King of Cards

by Ward, Robert

  “Jesus,” Val said.

  “Well, that’s too bad,” Eddie said quickly. “‘Cause you aren’t going to live to ever get their dough!”

  He waved the gun around a little. He was trying to look menacing, but the barrel sagged a little, making him look like a substitute teacher with a pointer in his hand.

  “I do not blame you at all,” Jeremy said. “Not at all. Because you are right. I have a disease. Believe me, I know it. I mean, God, listen to me, going on about the business right here and now, while you are holding a gun on me and telling me it’s my last minute on earth. You see? It’s a goddamned disease. What I am telling you is that I forgot, I forgot that you, my brother, a man I love and care about deeply, I forgot that you were even in Tangier. I got so goddamn involved in selling cards that I put all human feeling behind me and got into a complete capitalist business hustle, like a goddamned pariah. I became a fucking, sniveling, greed-mongering piece of shit. There’s nothing more to say about it, though of course, your share of the company with Kodak behind us will be worth considerably more, much more, than we could have ever dreamed of in the past.”

  “Yeah,” Eddie said in a weaker voice. “Fine. Maybe with all that money I can buy a new fucking hand. You asshole!”

  That charged him up a little, and he waved the gun again.

  Jeremy slapped himself in the forehead.

  “Listen to me,” he said. “I’m doing it again, trying to seduce you the same moment I am confessing, which tells you how far I am from the man I believe myself to be. ‘Cause I like to think of myself as a guy who is building a family here, a real family, just the opposite of the ones we inherited, a family based on love and trusting. But at the same time, I see this disease in myself, I recognize it in my guts, eating at me like a cancer, this greed, this need to expand, to be Mr. Big Big Big. Which in no way excuses me from execution at your hand if you so wish to go through with this. I was wrong. It’s on my head. So go ahead, Eddie, shoot!”

  Jeremy folded his legs and his arms in front of his chest like Buddha and shut his eyes as if he were prepared to die.

  Eddie squinted his eyes until they looked like little black baitworms.

  “You think, you think you can just forget me? Let me lose my goddamned hand and get out of it because you’re the goddamned King of Cards or something?” Eddie said. “Well, forget it man.”

  He aimed carefully at Jeremy’s head and fired. But just before pulling the trigger he turned the barrel to the ceiling. Sawdust and wallpaper floated down on us like confetti. Then Eddie tossed the gun on the bed, turned, and pushed me out of the way as he stalked out of the room.

  “Holy shit,” I said, my heart pounding through my shirt.

  Jeremy crossed himself and fell back on the bed, arms spread open in supplication to the God of Bullshit, who had just saved his life.

  “Are you all right, Jeremy?” Val said.

  Jeremy let out a long, long sigh.

  “Oh, you almost lost it, pal,” I said. “You came that close!”

  “You think he’ll try it again?” Val said.

  “Find the Babe and apprise her of the situation,” Jeremy said in what sounded like a death rattle.

  Val went over to the bed and stroked Jeremy’s head. He sighed deeply again and held onto her hand.

  “You know, there’s one thing I don’t understand,” Val said. “I don’t see how cutting off Eddie’s hand saved his life.”

  “This is true,” Jeremy said, sitting up and running a shaky hand through his cowlick. “If that had been a true coral snake, Eddie would be planted somewhere in the Mideast right now. No, it sounds to me like it was a harmless milk snake. Looks exactly like a coral snake, but wouldn’t harm a fly.”

  “Then they just cut off his hand for laughs?” I said.

  “‘Fraid so,” Jeremy said. “But for Christ’s sake, whatever you do, don’t tell him.”

  Having averted Jeremy Raines’s premature death and calmed the amputated Eddie, we were, of course, all anxious to know of the new “relationship with Kodak.”

  “The answer is our relationship is, at this point, tenuous,” Raines said as we had our lunch—crab cakes expertly cooked by Babe—sitting in the Hellhole basement by the embosser and the endless rows of plastic cards. “They are eventually going to send a man down to chat with me. Which brings us to a few stumbling blocks. Nothing we can’t overcome, of course, but they could prove a little troublesome. For one, the Kodak rep can never, ever, ever be let into the house. I had to, well, fudge things a bit in that department.”

  “Meaning what?” the Babe said as she fondled Eddie’s stump.

  “Meaning in my desire to make the business sound attractive, I kind of hinted that we had our own building,” Raines said.

  “Oh, Christ, you didn’t,” Val said.

  “I’m afraid so,” Raines said. “Well, I told him that I was buying a building for us right now. That by the time they sent their rep down to talk things over with us we’d be fully installed.”

  “Great,” I said. “When he gets here he’ll see the Hellhole and realize that we’re rank amateurs.”

  “You worry far too much, my friend,” Raines said, flipping me a beer. “Worry will make you old before your time. Believe me, I’ve got a little plan all set up for our friends from Kodak. Which brings me to a second part of the plan. There’s a man some of you may have read about in the Sunpapers. Mr. Rudy Antonelli. He’s going to be calling from time to time, and he’ll help us with the Kodak situation. Old friend of my dad’s.”

  “Rudy Antonelli?” I said. “As in the gangster Rudy Antonelli?”

  Jeremy Raines put his strong arm on my shoulder and shook his head. “The things you don’t understand could fill an encyclopedia,” he said. “Baltimore doesn’t have gangsters. That kind of crude stuff happens in New York and Chicago. Rudy is a businessman, owner of Soft Shell Limited, the most successful real estate company in the city, also owner of the most successful Italian restaurant—Antonelli’s—of Little Italy. Not to mention various prize-winning racehorses.”

