The Music of Chance (5 page)

“I guess you hit the jackpot, all right. But maybe not the one you were counting on.”

“You’ve got your best of times, and you’ve got your worst of times. Last night was one of the worst.”

“At least you’re still breathing.”

“Yeah. Maybe I got lucky, after all. Now I get a chance to see how many more dumb things can happen to me.”

Pozzi smiled at the remark, and Nashe smiled back, encouraged to know that the kid had a sense of humor. “If you want my advice,” Nashe said, “I’d get rid of that shirt, too. I think its best days are behind it.”

Pozzi looked down at the dirty, blood-stained material and fingered it wistfully, almost with affection. “I would if I had another one. But I figured this was better than showing off my beautiful body to the world. Common decency, you know what I mean? People are supposed to wear clothes.”

Without saying a word, Nashe walked to the back of the car, opened the trunk, and started looking through one of his bags. A moment later, he extracted a Boston Red Sox T-shirt and tossed it to Pozzi, who caught it with his free hand. “You can wear this,” Nashe said. “It’s way too big for you, but at least it’s clean.”

Pozzi put his coffee cup on the roof of the car and examined the shirt at arm’s length. “The Boston Red Sox,” he said. “What are you, a champion of lost causes or something?”

“That’s right. I can’t get interested in things unless they’re hopeless. Now shut up and put it on. I don’t want you smearing blood all over my goddamn car.”

Pozzi unbuttoned the torn Hawaiian shirt and let it drop to his feet. His naked torso was white, skinny, and pathetic, as if his body hadn’t been out in the sun for years. Then he pulled the T-shirt over his head and opened his hands, palms up, presenting himself for inspection. “How’s that?” he asked. “Any better?”

“Much better,” Nashe said. “You’re beginning to resemble something human now.”

The shirt was so large on Pozzi that he almost drowned in it. The cloth dangled halfway down his legs, the short sleeves hung over his elbows, and for a moment or two it looked as if he had
been turned into a scrawny twelve-year-old boy. For reasons that were not quite clear to him, Nashe felt moved by that.

They headed south on the Taconic State Parkway, figuring to make it down to the city in two or two and a half hours. As Nashe soon learned, Pozzi’s initial silence had been an aberration. Now that the kid was out of danger, he began to show his true colors, and it wasn’t long before he was talking his head off. Nashe didn’t ask for the story, but Pozzi told it to him anyway, acting as though the words were a form of repayment. You rescue a man from a difficult situation, and you’ve earned the right to hear how he got himself into it.

“Not one dime,” he said. “They didn’t leave us with a single fucking dime.” Pozzi let that cryptic remark hang in the air for a moment, and when Nashe said nothing, he started again, scarcely pausing to catch his breath for the next ten or fifteen minutes. “It’s four o’clock in the morning,” he continued, “and we’ve been sitting at the table for seven straight hours. There’s six of us in the room, and the other five are your basic chumps, chipsters of the first water. You give your right arm to get into a game with monkeys like that—the rich boys from New York who play for a little weekend excitement. Lawyers, stockbrokers, corporate hot shots. Losing doesn’t bother them as long as they get their thrills. Good game, they say to you after you’ve won, good game, and then they shake your hand and offer you a drink. Give me a steady dose of guys like that and I could retire before I’m thirty. They’re the best. Solid Republicans, with their Wall Street jokes and goddamn dry martinis. The old boys with the five-dollar cigars. True-blue American assholes.

“So there I am playing with these pillars of the community, having myself a real good time. Nice and steady, raking in my share of pots, but not trying to show off or anything—just playing it nice and steady, keeping them all in the game. You don’t kill the goose that lays the golden egg. They play every month, those
dumbbells, and I’d like to get invited back. It was hard enough swinging the invitation for last night. I must have worked on it for half a year, and so I was on my best behavior, all polite and deferential, talking like some faggot who goes to the country club every afternoon to play the back nine. You’ve got to be an actor in this business, at least if you want to move in on the real action. You want to make them feel good you’re emptying their coffers, and you can’t do that unless you show them you’re an okay kind of guy. Always say please and thank you, smile at their dumb-ass jokes, be modest and dignified, a real gentleman. Gee, tonight must be my lucky night, George. By golly, Ralph, the cards sure are coming my way. All that kind of crap.

