The Hollow Man

Malebolge

Bremen liked it here in the place where there was no night, no darkness, and where the neurobabble knew no boundaries between the penultimate, mindless surges of lust and greed and the ultimate, fiercely minded concentration on numbers, shapes, and odds. Bremen liked it here where one never had to move in the harsh glare of sunlight, but could exist solely in the warm chrome-and-wood glow of never-dimming lights, here where the laughter and movement and intensity never slackened.

He sometimes wished that Jacob Goldmann were alive so that the old man could have shared this all-too-physical realization of their research—a place where probability waves were colliding and collapsing every second of every day and where reality was as insubstantial as the human mind could make it.

Bremen spent a week in the desert town and loved every greedy, foul-minded, belly-ruling-the-mind second of it. Here he could be born again.

He had sold the Jeep to an Iranian guy out on East Sahara Avenue. The Iranian was deliriously happy to get transportation for his last two hundred and eighty-six dollars and made no demands for little things such as a pink slip or registration.

Bremen used forty-six of the dollars to check into the Travel Inn near the downtown. He slept fourteen straight hours and then showered, shaved the last of his beard off, dressed in his cleanest shirt and jeans, and then began working his way through the downtown casinos: the Lady Luck, the Sundance, the Horseshoe, the Four Queens, ending up in the old Golden Nugget. He had started the evening with a hundred forty-one dollars and sixty cents. He ended the night with a little over six thousand dollars.

Bremen hadn’t played cards since his college days—and that had been mostly bridge—but he remembered the rules of poker. What he had not remembered was the Zen-deep concentration that the game demanded. The razor slashes of outside neurobabble were dulled here at the poker table because of the laser intensity of the concentration surrounding him, by the near-total absorption with the mathematical permutations that every bid and new card brought, and by the concentration demanded of Bremen himself in sorting everything out. Playing five-card stud was not like trying to pay attention to six televisions tuned to different stations; it was more like attempting to read half a dozen highly technical books simultaneously while the pages were being turned.

The other players ran the gamut: professional poker players whose livelihoods depended upon their skill and whose minds were as disciplined as those of any research mathematicians Bremen had ever met, gifted amateurs who blended real enjoyment of the high-stakes game with their quest for luck, and even the occasional pigeon sitting there fat, happy, and stupid … not even aware that he was being played like a cheap fiddle by the professionals at the table. Bremen took them all on.

During his second week in Las Vegas Bremen moved through the casinos on the Strip, checking into each with enough money to deposit in the safe to have his room comped and generally to be treated as a high roller. Then he would wander down to the card room and stand in line, occasionally watching the closed-circuit videos that explained how the game was played. To look the part, Bremen purchased Armani jackets that could be worn with open-collared silk shirts, three-hundred-dollar linen slacks that wrinkled if he looked at them hard, not one but two gold Rolexes, Gucci loafers, and a steel carrying case to hold his cash. He did not even have to leave the hotels to outfit himself.

Bremen tried his luck and found it good at Circus-Circus, Dunes, Caesar’s Palace, the Las Vegas Hilton, the Aladdin, the Riviera, Bally’s Grand, Sam’s Town, and the Sands. Sometimes he saw the familiar faces of the professionals who moved from casino to casino, but more often the players at the hundred-dollar tables preferred to play at their favorite casino. The mood in the card room was as intense as that of a hospital operating room, with only the loud voice of the occasional boisterous amateur breaking the low-murmured concentration. Amateur or professional, Bremen won, taking care as he did so to win and lose with the slow accretion of gain that might be attributed to luck. Soon the professionals avoided his table. Bremen continued winning, knowing now that luck favored the telepathic mind. The Frontier, El Rancho, the Desert Inn, Castaways, Showboat, the Holiday Inn Casino. Bremen moved through the town like a vacuum sweeper, being careful not to sweep up too much from any one table.

Unlike the other games, even blackjack, where the player was pitted against the house and security against cheating, card counting, or some “system” was heavy, only the house-provided dealer usually monitored the poker players. Occasionally Bremen would glance at the mirrored ceiling where the “eye in the sky” was certainly videotaping proceedings, but since the house took its profit from a share of the winner’s pot, he knew there would be little suspicion here.

Besides, he was not cheating. At least not by any measurable standards.

Occasionally Bremen felt guilty about taking money from the other players, but usually his mindtouch with the professionals at the table showed them to be similar to the casino dealers themselves—smugly confident that time would average out the winnings in their favor. Some of the amateurs were experiencing an almost sexual thrill at playing with the big boys, and Bremen felt he was doing some of these pigeons a favor by retiring them early.

