Live by Night

At the table, neither Joe nor Graciela spoke for some time. They drank their drinks, they watched the band. Graciela looked around the room and then out at Sal standing by the car, his eyes never leaving them. She looked at the patrons and the waiters who pretended not to watch them.

She said, “I’ve become the people my parents worked for.”

Joe said nothing because every response he thought of would be a lie.

Something was getting lost in them, something that was starting to live by day, where the swells lived, where the insurance salesmen and the bankers lived, where the civic meetings were held and the little flags were waved at the Main Street parades, where you sold out the truth of yourself for the story of yourself.

But along the sidewalks lit by dim, yellow lamps and in the alleys and abandoned lots, people begged for food and blankets. And if you got past them, their children worked the next corner.

The reality was, he liked the story of himself. Liked it better than the truth of himself. In the truth of himself, he was second-class and grubby and always out of step. He still had his Boston accent and didn’t know how to dress right, and he thought too many thoughts that most people would find “funny.” The truth of himself was a scared little boy, mislaid by his parents like reading glasses on a Sunday afternoon, treated to random kindnesses by older brothers who came without notice and departed without warning. The truth of himself was a lonely boy in an empty house, waiting for someone to knock on his bedroom door and ask if he was okay.

The story of himself, on the other hand, was of a gangster prince. A man who had a full-time driver and bodyguard. A man of wealth and stature. A man for whom people abandoned their seats simply because he coveted them.

Graciela was right — they had become the people her parents worked for. But they were better versions. And her parents, hungry as they were, would have expected no less. You couldn’t fight the Haves. The only thing you could do was become them to such a degree that they came to you for what they had not.

He left the veranda and reentered the hotel. He turned his flashlight back on, saw the great wide room where high society had been poised to drink and eat and dance and do whatever else it was that high society did.

What else did high society do?

He couldn’t think of an answer right off.

What else did people do?

They worked. When they could find it. Even when they couldn’t, they raised families, drove their cars if they could afford the upkeep and gas. They went to movies or listened to the radio or caught a show. They smoked.

And the rich…?

They gambled.

Joe could see it in a great smash of light. While the rest of the country lined up for soup and begged for spare change, the rich remained rich. And idle. And bored.

This restaurant he walked through, this restaurant that never was, wasn’t a restaurant at all. It was a casino floor. He could see the roulette wheel in the center, the craps tables over by the south wall, the card tables along the north wall. He saw a Persian carpet and crystal chandeliers with ruby and diamond pendants.

He left the room and moved down the main corridor. The conference rooms he passed became music halls — big band in one, vaudeville in another, Cuban jazz in the third, maybe even a movie theater in the fourth.

The rooms. He ran up to the fourth floor and looked at the ones overlooking the Gulf. Jesus, they were breathtaking. Every floor would have its own butler, standing at the ready when you got off the lifts. He’d be at the service of all guests on that floor twenty-four hours a day. Every room would, of course, have a radio. And a ceiling fan. And maybe those French toilets he’d heard about, ones shot water up your ass. They’d have masseuses on call, twelve hours of room service, two, no three, concierges. He walked back down to the second floor. The flashlight needed another rest, so he shut it off, because he knew the staircase now. On the second floor, he found the ballroom. It was in the center of the floor with a large viewing rotunda above it, a place to stroll on warm spring nights and watch others of bottomless wealth dance under the stars painted on the domed roof.

What he saw, clearer than any clear he’d ever known, was that the rich would come in here for the dazzle and the elegance and the chance to risk it all against a rigged game, as rigged as the one they’d been running on the poor for centuries.

And he’d indulge it. He’d encourage it. And he’d profit from it.

Nobody — not Rockefeller, not Du Pont or Carnegie or J. P. Morgan — beat the house. Unless they were the house. And in this casino, the only house was him.

He shook his flashlight several times and turned it on.