About the Book
About the Author
Also by Ben Mezrich
Title Page
Author’s Note
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Epilogue
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Copyright
The ultimate true story of Las Vegas, the book the casinos don’t want you to read…
For nearly five years, he was known as the ‘Darling Of Las Vegas’; the biggest high roller to hit Sin City in decades, a hotshot, twenty one year-old kid with an unlimited lust for big money action. His name was Semyon Dukatch, and stories swirled in his wake. Some said he was a Russian arms dealer, others a pop star from Eastern Europe. But the truth was even more unlikely: he was a twenty-one year old graduate student who had a plan that would one day make him richer than anyone could possibly imagine.
Dukatch quickly became a legend in the world of cards and casinos. He is the only person banned from the island of Aruba. He was held, at gunpoint, in a cave in Monte Carlo, and he made millions of dollars playing blackjack, using brilliantly simple playing techniques revealed in this book for the first time.
Ben Mezrich is a writer and broadcaster. Author of the international bestseller Bringing Down the House, he lives in Boston. Visit http://benmezrich.com for more info on Ben, Vegas, and the MIT gang.
Also by Ben Mezrich
Non-fiction
Bringing Down the House
Ugly Americans
The Accidental Billionaires
Fiction
Skin
Fertile Ground
Threshold
Reaper
As Holden Scott
The Carrier
Skeptic
The events described here took place over the course of eighteen months in the 1990s. Some names and identities were changed to protect the innocent and not-so-innocent.
En Route from Hurrah’s, Atlantic City
Somewhere over New Jersey
Under different circumstances, the moment might have seemed almost comic.
A forty-year-old Cessna four-seater airplane, lurching up and down in the turbulent dark. Two MIT kids dressed in velvet shirts and too-tight jeans, hanging on for dear life as they stared wide-eyed through the cockpit windshield. A plastic garbage bag full of hundred-dollar bills stuffed beneath their feet. And then the statement that hung in the rarified air between them:
‘See, the thing is, I’m not really supposed to fly at night.’
In the passenger seat, Semyon Dukach turned to stare at the young man sitting in the pilot’s chair next to him. Victor Cassius was sweating. His mahogany skin was glistening and his thin black hair was matted against his forehead. His thin lips were pressed against his bright white teeth, and his eyes, usually narrowed into slits, were twin manhole covers. His collar was soaked through, and he was hunched forward over the steering yoke, his round shoulders bunched together beneath the electric purple shirt.
‘What do you mean?’ Semyon asked, his voice barely audible over the growl of the Cessna’s twin engines.
‘I shouldn’t be flying after it gets dark. Instruments, and shit.’
Semyon blinked. This was not good. Five minutes earlier, the sky outside the windshield had gone from a dull, gunmetal gray color to near blackness. Semyon could still barely make out the low cloud cover a few hundred feet below the small airplane, but beyond that, he couldn’t see anything. No lights indicating towns, no geographic clues that could help them figure out their location. All he really knew was that they were somewhere over New Jersey. That twenty minutes ago, they had taken off from a small airfield outside of Atlantic City, heading due north.
‘Okay, don’t panic,’ Victor mumbled, reaching beneath the control panel. ‘Let me see. I know there’s a switch down here somewhere …’
A moment later he found the trigger for the headlights. A tiny cone of yellow blinked against the sky. Great, Semyon thought. Like aiming a flashlight into a snowstorm. He tried to remain calm. He had been in dangerous situations before. He’d been beaten up. Held at gunpoint. Nearly thrown out of a hotel window. But somehow, this seemed worse. This was really his own fault.
Semyon couldn’t believe he had let Victor talk him into climbing into the Cessna in the first place. The thing was ancient, and looked more like an old rusting VW Bug than an airplane. The bright yellow paint on the outside hull was scuffed and peeling, and there were visible cracks in the aluminum wings. The interior of the cockpit was cramped, all vinyl and plastic, and the poorly cushioned seats smelled like mildew. The control panel was like something out of World War II, bubbled glass gauges and black plastic switches.
But the derelict plane wasn’t even the worst part of the equation. Right before takeoff, Victor had admitted that he’d spent the minimum required amount of hours with the flight instructor. Any more would have cost extra, and the whole point of the airplane was to save money. Victor had done the calculations; now that the team was hitting Atlantic City on a regular basis, it made more sense to buy a used plane to shuttle them back and forth from Boston than to fly commercial.
For Victor, it was always about the bottom line. He was always economizing, always optimizing. He had never paid full price for anything in his entire life. Two weeks into a relationship, he would move in with a girl to save money on rent. To describe him as cheap would be a disservice. He made being cheap into an art form. And when Semyon had pressed him on the subject of the expedited, money-saving flight lessons, Victor had replied in true MIT fashion. Though he had far less training than the average pilot, his IQ was far higher; Victor believed that IQ would more than make up the difference.
To Victor’s credit, the flight down to Atlantic City had actually been quite pleasant. The weather had been perfect, and Victor had guided the Cessna down the Eastern Seaboard like a real pro. Right before the approach, he’d taken them low over the Hudson River, gliding around the Statue of Liberty so that the whole Manhattan skyline opened up in front of them, a gilded pincushion.
