Double down, p.5
Double Down, page 5
He was sprawled on the sofa, lord of the manor, surveying his princely domain. He was smoking, leisurely but steadily. The air was thick, blue. The room’s sole ashtray, rapidly filling, rested in his lap. Not to worry. On the counter were a pair of gallon milk jugs, their tops sheared off, their insides blackening from the rising accumulation of cigarette ash, two months’ supply. His own contribution to the decor. In the weakening light they looked remarkably like a cautionary photo of the autopsied lungs of a cancer victim. Just say no, Mr. Waverly.
He drank a Lite beer, his fourth, or it might have been more, he hadn’t kept count. Something he seldom did, solitary drinking. But in the hours following that chance encounter with Caroline Crown, he’d felt a peculiar sense of disorientation, like a man awakening from a deep sleep. And now was no time for disorientation. After the last disastrous Michigan adventure, he’d borrowed from Bennie a formula for the restoration of order. The Benjamin S. Epstein time-tested, fail-safe therapy: willed amnesia, an aggressive lack of interest in the past. A part of him found security in the quantifiable, in the chips and cards and odds and galaxies of numbers whirling in his head. In the tools of his trade, and the focused exercise of that vocation. Another part found a measure of comfort in a serene, numb fatalism. The sky tumbles, let it fall; in the meantime the cells of the body are expiring anyway, silently, millions of them, but one by one. The author of all ruin is imagination, and the only certain means to expunge it is to arrest the contagion of memory.
Sure. Why not? Easy.
Nevertheless, he thought about her (for life wouldn’t always accommodate to the pithy epigram). And to think about Caroline Vanzoren Crown was to think equally about Robbie Crown, their mingled childhoods, tangled tricornered friendship. Three institutional brats, raised in the snug shelter of a small private college by determinedly intellectual parents educated almost certainly beyond their capacities, in the way most professorial sorts are. Grown up together on the same block, Robbie across the street, Caroline three doors down. Drilled from infancy in the undisturbed acceptance of all the old verities. Honor students?—but of course. Scholar-athletes, all three of them, after the Platonic ideal: Robbie a track star, mighty heaver of shot and discus; Caroline a stalwart on the tennis team; he the swimmer. Twenty-two years of earnest camaraderie, from the first frantic tumult of kindergarten through the solemn strains of “Pomp and Circumstance” as rendered by the Calvin College orchestra. All those shared aspirations, easy achievements, dreams, goals, and reflections. All those years. How were you not going to think about them, here in the oppressive lonely silence of a Tropicaire efficiency unit, the past stubbornly unspooling inside your head?
But if you’re going to give in to those sunshine memories, what’s to keep you from following them further, opening the briefcase of the other side of your life, the darker side, and laying out all its sorry documents for display, a casual scrutiny? Well, nothing, he supposed, and so he did just that, and through the analgesic distancing of time and beer fog, that stormy chronicle of mischance, misplaced trust, botched choices, treacheries, wicked luck, explosive, deadly violence, griefs monumental and small, it didn’t look quite so bad, maybe after all not so bad. And he, to his thinking, not some cloven-hoofed demon stalking the earth, casting no shadow. Not necessarily.
Look at them, those documents. There’s the record of a marriage that could only have been fashioned by a malevolent fate, textbook case of opposites repelling, its only redeeming grace an innocent son, lost to him now forever. And there’s the one of his first descent into a kind of furious madness, the cunning, comic payback on his wife’s attorney (he could even yet conjure up an image of that grasping, beefy shyster face) backfired, gone suddenly awry, the hapless attorney slumped across an office floor, lifeblood leaking from the gash in his forehead, reddening the beige carpet. An accident? Tragic mistake? Yeah, right. Tell it to His Honor.
