Read an Excerpt

one
 
It was the middle of April, and the morning sun laid its white weight across all the architectural confections along the Las Vegas Strip, and shone with bright impartiality upon the grubbiness of the town itself, upon the twenty-four-hour-a-day marriage chapels, the sour little rooming houses and anonymous motels.
 
In the big hotels … Sahara, Desert Inn, Tropicana, Riviera, New Frontier, Sands … the guests slept in too darkened rooms, in the chilly whisper of air conditioning.
 
At the Cameroon, the front desk phoned at the customary nine o’clock, bringing Hugh Darren, the assistant manager, up out of a submarine nightmare where he had been fleeing through endless coral caverns from a Thing which wore the red compulsive face of Jerry Buckler.
 
He put the phone back on the cradle and swung long legs out of his bachelor bed and sat there for a time, making the transition from the fading terror of the dream to a bright Wednesday, to the shifting intricacies, the partial projects of this day. He was nearing the end of his twenty-ninth year, and he sensed that thirty was a label of a significance he could not yet comprehend. He was a big lean limber man who gave the impression of leisure and indolence and low-pressure amiability. He moved with that elusive look of style and special favor that some athletes achieve. His hair was a crisp short brown, with ginger highlights; and his eyebrows were a lighter shade, unusually bristling and heavy over gray-blue eyes set aslant in the bony, slightly freckled, asymmetric face. It was an ugly-attractive face which had adjusted itself to a habitual expression of mild irony. He could not have imagined for himself any kind of life work which would not have required a constant involvement with people. He had the detectable composure of a man who knows he is very, very good at his work, and the humility to appreciate the luck that led him into it.
 
Hugh Darren rubbed a coppery stubble with his knuckles, stretched until the flat muscles of his shoulders popped, remembered the last of the dream before, it was all gone and mumbled aloud, “Son of a bitch nearly caught me that time.”
 
He walked to the window and yanked the cord to open the slats and let the desert sunshine into the room. It was a second-floor room in the rear of the building, in the old original wing. New construction had made these rooms unsuitable for paying guests, and they had been assigned for staff use. They used to look out across the brown floor of the desert toward the eroded mountains. Now they looked out at a blank wall of the new convention hall, and down into the rerouted service alley. He squinted at the too-blue sky and had a glimpse of a commercial jet swinging into its landing pattern before it disappeared behind the cornice of the convention hall. He looked down into the service alley and, with a professional eye, checked the neatness of the long rank of garbage cans outside the rear doors of the main kitchen.
 
After he took his shower, and before he shaved, he phoned down for breakfast. It was wheeled in just as he finished shaving. He looked out at Herman, the bald maestro of the Cameroon Coffee Shop, and said, “Currying favor again, I see.”
 
“Good morning, Mr. D.,” Herman said with broad gold-flecked grin. “We got the good sausage again. So I serve myself. So you remember Herman with pleasure, is it not so?”
 
Hugh walked out of the bathroom in his robe, drying his face. “And you bring it up yourself when you want to be the first with the news. And it is always bad news. So where is the pleasure in that, my friend?”
 
“No special news, Mr. D.”
 
“But there happens to be one interesting little thing?”
 
Herman inspected his place setting carefully and stepped back and shrugged. “Just a small thing. Mr. Buckler came back earlier than anyone expected. At three this morning, I think. Mr. Downey, the new man on the night desk, displeased him, and so he was fired.”
 
Hugh Darren lowered his head, closed his eyes and told himself to count very slowly to ten.
 
“Herman, I don’t know how I’d ever get along without you. Get Bunny Rice up here on the double.”
 
Hugh Darren had barely begun his breakfast when Bunny Rice arrived. Bunny, when summoned, always arrived looking as though he had run all the way. When Hugh Darren came to the Cameroon the previous August to rescue what was possibly the poorest hotel operation on the Strip, he had given the most careful consideration to the selection of people to help him. Bunny Rice had then been working the front desk on shifts that changed from week to week.
 
