The Last Don - Mario Puzo [74]
And so, to Gronevelt, the seven Villas were like seven crowns that he bestowed on the heads of only those gamblers who risked or made a Drop of over a million dollars on their two- or three-day stay. It didn’t matter that they won or lost. Just that they gambled it. And they had to be prompt in paying their markers or they would be relegated to one of the suites in the Hotel itself, which, however plush, were not comparable to the Villas.
Of course there was a little more. These were Villas where important public men could bring their mistresses or boyfriends, where they could gamble in anonymity. And strange to say there were many titans of business, men worth hundreds of millions of dollars, even with wives and mistresses, who were lonely. Lonely for carefree feminine company, for women of exceptional sympathy. And for these men, the Villas would be furnished by Gronevelt with the proper beauty.
Governor Walter Wavven was one of these men. And he was the only exception to Gronevelt’s rule of the million-dollar Drop. He gambled modestly and then with a purse supplied privately by Gronevelt, and if his markers exceeded a certain amount they were put on hold to be paid by his future winnings.
Wavven came to the Hotel to relax, to golf on the Xanadu course, and to drink and court the beauties supplied by Gronevelt.
Gronevelt played it very long with the governor. In twenty years he had never asked an outright favor, just the special access to present his arguments for legislation that would help the casino business in Vegas. Most of the time his point of view prevailed; when it did not, the governor gave him a detailed explanation of the political realities that had denied him. But the governor provided a valuable service in that he introduced Gronevelt to influential judges and politicians who could be swayed with hard cash.
Gronevelt nurtured in his secret heart the hope that, against long odds, Governor Walter Wavven might someday be the president of the United States. Then the rewards could be enormous.
But Fate foils the most cunning of men, as Gronevelt always acknowledged. The most insignificant of mortals become the agents of disaster to the most powerful. This particular agent was a twenty-five-year-old young man who became the lover of the governor’s eldest child, a young woman of eighteen.
The governor was married to an intelligent, good-looking woman who was more fair, more liberal in her political views than her husband, though they worked well as a team. They had three children, and this family was a great political asset for the governor. Marcy, the eldest, was attending Berkeley, her choice and her mother’s, not the governor’s.
Freed from the stiffness of a political household, Marcy was entranced by the freedom of the university, its orientation toward the political left, its openness to new music, the insights offered by drugs. A true daughter of her father, she had a frankness of sexual interest. With that innocence and the natural instinct for fair play in the young, her sympathies were with the poor, the working class, the suffering minorities. She also fell in love with the purity of art. It was therefore very natural for her to hang out with students who were poets and musicians. It was even more natural that after a few casual encounters she fell in love with a fellow student who wrote plays and strummed the guitar and was poor.
His name was Theo Tatoski and he was perfect for a college romance. He had dark good looks, he came from a family of Catholics who worked in Detroit’s auto factories and, with a poet’s alliterative wit, always swore he would rather fuck than fit a fender. Despite this he worked part-time jobs to pay his tuition. He took himself very seriously, but this was mitigated by the fact that he had talent.
Marcy and Theo were inseparable