You want more, Mr. Waverly? You’re rolling now, up to it; and anyway, what have you got better to do? So take a peek at the next one, the jacket compiled through a seven-year holiday in Jacktown (with a brief side trip to Ypsi’s Forensic Psychiatry Center, get your head right—don’t forget that). But this one’s blurrier than the others, your censors charitably blocking a savage jungle-land, house of rage, peopled by thuggish brutes on either side of the bars. Out of all those dangerous, desperate years the only memories that surface with anything approaching vividness are of two men, late-arriving mentors, who rescued you from what Conrad once called the “supreme disaster of loneliness and despair,” and who taught you how to survive in a world, walled or not, utterly without mercy. One of them was a demented mystic, lifer, visionary, twisted saint, probably dead by now; the other, Bennie Saul Epstein, cellmate and later partner and improbable friend, a man who sees life clearly, untouched by any troubling shades of ambiguity: money is money, enemies are enemies, loyalties run deep. They were both of them, each in his own way, the finest men he’d ever known.
More yet? Maybe you’d like to get literal with those documents, open your shirt and examine the zippers stitched into your torso, permanent record of last year’s ill-conceived, ill-starred journey into the past. He didn’t undo the buttons on his shirt, but a wash of bitter recollections returned to him out of nowhere all the same, swamped him. Michigan memories, all of them: another faithless woman; a long brutal touchup in the basement of a house in the woods outside Traverse City; the second payback and this one—a corpse incinerating in the back of a Porsche, its head obliterated by a blast of the shotgun held in his own hands—by no reach of the imagination an accident; a brief furious struggle for his life in the dark courtyard of a sleazy Ann Arbor motel. Michigan memories. Not so fond.
Enough.
But if you can’t erase the past, how do you suspend it? How? By a conscious effort of will, he catechized himself. By invoking the formula. By focusing on real and present dangers, those private Furies, say, resurrected into what new figurations only God and maybe, by now, Bennie knew for sure. That was how. In his experience, trouble, when it came, usually came quickly and just as often unannounced. So there were other matters to ponder, more urgent even than Caroline and Robbie Crown.
He tried turning his thoughts to those matters, but without much success. He’d eaten nothing since morning (food not being a high priority lately) and, unseasoned drinker, he was fuzzy-headed from the beer. His attention wandered. An indolent breeze stirred the verticals on the open, streetside window. He got up and walked over to it, parted the blinds with his fingers, and peered out.
Not your most breathtaking view. Directly across the road was the sprawling Collonades Beach Hotel, once the jewel of Singer Island, abandoned now, utterly deserted, beginning to crumble. Tropical birds chattered in the cluster of palm trees around the canopied entrance. Twilight shadows lengthened over the decks and windows of the upper floors. Here and there a small light glittered in an empty room or corridor, invitation to a ghostly party. On this side of the road another light, crackling neon, announced the Tropicaire Efficiency Apartments, extending its own kind of runic invitation with the steady yellow glow of a universally acquiescent YES. One pink fender of the Seville was visible in the guest lot around the corner from his unit. The owner’s pickup was parked in the tow-away zone out front. A tiny green lizard skittered across the asphalt, minatory dragon in his insect world.
A car appeared at the far end of the street. Waverly released the blinds and drew back from the window. He pulled in a series of quick, shallow breaths. The muscles in his neck and shoulders tightened. He watched the car approach, pass, fade out of sight. The driver was a frail little woman of advancing years, a wheel-clutcher, somebody’s grandma. Gradually his breathing decelerated. God, he was weary of jeopardies, hazards, perils. Sick to death of negotiating the demands of caution, vigilance, stealth, strategy, cunning. A world of snares, skirmishes, ambushes, twisted angles of vision. A world crawling with dragons. He felt like a born victim, a man who possesses some dim foreknowledge of his own fate but is powerless to escape it.
His glance fell on the windowsill, littered with the discarded wings of swarmers, or perhaps of the more aptly named deathwatch beetles. He touched at them gingerly and they crumbled under his finger, dry as dust. He ran a hand along the sill, discovered a soft grainy powder on its surface. Termite shit. Well, you live in a swamp, you share it with the vermin. Tomorrow, or sometime soon, he’d mention it to the owner. No hurry. With any luck at all he’d be out of here before the walls and ceiling collapsed around him.
