Chapter 86

Royce Inoue-Stone had officially been the owner and casino boss of the Seraglio Garden Hotel and Casino for less than a month when he decided to close its doors and halt operations. He desperately hoped that he’d be able to open them again soon or at all for that matter.

Eight new cases of the novel coronavirus had been diagnosed in the last three days and the Jayanesia Ports and Airports Corporation was less than twelve hours away from closing all the airports and seaports to commercial transport for at least seventy-two hours, but already Jayanesia Health and Hospitals was warning that the shutdown might be “substantially longer.” Half of those eight new cases were in people who hadn’t been in contact with each other or to the airport where the initial outbreak had been reported within the last month. That meant there were an untold number of other people walking around with the illness.

It was extremely fortunate that none of the people now diagnosed with the illness had been to the Seraglio Garden, but two of them had stayed at the Royal Jayanesian right across the highway and everything suggested it was just a matter of time before it spread. A casino like the Seraglio Garden was a terrible place to be with an unknown respiratory disease spreading. People packed in cheek to jowl at the table games, cavorted with strangers in the pools, and engaged in all sorts of foreplay at the three dance clubs it hosted - not to mention what they got up to when they returned to their rooms.

They’d stopped taking check ins when the lockdown was announced three days ago and the hotel was down to about thirty percent occupancy. Most of the remainder were already scheduled to check out the next morning and, while about a hundred guests hadn’t given any indication they were leaving, he had to assume that most of the rest were planning to leave before they got stuck on the island.

A casino-hotel with no guests had no reason to keep operating and deciding to shut down was more of a formality than anything else. Or so Royce thought until Big Jules knocked on his open office door. “You busy, boss?”

“I am trying to find somewhere to donate six hundred pounds of shrimp cocktail before it goes bad, but mostly I’m waiting for people to call me back,” said Royce.

Big Jules sat across the desk from Royce and rested one leg on his opposite knee. “I imagine you’re thinking about what to do next with this lockdown.”

Royce looked up from his phone. Big Jules was a professional poker player who’d checked into the Seraglio Garden in 1995 and never checked out. At some point, Royce’s grandfather who’d owned and operated the SG until a month ago had decided that it was worth more than the cost of the room he was occupying to have Big Jules around full-time and hired him as a promoter for the casino’s poker room, making his hotel room part of the compensation package. Now in his early fifties, Big Jules was the casino’s longest-term resident and a friend of sorts. Royce himself had lived in the casino more or less full time in the seven years since turning eighteen even though he still nominally lived with his parents in Jayanesia City.

He’d also been working in the casino that long. Not only had his grandfather given him a place to stay despite an estrangement between them imposed by his parents, the old man had given him a job and from the very start suggested that Royce could one day own and run the Seraglio Garden in his stead.

Royce hadn’t expected that day to come quite so soon, but a bout of pneumonia had put his grandfather in the hospital the previous summer and talks of succession soon followed. A lot of the casino’s employees weren’t just surprised that Royce would be taking over the reins so soon, but also that he was his grandfather’s grandson at all. At the old man’s suggestion, he’d dropped the “Stone” from his last name on the job and “Inoue” was a common enough Japanese name to not immediately arouse suspicion of nepotism.

In the intervening seven years, Royce had worked in dozens of roles across casino and hotel operations and had an opportunity to make a good impression on some of the people who would one day work for him if they stuck around long enough.

His most senior managers had known from the beginning though and supported him when the handover was announced. The alternative, they reminded people, was to sell the casino to one of the big gaming corporations who, if they didn’t tear the place down immediately in favor of something newer and glitzier, would still rip the heart out of what made the SG special.

Now, he worried that he was about to use up all that good will with a decision he didn’t see any way out of. He said to Big Jules, “I don’t see any way around it. We’ve got to shut the doors and ride it out.”

Big Jules gave him an unreadable look - the same look that had been baffling his opponents across the poker table for decades. “You ask your grandfather what he thought about it?”

“That was one of the first things I did. He told me I was better qualified to make the decision than he was anymore,” said Royce.