But tonight, it was a completely different story. Victor’s last-minute decision to chart a course toward Princeton to visit an ex-girlfriend who was helping them recruit new team members had delayed their takeoff until near dusk. The wind had already been picking up by the time they’d reached the airfield outside of AC, and their takeoff had nearly given Semyon a heart attack. They’d almost been blown off the end of the runway, and the plane had climbed so slowly, Semyon had been certain they were going to crash into a row of town houses at the edge of the small airport. That they were still alive seemed like a miracle – and they were going to need a much bigger miracle to get back on the ground.
Victor tapped at one of the gauges with a stubby finger, then rubbed his eyes.
‘We’re okay. Nothing to this. But I’m going to need your help.’
‘I don’t know anything about flying –’ Semyon started. Victor cut him off.
‘We need to triangulate our position. To find the airport in Princeton. You can use the radio frequency. There’s a chart under your seat.’
‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,’ Semyon gasped. Triangulate their position? His PhD was in computer science, not engineering. He’d never triangulated anything in his life. He knew, in theory, how it worked. He was an MIT student, after all. But to find an airport in the middle of the night, while the plane was jerking around like a sick marionette – it seemed a terrifying task.
‘It’s either that, or we just set this sucker down in a field somewhere.’
Semyon clenched his teeth, then bent forward to search beneath his seat. The plastic garbage bag took up most of the room between his heels and the ratty orange carpeting. He dug beneath the bag, feeling the thick bulges of banded hundred-dollar bills that pressed out against the cold plastic. He knew exactly how much was in the bag because he had counted it himself in the back of the rented car they had driven to the airfield. Three hundred and fifty thousand, thirty-five banded stacks of ten thousand. All of it taken from Harrah’s in a little more than ten hours of play. Just the two of them, working in shifts, moving from table to table across the blackjack pit. The rest of their MIT team had watched in near awe from elsewhere in the casino as they had displayed their skills.
Semyon Dukach and Victor Cassius were the best in the world at what they did – although, to be fair, there were only about ten people in the world who knew their system.
Semyon and Victor were not card counters. In their minds, card counting was for jocks. Anyone could learn how to count cards by picking up a book or watching a special on television. You didn’t have to be a genius to count cards.
What Semyon and Victor did was something quite different, something the casinos did not yet know about – something that nobody had ever put on paper. It was a system that had to be seen to be believed. It was a system that took true genius – and hubris – to pull off. The kind of hubris that made a twenty-four-year-old MIT grad student believe he could pilot a plane by means of his IQ. The kind of genius that could learn how to triangulate an airplane’s position during severe turbulence.
His fingers trembling, Semyon finally found the chart beneath the plastic bag of money and yanked it onto his lap. Victor pointed him toward the radio receiver, and he went to work.
Angles and Dopplers and curvature patterns and radio waves. Angstroms and meters and degrees. Semyon found himself entering that familiar zone of numbers and calculations. Although he’d never tried anything like this before, he’d spent most of his life studying one form of mathematics or another. The only thing that came easier to him than math was cards; and really, cards was just an extension of math. At its heart, this problem was all math as well. It was a matter of using the signals from two radio towers he could locate on the chart to calculate the position of the Cessna’s own radio. An equation with calculable variables.
Five minutes later, he looked up from the chart and began directing Victor toward the coordinates he’d calculated. The Cessna shuddered as they navigated through the cloud cover, cutting hard into a tight descent. There was a loud whine as the tail rudder fought against the thick, humid air – and then, there it was. Flickering orange and red lights, a small, visible tower, and beyond that, a single paved runway. Victor let go of the controls long enough to clap his hands.
‘Brilliant!’ he shouted. ‘I always knew you were good for something.’
‘Just get us down,’ Semyon said, relief washing through him. His entire body was trembling, and he felt like he’d just run a marathon. He watched as Victor began checking the gauges. The lights of the small airfield became brighter as the Cessna’s nose dipped to a forty-five-degree angle and they descended lower and lower. Semyon could make out the entire runway now, guessing it was at least fifty feet long. At the far end, he could see a parking lot of sorts, lined with dormant corporate jets and training airplanes, some feminine, curved and modern, some more masculine, angles and edges like the old Cessna itself.
They were about three hundred yards from the runway when Semyon noticed something that bothered him. Victor had gone still, his hands tight around the steering yoke.
‘What’s the problem?’
Victor cleared his throat.
‘Nothing, really. Except, well, it looks like we’ve got a bit of a crosswind here.’
Semyon peered out the windshield. He could feel the plane jerking with the wind, but he didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.
‘So?’
‘Well’ – Victor coughed – ‘landing a plane like this in a crosswind is kind of an advanced skill.’
‘What do you mean, advanced? You’ve practiced this, right? In flight school?’
Victor paused.
‘Well, I did try it once. And I almost made it. The instructor didn’t have to take over until the last few minutes. He said my approach was pretty good, though.’
Semyon shut his eyes. His throat was constricting, and he could barely feel his fingers where he gripped the seat beneath him. They were going to die. He had trusted his life to a cheap maniac, and now he was going to die.