Bremen did not really think about what he was going to do with the money; acquiring it had been his goal, his desert epiphany, and the details of how he was going to spend it could be deferred for a while. Another week here, he thought, and he could lease a Learjet to take him anyplace in the world he wanted to go.

He did not really want to go anywhere. Here, in this deepest of the tunnels he had traveled, he found some solace in the intensity of greed and lust and shallowness that surrounded him.

Walking the halls in one of the casino hotels reminded Bremen of watching the Mayor Marion Barry videotape of a few years earlier: a boring exercise in banality, ego, and frustrated sexuality. Even the high rollers in their shag-carpeted suites, rolling around in their Jacuzzis with one or more showgirls, ended up feeling hollow and frustrated, wanting more experience than the experience itself offered. Bremen found the entire town symbolized perfectly by the chrome troughs of its always-open buffets offering up heaps of underpriced, mediocre food, and by the mindtouch glimpses of its hundreds of solitary men and women alone in their hotel rooms, emotionally viscerated by the day or night’s gambling, masturbating in solitude to the “adult” videos piped to their rooms.

But the five-card-stud poker tables were places of forgetting, temporary nirvanas reached through concentration rather than meditation, and Bremen spent his waking hours there, accumulating money in small but never-faltering increments. By the time he had worked his way through the larger casinos on the Strip, his steel carrying case held almost three hundred thousand dollars in cash. Bremen went to the Mirage Hotel, admired its working volcano outside and its tank of live sharks inside, and almost doubled his money in four nights of ten-thousand-dollar-entry-fee tournament play.

He decided that one more casino would be the icing on the cake and decided to finish up in a huge, castlelike structure near the airport. The card room was busy. Bremen waited like the other pigeons, bought his hundred-dollar chips, nodded hellos to the other six players—four men and two women, only one of them a pro—and settled into the night’s haze of mathematics.

He was four hours and several thousand dollars up when the dealer called a halt and a short, powerfully built man in the blue-blazered uniform of the casino whispered in Bremen’s ear, “Excuse me, sir, but could you come with me, please?”

Bremen saw only the command to bring this lucky player to the manager’s office in the flunky’s mind, but he also saw that the command would be obeyed under any circumstances. The flunky carried a .45 automatic in a holster on his left hip. Bremen went with him to the office.

The neurobabble distracted him, all those surges of lust and greed and disappointment and renewed lust adding to the background mindnoise, so that Bremen was not warned until he was waved into the inner office.

The five men were watching the video monitors when Bremen entered and they looked up with an almost quizzical humor, as if surprised to see the image on the television standing live and three-dimensional among them. Sal Empori was sitting on the long leather couch with the thugs named Bert and Ernie on either side of him. Vanni Fucci was seated behind the manager’s desk, his hands clasped behind his head and a huge Cuban cigar clenched between his teeth.

“Come on in, civilian,” said Vanni Fucci around the cigar. He nodded for the flunky to close the door and wait outside. Vanni Fucci gestured toward an empty chair. “Siddown.”

Bremen remained standing. He saw it all in their minds. The steel case by Bert Cappi’s leg was Bremen’s; they had searched his room and found the cash. It was their hotel, their casino. Or, rather, it was the absent Don Leoni’s casino. And it had been the thief Vanni Fucci, here on another deal entirely, who had seen Bremen’s image on the video monitor in the manager’s office. Vanni Fucci had ordered the manager to take a two-day vacation, and then the thief had called Don Leoni and settled back to wait for Sal and the boys to arrive.

Bremen saw all this clearly. And he saw, even more clearly, precisely what the aging Don Leoni was going to have done to the upstart civilian who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. First, Mr. Leoni was going to talk to Bremen back in New Jersey, where they would find out whether this civilian was really a civilian, or whether he worked for one of the Miami Families. It did not matter too much, because Bremen would then be loaded aboard a garbage truck and taken out to their favorite place in the Pine Barrens, where they would blow Bremen’s brains out, put his body in the truck’s compactor, and dump the parcel in the usual place.

Vanni Fucci smiled broadly and removed the cigar. “Okay, stay standing. You been real lucky, kid. Real lucky. At least up to now.”

Bremen blinked.

Vanni Fucci nodded, Bert and Ernie moved more quickly than Bremen could react, he felt his arms pinned, and Sal Empori raised a hypodermic needle to the light and injected him in the arm through his seven-hundred-dollar Armani jacket.