“And the managers?” Big Jules prompted.

“The consensus is that we lose money hand over fist every day we keep the place open with no guests - maybe a hundred thousand a day if we just keep one hotel tower running, maybe a million dollars a day if we keep all of the lights on. And we’re still not sure if our insurance is going to cover any of our losses if this thing blows over. They sent us another letter warning that they’re not liable for ‘government overreaction.’”

Big Jules nodded thoughtfully. “Would you mind if I mentioned a few things you might not have considered or known about?”

Royce looked at him like a drowning man might look at a jet ski that magically appeared before him. “Fuck no I don’t mind, Big Jules. If you have some perspective, that might give me a better answer.”

Big Jules gestured. “Let me start with the bad news. You’ve got about a hundred employees who will be displaced when we shut down.”

Royce shook his head. “That’s not right. There are forty-two people living in the staff rooms under the East Tower and three of us with rooms in the hotel proper. I was going to ask you about where we could relocate to shut the tower down all together, but keep the staff rooms operational.”

“The people who live under the East Tower are all entry-level kitchen and cleaning staff - maids, dishwashers, bus boys, mostly fresh off the boat, no English or Japanese, and a lot of them too young to work the casino floor in any case. But, I’m not talking about them. You know your grandfather set it up so we’d always put aside a few unbooked rooms for the staff to crash in, right?” Big Jules reminded him.

“Yeah, as a convenience. I’ve been in those rooms and never seen more than seven or eight people using them,” said Royce.

“Eight might be about right. So, three rooms times eight people times three shifts is about a hundred people give or take,” said Big Jules.

Royce hadn’t thought about it in those terms at all. He winced now. “Shit, that’s a lot of people. But I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it. If we keep the place open and run out of money, everybody is still on the street, but now they’ve also got no job to go back to when it’s over.”

Big Jules leaned forward and tapped Royce’s desk phone with one big, meaty finger. “Have you considered talking to the government?”

Royce tried to hide his disappointment. He’d hoped Big Jules would have some secret solution that might magically solve his problems, but he should know better than to hope for miracles. Diplomatically, he said. “That’s a very ... American solution.”

“And that’s a very Jayanesian answer,” Big Jules shot back immediately. He’d come into the office with a newspaper folded under his arm and handed it across the desk now. “Read that.”

Royce took the paper awkwardly like it was a valuable relic from the past. He could count on one hand the number of times he’d read an actual newspaper and doubted he could hold an open one gracefully no matter how many extra hands he grew. Big Jules had circled a headline in red. The article was about four new skyscrapers going up in Haven. He frowned. “This one? The one about new buildings in Haven?”

“Yeah, read it.” Big Jules answered.

Royce sighed and pulled the paper closer, scanning for salient details. “They’re building four new towers ... accelerated schedule ... higher demand than expected since 2017.” He continued to scan for more information, but shook his head. “I’m sorry, Big Jules. Maybe I’ve just got shrimp on the brain, but I’m not getting it.”

“It’s all right. What do you know about Haven?” Big Jules asked.

Royce hadn’t been the best student, but he knew this one. “Haven is where you start out and where you end up. The holding company built it specifically for recent immigrants, senior housing, and transitory housing for people who have no place else to go. Most of Jayanesia’s hostels are there.”

“And the holding company loses money on all that, right?” Big Jules asked.

“I ... never really thought about it. I guess those are pretty low-margin customers,” said Royce.

“They’re low-margin customers and most of them are subsidized. The holding company loses about nine grand a year per resident, like half a billion dollars total. It’s the biggest red number on their annual report going back as long as I’ve been here. And they do it because they know they’re going to bring in five times as much from those same people who wouldn’t be able to live here otherwise over the course of their lives.”

Royce hadn’t known that. To a Jayanesian his age, the government and the holding company were one and the same and both as ubiquitous and unremarkable as air. He almost never thought about them and certainly didn’t know how they made or lost money. “So, you think there’s some way we can operate at a loss and make a profit in the long-term?”

