Mario Puzo - Fools die

The French were also written off. The French didn’t travel and would never stand for the extra house double zero on the Vegas wheel.

But the Germans and Italians were wooed. Germany with its expanding postwar economy had many millionaires, and Germans loved to travel, loved to gamble and loved the Vegas women. There was something in the high-flying Vegas style that appealed to the Teutonic spirit, that brought back memories of Oktoberfest and maybe even Gotterdammerung . The Germans were also good-natured gamblers and more skillful than most.

Italian millionaires were big prizes in Vegas. They gambled recklessly while getting drunk; they let the soft hustlers employed by casinos keep them in the city a suicidal six or seven days. They seemed to have inexhaustible sums of money because none of them paid income tax. What should have gone into the public coffers of Rome slid into the hold boxes of air-conditioned casinos. The girls of Vegas loved the Italian millionaires because of their generous gifts and because for those six or seven days they fell in love with the same abandon they plunged on the sucker hard-way bets at the crap table.

The Mexican and South American gamblers were even bigger prizes. Nobody knew what was really going on down in South America, but special planes were sent there to bring the pampas millionaires to Vegas. Everything was free to these sporting gentlemen who left the hides of millions of cattle at the baccarat tables. They came with their wives and girlfriends, their adolescent sons eager to become gambling men. These customers too were favorites of the Las Vegas girls. They were less sincere than the Italians, perhaps a little less polished in their lovemaking according to some reports, but certainly with larger appetites. Cully had been in Gronevelt’s office one day when the casino manager came with a special problem. A South American gambler, a premier player, had put in a request for eight girls to be sent to his suite, blondes, redheads but no brunettes and none shorter than his own five feet six inches.

Gronevelt took the request coolly. “And what time today does he want this miracle to happen?” Gronevelt asked.

“About five o’clock,” the casino manager said. “He wants to take them all to dinner afterward and keep them for the night.”

Gronevelt didn’t crack a smile. “What will it cost?’

“About three grand,” the casino manager said. “The girls know they’ll get roulette and baccarat money from this guy.”

“OK, comp it,” Gronevelt said. “But tell those girls to keep him in the hotel as much as possible. I don’t want him losing his dough down the Strip.”

As the casino manager started to leave, Gronevelt said,” What the hell is he going to do with eight women?”

The casino manager shrugged. “I asked him the same thing. He says he has his son with him.”

For the first time in the conversation, Gronevelt smiled. “That’s what I call real paternal pride,” he said. Then, after the casino manager left the room, he shook his head and said to Cully, “Remember, they gamble where they shit and where they fuck. When the father dies, the son will keep coming here. For three grand he’ll have a night he’ll never forget. He’ll be worth a million bucks to the Xanadu unless they have a revolution in his country.”

But the prize, the champions, the pearl without price that every casino owner coveted were the Japanese. They were hair-raising gamblers, and they always arrived in Vegas in groups. The top echelon of an industrial combine would arrive to gamble tax-free dollars, and their losses in a four-day stay many times went over a million dollars. And it was Cully who snared the biggest Japanese prize for the Xanadu Hotel and Gronevelt.

Cully had been carrying on a friendly go-to-the-movies-and-fuck-afterward love affair with a dancer in the Oriental Follies playing a Strip hotel. The girl was called Daisy because her Japanese name was unpronounceable, and she was only about twenty years old, but she had been in Vegas for nearly five years. She was a terrific dancer, cute as a pearl in its shell, but she was thinking about getting operations to make her eyes Occidental and her bust puffed to corn-fed American. Cully was horrified and told her she would ruin her appeal. Daisy finally listened to his advice only when he pretended an ecstasy greater than he felt for her budlike breasts.

They became such friends that she gave him lessons in Japanese while they were in bed and he stayed overnight. In the mornings she would serve him soup for breakfast, and when he protested, she told him that in Japan everyone ate soup for breakfast and that she made the best breakfast soup in her village outside Tokyo. Cully was astonished to find the soup delicious and tangy and easy on the stomach after a fatiguing night of drinking and making love.

It was Daisy who alerted him to the fact that one of the great business tycoons of Japan was planning to visit Vegas. Daisy had Japanese newspapers airmailed to her by her family; she was homesick and enjoyed reading about Japan. She told Cully that a Tokyo tycoon, a Mr. Fummiro, had given an interview stating that he would come to America to open up overseas branches of his television manufacturing business. Daisy said that Mr. Fummiro was famous in Japan for being an outrageous gambler and would surely come to Vegas. She also told him that Mr. Fummiro was a pianist of great skill, had studied in Europe and would almost certainly have become a professional musician if his father had not ordered his son to take over the family firm.

That day Cully had Daisy come over to his office at the Xanadu and dictated a letter for her to write on the hotel stationery. With Daisy’s advice he constructed a letter that observed the, to Occidentals, subtle politesse of Japan and would not give Mr. Fummiro offense.

In the letter he invited Mr. Fummiro to be an honored guest at the Xanadu Hotel for as long as he wished and at any time he wished. He also invited Mr. Fummiro to bring as many guests as he desired, his whole entourage, including his business colleagues in the United States. In delicate language Daisy let Mr. Fummiro know that all this would not cost him one cent. That even the theater shows would be free. Before he mailed the letter, Cully got Gronevelt’s approval since Cully still did not have the full authority of “The Pencil.” Cully had been afraid that Gronevelt would sign the letter, but this did not happen. So now officially these Japanese were Cully’s clients, if they came. He would be their “Host.”

It was three weeks before he received an answer. And during that time Cully put in some more time studying with Daisy. He learned that he must always smile while talking to a Japanese client. That he always had to show the utmost courtesy in voice and gesture. She told him that when a slight hiss came into the speech of a Japanese man, it was a sign of anger, a danger signal. Like the rattle of a snake. Cully remembered that hiss in the speech of Japanese villains in WW II movies. He had thought it was just the mannerisms of the actor.

When the answer to the letter came, it was in the form of a phone call from Mr. Fummiro’s overseas branch office in Los Angeles. Could the Xanadu Hotel have two suites ready for Mr. Fummiro, the president of Japan Worldwide Sales Company and his executive vice-president, Mr. Niigeta? Plus another ten rooms for other members of Mr. Fummiro’s entourage? The call had been routed to Cully since he had been specifically asked for, and he answered yes. Then, wild with joy, he immediately called Daisy, and told her he would take her shopping in the next few days. He told her he would get Mr. Fummiro ten suites to make all the members of his entourage comfortable. She told him not to do so. That it would make Mr. Fummiro lose face if the rest of his party had equal accommodations. Then Cully asked Daisy to go out that very day and fly to Los Angeles to buy kimonos that Mr. Fummiro could wear in the privacy of his suite. She told him that this too would offend Mr. Fummiro, who prided himself on being Westernized, though he surely wore the comfortable Japanese traditional garments in the privacy of his own home. Cully, desperately seeking for every angle to get an edge, suggested that Daisy meet Mr. Fummiro and perhaps act as his interpreter and dinner companion. Daisy laughed and said that would be the last thing Mr. Fummiro would want. He would be extremely uncomfortable with a Westernized Japanese girl observing him in this foreign country.