As I approached the roped-off baccarat area, Jay Guiness, my VIP coordinator, hurried over.
“Zack, we managed to get it all set up on short notice. You sure know how to surprise a guy. Hell, I didn't even know you had solicited his play for the opening, less more that you would be playing.” He leaned close to whisper. “I heard Mr. Wan was persona non grata in this town. This is really a surprise.”
“Yeah, I'm full of surprises.”
They all gave me the eye as I talked to Guiness: Mr. Wan, big creepy Ling, Tommy Chow, and a couple of boys who looked like the type that gave 9mm café coronaries in Macao. Waiting for me like a pack of jackals ready to rip off pieces of flesh. What fucking nerve. I had to give Wan creditâthe bastard had brass balls.
He was seated at Tommy Chow's lucky-for-him, unlucky-for-his-wife, chemin de fer table. He lifted himself out of the chair just enough to give me a small bow. I couldn't help it, I had to laugh. Fucking brass balls.
Moody appeared at my elbow. We exchanged looks and I said to Guiness, “Do me a favor, double-check and make sure the kitchen and wine cellar serve nothing but our best to our guests Mr. Wan and his companions.”
As soon as Guiness left, I asked Moody, “How'd you find out?”
“Your wife called me as soon as they showed up. Your VIP man buzzed up to your suite looking for you. I hope you know what you're doing with these guys. A couple of them look like candidates for China's Most Wanted.”
“I know as much as you do.”
He shot a glance at the Macao mafia. “What d'you mean?”
“I mean they showed up unannounced. I thought Wan had a federal warrant.”
“Not anymore. The minute Mrs. Riordan sent out an SOS, I called an old pal at the FBI office. Wan settled up by paying a seven-figure income tax problem. What's going on, Zack, how can these guys just pop in?”
I shrugged. “I guess Mr. Wan wants to play shimmy. With me.”
“For what?”
“Everything you see.”
I turned to go to the table and Moody stopped me.
“I can have them out of here in no time flat, just say the word. These guys are no joke. If you need them out of your life, it isn't beyond the realm of possibilities that they could end up in shallow graves pushing up sagebrush.”
“It won't work. There's a funny thing about life, Moody, it's all a big circle. You head out in one direction, take all kinds of turns, but no matter if you go up or down or how many turns you make, one day you come face to face with yourself again. This is my day. But I do want your help. Get some protection for Morgan and the kids.”
“Already taken care of. Two of your security people were outside the suite. I sent them away and put two of my best people there.”
“Then let's play shimmy.”
I stopped at the table and gave a bow to Wan and another to Chow. “Gentlemen. Mr. Wan, I see you are wearing your lucky red robe.”
I wondered what the old bastard had up his sleeve.
“So good of you to consent to play with me, Mr. Riordan. Frankly, I am tired of losing to Mr. Chow. I hope you are not as lucky as he is.”
I took a seat at the table. “I suspect I used up all my luck for a two-bit jackpot a long time ago. But maybe the fickle Lady will smile on me again tonight.”
“For my sake, I hope she will not smile too broadly in your direction. Shall we say a million a hand?”
A gasp escaped from the group of people who had gathered to watch the game. I laughed out loud. A million dollars a hand was better than playing for fingers and toesâand meatier parts when you ran out of those.
“If you want to get it over with fast, let's just cut the cards. The loser throws himself from the top of the hotel tower.”
Wan clicked his tongue. “Patience, Mr. Riordan, patience. Giving pleasureâand inflicting painâare not to be hurried if they are to achieve their goals.”
“And what is your goal this evening, Mr. Wan?”
He cackled. “Everything you have, Mr. Riordan.”
We were going to play shimmy for Forbidden City, that was the bottom line. The rest of the message was subliminal: We do it this way or we do it the Macao way. It goes without saying that Wan planned on winning. He was too smart a cookie to rely on luck when he was playing with his own money. I was sitting on a hundred million dollars of his and he wanted it back. Plus a pound of my flesh.
So what was the gimmick? This time it wasn't going to be something as clumsy as a card up the sleeveâno one ever accused Wan of being stupid. The table was the obvious candidate for hiding the gaff. I had examined it a long time ago for Wan, now it was time to examine it for myself.
“Good of Tommy to let us use his lucky table.” I started poring over the table, with hands and eyes. Moody got down with me and did his own check.
“How's Tommy's wife?” I asked, just making conversation to fill in the void while we checked out the table. “Still stuck in Saigon?”
That produced an ugly grunt from Tommy Chow.
I took Moody aside after we struck out examining the table. “Tell security I want two cameras on the table at all times, and beam the images onto the big-screen TV in my suite. Tell Morgan I need to know what the bug in the play is.”
“How she can tell?”
“She's almost as good as her old man was.”
Almost. But not quite. And the “not quite” covered a lot of territory. Whatever Wan had done to put a bug in the play, it had to be first class, something he was sure would get by even me. And if it got by me, Morgan catching it would be a real long shot.
If it wasn't the table, it had to be somethingâor someoneâelse. The croupier and ladderman were the only people besides me and Wan who participated in the play. And the ladderman didn't touch anything; he was just there to make sure the rigid rules were observed.
I went over and whispered to him.
“Nick, if you ever see me tug my ear, like this,” I pulled on my earlobe, “you do it, too.”
“You want me to tug my ear?”
“Only if you see me do it.”
The croupier handling the paddle and shuffling was a long-time employee from Halliday's. I nodded at him.
“Everything okay, Zack?” he asked.
“Everything's cool. Just give me a good shuffle.”