He returned to the sofa and stretched out, summoning sleep. For a considerable time it refused to come, though now and again he seemed to doze, and when he did a welter of images romped behind his eyes: playful figures, jesters, clowns, but all of them with faces on which, oddly, there were no smiles. Then the images would flatten, dwindle, vanish altogether, wakening him with a jolt. An hour or more passed in this way. Before he finally sank into a fitful slumber, his last lucid thoughts were of Bennie, where exactly he was that moment, what he was transacting, how he was doing.
SIX
Not so sensational, is how Bennie would have put it, how he was doing just then. He was sitting in a plush, semicircular booth near the back of the Floral Gardens Lounge, located on Ogden Avenue in the fashionable suburban community of Hinsdale. To his immediate left sat Eugene Stumpley. Facing him was Gunter Dietz. Bennie and Eugene drank Scotch, rocks. Dietz, who had just arrived, was occupied with ordering: martini, up, cocktail mushroom, ice water on the side. “And of course you’ll use your Bombay gin,” he added, as much polite request as command.
“Of course, Mr. Dietz,” said the palm-polishing waiter.
Dietz let his glance slide over Bennie. “You ready for another, Mr., uh, Ep-stein, is it?” he asked, laying a faintly derisive stress on the first syllable of Bennie’s name.
“Epstein, right. Call me Bennie.” Dietz leveled an outland stare on him, called him nothing, so Bennie put a hand on his glass and said, forcedly hearty, “Still workin’ on this one. Stumpy and me, we been here awhile, chewin’ over the old days.”
“Eugene?”
“I’m good, too, Mr. Dietz.”
Dietz made a signal with his eyes, and the waiter vanished into the jostling crowd. The lounge was packed at this hour, every booth and table and bar stool taken. The mirrored walls swirled with reflected figures, intense-looking men and women—thirtyish, most of them, flawlessly power-dressed. There was no music or TV, only a muted conversational swell broken by an occasional peal of brittle laughter. A giant aquarium teeming with vacant-eyed fish dominated the space between the arms of a horseshoe-shaped bar. Strategically placed crystal chandeliers delivered a subdued yellow light. The carpet and the cushy upholstery of the booths were done in deep turquoise. And faithful to its name, the Floral Gardens accented its decor with an abundance of greenery. Like drinking in the goddam Congo, Bennie thought, fucking plants and trees everywhere you look. What he said though, after the waiter reappeared and set the martini and a tall water glass on the table, was, “Nice place here.”
“I’ve always liked it,” Dietz said. “You get a better class of people here. Professional people. Per se.” He spoke very deliberately, as though the prolonged pauses helped him edit his thoughts. Coming out of that thin-lipped slit of a mouth the words were chilling, even when he was talking about preferences in bars.
Bennie had never met Dietz before, but over the years he’d heard plenty about him. And from all he remembered of everything he’d heard, he wasn’t exactly counting the minutes till this sitdown. “Now they’re your best kind,” he said, working his baggy face into a shrewd expression, trying the sage man of business on him. Shit, try anything. “Good spenders. Never give you no grief.”
“Grief,” Dietz said philosophically. “Grief is something we all want to avoid. All of us. When we can.”
Bennie decided the best thing to say to that was nothing at all. Grief—least the kind Dietz meant—was a subject better left alone. If you could.
For a long moment a silence hung in the air. Eugene drew his spindly shoulders around him, looked at the ceiling, floor, room at large, settled finally, if briefly, on his lap. Dietz took a decorous sip of martini, followed it with another of ice water. He leaned back, ran a hand through his thick white hair. Adjusted the knot in his silk tie. Stroked his hard jaw. He allowed his wintry gaze to shift slowly between Bennie and Eugene. Even in the confines of the booth, his height and bulk were such that he seemed to tower over both of them. “So,” he said at last, “you two boys go back a ways.”
“That we do,” Bennie affirmed. “All the way back the fifties, when we was a couple young bucks just gettin’ our game goin’. I was runnin’ my first wire. Five-and-dimer, out of Skokie. And old Stumper here”—he reached over and laid a comradely punch on Eugene’s arm—“he was a mule them days, I remember correct. Scootin’ for anybody’d take him on.”