The Cessna dipped lower, curving deep toward the black strip of pavement. Muggy air rushed through the cockpit. Semyon could see that Victor was struggling against the wind, fighting to keep the nose of the plane aimed at the runway. Every few seconds the plane jerked to the right, then jerked back toward center. Closer, closer, closer. Semyon clenched his jaw, his eyes wide, his hands flat out against the console in front of him. And then there was a solid thud as the landing gear touched down.
‘We’re on the ground!’ Victor shouted.
The entire plane shuddered, and Semyon felt as if someone had pushed him from behind. The tail was swinging back and forth with the wind. A second later, the Cessna coasted off the pavement and they were on grass, still rocketing forward.
‘Get back on the fucking runway!’ Semyon shouted.
But Victor was frozen. Staring straight ahead, his fingers white against the steering yoke. The plane continued down the grass, moving fast. Semyon looked at the speed gauge. Going down, but not quickly enough. Eighty mph, seventy, sixty. He turned back to the windshield, staring ahead with wild eyes. The runway lights were somewhere off to his left; here, on the grass, it was almost pitch-black. All he could see was the little cone of yellow from the headlight, bouncing along the grass, pitching up and down, illuminating shrubs and dirt… and planes.
Christ, the field of parked airplanes. Straight ahead, maybe another twenty yards.
‘We’re going to hit the planes –’ Semyon started, and then he saw the brick wall. About three feet high, separating the field and runway from the parking lot. Semyon looked over, realized that Victor had seen it, too. There was nothing they could do.
‘Hold on!’ Victor yelled.
Suddenly the entire plane lurched up, and there was the sound of tearing metal. Everything seemed to crumple inward. Semyon slammed forward, his head slapping against the control panel. An instant, sharp pain tore through his right foot, and he screamed. Then he felt the heat. He opened his eyes and saw a huge ball of flame engulfing the cockpit.
Instinct took over. Semyon’s fingers somehow found the searing metal of his seat-belt clasp, and a second later he was pulling himself across the passenger seat toward the door. His right foot was useless, shards of white pain ricocheting up from his toes to his ankle. Behind him, he could just barely see Victor kicking his way out of the wreckage on the other side.
His shoulder found the door, and he leaned into it with all his weight. There was a crack as the hinges snapped outward. His body tumbled to the grass. He rolled onto his knees, then started to crawl forward. His palms and cheeks stung, and he knew he was burned pretty badly. But the worst pain was still his foot.
He managed to get himself up on his good leg and hobbled as fast as he could, putting as much distance between himself and the burning Cessna as possible. Loud pops and bursts of heat erupted behind him. He could hear Victor shouting something from somewhere to his right, and he was glad his teammate had made it out as well. When he reached what he assumed to be a safe distance, he finally turned back toward the plane.
The fire was rapidly consuming the thing, orange flames licking up toward the black sky. The wings were curling inward like aluminum foil, and small explosions ripped up and down the tail. In a few seconds, the thing was going to be completely gone. Semyon could hardly believe they had both escaped the crash. There were sirens in the distance, and Semyon smiled, relief washing over him.
He saw Victor out of the corner of his eye. Running hard, wisps of smoke trailing behind him. No wonder he was running. It looked like his clothes were still on fire. Then Semyon came to a sudden realization. Victor wasn’t running away from the wreckage. He was running toward it.
Semyon stared at his teammate in utter shock.
The money. Victor was going back for the money.
‘That crazy mother –’ Semyon whispered. He shook his head. Victor was insane. They had just narrowly escaped burning to death in the wreck. And Victor was going back for the cash. Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. A good win, to be sure, but there was always more money to be won. There was always another casino to hit. It wasn’t worth dying for, was it?
Semyon closed his eyes. The sirens were getting louder. In a moment, the ambulances and the fire trucks would arrive. By then, there’d be nothing left of the Cessna. Nothing left of the garbage bag tucked beneath the seats.
He took a deep breath, opened his eyes, and limped after Victor, back toward the burning plane.
The Ranch
Carson City, Nevada
Present day
WAY TOO MUCH velvet for three in the afternoon. Even for an oasis in the middle of the desert, a place that reeked of perfume and cigar smoke and Jack Daniel’s, a place that I had been directed to by a cocktail napkin scarred by bright red lipstick. The velvet seemed to flow from everywhere at once; snaking down the wood-paneled walls, erupting from the low, tiled ceiling in voluptuous, pulsating waves, bursting from the shadowy corners, undulating beneath the plush daybeds and aging sofas that lined both sides of the ornate parlor. The stiff, blustery air-conditioning wasn’t helping matters; the blasts of frigid air made the velvet dance and shimmer like living tissue. As a visual, it was more nauseating than enticing.
It had been a long taxi ride from the Strip, and I was dead tired from the heat outside. Arid, desert heat, not the kind that makes you sweat. Rather, the kind that cooks your brain. It was early September, and in this part of Nevada, that still counted as summer. You had to be crazy to come this far out into the desert in summer. Crazier still, to come to a place like this in the middle of a Friday afternoon.
I stepped deeper into the parlor, calming my nerves with deep breaths of frigid perfume, smoke, and whiskey. I wondered if the taxi was still waiting outside, as I had asked, or if the driver had simply pulled away as soon as I’d passed through the metal gate and made my way to the wire-screened front door. I certainly wouldn’t have blamed him. Anyone deviant enough to pay three hundred bucks for the ride out to this ranch in the middle of nowhere deserved what was coming to him. I was no exception.
