But devout Aeneas now—the last rites performed and the grave-mound piled high . . . sets sail on his journey . . .
Virgil
The Aeneid
Book VII
Danny’s discontent.
Looking down at the Las Vegas Strip from his office window, he wonders why.
Less than ten years ago, he thinks, he was fleeing Rhode Island in an old car with an eighteen-month-old son, a senile father, and everything he owned jammed in the back. Now he’s a partner in two hotels on the Strip, lives in a freakin’ mansion, owns a cabin up in Utah and drives a new car every year that the company pays for.
Danny Ryan is a multimillionaire, which he finds as amusing as it is surreal. He never dreamed—hell, nobody who knew him back in the day ever dreamed—that he’d ever have a net worth beyond his next paycheck, much less be considered a “mogul,” a major power player in the major power game that is Las Vegas.
Whoever doesn’t believe that life is funny, Danny thinks, doesn’t get the joke.
He can easily remember when he had twenty bucks in his jeans pocket and he thought he was rich. Now the clip he keeps in one of his tailor-made suits usually has a thousand or more in it as walking-around money. Danny can recall when it was a big deal when he and Terri could afford to go out for Chinese on a Friday night. Now he “dines” at Michelin-starred restaurants more than he wants to, which partially accounts for the shelf developing at his waistline.
When asked if he’s watching his weight, he usually answers that yes, he’s watching it slide over his belt, the bonus ten pounds he’s gained from living a mostly sedentary life at a desk.
His mother has tried to get him into tennis, but he feels stupid chasing a ball around just to whack it and have it come right back at him, and he doesn’t play golf because for one thing it’s as boring as shit, and for another, he associates the game with doctors, lawyers, and stockbrokers, and he’s not any of those.
The old Danny used to sneer at those types, looked down at those effete businessmen from beneath. He’d jam his toque down over his shaggy hair, climb into his old peacoat, grab his brown-bag lunch with pride and a chip on his shoulder, and go to work on the Providence docks, a Springsteen kind of guy. Now he listens to Darkness on a Pioneer stereo system that ran him a bill and a half.
But he still prefers a cheeseburger to Kobe beef, good fish-and-chips (impossible to get in Vegas at any price) to Chilean sea bass. And on the rare occasion when he has to fly anywhere, he goes commercial instead of taking the corporate jet.
(He does, however, fly first class.)
His reluctance to use the company’s Learjet pisses his son off no end. Danny gets it—what ten-year-old doesn’t want to fly on a private jet? Danny has promised Ian that the next vacation they go on of any distance, they’ll do it. But he’ll feel guilty about it.
“Dan is a chowderhead,” his partner Dom Rinaldi said one time, meaning that he’s an old New England, practical—well, cheap—guy . . . for whom any kind of physical indulgence is deeply suspect.
Danny deflected the issue. “Try getting a decent bowl of chowder here. Not that milky baby puke they serve, but real chowder in the clear broth.”
“You employ five
executive chefs,” Dom said. “They’ll make you chowder from the foreskins of virgin Peruvian frogs if you tell them to.”
Sure, but Danny won’t do that. He wants his chefs spending their time making the guests anything they want.
That’s where the money comes from.
He gets up, stands by the window—tinted to combat the relentless Las Vegas sun—and looks down at the Lavinia Hotel.
The old Lavinia, Danny thinks, the last of the hotels from the fifties building boom—a relic, a remnant, barely hanging on. Its long-gone heyday was the era of the Rat Pack, wiseguys and showgirls, counting room skim and dirty money.
If those walls could talk, Danny thinks, they’d take the Fifth.
Now it’s on the market.
Danny’s company, Tara, already owns the two adjacent properties to the south, including the one he’s standing in. A rival group, Winegard, has the casinos to the north. Whoever ends up with the Lavinia will control the most prestigious location left on the Strip, and Las Vegas is a prestige kind of town.
Vern Winegard has the purchase all but sewed up, Danny knows. Probably for the best, probably not wise for Tara to expand too quickly. Still, it is the only space left on the Strip, and . . .
He buzzes Gloria in the outer office. “I’m going to the gym.”
