"What you give him?"
"Give him a smack. First I had to catch him."
"He scurried around, did he. Jesus. You say anything? Make it look…"
"Yeah. I said, 'You called me chief.' "
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. You know. 'You fucking chiefed me out.' "
"Anything else?"
"Yeah. After I give him the smack I said, 'Don't chief me out.' "
'"Don't chief me out.'"
"Yeah. 'Never chief me out.' You know. 'You don't never fucking chief me out.' "
Steve was trying to imagine Richard chiefing Clasford out. "Clasford. When was the last time somebody chiefed you out?"
"I don't know. When I was about phree."
"Yeah well take care, chief."
He pocketed the mobile and parked the Cosworth. It all proved that the town was safer than the country. The trees were more dangerous than the streets. The city was like world opinion-it held you back. The fields held no one back. Why do you think people get stabbed fifty-seven times? Why do you think people die from thirty-nine blows to the head? Given the leisure (the privacy, the seclusion), you don't stop. It's the … reversecard at the bottom of the deck; and then slid in the second and third, saying, "One jack goes in the first floor. And one on the next floor." He paused, thinking. "And the fourth jack goes on the roof to look out for police." Reasonably skillfully he placed the four jacks, held tightly, as one card, on the top of the pack. Marco watched with drugged interest. "Then the police came! Me-mao me-mao me-mao me-mao! So the jack on the roof called to the other jacks: 'Police are here!' And they all came running up. One jack, two jacks, three jacks, four jacks."
Marius's shoulders subsided; tension absented itself from him. "Brilliant," said Gina. Marius gave a modest smile and lifted his eyes toward Marco-and Marco's imploring stare.
Marco said: "Then what?"
Richard shifted his weight. He too was thinking about a story: "The Aleph," by Jorge Luis Borges. About a magical device, the aleph, that knew everything: like the Knowledge. About a terrible poet, who wins a big prize, a big requital, for his terrible poem. "Astonishingly," the narrator writes, "my own book, The Cards of the Cardsharp, received not a single vote." Richard listened to the tuneless blues that was playing in his head. None of this ever left him and everything always reminded him of it.
"Then what?" said Marius.
"Then what?" said Marco.
"… Nothing!"
"Did the police get them? What did they steal? Where did they go?"
"Marco."
Yes. Because Marco was always like this. Marco. So unlike Marius, who was so firmly placed in the world, who constantly sought and identified distinctions (that was a hem, that was a fringe; that was an eave, that was a ledge; that was a scratch, that was a scrape), who had already joined in the great human venture of classification. Richard, too, knew all about classification. That afternoon, hoping to begin a single-paragraph review of a seven hundred-page biography, L. H. Myers: The Forgotten, he had spent an hour with his ragged thesaurus, in search of a fancy word for big. Halfway through this search, Gal Aplanalp telephoned. "You're not going to believe this," she began . . . Whereas Marco would believe anything. He longed to believe everything. He never wanted any story to end. It had been tentatively suggested, by a young neurologist, that this was why Marco cried in the night; the broken narrative of dreams, or simply the fact that dreams ended.
"Marco," said Richard. "I want to see you in my study. Now."
The child got straight to his feet. This had never happened before butthere slowly formed the freeze-framed torso of a woman. Scozzy stared, with consent, with recognition: you could see the bruised scars on the undersides of her breasts, from the surgeon's work: seals of approval. The woman, like the man who watched her, was all alone. But he was the virgin. The wild boy had never done the wild thing (and had his theories about the jizm and the ism). When he watched pornography, he sometimes thought, he was trying to find out whom he wanted to hurt. Scozzy touched the Play. She wrenched off the remains of her muscle shirt and then reached down with inch-long fingernails and savagely juxtaposed her fixed tits.
Three days later, by which time Richard's eye had ceased its experiments with the visible spectrum, had stopped trying to be a yellow eye or a violet eye and became, unarguably, a black eye, something else resolved itself in his head: he got up from the kitchen table and crossed the passage. On the sitting room floor Marius was showing Marco a card trick, in the autumn dusk of Calchalk Street, with the furniture acquiring ghosts of poor definition and the sound of footsteps miraculously surviving their ascent from the street below . .. The card trick, Richard knew, had involved Marius in much preparation. With the deck in his hand he had disappeared into the bathroom for about fifteen minutes. But now he was ready. His aim was to tell a story. On the leading edge of card tricks, this activity being fanatically evolved, like all others, there were hour-long spectaculars with plots as complicated as Little Dorrit (which revolves, if you recall, on someone leaving money to his nephew's lover's guardian's brother's youngest daughter: Little Dorrit) and with interplay of theme and pattern aspiring to the architectonic, the Prousto-Joycean. Marius's card trick was old and crude and self-defeatingly famous. Marco didn't know it. It was called "The Four Jacks" and it told a simple tale of urban striving.
"There are four jacks. See?" said Marius, showing Marco the four jacks in a vertical strip-behind which the three decoy cards (a nine, a five, a three-mere commoners) despicably lurked. "And they decide to rob a house."
"Our house?"
The upper periphery of Marco's riveted vision told him that his father was in the room, standing near the door. Reassuringly and eternally, Gina sat knitting on the window seat, her legs crossed sharply in answer to the angles of the needles.
"No. This house," said Marius, indicating the remaining forty-five cards. "One jack goes in the basement." Marius placed the first decoy"It was a joke, Daddy." "What do I smell of?" "Nothing. You. It was a joke, Daddy."
"I'm sorry. Don't tell Mummy. Just say you wouldn't do your homework or something. Come and give me a kiss. Forgive me." And Marco did so.
At about eleven-fifteen that night the twins, in their twin beds, were winding up a long, whispered and untendentious discussion (tangerines, a new supervillain, water pistols) and had started to think about calling it a day. At any rate their silences were more extended, their yawns more musical and vacant. Marius, in particular (always the more likely to close things out), lay on his side with both hands thrust down the front of his pajama bottoms. He was indulging in his nightly fantasies of rescue. His father, at that age, taking what he needed from any genre available, was shepherding adult showgirls onto gondolas from the black gurgling rock-sides of island fortresses. Marius braved lasers and particle beams, interposing himself between their fire and a succession of alien maidens wearing catsuits and pastel tunics in video-puppet dreamscapes that rushed past or through him, as the lit runway is assimilated by the cockpit monitors of the landing plane. He rolled on to his back and said,
"Why did Daddy call you?"
Marco thought for a moment. He saw Richard's face and all the troubled calculation in it. He saw him on another day, head bent, sniffing his fingertips. And on another day (by general consensus a very bad day: the rooms were hushed), with him sitting at the kitchen table over an opened letter and smoking a concussed cigarette. Marco said, "He thinks he smells of shit."