The truth was, this wasn’t my first time in a place like this. For the past ten years, I’d traveled the world in search of stories, and sometimes those stories took me to places you really couldn’t talk about at cocktail parties. Places like this ranch of paneled wood and velvet; a low, squat building that from the outside seemed to blend into the horizon – except for the neon sign on the roof and the decorative hitching posts in the driveway.
I took another step into the parlor, a circular space cluttered with anachronistic furniture, braced on one side by a long, mahogany bar. The bar stools were the same color as the velvet, a dusty crimson, and the sofas and daybeds had been upholstered to match. There were paintings on the walls, most of them of horses, a few of women and men in Wild West getups: hoop skirts, cowboy hats, boots with spurs. Kitschy, except I was pretty sure some of the paintings were authentic, since I knew that this place had existed, in some form or another, since the days of boots with spurs. An institution, of sorts, certainly more permanent than the neon behemoths of the Vegas Strip, built on something more primitive, seductive, and, indeed, human than the vice that had founded Sin City itself.
I’d almost made it to the middle of the room when I saw the woman sitting at the stool at the far end of the bar. Midfifties, short, squat, wearing a pink summer dress and white, high-heeled shoes. Her hair was a mop of curls, and her lipstick was an unnerving shade of orange. There was a glass of brown liquid on the bar in front of her. It could have been Coke, but just as easily whiskey. She heard my progress through the parlor and turned, but there wasn’t any surprise in her gaze. I guessed that despite the heat and the time of day, this place still had its fair share of visitors.
She slid off her stool and turned toward me, smiling an orange smile.
‘Welcome, stranger.’ She didn’t seem to really look at me, instead focusing on a point just left of my ear. Seemed like force of habit; maybe she didn’t want to remember my face. ‘Have a seat on any of the couches, and I’ll show you what we’ve got.’
I lowered myself onto one of the daybeds, tucking my legs under the plush material. I was trembling beneath my white cotton button-down shirt, but the truth was, it was more anticipation than fear. Even though I was there for different reasons than the average client, the thrill was impossible to ignore.
The woman leaned back against the bar and clapped her hands. Then she cleared her throat.
‘Ladies from the right!’
There was a shuffling sound, then a door opened along the right wall of the parlor. The first woman who came through the open doorway was ridiculously tall, maybe six feet, and her eight-inch stiletto heels made her seem almost gargantuan. She had flowing blond hair, glowing strands twisting down over her bare shoulders, gold rivulets dancing down the cavern of her surgically enhanced chest. Her bright red lingerie left little to the imagination. She was pretty, certainly, but more than a little terrifying as well. And she wasn’t alone.
She was followed across the parlor by three more women, all in brightly colored lingerie and stripper heels. Two of them blond, one African-American. One of the blondes was short, a little more rounded, with a circular face and ovoid eyes. She could have been nineteen, if not for the spiderweb of lines at the edges of her overly pursed lips. The other blonde was much older, though she carried herself well. Surgery, again, and a lot of makeup, expertly applied in thick swatches across her cheeks, under her eyes, across her lips. The black girl was the only one of the four who was smiling, and it helped her stand out even more; she was by far the most beautiful of the girls, and she wouldn’t have looked out of place on the pages of a magazine. Five nine, thin, smooth, brown legs, and a rounded, natural chest. Her outfit was lacy and white and fit perfectly over her curves.
It was a feat to pull my eyes back to the woman with the orange lips. She winked at me, then cleared her throat again.
‘Ladies from the left!’
The door to my left had already swung inward before she’d finished her command. Four more girls entered the parlor. Two more blondes, a brunette, and an Asian. Again, lingerie, again high heels treading across the velvet sea. The blondes looked like sisters; matching green bras, panties, and garters, matching green eyes, matching, egg-shaped boob jobs. The brunette seemed to be Eastern European, with dark slashes for eyes, a sharp, upturned nose, and a jaw that could cut glass. The Asian girl had her hair back in a severe bun, and her outfit was all black leather and silver studs. She was playing the part, her lips curled down at the corners, her charcoal eyes smoldering with faux anger.
‘Take your time,’ the lady of the house woodenly encouraged, obviously reciting by rote. ‘And take a good look. The finest ladies in the business. Money-back guarantee. Make your selection whenever you’re ready.’
She glanced at her watch, elbow on the bar, chin resting in the crook of her palm. I wondered how long the average customer sat in the parlor, ogling the girls lined up in front of him. Did most of the men who came here have something particular in mind, or was it a point-of-purchase kind of business? In Amsterdam, the girls wore gowns and stood on a raised stage behind the bar. In Tokyo, the clientele sat in small booths, and the girls paraded through, one at a time. In Vancouver, like Bangkok, you chose girls from behind one-way glass. In New York, it was all passwords, descriptions, and of course, the Internet.
Yes, I had been through this many times before in the course of my research, but it was never the same – every place had its own characteristics. Even a hundred miles out in the desert, this was still a Vegas thing. The lineup was a show of sorts, and these were showgirls. The understated cowboy theme, the routine of the ‘madam’ and her girls, all of it choreographed in the way an amusement park choreographs its attractions. In effect, the Ranch was just another ride in the neon, adult Disney that was Las Vegas. And I was simply another paying customer.
