Grifter's Game (3 page)

Then I came to the box.

I thought of money, first of all. It was a small wooden box made of teak or mahogany and it was about the same size and shape as a dollar bill. I took a deep breath and prayed that it held a stack of hundreds. Maybe the bastard was a doctor and he wasn’t depositing his receipts, working some kind of a tax dodge. Maybe a hundred different things.

The box gave me trouble. It was locked and none of my keys fit it. I gave up fooling around after awhile and set it on the dresser. It was hinged at the back. I had a little file that went right through those hinges.

I started to open the box. Then I stopped, found a cigarette, and lit it. I was playing a little game with myself. The box was a present, and I had to try to guess what the present was. Money? Pipe tobacco? Fertilizer? It could be anything.

I took off the lid. There was a piece of tissue paper on top and I removed that right away.

There was nothing under the paper but white powder. I was completely destroyed. There is nothing quite so compelling as a sealed box. I had the contents turned into a mental fortune, and now old L.K.B.’s box turned out to be a bust. Powder!

Maybe there was something underneath the powder. I got ready to blow it away, and then all of a sudden some little bell rang deep inside my head and I changed my mind.

I stared at the powder.

It stared back.

I managed to finish my cigarette and butt it in an ashtray thoughtfully provided by the management of the Hotel Shelburne. Then I turned back to the box. I put one finger to my lips and licked it, then dipped it gingerly into the powdery substance.

I licked the finger.

It was absolutely astonishing. I blinked rapidly, several times, and then licked my finger again, dipping it once more into the box.

I licked it another time. There was no mistaking the taste, not now, not after many years. When you work in a racket, even briefly, you learn what you can about the racket. You learn the product, first of all. No matter how small your connection with the racket or how little time you spend with it, this much you learn. I had played the game for two months, if that, in a very small capacity, but I knew what I had on my dresser.

I had approximately sixty cubic inches of raw heroin.

2

For a few minutes I just stood there and felt foolish. I’d picked up more than a wardrobe at the railway station. I’d picked up a fortune. How much was the heroin worth? I couldn’t even begin to guess. A hundred grand, a quarter of a million, maybe more, maybe less. I had no idea and I didn’t even want to think about it.

I couldn’t keep it and I couldn’t sell it and I couldn’t give it back. If L.K.B. ever found me with it he would kill me as sure as men make little green virgins. If the government ever found me with it they would lock me up and drop the key in the middle of the China Sea.

I could throw it away. Did you ever try throwing away a hundred grand, or a quarter of a million?

I put the lid back on the box and tried to figure out what to do with it. I couldn’t hide it. People who carry around large quantities of heroin are not amateurs. If they search a room, they find what they are looking for. And if L.K.B. and his buddy boys realized I was their pigeon, no hiding place in the room would keep the heroin away from them. And I had to hold onto the stuff. It could be my trump card, the only thing that would keep me alive if they ever caught on. I could use it to work a deal.

I needed a hiding place for the time being, though. I rejected the standard ones, the cute places where a real pro always looked first. The toilet tank, the bed, the outer windowsill. I stuck it on the floor under the dresser and tried to forget about it.

I got dressed in a hurry and left the hotel. The store I was looking for was two long blocks off the Boardwalk on Atlantic Avenue near Tennessee. I went in and bought a good attaché case for twenty dollars and change. It was a nice case—I didn’t know you could get them that good so far from Madison Avenue.

I lugged the case back to the hotel, bought a pair of Philly papers at the newsstand in the lobby, then went back to my room. The little box with the hinges filed through was right where I’d left it under the dresser. I took it out, wrapped it up tight in paper so it wouldn’t come open, and put it in the attaché case. Then I crumpled up paper and packed it in tight so that nothing would rattle around. I used all of the paper, closed the case and locked it up. I made a mental note to get rid of the key. When the time came, I could always break the thing open. But I didn’t want to have the key on my person.

I hefted the case a few times experimentally. It was neither too heavy nor too light. It could have been almost anything.

