THE REVERSE CURRENT - The Casino Floor

A casino floor does not smell like money

A casino floor does not smell like money.

Money itself is practically odorless unless you bury your nose in a fresh stack of hundred-dollar bills, which smells vaguely of chemical bleach and linen.

A casino floor smells of cold air-conditioning, stale cigarette ash, spilled

Hennessy, and the greasy sweat of men who have been sitting in the same velvet chair for fourteen hours without taking a leak.By the spring of 2003,

I was running the floor at the

Casino.It wasn’t my building.

Sun belonged to

Vance and a syndicate out of

Guangdong headed by a man named

Chen was fifty, thin as a bamboo stake, with a dry, hacking cough and a left eye that twitched whenever he got angry.

He ran the cash tables, the underground banking wire, and the

VIP suites on the second floor.My job was simple: keep the floor quiet, make sure the house edge didn’t slip, and keep my eyes open.The

Sun sat right on the neutral strip—a fifty-yard wide, gravel-paved no-man’s-land between the border post and the river.

Officially, it was in

M Country territory, beyond the jurisdiction of the provincial police across the water.

Practically, it was an island where the normal rules of statecraft dissolved into a haze of smoke, plastic chips, and gold-plated watches.I wore a dark grey tailored suit now.

The top button of my white shirt was always unbuttoned, and my hair was neatly trimmed, brushed back from my forehead.

My hands were clean, smooth, the nail-beds pristine.

You wouldn’t have guessed those fingers used to be stained with shoe-blackening or that

I had once spent two hours shivering under a river root while border patrols fired blindly into the fog.I stood on the mezzanine balcony, looking down over the baccarat tables.Down on the green felt, beneath the bright overhead halogen lamps, sat four men.To the left was

Than, a senior battalion commander in the regional junta forces.

He wore a crisp khaki tunic with gold stars on the shoulders, his holster hanging loose from the back of his chair.

Opposite him sat

Lu, the head of the county anti-narcotics task force from across the river—the very unit whose men had ambushed

Blackie six months ago.Between them were two regional timber brokers and a quiet guy from

Fujian who ran a fleet of refrigerator trucks.They weren’t fighting.

They weren’t shouting.

Lu was tossing hundred-dollar plastic chips onto the Banker square, laughing as

Than poured him another three fingers of blue-label

Scotch from a crystal decanter.“Look at them,” Chen’s dry voice rattled beside me.He had walked up so quietly his leather loafers hadn’t made a sound on the carpet.

He leaned his elbows on the brass railing, his bony fingers tapping out a dry, arhythmic beat.”Six months ago,

Lu’s boys shot three smugglers at the river landing,” I said softly, my eyes fixed on the green table below. “And now he’s drinking

Than’s whiskey.”Chen let out a short, phlegmy laugh that turned into a wet cough.

He pulled a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket, wiped his mouth, and spat into a small brass spittoon resting by the pillar.”Lu didn’t shoot those boys because they were moving base,

Leo,” Chen rasped, his voice dropping into a conspiratorial whisper. “He shot them because they were moving base for a syndicate that forgot to buy the monthly advertising space at his precinct.”He pointed a thin, yellowed finger down at the felt.”That table down there?

That’s not a game of chance.

That’s the clearinghouse.

Lu loses twenty thousand dollars to

Tuesday night at baccarat.

Than takes the twenty thousand, gives fifteen to his brigade commander to keep the mountain road open, and hands five to the border chief.

Lu goes back across the river, writes a report about how tough the fight against drugs is, and picks up his commission on the next convoy of chemical drums coming down from the north.”I stared at

He had just lost a five-thousand-dollar hand.

He didn’t even flinch.

He simply reached into a leather satchel resting between his boots, pulled out another brick of banded hundred-dollar bills, and tossed it to the dealer to be converted into chips.The entire enforcement ecosystem wasn’t a wall.

It was a water mill.The narcotics flowed down from the mountains, the money flowed up from the coast, and the men in uniform sat at the wheel, taking their cut of the splash as the water turned the wooden blades.

If you tried to stop the water, you got crushed under the wheel.

If you bought a piece of the mill, everyone smiled, poured your

Scotch, and tipped their caps when your trucks rolled past the checkpoint at two in the morning.”You’re a quiet guy,

Leo,” Chen said, turning his head to look at me, his good eye squinting. “Vance says you’ve got good nerves.

Says you didn’t panic when the river went loud.””Panicking doesn’t change the current,” I said flatly.”No,” Chen agreed, a slow, thin smile creeping across his lips. “It just makes you drown faster.

Listen to me.

The baccarat table is fine for small money—a hundred grand here, fifty grand there.

But the real game is moving to the chemicals.””Beans?” I asked, using the street code for ephedrine.Chen nodded once. “The heroin business is old.

It’s dirty, it’s messy, and the farmers in the hills are always complaining about the weather.

But synthetic?

You don’t need rain.

You don’t need sun.

You just need five drums of precursor, two good kettles, a military escort, and a clean garage.”He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small, heavy piece of clear acrylic.

Inside the plastic was embedded a single, crystalline shard about the size of a thumb, glistening under the casino lights like a shard of pure river ice.”The

Taiwanese buyers are offering eighty thousand a kilo in

Guangzhou,” Chen whispered. “If we bring the raw ephedrine down from the pharmaceutical factories in the north, we can supply three cook-houses in the military zone before the rainy season starts.”I took the small acrylic block from his hand.

It felt cold, heavy, and perfectly square.I looked back down at the floor.

Lu had just won a ten-thousand-dollar payout.

Than on the back, and the two of them clinked their glasses together, the heavy crystal ringing clear and bright over the noise of the slot machines.I realized then that my old fears—the fear of the law, the fear of the green-slicker border police, the fear of the night raids—were just ghost stories told to scare small-time boys from the

There was no law here.

There was only the price of entry.”How many drums can

Julian move on his

Soviet truck?” I asked

Chen softly.Chen’s smile widened, showing a row of gold-capped molars. “As many as you can weld under the bed,

As many as you can weld.”