“Do you need directions?”
“Funny.”
“Do you remember that you have a lunch with Mr. Winegard and Mr. Levine?”
“I do now,” Danny says, although he wishes he didn’t. “What time?”
“Twelve thirty,” Gloria says. “At the club.”
Even though Danny doesn’t play golf or tennis, he’s a member of the Las Vegas Country Club, because, as his mother instructed him, it’s pretty much mandatory for doing business.
“You have to be seen there,” Madeleine said.
“Why?”
“Because it’s old Las Vegas.”
“I’m not old Las Vegas,” Danny said.
“But I am,” she said, “and like it or not, to do business in this town, you have to do it with old Las Vegas.”
Danny joined the club.
“And the bouncy castle will be delivered by three,” Gloria says.
“The bouncy castle.”
“For Ian’s birthday party?” Gloria says. “You do remember that Ian’s party is this evening.”
“I remember,” Danny says. “I just didn’t know about a bouncy castle.”
“I ordered it,” Gloria says. “You can’t have a kid’s birthday party without
a bouncy castle.”
“You can’t?”
“It’s expected.”
Well then, Danny thinks, if it’s expected . . . A horrifying thought hits him. “Do I have to assemble it?”
“The guys will inflate it.”
“What guys?”
“The bouncy castle guys,” Gloria says, getting impatient. “Really, Dan, all you have to do is show up and be nice to the other parents.”
Danny is sure this is true. The ruthlessly efficient Gloria has teamed up with his equally methodical mother to plan this party, and the two of them together are a terrifying combination. If Gloria and Madeleine ran the world—as they think they should—there would be full employment and no wars, famine, pestilence or plague, and everyone would always be on time.
As for being nice to the guests, Danny’s always nice, affable, even charming. But he does have a justified reputation for sneaking off at parties, even his own. All of a sudden someone notices his absence, and he’s found in a back room by himself, or wandering around outside, and on more than one occasion, when a party has gone late into the night, he has simply gone to bed.
Danny hates parties. Hates schmoozing, small talk, finger food, standing around and all that shit. It’s tough, because socializing is a big part of his job. He pulls it off, he’s good at it, but it’s his least favorite thing.
When the Shores opened, just two years ago after three years in construction, the company threw an opening-night extravaganza, but no one can remember seeing Danny there.
He didn’t give one of the several speeches, he didn’t appear in any of the photographs, and the legend started that Danny Ryan didn’t even attend the opening of his own hotel.
He did—he just stayed in the background.
“Ian’s going to be ten,” he says now. “Isn’t that too old for a bouncy castle?”
“You’re never too old,” Gloria says, “for a bouncy castle.”
Danny clicks off and stares out the window again.
You’ve changed, he thinks.
It’s not just the excess pounds, the slicked-back Pat Riley haircut, the suits from Brioni instead of Sears, cuff links instead of buttons. Before Las Vegas, you wore suits only at weddings and funerals. (Given the hard facts about New England in those days, there were more of the latter than of the former.) It’s not just that you have folding money in your pocket, that you can pay for a meal without worrying about the tab, or that a tailor will come to your office with a tape measure and swatches.
It’s the fact that you like it.
But there’s this sense of . . .
Discontent.
Why? he wonders. You have more money than you can spend. Is it just greed? What was it the guy in that dumb movie—his name was like some lizard or something—said: “Greed is good”
Fuck that.
Danny knows himself. With all his faults, his sins—and they are legion—greed isn’t one of them. He used to joke with Terri that he could live in his car and she’d retort, “Have a good time.”
So what is it? What do you want?
Permanence? Stability?
Things you’ve never had.
But you have them now.
He thinks of the beautiful hotel he built, the Shores.
Maybe it’s the beauty you want. Some beauty in this life. Because you’ve sure as hell had the ugly.
A wife dead from cancer, a child left without a mother.
Friends killed.
And the people you killed.
But you did it. You built something beautiful.
So it’s more than that, Danny thinks.
Be honest with yourself—you want more money because money is power and power is safety. And you can never be safe enough.
Not in this world.