Then I took it back down to the lobby and hauled it over to the front desk. The room clerk waited obligingly while I picked up my case and put it on the desk between us.

“Wonder if you’d do me a favor,” I said. “I’ve got a commercial presentation here that I’m in the middle of. Not valuable to anybody but me, but there’s always the chance that somebody might walk off with it not knowing what was in the case. The company would raise hell if that happened. Could you stick it in the safe for me?”

He could and did. He started to write out a claim check for me but I shook my head.

“I’d only lose it,” I told him. “I’m not worried about it. I’ll pick it up before I go.”

I gave him a dollar and left him with a safeful of heroin.

I had time to kill and thinking to do. I left the hotel again and took a walk on the Boardwalk. If anything, it was worse than when I’d been in town three years back. There were more hotdog and fruit juice stands, more penny arcades, more bingo games and carney booths and flashy souvenir shops. Sex was also present. The professionals stuck to the bars on the side street, but the amateur competition cluttered every board on the Boardwalk. Young girls walking in twos and threes and fours; blondes who got their hair from bottles; fifteen and sixteen and seventeen-year-olds with their blouses too sheer and their blue jeans too tight, their makeup too thick and their strut too obvious. Victory girls who didn’t know the war had been over for fifteen years.

The boys were there because the girls were there. They played a game as old as the world, the boys trying to score, the girls trying to be scored upon without looking cheap about it, as though there was a way in the world for them to look otherwise. The boys were clumsy and the girls were clumsier, but somehow they would manage to get together, manage to find a place to neck and pet and make sloppy love. The girls would get pregnant and the boys would get gonorrhea.

One hotel had a terrace facing on the Boardwalk with umbrella-topped tables and tall drinks. I found an empty table and sat under the shade of the umbrella until a waiter found me, took my order, left me and returned with a tall cool vodka collins. It came with a colored straw and I sipped it like a kid sipping a malted. I lit a cigarette and settled back in my chair. I tried to put everything together and make it add up right.

If I had a tighter connection with a branch of the narcotics trade it would have been easier. A while back I’d done a few jobs for a man named Marcus. It was strictly messenger-boy stuff—pick up this, take it there, give it to so-and-so. I hadn’t seen Marcus in years and I didn’t know where he was. He probably wouldn’t even remember me.

That made selling the stuff impossible.

My other connection was L.K.B. I didn’t know who he was, but I had an idea that it wouldn’t be too hard to find out. He had arrived just that day, and he had probably checked into a hotel already. All I had to do was run down the list of recent arrivals at the six best hotels in town. Somebody would have those initials, and he would be my boy. I could get in touch with him from a distance, try to work a deal with him and sell his own stuff back to him. It might work. It also might get me killed. The best I could hope for was a few thousand, a slim fraction of the value of the stuff. And I would spend the rest of my life waiting for a knife in the back.

I didn’t like that.

I sipped more of the drink. A man walked by with a girl on his arm. Two old ladies rolled by in a rolling chair pushed by a bored attendant. Victory girls passed, looked at me, decided I was too old, and hurried on with their tails twitching.

I decided to sit tight. For the time being I was in the clear. The way things stood, the worst that could happen was that I skipped the hotel and left them with a box of heroin. If everything broke right, I could get out with a box in tow, hold it for a few years until everybody forgot about it, then find a way to sell it off a little at a time without raising anybody’s eyebrows.

In the meantime there was Mona. I thought about her and remembered that she would be on the beach at midnight, waiting for me. I almost forgot the heroin, just thinking about her.

I dropped a buck for the drink and some change for the waiter on the table, and I left. Two blocks further along the Boardwalk I found a good restaurant where they served me a blood-rare steak and very black coffee. I lingered awhile over a second cup of coffee, then went out and found a movie.

The movie was lousy, a historical epic called
A Sound of Distant Drums
, a technicolor cinemascope package with pretty girls and flashing swords and people getting themselves killed flamboyantly. I dozed through most of it. It was a little after ten when I finally got out and headed for the hotel.