“Anyway, I got there with a little more than five grand in my pocket, and by four o’clock I’m almost up to nine. The game’s going to break up in about an hour, and I’m getting ready to roll. I’ve figured those mugs out, I’m so on top of it I can tell what cards they’re holding just by looking at their eyes. I figure I’ll go for one more big win, walk out with twelve or fourteen thousand, and call it a good night’s work.

“I’m sitting on a solid hand, jacks full, and the pot’s beginning to build. The room is quiet, we’re all concentrating on the bets, and then, out of nowhere, the door flies open and in burst these four huge motherfuckers. ‘Don’t move,’ they shout, ‘don’t move or you’re dead’—yelling at the top of their lungs, pointing goddamn shotguns in our faces. They’re all dressed in black, and they’ve got these stockings pulled down over their heads so you can’t tell what they look like. It was the ugliest thing I ever saw—four creatures from the black lagoon. I was so scared, I thought I’d shit in my pants. Down on the floor, one of them says, lie down flat on the floor and no one will get hurt.

“People tell you about stuff like that—hijacking poker games, it’s an old hustle. But you never think it’s going to happen to you. And the worst part of it was, we’re sitting there playing with cash.
All that dough is sitting right there on the table. It’s a dumb thing to do, but those rich creeps like it that way, it makes them feel important. Like desperadoes in some half-assed western movie—the big showdown at the Last Gasp Saloon. You’re supposed to play with chips, everybody knows that. The whole idea is to forget about the money, to concentrate on the goddamn game. But that’s how those lawyers play, and there’s nothing I can do about their rinky-dink house rules.

“There’s forty, maybe fifty thousand dollars’ worth of legal tender sunning itself on the table. I’m spread out on the floor and can’t see a thing, but I can hear them stuffing money into bags, going around the table and sweeping it off—whoosh, whoosh, making quick work of it. I figure it’s going to be over soon, and maybe they won’t turn their guns on us. I’m not thinking about the money anymore, I just want to get out of there with my hide intact. Fuck the money, I say to myself, just don’t shoot me. It’s weird how fast things can happen. One minute, I’m about to raise the guy on my left, thinking what a smart, high-class dude I am, and the next minute I’m flat on the ground, hoping I don’t get my brains blown out. I’m digging my face into the goddamn shag carpet and praying like a son of a bitch those robbers are going to split before I open my eyes again.

“Believe it or not, my prayers are answered. The robbers do just what they say they’re going to do, and three or four minutes later they’re gone. We hear their car drive away, and we all stand up and start breathing again. My knees are knocking together, I’m shaking like a palsy victim, but it’s over, and everything is all right. At least that’s what I think. As it turns out, the real fun hasn’t even started yet.

“George Whitney got it going. He’s the guy who owns the house, one of those hot-air balloons who walks around in green plaid pants and white cashmere sweaters. Once we’ve had a drink and settled down a little, big George says to Gil Swanson—that’s the lugger
who worked out the invitation for me—‘It’s just like I told you, Gil,’ he says, ‘you can’t bring riffraff into a game like this.’ ‘What are you talking about, George?’ Gil says, and George says, ‘Figure it out for yourself, Gil. We play every month for seven years and nothing ever goes wrong. Then you tell me about this punk kid who’s supposed to be a good player and twist my arm to bring him up, and look what happens. I had eight thousand dollars sitting on that table, and I don’t take kindly to a bunch of thugs walking off with it.’

“Before Gil has a chance to say anything, I walk right up to George and open my big mouth. I probably shouldn’t have done that, but I’m pissed off, and it’s all I can do not to punch him in the face. ‘What the fuck does that mean?’ I say to him. ‘It means that you set us up, you little slimeball,’ he says, and then he starts poking me in the chest with his finger, pushing me back into the corner of the room. He keeps poking at me with that fat finger of his, and all the while he’s still talking. ‘I’m not going to let you and your hoodlum friends get away with a thing like that,’ he says. ‘You’re going to pay for it, Pozzi. I’ll see that you get what’s coming to you.’ On and on, jabbing with that finger of his and yammering in my face, and finally I just swat his arm away and tell him to step back. He’s a big one, this George, maybe six-two or six-three. Fifty years old, but he’s in good shape, and I know there’ll be trouble if I try to tangle with him. ‘Hands off, pig,’ I say to him, ‘just keep your hands off me and step back.’ But the bastard is going crazy and won’t stop. He grabs me by the shirt, and at that point I lose my cool and send my fist straight into his gut. I try to run away, but I don’t get three feet before another one of those lawyers grabs hold of me and pins my arms behind my back. I try to break away from him, but before I can get my arms free, big George is in front of me again and letting me have it in the stomach. It was awful, man, a real Punch-and-Judy show, a bloodbath in living color. Every time I broke away, another one of them would
catch me. Gil was the only one who wasn’t part of it, but there wasn’t much he could do against the four others. They kept working me over. For a moment there I thought they were going to kill me, but after a while they started to run out of gas. Those turds were strong, but they didn’t have much stamina, and I finally squirmed loose and made it to the door. A couple of them went after me, but there was no way I was going to let them catch me again. I tore ass out of there and headed for the woods, running for all I was worth. If you hadn’t picked me up, I’d probably still be running now.”

