Manso knew a lot about gangsters. When they flew him back to the States, he had close to three grand in his pocket and he took the whole roll straight to Vegas. He won the first three nights straight and had the feeling that he had found the only sensible way in the world to make a living. The fourth night he stepped up to the crap table of the Sands with $8,500 on his hip. By midnight he had run it up to twenty thousand, and at a quarter to three in the morning he had a fifty-dollar bill in his shoe and no chips at all in front of him.
An assistant manager bought him breakfast, told him to forget his hotel bill, and bought him a bus ticket to L.A. Manso cashed the ticket at the bus station. He took a five-a-week room in downtown Vegas and got a job in an automatic car wash. He spent every night at the downtown casinos. He played as small as he could and never lost more than five dollars in a night. Most of the time he watched.
He ate out of cans and saved his money. He talked to people, he read books. He thought things out very carefully, and he finally concluded that you couldn’t beat the tables, but he kept going to the casinos and watching the play and betting nickels and dimes while making larger bets in his mind. After a few more months he changed his mind. You could beat the tables, but only if you had three things. You needed the knowledge and the capital and, most important of all, the attitude.
Even so, you weren’t likely to beat the casinos’ brains out. But you could learn to tune yourself in, could develop the knack of sensing when your luck was coming so that you could ride the hot streaks and go home the instant they cooled. You couldn’t get rich that way, but if you had a thick enough bankroll, you could do about well enough to live fairly well without working for a living.
It took Manso a long time to save a thousand dollars. When he hit that figure, he was ready. He went back to the Sands. He was in the casino for eighteen hours straight. He would make small bets at the crap table, waiting for the feeling to come, and when it didn’t, he would kill time at a nickel slot machine waiting for the mood to shift. At three in the afternoon, after sixteen hours, he was about three hundred dollars ahead. He was also out of nickels, so he moved on down the line to a quarter machine, dropped in his only quarter, and caught the jackpot on the first shot.
He went straight to the crap table and pushed his luck straight up to five thousand dollars. He couldn’t do a thing wrong. When his roll stood at five grand, he had the dice rattling in his hand and a thousand of his dollars on the table, a limit bet on the pass line and another on the eight. He was set to roll when something happened inside his head, some message reached him, and he held up in midroll and pulled both bets back and dropped a five-dollar chip on the Don’t Come line.
“You’re betting against yourself,” the croupier said.
The dice came up ace-deuce craps. He cashed in five thousand and five dollars. He settled his bill from before and reimbursed the assistant manager for the bus ticket. He was on the next plane to Los Angeles. When the colonel called him, he was working on an assembly line at an aircraft factory and thinking about getting back in the service.
There was never any question in his mind about what to do with the proceeds from the first job they pulled. He had acquired two of the three necessities earlier, the knowledge and the attitude, and now he had the requisite capital. Now, with all of that cash in his kick, it didn’t really matter whether he won or lost.
Since then he lived the ideal life. He drifted from Vegas to Puerto Rico to Nassau and back again. Sometimes he went to Europe, but the casinos there didn’t have it for him. Everything was too formal, too stuffy. He liked the life in the American casinos. Plush, wellstaffed hotels, the best night life in the world, beautiful and eager women, fine food, and action whenever he was in the mood. He won a little more than he lost, and when his luck went sour, he knew enough to stay away from the tables. He didn’t need twenty-four hours a day of gambling. There were enough other things that he liked about the life.
The one thing he didn’t like was the gangsters. You couldn’t have gambling without them, it seemed. They were all over Vegas and the Caribbean. Manso knew some of them enough to nod to and others enough to drink with, and they knew him for a right bettor who didn’t leave much on their tables but who rarely hurt them, either. They thought he was all right He thought they were garbage, but he didn’t let them know it.
Now, at Platt’s restaurant, he carried the remains of his Bloody Mary to a table in the back. He ordered a rare sirloin and a salad and wondered if Platt would show up.
Manso was on his second cup of coffee when the gangster walked in. There were three others in his party. The other man with him was half a head taller than Platt and weighed fifty pounds less. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes deeply sunken, and he walked with his arms tight against his body and a look of incipient death in his eyes. The two girls were blondes in their late twenties, and Manso thought they looked hired. He watched Platt’s girl and wondered if he had played the revolver trick on her.
He finished his coffee and signaled for the check. While he was waiting for his change he saw Buddy Rice at the door. At once he dropped his eyes, rested his forehead on one hand as if in thought. Platt had looked his way twice and had shown no recognition. Platt, though, would not be apt to recognize him; Rice, bodyguard and seeing-eye dog, was supposed to scan rooms his master entered and place the faces he found in them.
Manso raised his eyes again. Buddy was alone at a table on the far wall, positioned so that he could keep an eye on Platt’s table. The waiter brought Manso’s change. He left an unremarkable tip. When the welterweight-turned-headwaiter went over to talk to Buddy Rice, Manso got to his feet and left the restaurant.
On the pavement he lit a cigarette and walked off to the left. Rice had come into the restaurant almost five minutes after Platt. He had parked the car, obviously. Manso walked on past the restaurant’s parking lot. There was an attendant on duty, a stringy kid in an ill-fitting uniform. But did he park the cars himself or just stand guard? Manso crossed the street at the corner, came back halfway on the other side, and waited. After a few minutes a car pulled in and the boy parked it.
So Rice had dropped them off. Then he must have gone on around the block to the lot entrance, where he turned the car over to the kid.
But when it was time to pick up the car, Rice wouldn’t have to drive around the block. For that matter, there was a fair possibility that Platt and his party would walk the few yards to the lot entrance with him. Whether they did or not, there was no room for Manso to make his play.
He stood in a doorway for a few moments, thinking it out. Then he walked to his own car, parked on the street around the corner. He drove halfway around the block and parked the Plymouth in front of an unlit house.
Another house two doors down was backed up against the restaurant’s parking lot. Manso shucked his jacket and tie, left them in the car. He changed his black oxfords for tennis shoes and slipped noiselessly up the driveway and through the backyard. The lawn was soggy from a full afternoon of sprinkling. When a light went on in the rear of the house, he dropped flat on the wet grass, and for a thin moment he was back in Bolivia on an antiguerrilla patrol with high swamp grass bunched under him and the chatter of the guerrillas, a mongrel Indio-Spanish, rattling on either side of him. The light went out. He stayed where he was for another moment or two, then got to his feet and moved silently to the fence.