The Music of Chance (10 page)

It wasn’t difficult to find the bridge at Frenchtown, but once
they crossed the Delaware into Pennsylvania, the route became less certain. Ockham was no more than fifteen miles from the river, but they had to make a number of complicated turns to get there, and they wound up crawling along the narrow, twisting roads for close to forty minutes. If not for the storm, it would have gone somewhat faster, but the low ground was clogged with mud, and once or twice they had to climb out of the car to remove fallen branches that were blocking their way. Pozzi kept referring to the directions he had scribbled down while talking to Flower on the phone, calling out each landmark as it came into view: a covered bridge, a blue mailbox, a gray stone with a black circle painted on it. After a while, it began to feel as if they were traveling through a maze, and when they finally approached the last turn, they both admitted that they would have been hard-pressed to find their way back to the river.

Pozzi had never seen the house before, but he had been told that it was a large and impressive place, a mansion with twenty rooms surrounded by more than three hundred acres of property. From the road, however, there was nothing to suggest the wealth that lay behind the barrier of trees. A silver mailbox with the names FLOWER and STONE written on it stood beside an unpaved road that led through a dense tangle of woods and shrubs. It looked uncared-for, as if it might have been the entrance to an old, broken-down farm. Nashe swung the Saab onto the bumpy, rut-grooved path and inched his way forward for five or six hundred yards—far enough to make him wonder if the path would ever end. Pozzi said nothing, but Nashe could feel his apprehension, a sullen, sulking sort of silence that seemed to say that he, too, was beginning to doubt the venture. At last, however, the road began to climb, and when the ground leveled off a few minutes later, they could see a tall iron gate fifty yards ahead. They drove on, and once they reached the gate, the upper portion of the house became visible through the bars: an immense brick structure looming in the near
distance, with four chimneys jutting into the sky and sunlight bouncing off the pitched slate roof.

The gate was closed. Pozzi jumped out of the car to open it, but after giving two or three tugs on the handle, he turned to Nashe and shook his head, indicating that it was locked. Nashe put the car into neutral, applied the emergency brake, and climbed out to see what should be done. The air suddenly seemed cooler to him, and a strong breeze was blowing across the ridge, rustling the foliage with the first faint sign of fall. As Nashe put his feet on the ground and stood up, an overpowering sense of happiness washed through him. It lasted only an instant, then gave way to a brief, almost imperceptible feeling of dizziness, which vanished the moment he began walking toward Pozzi. After that, his head seemed curiously emptied out, and for the first time in many years, he fell into one of those trances that had sometimes afflicted him as a boy: an abrupt and radical shift of his inner bearings, as if the world around him had suddenly lost its reality. It made him feel like a shadow, like someone who had fallen asleep with his eyes open.

After examining the gate for a moment, Nashe discovered a small white button lodged in one of the stone pillars that supported the ironwork. He assumed that it was connected to a bell in the house and pushed against it with the tip of his index finger. Hearing no sound, he pushed once again for good measure, just to make sure it wasn’t supposed to ring outside. Pozzi scowled, growing impatient with all the delays, but Nashe just stood there in silence, breathing in the smells of the dank earth, enjoying the stillness that surrounded them. About twenty seconds later, he caught sight of a man jogging in their direction from the house. As the figure approached, Nashe concluded that it could not have been either Flower or Stone, at least not from the way Pozzi had described them. This was a stocky man of no particular age, dressed in blue work pants and a red flannel shirt, and from his clothes Nashe
guessed that he was a hireling of some sort—the gardener, or perhaps the keeper of the gate. The man spoke to them through the bars, still panting from his exertions.

“What can I do for you, boys?” he said. It was a neutral question, neither friendly nor hostile, as if it were the same question he asked every visitor who came to the house. As Nashe studied the man more closely, he was struck by the remarkable blueness of his eyes, a blue so pale that the eyes almost seemed to vanish when the light hit them.