Big Jules shook his head. “No, I think the Jayanesian government has a housing crunch. How long do you think this lockdown is going to last?”

“That’s the billion-yen question, isn’t it? It could be three days. It could be a lot longer.” Royce held out his hands in a gesture of surrender.

“So, if you knew it was going to be three days, you’d want to stay open and ride it out, right?”

Royce nodded. “Yeah, sure. It’ll cost us more to shut down and reopen than we lose by staying open for three days.”

“How long before it becomes more expensive to keep one tower open than to close and reopen?”

Royce knew the answer to that one. “Eleven days, give or take three.”

“If this thing goes on for more than eleven days, Jayanesia’s going to have some really big problems to address. Fifty thousand people work in tourism alone. Some of those people are going to need transitory housing. If people start getting sick, they’re going to need to go into quarantine...”

“We don’t have facilities for quarantine...” Royce pointed out.

“No, but if people are going into quarantine, the people they live with will need somewhere to stay in the meantime. And you’ve already got guests who are scrambling to find other places to stay and ride this out. Nagusa and her band would probably stick around at least in the short term.”

“Really?” Royce handed the paper back absentmindedly. In his mind, Big Jules had buried the lede. He hadn’t had much time with the women of the Kpop supergroup GWP, but the one evening he’d spent playing host to them and the brief chances he’d gotten to talk with them since had made him a fan. More than that, he suspected he was falling in love with one of them. He just hadn’t decided which one yet. He’d been looking forward to finding out and the idea of having their stay cut short after just a week of performances had been personally and financially devastating.

If they reopened their doors in three days and regained even three or four performances that would go a long way towards getting back into the black. He pulled his desk phone closer. “Who in the government would I even talk to?”

“Health and Hospitals has the budget for pandemic response. I’d start there.” Big Jules tucked his newspaper under his arm and started to rise.

Two hours later, Royce had the beginnings of a plan in motion. He’d called the senior managers into his office briefly to confer on the very basics to see if they had buy-in and got it with more enthusiasm than he expected to see. This made him more watchful during the general staff meeting. He’d been trying so hard not to look too closely at his employees since news of the lockdown started to spread, unable to keep from taking the worry and stress he saw there as a personal indictment of his ability to run the Seraglio Garden without his grandfather there. Now, he saw hope and even excitement at the possibility of limping along.

He still wouldn’t know how viable the whole scheme was until his people came back with numbers on what it would cost to operate a single tower with somewhere between a hundred and three hundred guests while keeping the rest of the hotel and casino ready to reopen with twenty-four hours of notice.

Even so, he was optimistic enough to head upstairs to the floor with all of the Garden’s best suites. Even the sight of the nearly-empty casino floor wasn’t enough to quash his rising hope.

Nagusa Oblongata herself answered the door. A superstar herself only a few brief years ago, she’d given up touring last year to organize and manage Girls With Power “before she aged out.” Still in her late twenties and drop-dead gorgeous, Royce suspected she’d jumped the gun on that one, but acknowledged he didn’t know the KPOP business at all until booking GWP as his first marquee act.

She looked worried when she saw Royce at her door. “Mister Inoue-Stone, please come in. There’s something I want to ask you.”

Royce stepped inside. This suite was one of the Garden’s best, if not its most expensive. The really expensive ones were, to his eyes, gaudy as fuck, but high rollers and guests with more money than taste flocked to them. This one was designed with longer-term stays in mind with generously-sized bedrooms, multiple en suite bathrooms, a full kitchen, and sturdy furniture meant to be lived on rather than just admired. If loss of revenue were no object, this is where Royce would want to live.

Even before they’d gotten fully into the main room, Nagusa turned to face him. “Are you coming to tell me you’re shutting down the hotel?”

“Not necessarily. We’re definitely going to have to shut down the casino and the concert hall for at least a few days, but we’re working on a plan to keep the West Tower open through this thing however long it lasts.”

Nagusa gave Royce a radiant smile that sent a thrill up his spine. “The record company has given us a budget to stay on Jayanesia until we can start performing again. It’s not enough for this gorgeous suite, but maybe you can find rooms for us?”