Danny has lunch once a month with his two biggest competitors.
Vern Winegard and Barry Levine.
It was Barry’s idea, and it’s a good one. He owns three mega-hotels on the east side of the Strip across from the Tara properties. There are other casino owners, of course, but these three form the nexus of power in Las Vegas. As such, they have shared interests and common problems.
The biggest one now is a looming federal investigation.
Congress has created the Gambling Impact Study Commission to investigate the effects of the gaming industry on Americans.
Danny knows the numbers.
Gaming is a trillion-dollar business, grossing over six times more money than all other forms of entertainment combined. Last year, players lost over $16 billion, $7 billion right here in Las Vegas.
The idea is gaining steam that gambling isn’t just a habit, or even a vice, but an illness, an addiction.
When gambling was illegal, it was organized crime’s breadbasket, by far its biggest profit center after Prohibition and bootlegging ended. Whether it was the numbers racket hawked on every street corner, or the race wire, the sports books, or backroom poker, blackjack and roulette games, the mob raked in vast amounts of money.
The politicians saw that and of course wanted their taste. So what once was a private vice became a civic virtue as state and local governments muscled in on the numbers with their own lotteries. Still, Nevada was about the only place that a gambler could legally play table games or bet sports book, so Las Vegas, Reno and Tahoe pretty much had a monopoly.
Then the Native American reservations figured they had a loophole and started opening their casinos. States, particularly New Jersey with Atlantic City, started doing the same thing and gambling proliferated.
Now anyone can just get in a car to go lose the rent or mortgage money. Some social reformers are likening gambling to crack cocaine. So now there’s going to be a congressional investigation.
Danny’s cynical about the motives, suspicious that it’s just them trying to stick their noses into the trough. Some of the Democrats are already floating the idea of a 4 percent federal tax on gambling profits.
For Danny, the tax isn’t the worst of it.
As it stands, the bill will give the commission full subpoena power to hold hearings, call witnesses under the penalty of perjury, demand records and tax returns, look into shadow corporations and silent partners.
Like me, Danny thinks.
The investigation could blow the Tara Group to bits.
Force me out of the business.
Maybe even put me in jail.
I’d lose everything.
This subpoena threat isn’t just an annoyance or another problem—it’s a survival issue.
“A disease?” Vern asks. “Cancer is a disease. Polio is a disease.”
Polio? Danny thinks. Who the hell remembers polio? But he says, “We can’t be seen to be fighting this. It’s a bad look.”
“Danny’s right,” Barry says. “We have to do what the alcohol industry has done, big tobacco—”
Vern won’t let it go. “You show me the craps table that’s given anyone cancer.”
“We put out some
PSAs about gambling responsibly,” Barry says, “we stick brochures for Gamblers Anonymous in the rooms, we fund some studies on gambling addiction.”
Danny says, “We can issue our mea culpas, throw some money along the lines that Barry suggested, fine. But we can’t let this commission go on a fishing expedition into our businesses. We have to shut down the subpoena power. That’s the line in the sand, as it were.”
No one disagrees. Danny knows that neither of them wants their financial laundry aired in public. Those sheets wouldn’t be squeaky clean.
“Here’s the problem,” Danny says. “We’ve only been donating money to the GOP—”
“They’re on our side,” Vern says.
“Right,” Danny says. “So the Democrats see us as the enemy. They’ll come after us with a vengeance.”
“So you want to give money to our enemies,” Vern says.
“I want to hedge our bets,” Danny says. “Keep giving to the GOP, but get some quiet money to the Dems, too.”
“Bribes,” Vern says.
“Never entered my mind,” Danny says. “I’m talking about campaign contributions.”
“You think we can persuade the Dems to accept money from us?” Vern asks.
“You think you can persuade a dog to accept a bone?” Barry asks. “The issue is how we start making nice.”
Danny hesitates, then says, “I invited Dave Neal to the party tonight.”
Dave Neal, a major player in the Democratic Party who holds no official position and is therefore free to maneuver. The word is if you want to get to the highest level of the Democratic Party, you could go through Neal.
