The Laws of our Fathers (57 page)

    We drove past the Roman Coin so we could see it. It was big as an arena, a huge concave of stressed concrete that suggested some huge-winged fowl. It was set back from the road behind a lawn of thick-leaved Bermuda grasses that had been cultivated in the midst of the desert. Aloft a huge reader board sign boasted Jerry Vale's name in four-foot letters. I dropped Michael half a block away, as the Eddgars had suggested, in order to foil any snooper. Michael seemed relatively composed. I still had no idea what June had said to get him to do this, except that his manner suggested he knew it was dangerous.

    'I'll say this for the last time,' I told him. 'You don't have to do this for me.' I received the same stoical shrug I'd gotten on the airplane. He was powerless to resist June anyway. He was in jeans and a Western shirt of a yellow plaid, with imitation mother-of-pearl snaps. The blondish hair snaked about him, but just the dry air of the desert somehow made him look more at home than he did in Damon, living on the edge of the volcano. He stared at me in the rental car, stuck for words, as usual. It was a Chevy Bel Air with bucket seats, a car five times the size of my VW. I felt as if I were operating a tank.

    ‘I figure,' he said, 'I figure you'd do it for me, if we'd traded places.' It was a confident testimonial to our friendship which I'd never have made, but he was gone with that and on his way to meet his fate, striding down the broad walk toward the hotel.

    I drove past him and pulled into the Roman Coin, following the circular drive beyond the doormen and bellboys, in their red vests and bow ties, and followed the signs around the back where the desert had been paved over in an endless parking lot. My body rattled with fear. I had to do this, I told myself. It was a test of courage: I wouldn't think I'd avoided Nam out of sheer cowardice, I'd know I could make myself do anything. I found that this idea, which I hadn't quite pronounced before, had been circulating, like some advertising slogan, in the intervals of thought all day. I walked into the back of the vast hotel, jiggling the car keys.

    The casino, when I reached it, was vast. Beneath the intense illumination, the stainless-steel corps of electrified slot machines, the wooden tables, the bettors, the intermittent islands of green felt were all set down on the flamboyant carpeting on which golden Caesar's heads repeated endlessly on a field of blood maroon. I had arrived humming some harmless tune I'd picked up from the lobby Muzak, but that was lost in the tumult of the casino: the outcry of a thousand voices - a number always reaching a raucous crescendo in the fortunes of a game - and the bells and occasional sirens screaming up from the slots where the old dolls, with change in paper cups, banged away at the machines. I had heard about this world from friends at home, guys whose fathers had grown up in the North End and liked to come out here so they could talk tough about losing money. No windows. No clocks. The quality of the light never varied with the hour, but about now, as the night was waning, there was nonetheless a certain soiled feeling. Some of the gamblers stood with their ties loosened and collars opened. Dressed in the Roman theme, the waitresses danced by in little toga getups, their tushes projected into tempting visibility on the stilts of their high heels. At odd moments, the sounds of the brass section of a tired band carried in from one of the lounge shows.

    So here was lumpen America, everybody I felt better than. The women paraded by in their Capri pants and stiff hairdos. East met West here, North and South. There were probably two thousand people in the casino and they all felt great. After nine months in Damon, California, these Americans - the people Nixon had been talking to while he ignored me - seemed as strange as creatures from another planet. Big-bellied guys with belt buckles the size of my fist and slick dudes from LA in Nehru jackets. Painted women of a kind I had not seen for months on the streets of Damon - models or showgirls or high-priced hookers - glided by in long gowns. With my hair well past my shoulders, and my outfit of sandals and standard-issue denim, jeans and jacket, I was the odd duck now. Not that anyone cared to notice. They were given over to their own intense preoccupations. That was the worst part. Here they were, Americans with permission. And what was it they craved? Not guns and bombs, not race wars or killing in the jungles. Just cheap thrills and lounge acts - they wanted to see Elvis in their best duds and get a chance to risk more than they could really afford. It was June, I speculated suddenly, who'd thought of Vegas, who'd been here in the past and who privately enjoyed the recollection of it like some forsworn perversion.