I took a deep breath, thinking of the cocktail napkin in the pocket of my jeans. The name scrawled beneath the directions to the Ranch hadn’t come with a description. I pretended to look over the girls, scanning the skin, silicone, and smiles.
‘I’ll take Gina,’ I finally said, praying that the crack in my voice was resounding only in my own ears.
The madam raised her eyebrows. I hadn’t identified myself as a frequent customer, and she certainly didn’t recognize me. But it didn’t really matter; I was a man with a wallet and I’d made my choice. She shrugged, snapping her manicured fingers. For the first time, I noticed that the nails matched her lips.
‘Thank you, ladies. The rest of you are excused. Gina, take this fine gentleman upstairs, and show him the ropes.’
A few of the girls had disappointed looks in their eyes as they shuffled back through the opposite doors. I didn’t pretend their disappointment had anything to do with my geek chic appearance; I knew they were thinking of a Friday-afternoon score, a good start to the weekend. As the doors closed simultaneously with a whiff of mingled perfumes, only one girl remained behind – the African-American woman in white lace with the pretty smile. She approached my daybed, holding out her hand, and I stumbled to my feet. Her fingers were warm against mine as she led me past the madam toward another door behind the bar.
‘Glad that’s over with,’ she whispered as the woman with orange lipstick went back to her drink. Gina opened the door with her free hand, revealing a short stairway ascending to the Ranch’s second floor. ‘We all hate the lineup. Boobs out there getting compared like melons in a supermarket. That sort of thing is the reason most of us left stripping. But I guess nobody’s buying melons without checking out the competition, right?’
I laughed, letting her lead me up the steps two at a time, trying not to notice how long her legs were, or how tight and sheer the white material was that hugged her rounded curves. She seemed much younger up close, maybe twenty, twenty-one. Her perfume was delicate and flowery, and her skin was pretty much flawless, a caramel brown. I wondered – why her? Was she part of this story, or was she just of the moment, locational, a prop of the scene?
‘Right about now,’ she continued, taking me down a long hallway lined with nondescript doors, ‘I’d be giving you the menu. Then we’d be haggling about prices. By the time we made it to my room, we’d have everything locked down, and you’d be all ready for the inspection.’
I raised my eyebrows. My heart was beating fast as I kept pace with her. This girl could move. ‘The inspection?’
She winked back at me. ‘That’s where it gets fun. You take out your cock and I look it over. Then I rub it down with alcohol and Bactine. All free of charge, honey.’
Her bluntness seemed incongruous with her youthful appearance. What she was describing was equal parts titillating and clinical. And it was also fairly distinct. Though there were establishments like this all over the world, in the United States, the Ranch represented something totally unique. A legal brothel, regulated by the Nevada Health Department, servicing one of the few prostitution-legal counties in the country. Just over the line from Clark County, where Las Vegas was located, which was supposedly prostitution-free, the Ranch was the closest place where a Vegas-based tourist could buy sex, or whatever else he desired.
‘But the Bactine rubdown’s about all that’s free here, honey,’ Gina said as we neared the end of the long hallway. ‘Two fifty for oral. Five hundred for a half-and-half. Seven fifty for two cups. And a thousand if you want to go around the world. But everything is negotiable. I mean, even though I know you’re not here for me, maybe I can interest you in some fun?’
She pulled my hand to her chest, running the back of my fingers against her bare flesh. I felt a tinge of heat in my stomach. I reminded myself that I was here for a story, nothing more. I wasn’t sure what it meant to go around the world, but I was pretty sure it couldn’t be considered a travel write-off.
‘I don’t think my publisher would consider it a necessary expense.’
She laughed as we reached a door at the end of the hall. There was a gold number in the center of the wood: 232. From the outside it looked like a motel room, but I knew from my research it was much more than that. Gina was a private contractor, and this was her office. She lived and worked in 232, for a tour of duty lasting a few months, maybe as many as six. In that time, she could make a hundred, maybe two hundred thousand dollars. Some of the higher-profile girls made even more. It was all highly regulated work; weekly visits from a doctor to test for STDs, monthly HIV screenings, consultations with stylists, makeup artists, even visits from therapists and tax experts. Ethics aside, in terms of professionalism and health standards, the Nevada brothels were a paradigm of the form.
Gina pushed the door to her room open and stood to one side.
‘Well, if you change your mind, I’ll be back in ten minutes. Hell, for a few hundred extra, your friend can watch.’
Before I could respond, she waved me inside, shutting the door behind me.
Her room was much more sparsely decorated than I would have guessed. A bank of wooden dressers along one wall, white shag carpeting, mirrors on the ceiling, and a single, king-size bed in the center of it all. No pictures anywhere, no windows, no knickknacks. No real sign of her personality in the room, which made sense when I thought about it. This was a place of business.
‘Gotta love a room with a view.’