“You think you might have talked to us about that first?” Vern asks.
No, Danny thinks, because you would have objected. It was one of those permission/forgiveness things. “I’m talking to you now. If you don’t think I should make an approach, I won’t. He comes to the party, he eats and drinks, he goes back to the hotel—”
“At this level,” says Barry, “a comped suite and a blow job aren’t going to do it. These guys are going to expect some real money.”
“We’ll ante up,” Danny says. “Cost of doing business.”
There’s no disagreement—the other two men agree that they’ll come up with money.
Then Vern asks, “Dan, are wives invited to this thing tonight?”
“Of course.”
“I didn’t know if they were, and mine’s nagging me,” Vern says. “You don’t have to worry about that, you lucky prick.”
Danny notices Barry wince.
It was an insensitive remark—everyone knows that Danny is a widower. But Danny doesn’t think that Vern meant any harm or
offense—it was just Vern being Vern.
Danny doesn’t dislike Vern Winegard, although he knows a lot of people who do. The man has the social graces of a rock. He’s abrasive, generally disagreeable and arrogant. Still, there’s something to like about him. Danny isn’t sure exactly what, some vulnerability under all that posturing. And although Winegard is a sharp businessman, Danny has never heard of his cheating anyone.
But he feels this little stab in his chest. Once again, Terri won’t be there to see her son’s birthday.
But the meeting went well, Danny thinks. I got what I wanted, what I needed.
If money will kill this subpoena thing, great.
If not, I’ll have to find something else.
He glances at his watch.
He just has time to make his next appointment.
Danny wakes to tendrils of sable hair on a slender neck, musky perfume, beads of sweat on bare shoulders even in the chill of his air-conditioned bedroom.
“Did you sleep?” Eden asks.
“I dozed off,” Danny says. “Dozed,” bullshit, he thinks, starting to come to. You dropped off like you were dead, a short but deep postcoital sleep. “What time is it?”
Eden Landau lifts her wrist and looks at her watch. It’s funny, it’s the one thing she never takes off. “Four fifteen.”
“Shit.”
“What?”
“Ian’s party.”
“I thought it wasn’t until six thirty,” she says.
“It isn’t,” Danny says. “But, you know, things to do.”
She rolls over to face him. “You’re allowed pleasure, Dan. Even sleep.”
Yeah, Danny has heard this before, from other people. It’s easy to say, it’s even rational, but it doesn’t acknowledge the reality of his life. He’s responsible for two hotels, hundreds of millions of dollars, thousands of employees, tens of thousands of guests. And the business isn’t exactly nine-to-five—there are famously no clocks in casinos and the problems are twenty-four seven.
“You of all people know I take time for pleasure,” he says.
True, she thinks.
Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, two o’clock sharp.
Actually, it works for her. Fits perfectly into her routine, because she’s on a Tuesday/Thursday teaching schedule, with one night class on Wednesdays. Dr. Eden: Psych 101, General Psychology; Psych 416, Cognitive Psych; and Psych 441, Abnormal Psych.
She sees clients late afternoons or evenings, and sometimes wonders what they’d think if they knew that she just got out of bed from one of these matinees. The thought makes her chuckle.
“What?” Danny asks.
“Nothing.”
“You laugh at nothing a lot?” Danny asks. “Maybe you should see a shrink.”
“I do,” she says. “Professional requirement. And ‘shrink’ is derogatory. Try ‘therapist.’”
“You sure you don’t want to come to the party?” he asks.
“I have clients tonight. And besides . . .”
She lets it trail. They both know the deal. It’s Eden who wants to keep their relationship a secret.
“Why?” Danny asked once.
“I just don’t want all that.”
“All what?”
“All that comes with being Dan Ryan’s girlfriend,” Eden said. “The spotlight, the media . . . First of all, the notoriety would hurt my work. My students wouldn’t take me as seriously, and neither would my clients. Second, I’m an introvert. If you think you hate parties, Dan, I hate parties. The faculty dos that I have to go to, I arrive late and leave early. Third, and no offense, casinos depress the hell out of me. The sense of desperation is soul-killing. I don’t think I’ve even been on the Strip in two years.”