Royce chuckled nervously. “Finding rooms isn’t going to be a problem. There are even some nice suites in that tower, but they’re not anywhere near as nice as this one.”

“Your hotel is clean and well-run? The toilets work?” Nagusa asked.

“Of course.” Royce was momentarily taken aback by the very question.

“Then it will be better than where we stayed on tour. The girls love this suite, but they’ll be happy with any place they can get a reliable hot shower and clean sheets. Come on. See how happy they are when I tell them.” Nagusa took his hand and led him further into the suite.

Royce wanted to tell her that wasn’t necessary, but he also really didn’t want to tell her any such thing. If Nagusa’s smile could thrill him like it had, he couldn’t wait to see what effect six grateful smiles from beautiful young Korean women all focused on him at once would feel like. Besides, she was leading him to the door he was pretty sure had the suite’s hot tub behind it.

“Wait here one second, please.” Nagusa slipped through the door quickly enough that only the faintest bit of hot, moist air wafted out. Royce spent the wait trying to manage his expectations and tamp down the fantasies that sprung up unbidden around the words “KPOP band in a hot tub.” He’d just gotten his breathing back to normal when the door opened again and Nagusa gestured him inside. As such, he wasn’t entirely braced for the sight that greeted him.

Three of the girls were perched around one edge of the hot tub with their feet on the water. One sat cross-legged across from them with a long-lensed camera. The fifth lay on her stomach on a lounger next to the tub. All five were in string bikinis with identical cuts but in different vibrant colors. Su-Jin wore green, Su-Bin blue, and Seong-Min in red. Eun-Sook with the camera wore yellow. On the lounger, Dan-Bi had both hands behind her back trying to securely fasten the top to her orange bikini. After a moment, Nagusa crouched down and helped her. Dan-Bi sat up, turned, and gave Royce a thoroughly-unnecessarily apologetic smile. At that point, every woman in the room was watching him expectantly.

“Girls, Royce has some good news for us,” Nagusa said.

Royce wouldn’t have wanted to oversell it quite like that, but he wasn’t about to contradict her. Knowing that four of the girls spoke Japanese while only three spoke English, he switched to the former. “We may need to move you to a slightly smaller suite, but we’re working on a plan to keep the West Tower of the hotel open while we shut down the casino. There won’t be anywhere for you to perform during the lockdown, but...”

He let his words trail off as Su-Jin translated for Su-Bin then all the girls started talking to each other in increasingly rapid-fire Korean. Nagusa let them talk for about a minute before making a settle-down gesture and shushing them. She asked, “Is that okay with you girls?”

Three of them nodded and smiled immediately. After Su-Jin translated for Su-Bin, they were nodding and smiling as well. Dan-Bi said “Thank you, Mr. Royce.” A moment later, the other four parroted her in synchronicity.

It shouldn’t have hit Royce as hard as it did, but he could have been struck by lightning at that moment and died a happy man. Since moving into the Garden, he’d gotten used to being surrounded by both women who were paid directly for being beautiful and those who worked for tips and tended to earn more the better they looked, but most of them hadn’t known him from Adam until it was announced that he would be their new boss. Certainly, many people had started treating him differently after that and a couple of showgirls had even spoken to him in what could arguably be called a friendly way, but he wouldn’t say he’d grown accustomed to the attention of gorgeous women.

Nagusa rose, took him by the arm, leaned in, and asked quietly, “Before they get too excited, how much do these suites cost?”

“Uh ... we’ll find a way to work within your budget,” promised Royce.

Two hours after that, his senior managers had brought him the numbers he needed and he’d plugged them all into a spreadsheet. Royce might not be an expert in Jayanesia history, but he probably knew more about hotel and casino management than any other twenty-five year old on the planet. He was less sure how he stacked up against people who’d actually been running hotel-casinos for more than a month. There were so many assumptions in his model that he didn’t know if the numbers that came out of it were meaningful. JH&H had offered him five hundred dollars a month for each guest who stayed in his hotel until they considered the epidemic over. They also offered him fifteen hundred dollars a month for each person they placed with him for temporary housing, both pro rated. Getting them to agree to pay the five hundred for his own employees if they stayed in hotel rooms and not just staff quarters almost got him out of the red.

