Evidently Heller doesn't trust this mafia, because he demands a hostage to keep at gunpoint before he even talks about meeting the capo. Someone tries to order a "tough mug" to go be Heller's hostage - "as the son of the Capo Gobbo Piegare, I command you in my father's name, go down that corridor, Jimmy Coniglio, and give yourself up as a hostage!" Heller hears this and decides he wants the capo's son as a hostage.
See, Mission Earth teaches us that if some gun-toting lunatic starts talking about needing a hostage, you shouldn't loudly declare that you're the son of a VIP and therefore prime hostage material. It's not completely without redeeming value.
So Don Julio, a thirty-year-old with a "very Sicilian face," reluctantly walks over for Heller to hold at gunpoint, and the two take an elevator all the way up to the capo's office on the second floor. While standing with his gun pressed against Don Julio's side, Heller and Capo Gobbo have a nice long chat, in Italian. I guess Heller learned Italian from the magic language boxes at some point. Pretty lucky he ended up falling into the mafia, then, as opposed to the yakuza or mafiya.
Gobbo summarizes their situation as a Mexican standoff - Heller has his son, but Gobbo has men, presumably "tough mugs," covering every exit with submachine guns. Which is actually a step backwards from last chapter, when Heller had a couch but was still surrounded by machine guns. I guess nobody in this criminal outfit had a hand grenade to flush him out of cover. Or a flamethrower.
Anyway, Heller has completely drained all five casinos in Atlantic City of cash, but Gobbo has a proposition to make - he'll sell Heller those casinos, "tons of real estate around them and a quarter of a mile of boardwalk, two miles of waterfront along the Intracoastal Waterway, a game preserve, a yacht marina and two piers. Sound impressive, kid?" Gris flinches at this point, worried that somehow Heller is going to "land squarely on his feet in spite of everything."
Gobbo's consigliere has all the deeds and contracts ready, and advises Heller to use his real name - see, when that not-waiter tried to get Heller's gun several chapters ago, he picked his pocket first, replaced Heller's wallet with a fake, and stole Heller's doctored passport! Heller, who can measure the granularity of stone with his naked eye, apparently lacks any other super senses.
Since the only man who would have Johnny Cattivo's passport would be the man he was supposed to have killed, the capo knows that Heller's actually Jerome Terrance Wister, the Whiz Kid, a revelation that makes all the gunmen in the room put out their empty palms and back off. Heller immediately throws Don Julio aside and lunges at Gobbo, holding a gun to his head while he calls Bang-Bang for reinforcements, agreeing to spare the capo only after his cash is safely - oh, he doesn't do that, sorry.
The bad news is that once again Heller's supposed youth is brought up, the good news is that it's for the last time. Heller points out that according to his passport Wister is only legally 17, but Gobbo reminds him that his birthday was three days ago, so he's all clear to sign this contract "and give me the privilege of wishing you a happy birthday." Heller signs, so do the other shareholding mobsters in the room, and Heller radios Krak to bring the money up the Room 201.
And now, for the exciting and dramatic reveal of how the Countess Krak evaded capture and hid the money from the mobsters: she disguised herself as "an old chambermaid" pushing a laundry cart! She literally drew lines of age onto her face! And a mobster groans that he walked right past her three times while searching the building! Wasn't that worth Gris inexplicably refusing to look at Krak's viewscreen?
The money gets inspected and sent along, and then the mobsters start singing "Happy Birthday" to Heller, but end the song with "You've been fun to screw." See, three days ago the New Jersey Gambling Commission ordered Gobbo's casino company to sell its property due to their nonpayment of bribes, because tomorrow the Grabbe-Manhattan Bank is going to foreclose and take over all of it. And the money Heller just gave away was all untraceable, laundered gambling losses the mobsters will get to keep.
And yes, they came up this plan to dump it all on Heller literally six hours or so ago, when they saw him enter the casino and start winning after "bribing" the roulette croupiers.
The rest of the men filed out. Gobbo, the last one at the door, made a sweeping gesture with his hand. "It is all yours, Wister. Every bit of it. But there's just one more thing. I don't know why they call you the Whiz Kid. You're the dumbest (bleepard) in a business deal that I ever met!" He bowed. He was gone.
Heller stood there for a moment. Then he dived for the phone. He punched the buttons frantically.
A sleepy voice at the other end said, "Hello."
Heller shouted, "IZZY! HELP!"
Yeah. A full Part in Atlantic City, and nothing to show for it. Heller isn't any closer to fulfilling his plan (assuming he has one), and though this is a defeat it doesn't exactly make him any worse off than he was before he left for the casinos. We haven't developed his character or anything, and his relationship with the Countess Krak is mostly unchanged. So... what was the point of all this again?
I also can't help but wonder how me might have used his magical camera that can see through time to avoid all this. Maybe look at a notepad he intends to write "success" of "failure" on after his fund-raising attempt was completed? So if he looked in the future and saw the latter he'd know to try a different plan? Do Time-Sights work on intended actions like that? Or only on things that your actions wouldn't affect, like roulette numbers? Wait, the casino closed early because Heller looked ahead in time to see when the casino would close, went to the casino, and caused it to close at that time. If your actions bring about the future seen in the Time-Sight, how could you use it to avoid it, anyway? If I looked through a Time-Sight on a spaceship and saw an incoming asteroid, and changed course, would I still hit that asteroid?
The worst part is that the whole Time-Sight nonsense might have been thought up just to set up this Part where Heller tries and fails to rob a casino. (editor's note from the future: possible, but the heroes do find a sensible use for it later, probably one of the first things anyone with a means of telling the future would do)
Back to Part Thirty-Eight, Chapter Eight
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