“It was a long time ago,” Eugene said, carefully distancing himself from both the chummy punch and the jocular recollection of their past acquaintance.
“Yeah, thirty years or better,” Bennie went right on, adopting the tones of a wise old codger calling up the foibles of yesteryear. “You remember them big Caddies we use to drive, Stump? Shark fins on ’em? ’Bout the size of your basic tank? I tell ya, put a little green in our wallets, we was King Shit. Them days.”
Out of a face full of anxious wiliness, Eugene smuggled a peek at Dietz, who was nodding thoughtfully, withholding comment, taking everything in. Eugene was a slight man, delicate-boned, stringy of physique. His blue polyester pinstripe, best suit in his wardrobe, had an unfortunate tendency to hang on him loose as a scarecrow’s outfit. Equally unfortunate was a retrograde chin that gave his head an odd top-heavy appearance, which the sparse hair slicked over the skull did little to soften. Spidery blood vessels on the hollow cheeks and nose added a dash of color to a complexion otherwise uniform gray, sooty. His vulture eyes roved constantly. Right about now he was wishing the gasbag would stuff a sock in it. The way he remembered, they’d done a little trafficking, nothing heavy. Yid was making it sound like they’d been to bed together. Partnered or something.
“Well,” Dietz said, addressing Bennie directly, “in any case, it’s a piece of luck you happened to know Eugene. For you, I mean. The luck.”
“Yeah, worked out real good. For everybody.”
“Tell me, Mr. Ep-stein, what business are you in now?”
“Now? Oh, I got me a little book. Also run a few players when there’s any action to scare up.” He figured he wouldn’t mention the stable of quiff he kept on call. Make that used to keep on call. Guy like Dietz, sitting there all cool and steady in his white linen suit, sucking up a martini, Mr. Fortune 500, he’d curl a lip at that line of work, even though he was probably in it himself. “Sort of a retirement income, like,” he added. Better to undersell, do some poormouthing.
“That’s in Florida?”
“Right, Florida.”
“And it’s one of those players of yours, brings you up here. I understand.”
Bennie leaned into the table, establishing what he hoped was a confidential zone. “See, when I heard what went down, Michigan, I rung up Stumpy here first thing and I—”
Dietz cut him off with a toss of a hand. “Man we’re talking about. Name’s Waverly. Is that right, too?”
“That’s his name.”
“And you’re here to, ah, represent him?”
“Well, yeah, I s’pose. You might say.”
Dietz regarded him with the most remote and glacial of smiles. “Well, either you are or you aren’t. Mr. Ep-stein. Can’t have it both ways. Which is it?”
Bennie was wearing an open-neck salmon-pink sport shirt, peach-colored trousers, tasseled burgundy loafers. Florida fashion plate. Now he regretted not putting on a jacket, something dark, to hide the sweat drenching his pits, rilling down his chest and the terraced slopes of fat at his midsection, pooling in the band of his shorts. Felt like a fucking rainmaker, or one of them fish in the tank up there. His mouth, in contrast, was dry as chalk. Had to make it work, though, spit out something, so he said, “How it is, Mr. Dietz, this Waverly, he didn’t have no idea what he was into. Some ways he’s a real intelligent fella. College boy. But he’s just got this natural habit for gettin’ himself in the glue. Y’see, he put in some time in the bin, puzzle factory, so his head ain’t always screwed on tight. What he wants to do, though, is—”
“You forgot the question.” Dietz broke in on him again. “What I asked was if you represented him. Or not. That’s all.”
“Guess I do.”
“All right. Good. Glad we got that much clear. So. Let’s hear your proposition.”
Bennie looked confused. He turned to Eugene. “You didn’t tell him?”
Eugene gave a barely perceptible shrug, glanced at Dietz for direction. During his many years of association with Gunter Dietz, he’d learned never to speak till he got a signal. Which he wasn’t getting now.