The output of his model said that he would make money or break even if the epidemic lasted up to eleven days then start losing money after that. He would lose almost $150,000 on day 21 before the line on his graph started to curve up towards break-even again. On day 39, they would start making money again, but only after losing a little over two million dollars.

Two million dollars was an acceptable loss - one he could even justify with the long-term staff retention he could expect if his numbers were right. But, of course, that was a big, big if.

If his numbers were wrong, the Garden could lose forty million dollars in the first sixty days. That was the worst-case scenario by his model. He hoped he would have the good sense to shut down at that point, but it would be enough to trigger all sorts of future problems. Royce ran a casino, but gambling with the house’s money was only fun if you weren’t the house. The Garden had lost more than forty million dollars to a single high roller on a single night, but that was baked into their profit model and hedged with insurance. Quite often, high rollers extended their stay after a big win and lost more than half of it back between gambling and other costs. There wouldn’t be any high rollers or anyone else gambling with the casino closed.

That thought sent him scrambling for the number of his current guests who’d said they would like to extend their stays if part of the hotel stayed open. It was 117. That was a miniscule amount, but certainly small casinos operated on numbers like that. One hundred seventeen bored, stir-crazy people would certainly do some gambling if it were available. He called Estefan Martinez, his head of Casino Operations on the phone and asked him to head over when he had a minute. Estefan was there less than five minutes later.

“What’s up?” Estefan asked.

Royce was surprised to see him so quickly. Of all his senior managers, Estefan was the one he most suspected of being insincere in the support he openly expressed for Royce in his role as casino chief, or at least of deliberately looking for small ways to demonstrate his independence from the new regime. Keeping Royce waiting around seemed like a favorite. Regardless, today he’d rushed over and Royce wasn’t about to hold a grudge over something he might be entirely imagining. “How much of a casino could you run if all you had were the conference rooms in the West Tower?”

“Starting when?” Estefan was already pulling out a tablet he carried under his arm as he sat down.

“Tomorrow,” said Royce.

“And we can empty them out, move gaming tables in there?” Estefan tapped on his tablet’s screen.

“Whatever you need.”

Estefan’s eyes scanned over his screen as he spoke in what sounded like a stream of consciousness. “So, no slots or roulette - nothing that needs to be calibrated and recertified when you move it. But yeah, blackjack, pai gow, three-card poker, those kinds of games. Do I get the ballrooms too?”

“Let’s say the biggest ballroom and you leave three conference rooms for hotel and hospitality operations,” Royce offered.

“You know there’s no vault in the West Tower, right?” Estefan pointed out.

“Shit!” Royce pursed his lips and slowly admitted. “I didn’t think of that.”

“It’s not a deal breaker, but I’d want sign-off from Helmut on getting cash and chips between the hotel and the vault under the casino. That’s going to mean extra security.”

Royce called Helmut, his head of Security, and asked him to come by. Helmut was there less than five minutes later.

“You guys are really fast today,” Royce commented. “There are like nine patrons on the casino floor right now and I don’t think one of them has more than a grand or two in front of them. Security needs are light.” said Helmut.

Royce quickly flicked to the casino’s security camera on the PC in front of him and was glad to see that his own estimate of eighty active patrons was much closer to reality than Bruno’s claim of nine. He normally wouldn’t have fact checked his security chief’s numbers in the middle of a meeting, but that number mattered right now. He explained what he wanted to do to both managers and, while they hashed out the details, plugged some new numbers into his model. His worst-case number got worse, but his best guess got markedly better. Eventually, Estefan interrupted his train of thought by saying, “Thirty-eight.”

He looked up. “Sorry, I was distracted trying to predict the future.”

“I can operate thirty-eight tables in five conference rooms and the biggest ballroom. That assumes I have the staff to run them and guests to play at them,” said Estefan.