I doubled around behind the hotel, found the passageway to the beach and walked through it. There was a pier that ran from the Boardwalk to the ocean and I stayed close to it so that nobody would see me from the Boardwalk and remind me that I wasn’t supposed to be on the beach. It was a silly rule to begin with, but Atlantic City was that kind of a town, built with the aid of a stopwatch. The beach closed at a certain hour, the pools in the hotels closed at a certain hour, the world folded up and disappeared at a certain hour. An insomniac could lose his mind in Atlantic City. Even the television shows went off the air at one o’clock.

The beach was empty. I walked down to where the water met the land and watched the waves come in. The sea is hypnotic, like the flames in a fireplace. I don’t know how long I stood there, watching the waves without moving a muscle or thinking a thought. I remember that the wind was cold, but that I didn’t mind it.

I gave up the game finally, walked back a few steps onto the beach, took off my jacket and made a pillow out of it. I was early—she wasn’t due until midnight. If she was coming at all. I wondered about that.

I stretched out on sand and propped up my head on my jacket. I let my eyes close and let my body relax, but I did not fall asleep. I dozed a little.

I barely heard her coming because my mind was on something else. When I did hear the feet on the sand I knew it had to be her. I lay there without moving and listened to her moving.

“You’re always sleeping,” she said. “Sleeping all the time. And now you’re ruining your clothes. That’s not very intelligent of you.”

I opened my eyes. She wore a very simple red dress and no shoes at all. The moonlight played on her and showed me how stunning she was.

“We can lie on this. You can ruin your suit all you want, but I’d hate to get this dress all sandy.”

For the first time I noticed the blanket she was carrying. I grinned.

“Aren’t you even going to get up?”

I stood up and looked at her. She started to say something but stopped with her mouth hanging open. I could understand it. There was something electric in the air, something neither of us could have put into words. Small talk was suddenly impossible. I knew it and she knew it.

I took a step toward her. She held out the blanket and I took hold of two corners and walked backwards. We spread the blanket on the sand and straightened up and looked at each other some more. The electricity was still there.

I wanted to say something but I couldn’t. I was certain it was the same for her. It would have been like talking through a wall. First we had to tear down the wall. Then there would be a time for talking.

I pulled my shirt out from my pants. I started unbuttoning it. I got it off and let it fall to the sand. I turned to her and she came close, reaching out a hand and touching my chest.

Then she turned around and asked me to unhook her.

I had trouble with the hook-and-eye at the top of the dress. My hands weren’t working properly. Finally I managed it. I unzipped the dress all the way down past her waist but I didn’t touch her skin at all.

She shrugged and the dress fell from her shoulders.

“The bra, Lennie.”

I took off the bra for her. It was black. I remember liking the contrast of the black bra and the pale skin. Then I turned away and took off the rest of my clothes.

When I turned to her once again we were both naked. I looked at her, all of her. I started at the face and looked all the way down past breasts and waist and hips to bare feet. Then I came back up again and my eyes locked with hers.

No words.

We walked toward each other until our bodies touched. I wrapped her up in my arms and held the sweetness of her against me. The silly voices of a thousand people drifted down from the Boardwalk like words from a brainless dream. The waves pounded behind us.

She kissed me.

And then we sank together to the blanket on the beach and forgot the world.

I was lying on my side looking over the beach to the sea. Above the water the moon was almost full. Her panties were a wisp of black silk on the sand beside me. I watched the waves and listened to her breathing.

I felt very strange, very weak and very strong at once. I remembered why I had come to Atlantic City in the first place, and I remembered all the things I had done for so many years, and everything seemed foolish, silly. I remembered, incongruously, Mrs. Ida Lister. I had slept with her, too, in Atlantic City. Not on the beach, but in a plush, air-conditioned hotel room. Not because I wanted to, but because she was picking up the tab.

It had all been so stupid. Not wrong, not immoral. Merely stupid. And so had the years of skipping hotel bills, and living on the edge of the law, and looking for the one big connection that would make everything all right.