Mario Puzo - Fools die

Daisy took charge. She grabbed a whiskey bottle and poured some down Niigeta’s throat, then helped him up and to the sofa. Linda looked at him pityingly. Niigeta was wringing his hands and pouring out speech to Daisy. Gronevelt asked what he was saying. Daisy shrugged. “He says it means the end of his career. He says that Mr. Fummiro will get rid of him. That he made Mr. Fummiro lose too much face.”

Gronevelt nodded. “Tell him to just keep his mouth shut. Tell him I’m going to have him put into the hospital for a day because he’s feeling ill, and then he’ll fly back to Los Angeles for treatment. We’ll make up a story for Mr. Fummiro. Tell him never to tell a soul, and we’ll make sure that Mr. Fummiro never finds out what happened.”

Daisy translated and Niigeta nodded. His polite smile came back, but it was a ghastly grimace. Gronevelt turned to Cully. “You and Miss Parsons wait for Fummiro. Act as if nothing happened. I’ll take care of Niigeta. We can’t leave him here; he’ll faint again when he sees his boss. I’ll ship him out.”

And that was how it worked. When Fummiro finally arrived an hour later, he found Linda Parsons, freshly dressed and made up, waiting for him with Cully. Fummiro was immediately enchanted, and Linda Parsons looked smitten with his handsomeness but as innocently as the ingenue of the western TV movie could be.

“I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “But I took your friend’s suite so that I could be right next to you. That way we can spend more time with each other.”

Fummiro grasped the implication. She was not just some slut who would move right in with him. She would have to fall in love first. He nodded with a broad smile and said, “Of course, of course.” Cully heaved a sigh of relief. Linda was playing her cards just right. He said his good-byes and lingered for a moment in the hall. In a few minutes he could hear Fummiro playing the piano and Linda singing along with him.

In the three days that followed Fummiro and Linda Parsons had the classical, almost geometrically perfect Las Vegas love affair. They were mad for each other and spent each minute together. In bed, at the gambling tables good luck or bad, shopping in the fancy arcades and boutiques of the Strip hotels. Linda loved Japanese soup for breakfast and loved Fummiro’s piano playing. Fummiro loved Linda’s blond paleness, her milk-white and slightly heavy thighs, the longness of her legs, the soft, drooping fullness of her breasts. But most of all, he loved her constant good humor, her gaiety. He confided to Cully that Linda would have made a great geisha. Daisy told Cully that this was the highest compliment a man like Fummiro could give. Fummiro also claimed that Linda gave him luck when he gambled. When his stay was over, he had lost only two hundred thousand of the million in cash, American, that he had deposited in the casino cage. And that included a mink coat, a diamond ring, a palomino horse and a Mercedes car that he had bought for Linda Parsons. He had gotten away cheap. Without Linda the chances were good he would have dropped at least half a million or maybe even the full million at the baccarat tables.

At first Cully thought of Linda as a high-class soft hooker. But after Fummiro left Vegas, he had dinner with her before she took the night plane to Los Angeles. She was really crazy about Fummiro. “He’s such an interesting guy,” she said. “I loved that soup for breakfast and the piano playing. And he was just great in bed. No wonder the Japanese women do everything for their men.”

Cully smiled. “I don’t think he treats his women back home the way he treated you.”

Linda sighed. “Yeah, I know. Still, it was great. You know, he took hundreds of pictures of me with his camera. You’d think I’d be tired of that, but I really loved him doing it. I took pictures of him too. He’s a very handsome man.”

“And very rich,” Cully said.

Linda shrugged. “I’ve been with rich guys before. And I make good money. But he was just like a little kid. I really don’t like the way he gambles, though. God! I could live for ten years on what he loses in one day.”

Cully thought, is that so? And immediately made plans for Fummiro and Linda Parsons never to meet again. But he said with a wry smile, “Yeah, I hate to see him get hurt like that. Might discourage him from gambling.”

Linda grinned at him. “Yeah, I’ll bet,” she said. “But thanks for everything. I really had one of the best times of my life. Maybe I’ll see you again.”

He knew what she was angling for, but instead, he said smoothly, “Anytime you get the yen for Vegas just call me. Everything on the house except chips.”

Linda said a little pensively, “Do you think Fummiro will call me the next time he comes in? I gave him my phone number in LA. I even said I’d fly to Japan on my vacation when we finish taping the show, and he said he’d be delighted and to let him know when I was coming. But he was a little cool about that.”

Cully shook his head. “Japanese men don’t like women to be so aggressive. They’re a thousand years behind the times. Especially a big wheel like Fummiro. Your best bet is to lay back and play it cool.”

She sighed. “I guess so.”

He took her to the airport and kissed her on the cheek before she boarded her plane. “I’ll give you a call when Fummiro comes in again,” he said.

When he got back to the Xanadu, he went up to Gronevelt’s living suite and said wryly, “There’s such a thing as being too good to a player.”

Gronevelt said, “Don’t be disappointed. We didn’t want his whole million this early in the game. But you’re right. That actress is not the girl to connect with a player. For one thing she’s not greedy enough. For another, she’s too straight. And worst of all, she’s intelligent.”

“How do you know?” Cully asked.

Gronevelt smiled. “Am I right?”

“Sure,” Cully said. “I’ll make sure to tout Fummiro off her when he comes in again.”

“You won’t have to,” Gronevelt said. “A guy like him has too much strength. He doesn’t need what she can give him.

Not more than once. Once is fun. But that’s all it was. If it were more, he would have taken better care of her when he left.”

Cully was a little startled. “A Mercedes, a mink coat and a diamond ring? That’s not taking care of her?”

“Nope,” Gronevelt said. And he was right. The next time Fummiro came into Vegas he never asked about Linda Parsons. And this time he lost his million cash in the cage.

The plane flew into morning light and the stewardess came around with coffee and breakfast. Cully kept the suitcase beside him as he ate and drank, and when he had finished, he saw New York ’s towers of steel on the horizon. The sight always awed him. As the desert stretched away from Vegas, so here the miles of steel and glass rooted and growing thickly toward the sky seemed limitless. And gave him a sense of despair.

The plane dipped and did a slow, graceful tilt to the left as it circled the city and then dropped down, white ceiling to blue ceiling, then to sunlit air with the cement gray runways and scattered green patches that formed the carpet earth. It touched down with a hard enough bump to wake those passengers who were still asleep.

Cully felt fresh and wide-awake. He was anxious to see Merlyn: the thought of it made him feel happy. Good old Merlyn, the original square, the only man in the world he trusted.

On the day that I was to appear before the grand jury, my oldest son was graduating from the ninth grade and entering high school. Valerie wanted me to take off from work and go with her to the exercises. I told her I couldn’t because I had to go to a special meeting on the Army recall program. She still had no clue to the trouble I was in, and I didn’t tell her. She couldn’t help and she could only worry. If everything went OK, she’d never know. And that was how I wanted it. I really didn’t believe in sharing troubles with marriage partners when they couldn’t help.