“We’re here to see Mr. Flower,” Pozzi said.

“You the two from New York?” the man said, looking past them at the Saab idling on the dirt road.

“You got it,” Pozzi said. “Straight from the Plaza Hotel.”

“What about the car, then?” the man asked, running a set of thick, sturdy fingers through his sandy-gray hair.

“What about it?” Pozzi said.

“I was wondering,” the man said. “You come from New York, but the tags on the car say Minnesota, ‘land of ten thousand lakes.’ Seems to me like that’s somewhere in the opposite direction.”

“You got a problem or something, chief?” Pozzi said. “What the fuck difference does it make where the car comes from?”

“You don’t have to get huffy, fella,” the man replied. “I’m just doing my job. A lot of people come prowling around here, and we can’t have no uninvited guests sneaking through the gates.”

“We’ve got an invitation,” Pozzi said, trying to control his temper. “We’re here to play cards. If you don’t believe me, go ask your boss. Flower or Stone, it doesn’t matter which. They’re both personal friends of mine.”

“His name is Pozzi,” Nashe added. “Jack Pozzi. You must have been told he was expected.”

The man stuck his hand into his shirt pocket, removed a small scrap of paper, cupped it in his palm, and studied it briefly at
arm’s length. “Jack Pozzi,” he repeated. “And what about you, fella?” he said, looking at Nashe.

“I’m Nashe,” Nashe said. “Jim Nashe.”

The man put the scrap of paper back in his pocket and sighed. “Don’t let nobody in without a name,” he said. “That’s the rule. You shoulda told me straight off. There wouldn’t have been no problem then.”

“You didn’t ask,” Pozzi said.

“Yeah,” the man mumbled, almost talking to himself. “Well, maybe I forgot.”

Without saying another word, he opened both doors of the gate, then gestured to the house behind him. Nashe and Pozzi returned to the car and drove on through.

T
he doorbell chimed with the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. They both grinned stupidly in surprise, but before either one of them could make a remark about it, the door was opened by a black maid dressed in a starched gray uniform and she was ushering them into the house. She led them across the black-and-white checkered floor of a large entrance hall that was cluttered with several pieces of broken statuary (a naked wood nymph missing her right arm, a headless hunter, a horse with no legs that floated above a stone plinth with an iron shaft connected to its belly), took them through a high-ceilinged dining room with an immense walnut table in its center, down a dimly lit corridor whose walls were decorated with a series of small landscape paintings, and then knocked on a heavy wooden door. A voice answered from within and the maid pushed the door open, stepping aside to allow Nashe and Pozzi to enter. “Your guests are here,” she said,
barely looking into the room, and then she closed the door and made a quick, silent exit.

It was a large, almost self-consciously masculine room. Standing on the threshold during those first instants, Nashe noticed the dark wood paneling on the walls, the billiard table, the worn Persian rug, the stone fireplace, the leather chairs, the ceiling fan turning overhead. More than anything else, it made him think of a movie set, a mock-up of a British men’s club in some turn-of-the-century colonial outpost. Pozzi had started it, he realized. All the talk about Laurel and Hardy had planted a suggestion of Hollywood in his mind, and now that Nashe was there, it was difficult for him not to think of the house as an illusion.

Flower and Stone were both dressed in white summer suits. One was standing by the fireplace smoking a cigar, and the other was sitting in a leather chair holding a glass that could have contained either water or gin. The white suits no doubt contributed to the colonial atmosphere, but once Flower spoke, welcoming them into the room with his rough but not unpleasant American voice, the illusion was shattered. Yes, Nashe thought, one was fat and the other was thin, but that was as far as the similarity went. Stone had a taut, emaciated look to him that recalled Fred Astaire more insistently than the long-faced, weeping Laurel, and Flower was more burly than rotund, with a jowly face that resembled some ponderous figure like Edward Arnold or Eugene Pallette rather than the corpulent yet light-footed Hardy. But for all those quibbles, Nashe understood what Pozzi had meant.