    At the side of the room, the lights glimmered on the domes of the chafing dishes of an enormous buffet piled with pink and yellow foods. It was cordoned off by the loops of a red velvet rope, strung between shining stainless-steel standards. Hunger came upon me with the intensity of lust. I watched some good-sized cowpoke, wobbling on the hob heels of his boots, fill a plate and I followed, but a security man in a maroon coat eyed me narrowly and I backed off with a lingering sniff, feeling like some Dickensian waif.

    Across the casino, I finally caught sight of Michael. He was loitering nervously, walking here and back about one of the plaster pillars, which was dressed up with climbing circles of vine. The bank of cashier's cages, done in the heavy brass of old-fashioned banks, waited just beyond him. When he saw me, Michael did his best, as we had been instructed, to remain circumspect. Give the FBI no clues. I was perhaps 200 feet away. I nodded once. He waited a few more seconds and then pushed off toward the windows. He seemed to have chosen the one he wanted to approach in advance. I couldn't imagine how he'd made that selection - a lucky number? Or had he actually assessed which teller seemed the most casual or worn down by the hour?

    I tried not to stare, shifting location every now and then to preserve my sight line, and glancing about occasionally to be certain no one was watching me or Michael. I was near a crap table, where an enormous fellow with lizard boots and a rhinestone bolo on his string tie was having a spell of good luck. The pit boss came by to ask him to take his cowboy hat off the table, while a stout woman in a rayon dress a bit too tight for her bulk stood silently beside him, her dyed high heels swinging from her finger. Looking back to Michael, I could see a dark-haired woman nodding to him through the brass bars. Then he reached back for his wallet.

    I knew it would be a wait. The signal could be going out right now. If the Bureau was poised, she would have had to do no more than meet somebody's eye. And there were watchers anyway: pit bosses and bouncers; guys who, according to legend, looked down from portholes above with shotguns to make sure no employees surrendered to the temptation of grand theft. I prepared myself to push off, to walk at no particular speed back to the Chevy. June had warned me: Just go. They would take care of the rest. But I felt no special peril. It was as anonymous as watching an event in a large stadium. In the interval, Michael turned away from the cage and peered into the smoke of the casino, catching my eye for an instant and heaving an enormous breath for my benefit. Beside me, a great cry went up again. The Texan at the crap table had made his point.

    When I looked back a moment later, Michael had left the cage. I was afraid he'd been refused, but I saw then he was cradling two stacks of chips in his large hand. At the side of the casino he passed into a men's room labeled satyrs in gilt. In there, he would enter a stall and pour the chips into an envelope preaddressed to the San Francisco post office box, already affixed with the postage and Special Delivery stickers. If the FBI was going to intercept him, Eddgar had predicted it would be in this interval. The money, Eddgar said, would be important to the government. But Michael was out in a moment, the manila envelope now beneath his arm.

    According to June, the FBI tail would not be conducted as in a thirties movie - one dumb s.o.b. riding along the curb as Michael walked away. They would use a number of cars, passing him up, lagging far behind, crossing directions. My assignment was countersurveillance. Memorize license plates. Watch. Michael's job was to find a mailbox. He would be walking south. There was to be no contact of any kind between us until we were certain he was safe. I circled out of the parking lot and saw him walking calmly in the thick evening foot traffic of the strip, where couples lingered. Beneath the marquee of one of the hotels, a man with his wallet in his hand counted what was left, while his wife beside him refused to look. Michael disappeared into another hotel. I drove around the block, and when I caught sight of him again, he was still ambling peacefully, the envelope now gone. Tomorrow, the money would be in San Francisco. Cleveland would make bail. Hobie would be safe. I would be safe. We could recover from what we had done in the name of freedom.

    At moments, Michael on foot made better progress than I did in the heavy traffic. Eventually though, as we moved farther north, it loosened up and I pushed on ahead. I'd seen nothing that merited alarm. Not one car had reappeared. None of the pedestrians, whom I'd scrutinized repeatedly, were noteworthy. There were a lot of powder-blue suits and white shoes, a striking prevalence of the new miracle fiber, polyester, but no one who seemed to have the markings of the FBI. At the Eden's Garden Spa Motel, I parked in the rear and edged back to Las Vegas Boulevard to watch Michael make his approach. There was a faced slate retaining wall that bounded the property and I sat atop it, checking the scene. We were well past the point of any danger. I wanted to tell Michael to knock it off, but he walked past me without glancing my way. 'In the back on the right,' I told him. 'Key's under the mat.'