I saw him on the ceiling first, because that’s where my gaze had settled, and he was smiling down at me, framed by a cloud of off-white pillows. I shifted my view to the bed, where he was lying, spread-eagled against her king-size sheets, arms crossed behind his head. He looked relaxed, completely unfazed by the strangeness of the location for our first meeting in nearly three months. But that’s how it always was with Semyon; as far as I could tell, he was comfortable in any setting, a true chameleon. More than a character trait, it was a calling, one of the keys to who he had become.
He rolled off the bed as I crossed the room, and we shook hands. He was a few inches taller than me, but I probably outweighed him by a good ten pounds. Everything about him was angular and narrow, from his build to the shape of his face. He had high, Slavic cheekbones, a thin jaw, a narrow forehead. His smile – and he was nearly always smiling – had more than a hint of wolf to it, stretching a little too far back, showing a few too many sharp teeth. He was good-looking, not matinee-idol handsome, but a character actor, an Ed Norton type. When he spoke, the words came out fast, tinged with enough hint of a Russian accent to force you to listen carefully, to catch every word.
On first impression, he was very amiable. Even after much time spent together, I liked Semyon, but I wasn’t sure I trusted him. There was something dangerous about him, and it wasn’t just that smile. I had spent many hours with him in Boston, and I knew his background.
‘Now we’re in deep, aren’t we?’ he asked, sitting back down on the bed. With a flourish, he pulled a wrapped deck of playing cards out of his pocket and tossed it between his hands. ‘A hooker’s bedroom in the middle of the desert. I guess it’s as good a place as any to start. This is as real as Vegas gets, isn’t it?’
I knew what he meant. At least this place was honest, as honest as the mirror on the ceiling. Unlike the Strip hotels, with their neon and buzzers and bells, all of it a disguise to hide the gambling at their core. Semyon was right, this was a good place to start.
‘What did you tell the girl?’ I asked. ‘Gina?’
‘I didn’t tell her anything. I just informed the madam what room I wanted, and how much I was willing to pay for an hour. For all they know, we’re just another kinky duo out here looking for kicks.’
He rolled the deck between his fingers, looking at me. ‘I’m surprised you’ve never been here before. I know you’ve spent a lot of time in Vegas.’
‘Vegas, yes. But never out here.’
He grinned. He liked the idea that he was showing me something new. When he’d first approached me, six months before, I’d basically shrugged him off. Another MIT kid with a story about beating Vegas, another twist on a tale I’d already taken as far as I thought it could go. I’d assumed his story was one I’d heard before. But then, over the next few weeks, I’d begun to discover things about the Russian whiz kid, things that made me think twice about completely blowing him off. When I finally sat down with him to hear his story, well, it made me want to dig deeper. The more I uncovered, the deeper I dug.
Semyon Dukach had indeed gone to MIT. He was a mathematical genius. And it was true, he knew how to count cards. But Semyon was more than just another MIT cardplayer.
He tossed the deck of cards to me, laughing as I nearly fumbled them to the shag carpet.
‘That’s because you never came to Vegas with me before. You’ve barely scratched the fucking surface.’
At one point in time, Semyon was the most notorious high roller in Sin City, perhaps even the world. He had been known by many names, but the one that had stuck was as flashy as many of the personas he had taken on: the Darling of Las Vegas. A living legend. He had beaten the game of blackjack more than anyone in history, in a way that had never been documented.
Although he knew how to count cards, his system was a different animal entirely. He and his team of MIT students had made millions, many millions, hitting the casinos harder than anyone else in the world – and yet, to this day, nobody knew how he had done it.
‘Beneath the surface,’ he said, still smiling. ‘That’s where it gets interesting. The gray areas. See, card counting is black-and-white. A fucking monkey can count cards. What we did, well, you need to be a little smarter to pull that off. And the casinos, they didn’t like us very much. Because we were winning, we were a real threat. More of a threat than anyone else. We were hurting them, and they knew it. So things got … tricky.’
His smile dimmed as he moved to the far edge of the bed. There was a hint of fear in his narrow eyes as he thought backward. It was unnerving to see him scared. He wasn’t the type to scare easily. He had grown up dirt-poor in the slums of Newark and downtown Houston. He had clawed and kicked his way to a first-class education. He had been in more fights by the time he’d reached MIT than probably anyone in the school’s history. He had built one of the most legendary teams to ever hit Vegas, kept it a secret for nearly fifteen years. Now, nearing thirty-three, he was most likely a millionaire many times over. And yet there it was in his eyes, fear.
He ran a hand through his hair, then suddenly pointed to a spot on the floor, a slash of shag carpeting beneath where the bed met the wall. His voice turned dead serious.
‘This is where I found his body. Right here, halfway under the bed. His arms were twisted behind his back, and his head, well –’
He stopped, looked at me, then shrugged.
No, this wasn’t a story anyone had ever heard before. And this place, this brothel in the middle of nowhere, it wasn’t just a good place to start. For Semyon Dukach and his team of MIT geniuses, this was the place where it had all come crashing down.
MIT
Cambridge, Massachusetts
A POSTER ON a hallway bulletin board.