“You'll have to talk to the machine.” He jerked his head at the automatic shuffler.
Like everything else in the club, the electronic shuffler was state of the art. I hoped it worked better than the goddamn electronic toilets. The purpose of mechanical shufflers was twofold: to save the time it took for a dealer to shuffle the six decks that went into the shoe and to ensure a random shuffle. The decks of cards came out of their original packaging in suit and numerical order, but using an automatic shuffler instead of a croupier to get a true random shuffle didn't mean we were trying to give the sucker a break. The odds in favor of the house were based upon a random shuffle, the more random the shuffle, the more predictable the return.
Only two people were in a position to cheat: the croupier and Wan. They were the only ones handling the cards besides myself. I trusted the croupier, but that didn't mean anything. The kind of money that was at stake meant that anyone's price could be met.
The croupier opened each of the six decks of cards and fanned them to show that the decks were true before loading them into the automatic shuffler.
“I'd like to check the shoe,” I told the croupier. I wanted to make sure there was no secret pocket in it.
“La sabot,
” the croupier said, grinning at his use of the French name for the shoe.
Wan did a cursory inspection of the shoe and the croupier passed it to me on his paddle.
“Just making sure we have an even playing board,” I told Wan, and passed the shoe back to the croupier.
“As the player immediately to the croupier's right, I shall act as banker-dealer first,” Wan said.
Each of us were given a hundred one-dollar chips.
“Each dollar chip is worth a million dollars,” Wan said. “I thought you would enjoy the irony that the highest-stakes game of chemin de fer ever played is being done with dollar chips. Each coup will be a minimum million-dollar bet from each of us.”
A coup was a hand of play. The chips could have been potato chipsâtheir value was meaningless. We were playing for the casino. The player that ended the game with all the chips stacked in front of him won the casino.
I had to think about the rules, get them straight in my head. Like the play I observed between Wan and Chow years ago, we would not be playing Las Vegas baccarat, but European-style chemin de fer, what we used to call shimmy in the States. Each player was dealt two cards, facedown, one at a time. Like blackjack, the player must always play before the dealer. You couldn't bust your hand, but you could end up with a score of zero to nine. The objective was to get nine or close to it. That much was played almost exactly like Vegas baccarat, but unlike baccarat, which had a rigid rule for every play, in shimmy the player and banker-dealer had some optional moves that could make or break them. The player had to take a hit on four or less, stay on six or more, but had the discretion to stay or take a hit on five. Because the player had to go first, whether he took a hit or not revealed a lot about his hand and affected the optional play the dealer had. Sometimes the dealer had an option to take a hit or stay.
Playing shimmy was actually a more interesting game than Vegas baccarat because there was some modicum of decision making involved.
After the shuffle, I inserted an indicator card for the cut. The croupier cut the cards and put another indicator card near the end of the deck, loaded the shoe, burned three cards, and passed the shoe to Wan.
Wan dealt me a card, one to himself, another card to me, then another to himself. I lifted my cards to take a peek. Four and a three, for a total of sevenâa good hand.
His face lit up.
“La grande,”
Wan announced.
He had a natural nine.
I had a terrible feeling that things were not going to go well for me.
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Morgan watched the game on the large-screen TV in the suite. The connection to the security center divided the screen into four parts: a global view of the chemin de fer table and the surrounding area, an overhead of just the table and players, and a view of each player. Cameras mounted to the side could focus in on players' hands when they lifted the cards to check their values. She had an open telephone line to the security room and a supervisor ready to follow her instructions.
“Mommy, what's Daddy doing?” William asked.
“Just playing cards, sweetie.”
Her eye followed the action, recalling what Con had taught her. Few girls sat on their daddy's lap and were shown how to stack a deck, spot a false cut, or catch a card pulled from the bottom before they were old enough to ride a bike. “Look for the bum moves,” Con told her, “anything that just doesn't jive.” But a good card mechanic rarely revealed himself with a suspicious move. Con taught her to think backward about cards: “Ask yourself what had to be done to get the hand. Most cheaters telegraph their moves, even by appearing overrelaxed.”
“How's he doing it?” she asked herself. Wan didn't shuffle; he had to deal from a shoe. So how was he cheating? He maintained an impassive, stoic presence as he played, revealing nothing she could spot in his body language that telegraphed he was cheating.
“When shuffling is done or Wan deals, give me the shoe with camera angles from every direction,” she told the security room supervisor. The cheating had to be done when the cards went into the shoe or came out. There was no other way it could happen. And Wan's long, wide sleeves were perfect to cover cheating. But she saw no false move as the cards were dealt. Wan came up with an eight, so close to a perfect nine, it was also called a “natural.”
He was beating the hell out of Zack, winning eight straight hands. Mathematically, something was rotten. But what? And she wondered if she had her heart in finding out. She told herself she wanted Zack to win ⦠but a voice inside her wasn't sure that's what she really wanted. What she really wanted wasn't Zack the dreamer who built the world's biggest casino, but a husband, a lover, and a father who wanted her and their children.
She realized that they had similar emotional backgrounds. She'd
been raised with a brother and a father, but neither constituted a family. Con had treated her more like a prized possession than a daughter. He bragged about her and bought her expensive things, but didn't nurture her in a wholesome family environment. Not having a mother meant no one to run to when she had the fright of her first period, no one to talk to when she needed a training bra, when her hormones started playing hell with her emotions as she went into puberty. Con had never come to a meeting with a teacher, never took them on a picnic, or on a trip to an amusement park. Blank checks and a succession of nannies had not filled the gap.