“Greetings, gentlemen,” Flower said, coming toward them with an outstretched hand. “Delighted you could make it.”

“Hi, there, Bill,” Pozzi said. “Good to see you again. This here’s my big brother, Jim.”

“Jim Nashe, isn’t it?” Flower said amiably.

“That’s right,” Nashe said. “Jack and I are half-brothers. Same mother, different fathers.”

“I don’t know who’s responsible for it,” Flower said, nodding in Pozzi’s direction, “but he’s one hell of a little poker player.”

“I got him started when he was just a kid,” Nashe said, unable to resist the line. “When you see talent, there’s an obligation to encourage it.”

“You bet,” Pozzi said. “Jim was my mentor. He taught me everything I know.”

“But he beats the living daylights out of me now,” Nashe said. “I don’t even dare to sit down at the same table with him anymore.”

By then, Stone had extricated himself from his chair and was walking toward them, drink still in hand. He introduced himself to Nashe, shook hands with Pozzi, and a moment later the four of them were sitting around the empty fireplace waiting for the refreshments to arrive. Since Flower did most of the talking, Nashe assumed that he was the dominant one of the pair, but for all the big man’s warmth and blustery humor, Nashe found himself more attracted to the silent, bashful Stone. The small man listened attentively to what the others said, and while he made few comments of his own (stumbling inarticulately when he did, acting almost embarrassed by the sound of his voice), there was a stillness and serenity in his eyes that Nashe found deeply sympathetic. Flower was all agitation and lunging goodwill, but there was something crude about him, Nashe felt, some edge of anxiety that made him appear to be at odds with himself. Stone, on the other hand, was a simpler and gentler sort of person, a man without airs who sat comfortably inside his own skin. But those were only first impressions, Nashe realized. As he continued to watch Stone sip away at the clear liquid in his glass, it occurred to him that the man might also be drunk.

“Willie and I have always loved cards,” Flower was saying. “Back in Philadelphia, we used to play poker every Friday night. It was a ritual with us, and I don’t think we missed more than a handful of games in ten years. Some people go to church on Sunday,
but for us it was Friday-night poker. God, how we used to love our weekends back then! Let me tell you, there’s no better medicine than a friendly card game for sloughing off the cares of the workaday world.”

“It’s relaxing,” Stone said. “It helps to get your mind off things.”

“Precisely,” Flower said. “It helps to open the spirit to other possibilities, to wipe the slate clean.” He paused for a moment to pick up the thread of his story. “Anyway,” he continued, “for many years Willie and I had our offices in the same building on Chestnut Street. He was an optometrist, you know, and I was an accountant, and every Friday we’d close up shop promptly at five. The game was always at seven, and week in and week out we always spent those two hours in precisely the same way. First, we’d swing around to the corner newsstand and buy a lottery ticket, and then we’d go across the street to Steinberg’s Deli. I would always order a pastrami on rye, and Willie would have the corned beef. We did that for a long time, didn’t we, Willie? Nine or ten years, I would say.”

“At least nine or ten,” Stone said. “Maybe eleven or twelve.”

“Maybe eleven or twelve,” Flower said with satisfaction. By now it was clear to Nashe that Flower had told this story many times in the past, but that did not prevent him from savoring the opportunity to do so again. Perhaps it was understandable. Good fortune is no less bewildering than bad, and if millions of dollars had literally tumbled down on you from the sky, perhaps you would have to go on telling the story in order to convince yourself it had really happened. “In any case,” Flower went on, “we stuck to this routine for a long time. Life continued, of course, but the Friday nights remained sacred, and in the end they proved stronger than anything else. Willie’s wife died; my wife left me; a host of disappointments threatened to break our hearts. But through it all, those poker sessions in Andy Dugan’s office on the fifth floor continued like clockwork. They never failed us, we could count on them through thick and thin.”