Truth be told, it’s one of the things that attracts him about her, that she’s the exact opposite of most of the women he meets in Las Vegas. Eden doesn’t want the glitz, the gourmet dinners, the parties, the shows, the presents, the glamour, the fame.
None of it.
She put it succinctly. “What I want is to be treated nicely. Some good sex, some
good conversation, I’m good.”
Dan checks those boxes. He’s considerate, sensitive, with an old-school sense of chivalry that just borders on paternalistic sexism but doesn’t cross the line. He’s good in bed and he’s postcoitally articulate, even though he’s clueless about books.
Eden reads a lot. George Eliot, the Brontës, Mary Shelley. Lately she’s been on a Jane Austen kick. In fact, for her next vacation she already booked one of those tours of Austen country, and will go blissfully alone.
She’s tried to get Dan interested in literature outside of business books.
“You should read Gatsby,” she said one time.
“Why is that?”
Because it’s you, she thought, but said, “I just think you’d like it.”
Eden knows a little about his past. Anyone who ever waited at a supermarket checkout counter does—his affair with movie star Diane Carson was tabloid fodder. And when Diane Carson committed suicide after he left her, the media went nuts for a while.
They called Dan a gangster, a mobster. There were allegations that he’d been a drug trafficker and a murderer.
None of that squares with the man she knows.
The Dan Ryan she knows is kind, gentle and caring.
But she’s sufficiently self-aware and trained to know that she enjoys the frisson of danger, of disrespectability that comes with his reputation, whether true or not. She was raised in an utterly respectable, normal background, so of course she’d find the difference attractive.
Eden feels a little guilty about it, knows she’s flirting with immorality. What if the stories about Dan are true? What if even some of them have a basis in reality? Is it still right for her to be literally in bed with him?
An open question that she’s unwilling at this point to answer.
Dan’s affair with Diane Carson was six years ago, but Eden thinks that he really loved that woman. Even now, there’s an air of sadness to him. She knows he’s a widower, too, so maybe that’s it.
They met on a fundraising walk for breast cancer, each of them engaging to walk twenty miles a day for three days. Dan got his rich friends and colleagues to sponsor him and God knows how much money he raised.
But he walked, she thought, when he could have easily just written a check.
She said so to him. “You’re committed.”
“I am,” he said. “My wife. My . . . late wife.”
Which made her feel like shit.
“And you?” he asked.
“My mother.”
“I’m sorry.”
He asked her about
herself.
“I’m a walking stereotype,” Eden said. “A Jewish girl from the Upper West Side who went to Barnard and became a psychotherapist.”
“What’s a New York psychiatrist—”
“Psychologist—”
“Psychologist—doing in Las Vegas?”
“The university offered me a tenure-track position,” she said. “When my New York friends ask me the same question, I tell them that I hate snow. And you? What’s your story?”
“I’m in the gaming industry.”
“In Las Vegas? You’re kidding!”
He held his hand up. “The truth. By the way, I’m Dan—”
“I was joking with you,” she said. “Everyone knows who Dan Ryan is. Even I do, and I don’t even gamble.”
That was on the first day’s walk. It took him until day three, after a good ten miles, to ask her out.
What surprised her was that he was so bad at it.
For a man who’d had an affair with a movie star, one of the most beautiful women in the world, a billionaire casino owner who had access to all kinds of gorgeous women, he was incredibly awkward.
“I was wondering if . . . I mean, if you don’t want to, I get it . . . no hard feelings . . . but I thought . . . you know . . . maybe I could take you to dinner or something sometime.”
“No.”
“Right. Got it. No problem. Sorry to—”
“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “I just don’t want to go out with you. If you’d like to come over and bring dinner . . .”
“I can have one of my chefs—”
“Takeout,” she said. “Boston Market. I love their meatloaf.”
“Boston Market,” he said. “Meatloaf.”
“I have next Thursday night free. Do you?”
“I’ll make it free.”
“And, Dan,” she said, “this is just between us, okay?”
“You’re ashamed of me already?”
“I just don’t want my name in the gossip columns. ...
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