Twelve square inches of white paper marred by poorly stenciled black ink, daggered to aging cork by a half-dozen brightly colored pushpins. Crumpled at the edges, creased and yellowed by too many fingers, nearly lost and overwhelmed by a sea of other makeshift advertisements bleeding out across the pockmarked board: yellow construction-paper parchments offering cheap guitar lessons; pink and blue index cards heralding last-minute apartment rentals; still-warm photocopied flyers scalping concert tickets; dot-matrix cuneiform listings spiriting intramural sports teams that nobody wanted to join. And there, in the middle of it all:
MAKE MONEY OVER THE SUMMER.
PLAY WITH THE MIT BLACKJACK TEAM.
SATURDAY MORNING, APRIL 12. ROOM 262.
Epiphanies were supposed to happen in places of great drama: the peak of an ice-blasted mountain, the middle of a storm-tossed ocean, a desolate beach on some deserted, primitive island. Epiphanies were supposed to strike like lightning, a bright, nearly spiritual blast of illumination, a fiery dagger cleaving through billowing black storm clouds of ignorance.
At MIT, epiphanies worked a little differently.
Semyon Dukach wasn’t sure what it was about the strange little poster that made him stop by the overloaded bulletin board. Maybe it was the word money in big block letters, the lack of which had dominated his thoughts in recent days as his rent neared due. Maybe it was something more complex, the sense of ennui that had slowly been building since his return to school life after seven months of a sort of ‘extended vacation,’ spent traveling the world with a backpack slung over one arm and a now ex-girlfriend dangling from the other. Or maybe it was simply the monotony of the Infinite Corridor itself, the seemingly never-ending hallway that ran, like a spinal column, through the massive central conglomeration of buildings that made up most of the MIT campus. Whatever the reason, he paused, reading the words through a second time – four of them standing out, glaring like the fluorescent lights above.
Make Money. Play Blackjack.
Semyon smiled, rubbing at his triangular jaw. He glanced over his shoulder to see if anyone else was somehow sharing his moment; but all he saw was that interminably long hallway, snaking back behind him all the way to Mass Ave. Eight hundred and twenty-five feet of unremarkable corridor, lined on either side by identical classroom doors, architecturally wondrous in the sheer audacity of its banality. Every kid who’d ever passed through MIT knew the Infinite Corridor intimately. For most of four long years, it served as background to the MIT experience, a sort of architectural white noise. Then, as if by miracle, twice a year, the faithful gathered at one end to watch a remarkable phenomenon. On two astronomically predictable days in January and November, the sun, in its inexorable passage, exactly crossed the axis of the Infinite Corridor, and the setting orb passed directly by the Mass Ave. entrance, shooting bright light down the entire length of the hall. The phenomenon was so spectacular that those who had witnessed it had given it a name: MIThenge, an analogy to Stonehenge.
For some reason, Semyon was reminded of those two miraculous days as he stood in front of the bulletin board. The truth was, since he’d traded his backpack for a computer terminal in the school’s comp lab, he’d felt himself descending right back toward the emotional funk that had inspired him to leave school seven months ago. Back then, it was Columbia, not MIT, but the mixed sensations of boredom, the lack of direction, the overwhelming blur of green computer screens and flickering fluorescent lights had been too much for him. He hadn’t really expected a brief trip around the world and a transfer to MIT to cure his growing sense of dissatisfaction with the choices he had made, but he had hoped to come back fresh enough to finish school for good, get out into the real world. Fuck, at twenty-one he was way too young for a midlife crisis. Even if he had gone through more shit in twenty-one years than most people went through in forty.
Deep down, as much as he hated to admit it, he knew he belonged at a place like MIT. He belonged in a computer lab – because he was good at it, fuck, he was probably better in front of a blinking green screen than anyone his age. But he also knew, deep down, that he needed more. He wanted more. Maybe, after everything he had been through, he deserved more.
‘Make money,’ he read again. ‘Play blackjack.’
Then he reached forward and ripped the poster from the board.
The minute he stepped into the crowded classroom on the second floor of Building 16, Semyon knew he had made a mistake. He wasn’t sure what he had been expecting, but this confederacy of MIT stereotypes seemed more a nightmare than an answer to his funk. All this place needed was a bank of computer screens, and he might as well have been spending a Saturday morning back in the computer lab.
There were at least forty people in the room, seated in chaotic rows of plastic, institutional-style chairs. A good thirty of them were male, and more than half of them Asian; not surprising, of course, given that this was MIT. The few girls in the room were of the local variety; thick glasses, hair in ponytails, baggy jackets and jeans. The men weren’t dressed any better; thick sweaters, baseball hats, jeans with torn knees, Timberland boots. Semyon couldn’t tell for sure, but most of the kids looked like seniors, though a few were obviously younger, maybe even freshman. Some of the seniors he recognized from the computer lab, but most of the faces were unfamiliar. He hadn’t been at MIT long enough to make many friends – actually, he wasn’t really the type to make friends easily, anyway. It took a lot to get past his walls, and he hadn’t made many exceptions. A few girlfriends at Columbia, a couple of acquaintances from high school, that was really it. He talked to his father about once a week, his mother during the holidays. During his seven months of travel, he’d missed a total of twelve phone calls to his answering machine.
He scanned the room again, seriously considering heading back to his dorm. He wasn’t looking for an extracurricular, and that’s what this was looking like. A math club with blackjack as an excuse. Too many bright-eyed, eager kids in college sweatshirts and baseball hats for this to be for real. Sure, maybe you could make some money using math at a blackjack table, but from the looks of this room, it wasn’t going to be anything more than a few slightly lucrative college field trips. This crowd was going to hit casinos and get away with it?