Royce rubbed his eyes. “Can you find out about the former, ask who would want to stay in the hotel and keep working under reduced circumstances? I’m trying to arrange for the latter now.”

“They’d have to stay in the hotel? Like live here?” Estefan sounded doubtful.

Royce nodded. “Not right away, but Jayanesia Health and Hospitals told me that they’re expecting the holding company to do some contractual juju to keep people from traveling all over the place if this thing goes on for too long.”

“Do you think it will?” Helmut asked.

Royce sighed and ran his hand through his hair. There was an unspoken assumption that was coloring his decision towards staying open, but he was afraid that if he said it out loud, it would sound absurd and undermine whatever decisions he made going forward. If Estefan were undermining him, he would be handing the casino operations director some enormous ammunition to pass around.

Of course, if he were wrong, he might be killing the Seraglio Garden all together. He couldn’t afford to let his pride keep him from getting a second and third opinion. Quietly, he said, “JH&H are handling the epidemic response and everybody there is quoting me numbers in months. When I asked if they thought this thing would go on for months, I got a really lengthy silence before the woman I was talking to said that the official position was that the lockdown was for three days pending new developments, but that if this thing got into the Americas and Europe, it could last considerably longer.”

“Hasn’t it gotten into America and Europe already?” Estefan asked.

“Some, yeah. Not a lot of reported cases, but a few. I don’t know what that means,” admitted Royce.

“What do your instincts tell you?” Estefan asked.

Royce thought for a moment that the question might be a trap, but he remembered how often his grandfather talked about instincts to his senior managers and he knew the managers had loved his grandfather. “My instincts tell me we should plan for this to be a long haul.

Estefan nodded sharply. “You should ask all of your senior managers that question about personnel staying in the hotel, then - see what you have to work with.”

Royce was aware that this might be another trap, but he’d already committed to trusting Estefan to be acting in good faith. He nodded. “I’ll do that right after this meeting.”

That was when the local news report he’d kept muted on the TV mounted on his wall put up the chyron. “New case of novel coronavirus traced back to Pirate Island.”

As his stomach dropped, he stared up at the screen and asked slowly. “Is there anything else?”

If the other men had more to discuss, they seemed to sense the shift in his mood and quickly excused themselves. Royce took a couple of minutes calming his breath. As much as his models said a longer epidemic was good for business, he’d still been hoping it wouldn’t happen. Since moving in here, he’d been raised to treat the Seraglio garden like a living, breathing entity on which the livelihoods of hundreds of people including himself just happened to rely. But, he also cared about Jayanesia and he’d been raised to pray for people in need regardless of how they got there. Not many of the Haderite church’s teachings had stuck with him, but he still very much lived by that one.

He took a moment to close his eyes, steeple his fingers together, and pray that the whole epidemic would blow over - that the feeling gnawing at his gut was wrong and his insurance company was right and this was all an over-reaction. As unironically as he could manage, he prayed that the world’s leaders would find the wisdom to band together and keep this thing from spreading before it became everybody’s problem.

Pirate Island wasn’t actually called Pirate Island except by everyone who talked about it on a day-to-day basis. By the time Royce opened his eyes, the chyron had been corrected to use its current name, Branden Island. Royce dimly remembered that the island was leased by someone who’d made a ton of money selling junk bonds in the eighties.

The reason it was called Pirate Island was because it had a reputation as the most “anything goes” of the Outer Islands. Even on the Inner Islands, Jayanesian law was incredibly hands-off when it came to individual rights. There wasn’t anything in it to keep people from putting anything into their bodies that they chose and very little to restrict what two consenting adults could do to each other. You could sign away all sorts of rights in a legally-binding contract short of letting someone kill or maim you or keep you incommunicado for more than seven days. There were a few things you couldn’t do because of international law, but activities that were routinely banned in other countries were entirely legal here. The laws Jayanesia would enforce on the Outer Islands were even fewer. Royce had once heard a comedian sum up the Outer Island Codes as “Don’t make me come out there.”