He was a spindly man whose greatest flaw was his tendency to come apart when faced with a crisis. But he knew his job and knew the town and the special problems of the area. He had energy, imagination, and a capacity for loyalty. And Hugh had judged him honest. And so Hugh had made him a special assistant in charge of hotel operations from midnight to eight A.M. In a normal hotel operation this would have been a job that held no challenge. But Vegas runs twenty-four hours a day.
 
Bunny Rice, at his own volition, came on duty at eleven, and did not leave until Hugh was in his own office. Bunny Rice was pallid, with bulging blue eyes, thinning mousy hair, jug-handle ears, a long severe upper lip, and a mouth which tended to tremble when he was upset, as though he were fighting back tears. He nonetheless seemed to enjoy his new scope, new responsibility and increased pay. He lived with his wife and three children in a new housing development on the far side of town.
 
“Sit down, Bunny. Relax. What’s this about Buckler firing Downey?”
 
“There wasn’t a darn thing I could do about it, Hugh.”
 
“Why didn’t you wake me up?”
 
“Because there wasn’t anything you could do either.”
 
“Jerry was loaded?”
 
“He was ugly drunk, Hugh. You know how he gets. If he’d gone right to bed there wouldn’t have been any problem. But he stopped at the desk to see if he had any mail. Downey may have seen him at a distance, but I don’t think he ever talked to him. Downey thought Mr. Buckler was a drunk trying to check in. I guess Mr. Buckler wasn’t talking very clearly. In the confusion, he got abusive, and Downey tried to get help from the casino guards to have him put out. So he fired Downey. Downey left right away. I filled in at the desk.”
 
“Let me do some thinking. No, don’t go yet. Stick around a little while.”
 
Hugh Darren finished his breakfast. He poured a fresh cup of coffee. “I guess it’s time, Bunny. I guess that’s the final straw. He goes or I go.”
 
Bunny licked his lips. “It … makes me nervous, Hugh. I don’t like to think of how it’ll be here if you’re the one who goes.”
 
“I won’t like it either. I’ve never made this kind of money before. And only a damn fool could say this kind of money doesn’t mean anything. And the job I want to do around here is only half done. But I just can’t keep taking the responsibility without having the authority.”
 
“Who will you go to with this … ultimatum, Hugh?”
 
Darren shrugged. “The man who can say yes or no. Al Marta. Who else?”
 
Bunny Rice looked as though he wanted to wring his hands and sob. “I think you ought to … to talk to Max Hanes about it first, Hugh. Really I do.”
 
“Max runs the casino operation. What’s that got to do with this?”
 
“Just talk to him, Hugh. Please. Tell him what’s on your mind.”
 
“Max and I aren’t what you’d call buddies, you know.”
 
“He’s a very smart man. And … excuse me for saying this … he knows a lot about how things work around here … things you might not know about, Hugh.”
 
Hugh Darren felt the quick anger tauten his body. “Bunny, I told them when I came here, and I’m telling you again, I have no interest in knowing anything about any clandestine arrangements. I’m no conspirator. I don’t give a damn about the casino and the money room, or any foxy tricks those boys practise. They had a sick horse here, and so they had enough sense to go out and hire a good vet. They hired a pro, Bunny. They hired me away from one of the biggest operations in the Bahamas. They said I’d have a free hand. I don’t have a free hand. All I want to do is run this hotel operation.”
 
“Just talk it over with Max, Hugh. Will you do that first instead of going up and hitting Al Marta with it cold?”
 
Darren studied his night manager’s anxious, loyal face. Byron B. Rice, condemned from the very beginnings of pinkness and trembling to be known as Bunny, robbed by that inevitable name of both passion and authority, never to be called Mr. Rice even by the bus boys.
 
Darren sighed. “All right, Bunny. I’ll do it your way.”