Semyon was halfway back toward the Infinite Corridor when he cast a final glance toward the front of the room – and something caught his eye. There was a large, steel desk at the head of the chaotic rows of plastic chairs, squatting beneath a wide, empty blackboard. A lone figure was leaning casually against the desk; a young man with dark brown skin and even darker, thinning hair, tapping an oversize eraser against his knee. The man looked vaguely South American, maybe from Colombia or Brazil. His eyes were a little too close together, and his nose was sharp and upturned, set above a pair of exceedingly thin lips. He looked to be average height, but thin, maybe even a little on the waifish side, and he was dressed oddly for the Saturday-morning meeting: a pinstriped gray suit, with a wide jet-black tie. He was surveying the room with quick flicks of his narrow eyes, continually tapping that eraser – oblivious to the fact that it was leaving a small cloud of chalk dust on the material of his recently pressed slacks.
Semyon raised his eyebrows, intrigued. The man at the front of the room looked to be twenty-four or twenty-five – too old to be an undergrad, but too young to be a professor. Maybe a TA, more likely a grad student. Was he the one who had put up the posters and called this meeting? Unlike the carbon-copy MIT kids, there was something innately interesting about the guy, the way he scanned the room, the way his eyes seemed to take in everything at once.
Watching the man watching the crowd, Semyon came to a decision. He’d give this thing a chance. Fuck, the computers weren’t going anywhere. He turned and searched the room for an empty chair. There was nothing open near the front – another sure sign they were in an MIT classroom – but there were a few openings by the back wall. Semyon chose the one next to the least objectionable-looking student, a tall, lanky kid with stringy, dirty blond hair hanging down into his eyes, wearing a tie-dyed red T-shirt and black cargo pants.
As Semyon dropped into the empty seat, the kid glanced at him, then gave him a thumbs-up.
‘Thought you were gonna jet. I almost did the same. Ain’t this the finest bunch of geeks you’ve ever seen?’
Semyon smiled. The kid held out a hand.
‘Owen Keller.’
‘Semyon Dukach,’ Semyon responded. Owen’s handshake was limp, and he smelled of cigarettes. He also seemed a little drunk, which was odd, considering it was Saturday morning.
‘Can’t blame you for wanting to ditch,’ Owen continued, brushing the locks of hair out of his eyes. ‘You don’t look like you belong with this crowd.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You look – well, hungry.’
It was a strange assessment. Semyon assumed he looked like everyone else. Maybe he didn’t wear glasses or a baseball hat, maybe he didn’t own any MIT sweatshirts or Timberland boots – but he was a geek to the core.
‘Fuck,’ Owen continued, not really pausing to explain himself, ‘we all aced the math portion of our SATs, right? We all memorized pi to the tenth digit, just for shits. So what makes these fuckers so fucking smug?’
Semyon looked around the room. He didn’t think the other kids looked smug. They just looked like… MIT kids.
‘What I mean is,’ Owen said, ‘you don’t look like you grew up in Weston.’
Semyon laughed, finally understanding. Weston was a wealthy suburb, fifteen minutes outside of Boston. Many of MIT’s brightest came from similar pastures, country clubs posing as towns, pretty little places bristling with prep schools and golf courses.
‘Not exactly,’ Semyon responded. ‘I was born in Moscow. When I was nine, my family emigrated to Newark, New Jersey. When I was fourteen we moved to Houston. I don’t think my family could have afforded to park our car in Weston – that is, if we’d been able to afford a car.’
Semyon wasn’t complaining; his past was simply his past. He didn’t have a chip on his shoulder. He knew his accent would always set him apart, but the rest seemed little more than lines in an imaginary biography.
‘Sounds like a fun childhood,’ Owen commented, leaning back so his chair touched the wall.
Semyon shrugged.
‘In Newark, I was a Russian kid in an all-black grade school. I got beat up a lot. In Houston, I was a Russian kid in an all-black high school. I got beat up a lot there, too.’
Owen whistled. ‘Fuck, I thought I had it bad being the only kid who could do long division in dumb-fuck, Indiana. That sounds pretty grim.’
Actually, it was much worse than it sounded. What Semyon had left out was that his family had escaped Russia by way of an Orthodox Jewish charity that had come to Moscow to help ‘refuseniks’ – Jews who had been denied visas because of their religion. The thing was, Semyon’s family wasn’t really all that Jewish. Ethnically, sure, but they didn’t know shit about the religion, had never been to temple, never even celebrated a holiday. They were just looking for a way out.
When Semyon and his parents had arrived in Newark, they’d found themselves swallowed up by a black-hatted cult. Not just Orthodox; actual zealots, strict fundamentalists who believed it was their religious mission to ‘educate’ the poor, misguided Slavs who had lost their spiritual selves to the Communist state. The unpleasant experience had culminated for Semyon when, at the age of ten, he was dragged to the local hospital by two rabbis and forced to undergo an ‘elective’ circumcision.
But Semyon wasn’t going to go into all that with someone he’d just met – even though Owen seemed cool enough.
makeup