"Beijing Craps" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

'Of course,' said the pit-boss. His smile slid out of the side of his mouth like the cottonseed oil pouring out of a freshly-opened can of sardines. 'We'll take care of your winnings, sir. Carlos! Here, take care of these gentlemen's winnings.'

'Twelve and a half k,' said Jack, pointedly, as if it were more money than he had ever possessed in his life.

'Five,' said Solly, without expression.

'Don't worry, sir. Carlos will keep it in the safe for you.'

With a great show of reluctance, Jack handed over his chips. 'Twelve and a half k,' he repeated. 'What do you think of that?'

Behind his well-pumiced acne craters, the stone-faced Carlos obviously thought nothing of it at all. One night's winnings for a mid-Western mark, that was all. The casino would have it all back tomorrow, or the next night.

'Please ... this young lady will show you to Mr Graf,' said the pit-boss, still smiling. From somewhere behind him, like an assistant in one of those corny Las Vegas lounge magical acts, a Chinese-looking girl appeared, in a skin-tight dress of cerise silk, with a split all the way up to the top of her thigh.

'Please follow,' she said, and immediately turned and began to walk ahead of them. Jack glanced at Solly and Solly glanced back at Jack. They could cut and run. But Jack had heard of Mr Graf; and Mr Graf had a hard, hard reputation; and if they ran away from Mr Graf, then the chances were that they would have to keep on running, for the rest of their natural borns.

Whatever had to be faced, had to be faced. Jack and Solly had both been beaten up before, more than once.

The Chinese-looking girl was already halfway across the casino floor, headed toward the wide violet-carpeted stairнcase that led down from the restaurant and the offices.

Solly said, 'After you, sport,' and Jack shambled after her like an obedient mutt, tugging the knot of his necktie, although it was already too tight. During his gambling career, he had deliberately cultivated the dislocated mannerisms of a Rube, freshly off the Piedmont redeye from the rural mid-West with a billfold crammed with ready money and no idea of how to play the tables.

In reality he had been born in Providence, Rhode Island, the son of a high school principal, and he was both well-educated and extensively-traveled. He had lived in Florence, in Aqaba, and Paris; and in the 1950s he had spent nine miserable months in London. But in the late 1960s he had spent six weeks living in Bellflower, Illinois, painstakingly imitating the local mannerisms and the local speech. These days, only a fully-bloomed Bellfiorian could have detected that his accent wasn't for real. He still said 'grass' instead of 'grayce.'

He had altered his appearance, too. He had cropped his hair short and bought himself a vivid chestnut-brown toupee. He had adopted thick-rimmed eyeglasses and sunbathed in his T-shirt, so that he had acquired that farm-style tan, face and neck and forearms only. Every morning he squeezed lumps of modeling clay in the palms of his hands, to give himself cheesy-looking crescents of dirt under his fingernails.

When he was working, he assumed a crumpled seerнsucker suit in brown-and-white check, a brown drip-dry shirt, and scuffed tan sneakers. At least, he liked to think that he 'assumed' them, and that his 'real' clothes were the clothes that hung in the closet of his suite at the Sands hotel. A single gray Armani suit, three handmade shirts, and a pair of polished English shoes.

In reality, however, the 'real' clothes had scarcely been worn, because Jack was always working. Even the soles of his 'real' shoes remained unscratched. He spent all afternoon and most of the night as Jack Druce the Rube. The rest of the time he spent sprawled on his back on his hotel bed with his sheet knotted around his waist like a loincloth, dreaming of Elaine going cold in his arms and whispering numbers to himself. But he needed the 'real' clothes to be hanging there waiting for him.

If he ever discarded his 'real' clothes, then the 'real' Jack Druce would cease to exist; and all that would be left would be Jack Druce the Rube; Jack Druce the Chronic Gambler. The laughing, sophisticated young college graduate would have vanished for ever; so would the husband of Elaine; and the father of Roddy, for what that was worth.

On the last day of May, 1961, Jack Druce had been a mathematical whiz-kid, the youngest research team-leader that San Fernando Electronics had ever employed. On the last day of May, 1961, San Fernando Electronics had brought two hundred seventy employees to Las Vegas, for the company's tenth annual convention. That night, Jack Druce had played dice for the very first time in his life, and doubled his annual salary in four-and-a-half hours.

Jack Druce had woken on the first day of June, 1961, with the certain knowledge that he had been hooked.

Now his house was gone and his car was gone. Not because be couldn't afford them. Most days, technically, he was very rich. The simple fact was that houses and cars didn't figure in his life any more. He lived in hotels; he walked to work; and he subsisted on free casino snacks and Salem Menthol Lights. His home was the Pass line. He never looked at his watch.

The Chinese girl led Jack and Solly through thick suffocating velour curtains, and then through double doors of heavy carved Joshua wood.

'I'm not so sure about this,' Jack told her; but she turned and half-smiled and said, 'Don't be afraid.'

Solly said nothing. Solly had an especially sensitive nose for danger. Solly was sniffing the atmosphere, checking it out.

Beyond the double doors, they found themselves in a large gloomy room, ferociously chilly with air-conditioning. In the center of the room stood a gaming-table, lit by a single low-hanging lamp of bottle green glass, a dark secretive lamp that scarcely illuminated the table at all, and gave to the six or seven men and women who were hunched around it a ghastly green look, as if they had been dead for several days.

Jack frowned at them. Two of them looked as if they had one foot in the grave for real. Their white hair shone silvery-green in the reflected light from the lamp; their skin was shrink-wrapped over their skulls, and thick with wriggling veins.

Yet three of the players were almost children - a spotty boy of sixteen or seventeen; a young girl of not much more than twelve; and a blond-headed boy who was so small he could scarcely throw the dice.