicago hasn't first exacted a more extreme private revenge.

One time, one time...

But now the bookkeeper I harbor tugs at my elbow, mewling of caution and buckled galoshes in avalanches. "Seven passes in a row already," he says, "and you have about one chance in three hundred of making eight in a row." He is a bookkeeper, figures are his life, but he does not know that dice have no memory. If there had been a hundred passes in a row, the odds to pass on the next come-out would be no different from what they had been on the first.

"The dice," he persists, "are sure to miss out now...let them get it out of their system." While I am pondering his gloomy counsel, the wily old kibitzer adds, "You made a vow you'd stop if you got two more passes. And you did get two more passes. You don't want to break your vow, do you?"

"You're being unfair," I reply. "I only bet a dollar on one of them. It shouldn't count."

I hear his hacking laugh. "It isn't the fault of the goddess that you only bet a dollar. She gave you what you asked. You had your chance..."

Sammie says, "OK, shooter."

I draw off the 37 yellow chips. "I'm betting a dollar."

"You're faded."

The dice spin off the wall.

"Seven," Eddie says, "seven, a winner."

Nerve, Sammie had said to me once, nerve.

Sammie pays me a dollar. No one else is on the board.

The old bookkeeper coughs for attention. "Wait," he pleads. "The cycle is sure to break now. Wait for a new one to start."

"If I hadn't listened to you," I said, "I could have finished him. And I would have had three quarters of a million dollars."

"No," he replies, "it would have been different if you'd bet the yellow chips. And it's too dangerous to try now. Wait."

"Make your bet, shooter."

"Two dollars is my bet." The crowd, greedy for carnage, stirs with the truculent sub rosa impatience of mutinous sailors.

"You're faded."

"Eleven," Eddie says, "eleven, a winner."

Sammie pays me two dollars. "Nerve is what it takes kid. You got it, or you don't."

"I'm betting three hundred and seventy thousand and four dollars."

"You're faded."

The crowd becomes a fat voluptuary shivering with anticipation. People are pressed six deep behind me and there must be a 300-pound stationmaster shoving each of them into the small of my back. There is something macabre in this chafing voracity, almost as though a Goya canvas had suddenly come writhing to life.

And then, as I take the dice, my consciousness of the crowd and the slots and the combo, which now seems to be all cymbals and throbbing drums, fades, and the world is reduced to a green-felt race track with Sammie on one side of it and me on the other, and the silence seems that of the catacombs in eternity. On that green oval of felt there are numbers printed in black and there are geometric lines drawn in white and there is a reflected glare of overhead lights which makes it seem as if the two of us are actors playing the parts--as the curtain goes up on a packed, hushed and darkened house--of precinct detectives bent over another shamming victim of our perhaps too-enthusiastic third degree.

"Throw dem marbles!" a heckler shouts, and I do.

"Eight," Eddie says, "the point is eight."

The next throw is too hard, and one the catapults into the crowd. ("No roll, no roll.") It is retrieved and returned to Sammie. He checks it--thumb and forefinger pivot test--then returns it to play.

I shake my head. "I don't want it."

Eddie slides me the bowl. "Don't change dice now," the bookkeeper says.

"It's bad luck to change in the middle of a point."

"He might have worked a switch," I answer.

"How could he? You were watching."

"Do you want new dice, or don't you?" Sammie says.

"One," I say, and take it. "You're asking for bad luck," the bookkeeper says.

I close my eyes. This one time, I plead, this one time an eight. An eight, and I am through forever.

"Ada Ross the stable hoss!"

"Seven," Eddie says, "seven, loser."