the lobby, it was necessary to walk past what he estimated to be at least a thousand slot machines, followed by a formidable array of craps tables, blackjack tables, and roulette tables.
He felt rather naive. As far as gambling was concerned, he had lost his fair share, and then some, of money playing both blackjack and poker, but he really had no idea how one actually shot craps, and roulette looked like something you saw in an old movie, with men in dinner jackets and women in low-cut dresses betting the ancestral estates in some Eastern European principality on where the ball would fall into the hole.
The restaurant surprised and pleased him. The menu was enormous. He broke his unintended fast with a filet mignon, hash-brown potatoes, two eggs sunny side up, and two glasses of milk. It was first rate, and it was surprisingly cheap.
He started to pay for it, but then decided to hell with it, and signed the bill with his room number.
Why should I spend my money when I’m out here doing an unpleasant errand for Dick Detweiler?
He walked past the blackjack, craps, and roulette tables and was almost past the slot machines when he decided that it would really be foolish to have been out here in Las Vegas, in one of the most famous gambling dens of them all, without having once played a slot machine.
He looked in his wallet and found that he had a single dollar bill and several twenties. There were also, he knew, two fifties, folded as small as possible, hidden in a recess of the wallet, against the possibility that some girl would get fresh and he would have to walk home.
He took one of the twenties and gave it to a young woman in a very short shirt who had a bus driver’s change machine strapped around her waist.
She handed him a short, squat stack of what looked like coins, but what, on examination, turned out to be one-dollar slugs.
He found a slot machine and dropped one of the slugs in and pulled the handle. He did this again seventeen times with no result, except that the oranges and lemons and cherries spun around. On the nineteenth pull, however, the machine made a noise he had not heard before, and then began noisily spitting out a stream of slugs into a sort of a shelf on the bottom of the machine.
“Jesus Christ!”
There were more slugs than he could hold in both hands. But the purpose of the waxed paper bucket he had noticed between his machine and the next now became apparent. Successful gamblers such as himself put their winnings in them.
And wise successful gamblers such as myself know when to quit. I will take all these slugs—Jesus, there must be two hundred of them—to the cashier and turn them in for real money.
He didn’t make it to the cashier’s cage. His route took him past a roulette table, and he stopped to look. After a minute or two he decided that it wasn’t quite as exotic or complicated as it looked in the movies about the Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo.
There were thirty-six numbers, plus 0 and 00, for a total of thirty-eight. The guy with the stick—the croupier, he recalled somewhat smugly—paid thirty-six to one if your number came up. Since there were thirty-eight numbers, that gave the house a one-in -nineteen advantage, roughly five percent.
That didn’t seem too unfair. And in another minute or two he had figured out that you could make other bets, one through twelve, for example, or thirteen to twenty-four, or odd or even, or red or black, that gave you a greater chance of winning, but paid lower odds.
Since 0 and 00 were neither odd or even, and were green, rather than black or red, the house, Matt decided, got its five percent no matter how the suckers bet.
And he also decided that since he had already made the mental decision to throw twenty dollars away, so that he could say he had gambled in Las Vegas, there was no reason to change simply because the slot machine had paid off.
He would now be able to say, he thought, as he put five of the slot machine slugs on EVEN that he had lost his shirt at roulette. That sounded better than having lost his shirt at the slot machines.