Harrah's on Virginia Street

Gene Voss stood at the foot of the dice table on a Thursday afternoon in October 1950, watching the table from the angle he had been taught to watch it from, which was three feet back from the rail and one foot to the left of the boxman’s right shoulder, so that he could see the players’ hands, the stickman’s hands, and the boxman’s hands all at once without seeming to be looking at any of them in particular.

He was thirty-one. He had been a pit boss at Harrah’s Club on Virginia Street for two years. Before that he had worked at the Bank Club for four years and at a small place in Sparks for one year and had spent two years in the war driving a truck in the European theater, and before that he had gone to high school in Battle Mountain and grown up in a town small enough that he had known every man, woman, and child in it by his fourteenth birthday. He had come to Reno in 1942 to be married. The marriage had not survived the war but he had stayed.

The afternoon was slow. The lunch crowd had thinned, the after-shift crowd had not arrived, and the floor had the quality, peculiar to casinos in late afternoon, of being lit for an event that had not yet started. The carpet had been vacuumed. The bartender behind the wood was wiping the rail with a folded cloth. The two dealers at the blackjack tables on the other side of the pit were leaning, in their identical white shirts and black vests, against the back wall.

Mr. Harrah came through the room at ten past three.

He came alone, which he often did. He was a tall, lean, soft-voiced man of about forty, in a quiet gray suit that had clearly been made for him by a careful tailor, and he walked through his casino the way a watchmaker walks through his shop, looking at small things. He looked at the rail of the dice table. He looked at the angle of the matchbooks in the matchbook holder. He looked at the way the bartender was holding his cloth. He looked at the carpet between the door and the cashier’s cage. He did not stop to inspect any of these things, exactly, but he saw them. Gene had watched him do this perhaps a hundred times in two years and had never seen him not see something.

He nodded to Gene as he passed. Gene nodded back. Mr. Harrah went on through the room and out the side door into the alley that ran behind Commercial Row, and was gone.

Gene returned his attention to the table.

The shooter at the dice table was a man in his fifties in a brown suit, alone, who had been at the table for an hour and was, by Gene’s estimate, down about three hundred dollars. He was not drunk and he was not loud and he was not making a scene. He was simply losing, in the patient, unsurprised way of a man who had lost in casinos before and had come, over time, to understand losing as the cost of being in the room. He bet five dollars on the pass line and threw a seven-out and tipped the stickman a quarter from his last short stack of chips and stepped back from the rail to count what was left.

It was less than he had thought. Gene saw the man’s face go through the small private rearrangement that men’s faces went through when the math came in worse than expected. He saw the man’s hand pause in his coat pocket for the cigarette pack, then come back out without one. He saw the man look toward the bar and decide, on a count of three, not to go.

Gene moved toward the rail.

“Sir.”

“Yes.”

“How are you finding the table this afternoon.”

“Cold.”

“Cold afternoons happen. We have a good kitchen in back if you would like a sandwich on the house.”

The man looked at him.

“I would not, sir, want to keep you from your afternoon. But the kitchen is back through the door behind the cashier and the corned beef is something Mr. Harrah is very particular about. If you have not had it I would say it is worth your while.”

The man looked at the table. He looked at his hand of chips. He looked at Gene.

“Corned beef,” he said.

“Yes sir. And a coffee or a beer. Whichever you prefer.”

The man pursed his lips. He nodded slowly. “All right.”

“Mary at the cashier’s window will give you a chit. Tell her Mr. Voss sent you back. Take your time.”

The man nodded. He picked up his last short stack of chips and went toward the cage.

Gene watched him go. He waited until he saw Mary hand the man the slip and direct him through the back door, and then he turned and went back to his post at the foot of the dice table. He nodded to the boxman, who nodded back. The boxman had seen the conversation. The boxman had seen many such conversations.

The procedure was a procedure Mr. Harrah had set down in his standing orders to the pit two years before. A losing customer who appeared at the threshold of distress was to be offered a meal, on the house, in a manner that did not embarrass him; a cab home, on the house, if he had no car; and a polite word the next time he came in. The order had been printed on a yellow sheet and taped inside the cashier’s drawer. Gene had read it on his first day and had thought it was sentimentality. He had since seen, in two years, perhaps three hundred losing customers go through the kitchen, eat the corned beef, drink the coffee, and come back the following week or the following month or the following year, and bet again, and lose again, and eat the corned beef again. He no longer thought it was sentimentality. He thought it was the most expensive cheap thing Mr. Harrah had ever done.

A new shooter took the dice. The boxman called for bets. A small crowd was beginning to drift in from the late shift at the Southern Pacific yard down the block, men in coveralls and lunch pails. Gene shifted a quarter step to his right.

The afternoon began.

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