Tildy stood immobile, suddenly chilled, her skin broken out in goose pimples.
“Ease up now, girl, it’s finished. You did great, just great.”
“A lot of help you were.”
He came and pulled Tildy against him, talked into the soft mat of her hair that smelled faintly of smoke. “Do you really think I would have let him take you? No way. I was working on him the whole time, playing with his head.” He moved his fingers up and down the column of her neck until she softened, her arms went loose and her face nestled into his.
Ten minutes later, with Vinnie securely trussed and gagged on the floor, Tildy was preparing a snug nest for Lucien in the deepest recesses of her bag. She stroked the cool, curving metal with her hand and said, “You go back to sleep, Papa.” Then she snapped the bag shut, stepped over Vinnie and out the door.
By midnight they had consumed large quantities of shellfish, listened to a 67-year-old pianist play boogie-woogie in a penthouse bar and checked into a fresh hotel near Washington Square. The room had wall-to-wall carpet, air conditioning and a color teevee.
“There,” Christo said. “Is this what you wanted?”
In darkness they watched a Jock Mahoney western (saddle tramp befriends young widow, saves ranch from foreclosure) and blankly, wordlessly, Tildy drew out his damp, curled penis. The dilatory rhythm of her pumping hand did not increase even at the last. His come was cold on her knuckles by the time she went looking for a towel.
10
MEN OF AFFAIRS GET up early and begin striving right after breakfast. While time may not be money, they often race in the same colors; and in the words of a young blood who tried to sell Christo a hot watch at five A.M. in the Detroit Greyhound terminaclass="underline" “Ain’t never too early to be hustlin’.” It’s not so much a question of getting a jump on the other guy as it is of tilting your mind to precisely the right angle, like the morning prayers of Benedictine monks.
Replete with brioche and black coffee, Christo and Pierce sat at the dining table counting and stacking bills and discussing the state of the market.
“You don’t see so much of that good black hash these days,” Pierce was saying. “Some fairly substantial quantities were being moved out of Lahore a year or two back, but I haven’t heard of anything lately. Nothing that’s reached New York at any rate.”
“How much would that bring per pound on a quantity basis?”
“Hard to say. Hash is moving into that premium area right now, so you might, depending on the variables, be able to hit eleven or twelve hundred.”
Christo reached for a paper clip, tossed another bundle of twenties onto the growing centerpiece beside the coffee pot. “I wish we could figure something that didn’t involve my leaving the country.”
“Poor methodology, jazzbo. You want to maximize every advantage, buying at the overseas market value and then selling back here. It’s called transfer pricing.”
“Whatever. It’s still a bit early in the day for that textbook material.”
“You should just meditate for a while. Get in contact with those bills.”
Pierce had suggested the ritual money counting. Clearly, their putative dope scam would require more capital than Christo was in any position to supply and so to increase his bankroll, Pierce had gotten him a seat in a no-limit poker game starting up in a few hours. He had suggested the counting as a kind of preparatory workout, a way of tuning in to those ethereal cash frequencies; the motions of gathering, riffling, folding and unfolding, the tactile sensations, all magnetizing Christo for those monster pots.
“I’ve got my mystical side,” Pierce had said.
“Uh-huh. Pass the sugar, will you?”
The game was run out of the East Side apartment of an all-purpose middleman named Ernest Freed. Back in the late ’60s Freed had almost cracked the best-seller list with an espionage novel called The Abramowitz Integer, but his next one had flopped badly and he hadn’t been in hardcover since. The last piece of writing he’d done was the script for a movie about lesbian stock car drivers that was never produced. Now he ran his little gambling operation, introduced his friends to very amiable “fashion models” (the friends, in turn, would occasionally alert him to an upcoming stock manipulation), and dabbled in ghetto real estate. When pressed, he would admit to having a literary project in the works, but indicated the media overlords would never let it see the light of day since it would “blow the lid off their whole lousy game.”
Freed’s game didn’t need a steerer. He kept to a select clientele, cosmopolites and professional people who wouldn’t get ugly if they dropped a few thousand, for whom it was better to be stone broke than uncool. He made generous contributions to the police department’s bulletproof-vest fund and kept the hard boys away with monthly payments and the understanding that if he booked any sports bets, he’d lay them off with some new talent they were bringing along, a decertified osteopath over in Jersey who was just coming off a three-year bit for Medicaid fraud.
“So what is it you’ve gotten me into?” Christo asked. “I mean, I’m not going up against pros I hope. I’d hate to get sandbagged all the way back to square one.”
“Would I lead you into that kind of spot? Hey, you should be able to put four walls and a roof around this type of competition. They’re lightweights, believe me. It’s only a game to them and to you it’s a job. It’s not a question of whether you’ll win, but how much.”
“Then what the hell is all this for?” Christo pointed to the piles of money and the packs of cards.
“I want you to be in your best fighting trim, that’s all. A little science, a little superstition. Remember what I said about maximizing your advantages? Now then, I’m going to deal you some straight flushes and I want you to really concentrate on a visual image of those cards.”
“This is a cash-only game. No checks, no IOUs.” Freed wore loafers without socks, satin jogging shorts and a white shirt open to his sternum. “We play no-limit table stakes here with check and raise permitted. It’s a fixed five-dollar ante, dealer calls the game and I take five percent out of every pot.”
Christo nodded. “Then I guess we’ll have to try to keep the pots small.”
“There’s an open bar.” Freed had the rote geniality of a tour guide. “Please help yourselves.”
Pierce poured himself a large neat Scotch. Christo opted for plain soda with a chunk of lemon.
“Who’s that?” Nodding to the brown colossus standing by the door.
“Security. This is his summer job. Rest of the time he’s what they call a nonteaching assistant at some vocational school in Brooklyn. Used to be a pro wrestler, the Mighty Bobo.”
“I thought these guys were supposed to be well-mannered. Family men.”
“You’ll see.”
Then Pierce introduced him to the other players: Steve, the record producer; Randy, who owned a couple of Japanese restaurants; Dennis, the lawyer; and Maury, from Wall Street. They shook hands and went back to arranging their money — fifties, hundreds, great sheaves of them. Freed tore the cellophane off two factory fresh decks, spread them out on the spotless green baize.
“You fellas don’t use the jokers, huh?” Christo said as all four were removed and torn in half.
“Where are you from anyway?”
“Newport, Kentucky. Fast horses, beautiful women, and plenty of side meat with greens.”
“Swell. A tourist.”
“Welcome to actionland, pal.”
“Come on, come on. First jack deals.”
On the first hand he stayed with all the way, Christo got sandwiched between an ace-high flush and queens full, and lost a little over four hundred dollars. Maury from Wall Street had whipped the pot skillfully and didn’t seem like any lightweight from where Christo was sitting. He glanced at Pierce with raised eyebrows.