Pozzi sighed with disgust, as if to expel the whole miserable episode from his mind. “At least there’s no permanent damage,” he continued. “The old bones will mend, but I can’t say I’m too thrilled about losing the money. It couldn’t have come at a worse time. I had big plans for that little bundle, and now I’m wiped out, now I have to start all over again. Shit. You play fair and square, you win, and you wind up losing anyway. There’s no justice. Day after tomorrow, I was supposed to be in one of the biggest games of my life, and now it’s not going to happen. Ain’t a fucking chance in hell I can raise the kind of money I need by then. The only games I know about this weekend are nickel-and-dime stuff, a total washout. Even if I got lucky, I couldn’t earn more than a couple of grand. And that’s probably stretching it.”

It was this last statement that finally induced Nashe to open his mouth. A small idea had flickered through him, and by the time the words came to his lips, he was already struggling to keep his voice under control. The entire process couldn’t have taken longer than a second or two, but that was enough to change everything, to send him hurtling over the edge of a cliff. “How much money do you need for this game?” he asked.

“Nothing under ten thousand,” Pozzi said. “And that’s rock bottom. I couldn’t walk in with a penny less than that.”

“Sounds like an expensive proposition.”

“It was the chance of a lifetime, pal. A goddamn invitation to Fort Knox.”

“If you’d won, maybe. But the fact is you could have lost. There’s always that risk, isn’t there?”

“Sure there’s a risk. We’re talking poker here, that’s the name of the game. But there’s no way I could have lost. I’ve already played with those clowns once. It would have been a piece of cake.”

“How much were you expecting to win?”

“A ton. A whole fucking ton.”

“Give me a rough estimate. A ballpark figure.”

“I don’t know. Thirty or forty thousand, it’s hard to guess. Maybe fifty.”

“That’s a lot of money. A lot more than your friends were playing for last night.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. These guys are millionaires. And they don’t know the first thing about cards. I mean, they’re ignoramuses, those two. You sit down with them, and it’s like playing with Laurel and Hardy.”

“Laurel and Hardy?”

“That’s what I call them, Laurel and Hardy. One’s fat and the other’s thin, just like old Stan and Ollie. They’re genuine pea-brains, my friend, a pair of born chumps.”

“You sound awfully sure of yourself. How do you know they’re not a couple of hustlers?”

“Because I checked them out. Six or seven years ago, they shared a ticket in the Pennsylvania state lottery and won twenty-seven million dollars. It was one of the biggest payoffs of all time. Guys with that kind of dough aren’t going to bother hustling a small-time operator like me.”

“You’re not making this up?”

“Why should I make it up? The fat one’s name is Flower, and the skinny guy is called Stone. The weird thing is that they both
have the same first name—William. But Flower goes by Bill, and Stone calls himself Willie. It’s not as confusing as it sounds. Once you’re with them, you don’t have any trouble telling them apart.”

“Like Mutt and Jeff.”

“Yeah, that’s right. They’re a regular comedy team. Like those funny little buggers on TV, Ernie and Bert. Only these guys are called Willie and Bill. It has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? Willie and Bill.”

“How did you happen to meet them?”

“I ran into them in Atlantic City last month. There’s a game I sometimes go to down there, and they sat in on it for a while. After twenty minutes, they were both down five thousand dollars. I never saw such stupid betting in my life. They thought they could bluff their way through anything—like they were the only ones who knew how to play, and the rest of us were just dying to fall for their Humpty-Dumpty tricks. A couple of hours later, I went over to one of the casinos to horse around, and there they were again, standing at the roulette wheel. The fat one came up to me—”