    He walked down the long drive, and in a moment the Bel Air appeared beside me. He nodded to me vaguely and pulled into the traffic. No cars had followed him in. There was a man walking a German shepherd who'd watched the dog lift his leg on a parking sign, but he was gone now and never returned to sight. If anyone was on Michael, they could not let him just drive away. Ten minutes later, he pulled back in. We both knew now that we were okay.

    I met him in back. Floodlights from the third-story roof illuminated the lot. The night was still. He hugged me then, a rare effusiveness but no surprise under the circumstances. He was leaner and harder than I might have imagined, and smelled of several days' sweat. It occurred to me that he had learned something from the more outgoing styles of Lucy and Sonny and Hobie and me. He'd had his own breakthroughs.

    'God, oh mighty,' I said. 'You okay?'

    'Little shaky.'

    The motel reservation had been made in Michael's name. By June's rules, it was my job to claim the room.

    'This is so stupid,' I said. He nodded sadly as I left, but was still without any apparent inclination to disobey.

    The motel room was inexpensive - $19 a night. In those days the casinos underwrote the room charges, even at a place like Eden's Spa. I stood in line, waiting my turn at the reception desk, too exhausted to feel much yet in the way of relief. I remembered Lucy driving the desert. Questions I'd never bothered with now surged at me. What if she got lost? What if the FBI had some bulletin out about my car? I realized again that I would never understand these few hours in my life.

    The motel was a poor compromise between the hobbled architectural imagination of the fifties and Las Vegas's Italianate excess. A tree - a fully leafed deciduous variety - grew in the lobby. It mashed itself against the ceiling, three floors above. At its base, various igneous rocks had been piled in a grotto arrangement through which recirculated water splashed. From across the room, I could spot goldfish, swishing their tails to remain still in the current, and coins, black against the concrete. Two weary guys, businessmen by the looks of them, with the lost, dejected appearance of men on the road, were seated on a round circular sofa that circumscribed the tree, absorbed in conversation and pointing to the fish.

    A group of New Yorkers emerged from the adjoining lounge and entered the lobby like a brass band. They were determined to have a grand time, calling each other's names at top volume. 'Paulie. Joey. Joanie. Lookit here.' Showy clothes and the reek of department store fragrances. They were making sly jokes -about sex, no doubt, from the way the women screamed together and smacked their manicures on the men's arms. I'd seen Vikki Carr's name in lights as we drove in, and all of them were gabbling about her by first name, as if they knew her, which I tended to doubt. Each man had the dimensions of a freezer and the women, no matter how sturdily built, wore skirts cut far up their thighs. Americans, I thought again. There was, after all, a lot I wasn't going to miss. One of the men, in a persimmon-colored jacket, was carrying a highball glass, which he left on the corner of one of the unoccupied reception counters as he went out the door.

    When I got to the head of the line, I gave Michael's name. 'Okay,' the receptionist said. She walked away and returned with a painfully thin man in a sport coat, who had thick glasses and a sloppy mustache. He made a slight gesture toward someone behind me.

    When I looked back, the two men by the fountain seemed to

    snap awake. In a crystalline moment, I watched them cross the carpeting, knowing that this was precisely what I had envisioned back at the Roman Coin. One fellow reached inside his pocket and I could read the words on his lips even before he spoke: FBI.

    They were still thirty feet away. I held up one finger, asking for a second, and slid off, walking deliberately to the doors, faster than I should have but still not in full flight. They waited until I pushed through the glass vestibule and reached the parking lot. I flew. It was a few seconds before I heard a voice crying out, 'Stop! You there, son. Stop.' Amazingly, I had gained as much as fifty yards on them. I tore back through the parking lot to where I'd left the car. Michael would be waiting. I was going to be all right. I forced myself to remain cool. We had enough time.