Bert the German grunted in appreciation of the conundrum. Bert hardly ever spoke. He was more dangerous than Teppo, and completely loyal to Nick.
“It was eating you, too,” Nick said. “Admit it. You didn’t like these guys trying to out-cheat you, Teddy Telemachus.”
“Of course he was mad!” Charlie said. “Who wouldn’t be?”
Shut the hell up, Teddy thought.
“Pride,” Nick said. “Pride starts to creep in.”
Teddy looked up into Nick’s eyes. “Yes,” Teddy said. “A little bit of pride.”
“So you had to take them down,” Nick said.
Teddy nodded.
Teppo and Bert had gone still. They could feel the change in the room. But fucking Charlie was swiveling his head between Nick and Teddy, laughing. “How’d you do it? Teddy? How’d you do it?”
“I’d like to know that myself,” Nick said. “Somehow he rigged the next hand, without even dealing it himself. How’d you do that, Teddy?”
Teddy tapped the surface of the table, remembering the last hand of the game. One of the New Yorkers was dealing. He pushed the deck to Teddy for the cut. Teddy made an amateurish cut using both hands and slid the deck back to the dealer.
So much preparation had gone into that simple transaction. Teddy had arrived in Cleveland with all the decks that they’d be using that night. One was clean, but the rest were pegged so that he could read the bumps under his fingers as he dealt. Plus he had two extra decks, one in his jacket pocket, one in a felt pocket stitched to the underside of the table, loaded in two different schemes.
Nobody noticed when he slid the pocket deck free. Nobody noticed when, thirty seconds later, he borrowed a card from the jacket deck and slipped it into the deck in his hand. And nobody noticed that the deck he returned after the cut was not the one he’d been handed.
Nick was waiting for an answer. Teddy shrugged. “Does it matter?”
Nick smiled. “I guess not.”
“Okay, so what happened?” Charlie asked.
“I only know this secondhand from Angelo,” Nick said. “And he was pretty hard to understand through all the bandages. But supposedly? Incredible. See, those two cheating fucks from New York, they find themselves with incredible hands. They start outbidding each other, and Angelo’s too stupid to get out of the way. Soon the pot’s huge, and everybody’s still in. They turn over the cards, and one of the New Yorkers’s got a straight, and the other’s got four of a kind, all deuces. Amazing, right? But here’s the topper: both New Yorkers are holding the two of spades.”
Charlie was laughing, confused. “What? Holy shit!” Teppo and Bert weren’t laughing, though. Teddy had suspected that the two of them had already heard this story from Nick, and the suspicion was turning his gut to ice.
“You can imagine how pissed off Angelo is,” Nick said. “Not the coolest head in the best of times. He starts shouting, and the New Yorkers know that somebody’s just fucked with them, and now they’re pissed. The goons storm in from the next room, and that’s when the shit hits the fan.”
Nick is looking at Teddy now. “A gun comes out. Angelo holds up his hand, and the bullet goes through his hand and into his jaw. The docs think the jaw can be fixed, but the hand, well the hand is just fucked. He’s going to bat lefty now.”
“Holy shit,” Charlie said. He was not an imaginative curser.
“I drove him to the hospital,” Teddy said. “I apologized to him.”
The men mulled the end of the story as if savoring a meal.
Then Nick shrugged. “I’d have preferred you held on to my money.”
Teddy felt his heart thump once in his chest. Everyone looked at Nick.
He wasn’t even pretending to work with the dough now. He flipped the switch on the pizza roller, and the two big cylinders whined up to speed.
Bert the German put a beefy hand on Teddy’s arm, tugged for him to stand up.
But Teddy couldn’t stand up. His legs had stopped working. Acid stung the back of his throat.
Teppo and Bert hauled him upright. Charlie said, “What’s going on, guys?” He was the only one in the room who didn’t know what was about to happen.
“Take off the watch,” Nick said.
After three hours of poring over files, Irene told him and Graciella that two things were clear: there was too much to copy, and there was definitely something fishy going on with the numbers. Irene, though, was due for her shift at Aldi’s.
“Let’s pack it up,” Graciella said. She no longer trusted for the paperwork to be safe in the office, because she had no idea how many people had keys, and who those people were loyal to. The only solution was to take everything they could get their hands on and move it off-site, where the women would go through it at their leisure. They filled the Buick’s trunk and the back of Graciella’s station wagon. She followed Teddy and Irene to the house, where they enlisted Buddy and Matty to help them unload.
It was an odd experience for Teddy. He’d been intending to keep Graciella away from the males of the family, so as not to scare her off. But she seemed charmed by Buddy’s shyness, and laughed at Matty’s hesitant jokes. In retrospect, that made sense: Graciella was raising three boys, and Buddy was as much a kid as any of them. Fortunately, he was a kid with a hobby. In the basement he’d been building deep shelving units out of spare lumber. The file boxes fit perfectly into place, like they were meant to be there.
Graciella said nothing about the metal window shades, but she asked about the large structure taking shape at the other end of the basement.
Buddy ducked his head and went upstairs.
“I think they’re bunk beds,” Matty said.
“Best not to ask questions,” Irene said. She’d pulled on the polyester Aldi’s smock. “I’ve got to go. Graciella, I’ll get back to the ledgers tomorrow.”
“I can’t thank you enough,” Graciella said. She went to Irene and took her hand in hers. “I mean it. I can’t. But I’ll try to make it up to you someday.”
Teddy thought: They’re having a moment! My girls are having a moment!
Graciella said that she should be going, too, because her mother was probably getting tired of watching the boys. Teddy said, “You can’t go, I need your help with something. I have entirely too much gin in the freezer, an oversupply of tonic, and an abundance of cucumbers.”
“Not limes?”
“It’s Hendrick’s, my dear. Cucumber slices, always.”
“I suppose I can do my part during this difficult time,” she said.
They took their drinks outside, into the August sunlight, and Graciella said, “You have hammocks!”
“We do?” They did. Two Mexican hammocks, slung in the shade between the three oaks. Another Buddy project, Teddy thought, financed by yours truly.
“I love hammocks,” Graciella said. She skirted the dirt patch—Buddy had provided as much explanation for filling the hole as he had for digging it—and eased into one of the hammocks, laughing while trying to keep her drink from spilling.
Teddy carried over one of the lawn chairs. “Aw, what are you doing with that?” she asked. “Take the other one.”
“I’m not a hammock person,” he said. He set up the chair across from her, removed his jacket, and draped it across the back. The white envelope slid out onto the seat of the chair. He’d forgotten about it. He picked it up nonchalantly and slipped it into the jacket side pocket. Graciella noticed but didn’t remark on it.
He sat across from her and they sipped their drinks while Graciella said pleasant things about Matty, the house, the yard. Perhaps some were lies but he didn’t care. The moment was as fine as any he could remember. A warm day at the end of summer, a beautiful woman in orange and green like a tropical flower blooming in his own backyard, a cold glass in his hand. It made him want to say philosophical things to her. He tried to construct a sentence about old age, bitter gin, and sweet tonic—the sweet tonic of youth!—but then lost concentration when Graciella kicked off one shoe, then the other.