  “Also not to mention that he’s currently being investigated by a federal anticrime task force,” I said angrily, “and the Maryland State Police and the Baltimore city boys as well. Jesus, Jeremy, we’re not going into business with the likes of him, are we?”

  “Of course not, my boy,” Jeremy said. “You see many years ago before my father got sick, he did certain favors for Rudy, all legitimate. The problem was a racial thing. Rudy wanted to get into the Maryland Country Club, and they didn’t accept people of his persuasion. My father talked to a few of the club’s board members, and Rudy has been forever grateful. He’s actually going to help us find the building.”

  “And give it to us?” I said, unable to stop playing the devil’s advocate. “Because it’s not like we’re rolling in assets.”

  “Worry, worry, worry,” Raines said. “Relax my friend. Anyway, if Rudy calls, just be cool. Now I’ve got to go see a charming nun over at St. Mary’s School for Young Women. Good old Sister Lulu has turned me on to her. Meanwhile, when do we get the University of Baltimore cards?”

  “Today,” I said. “I’m going down to the lab to pick them up this afternoon.”

  I felt a tremor of anxiety about that and prayed they’d turned out well.

  “Fine,” Raines said. “I’m certain they will be of the highest professional caliber, my boy.” He patted me on the shoulder, and I felt warmth shoot through me. There was something so kind in his manner, he had such confidence in me, that I badly wanted to succeed for him.

  “Mind if I tag along?” Val said. “I’ll get lonely out here all afternoon by myself.”

  “Oh, I guess I can handle that,” I said, smiling.

  “Ah, young love,” Raines smiled. “Remember, once you get the cards, you have to bring them back here so the Babe and Edward can emboss them and slip our fine high-grade plastic on them. If we work round the clock, we can get the whole set
back there by tomorrow and be paid by this weekend. Then we can have a long, serious party. See you all later.”

  He waved good-bye and headed up the steps.

  “What a madman,” I said to Val.

  “Yes,” she smiled, “but ain’t it fun?”

  I must confess that bright fall afternoon seemed filled with promise. Though theoretically I hated business, I had to admit that actually doing business—at least this kind of business—seemed like a great adventure. Here we were, a lit guy and gal, cruising beneath the flame-colored fall trees on historic row house Charles Street, headed down to the photo lab to pick up a great stack of I.D. photos for which we would eventually be paid fifteen thousand dollars. It seemed a small miracle—nearly impossible—and if it worked (and why shouldn’t it?), we could do the same at school after school. Driving with beautiful sexy Val, I succumbed to the I.D. card fever. Soon we would all be young millionaires, and then I would have plenty of time to devote myself more fully to my literary studies. After all, I told myself, even Dr. Spaulding once said that it was easier for a writer to get to the heart of life if he or she wasn’t burdened by the mundane worries and crushing anxieties of making a living.

  What’s more, I had other thoughts about writing, new and exciting thoughts that Jeremy and Val had inspired in me.

  “You know,” I said to Val as we rolled happily along, “I really want to start writing more. I really know it now.”

  “You’re kidding,” Val said, grabbing my hand and looking at me with complete admiration. “That’s wonderful. We can write poems together, help one another.”

  “No, you’re the poet,” I said. “I just want to start keeping notes on all this. Maybe I’m nuts, but I think we’re living out a great adventure and I want to document it all.”

  She smiled and kissed my neck, sending goose bumps down my back.

  “But you’re capable of so much more than just a documentary,” she said. “You could write a great novel.”

  “I doubt that,” I said. “I’m no Henry James.”

  “The hell with him,” Val laughed. “I know you think he’s the king of subtlety and all, but on some level he just told stories about the rich fops he hung around with in London. So you’ll do the same thing for Baltimore, only it’ll be more alive, wild, and sweeter ‘cause you’re wilder and sweeter.”

  I started to blush, but she squeezed my cock for emphasis and such literary nit-picking seemed beside the point.

  I parked the car in an old abandoned lot, and Val and I walked inside the long gray halls of the photo lab. As we entered the door, I gave her a conspiratorial pinch on her bottom. And she turned and ran her long, sexy tongue around her thick, sensual lips.

  We strolled hand in hand to the pick-up depot, where we were met by a gnomish-looking man in a gray lab jacket. He had thick glasses, a pocket protector, crepe soles, and a name tag that said, “Hi, I’m Marty.”

  “Good day, Marty,” I said in an expansive Rainesian way. “Are our cards ready?”

  He looked furtively at the ground and then, without uttering a word, shoved the box into my hands.

  “They’re a little, ah, weird,” he said.

  He tried covering himself with a grin, but he had the kind of mouth that was all gums.

  I looked down at the box, then holding my breath, pulled out a card.

  The girl’s name was Jane DeVries, age nineteen. More than that about her, it was impossible to say, for all that I could see of her was one nostril floating in an inky black sea.

  “Oh, God,” Val said. “We are in deep trouble.”

  Frantic, I pulled out two more cards. This one was of a boy named Mark Reynolds, but all that was visible of Mark was a thick blond eyebrow. And the second card was of a woman named Celeste West, but all we got to see of her was a thick upper lip.

  “It looks like a Magritte,” Val said.

  “Not funny,” I said. “How could this happen?”

  “Crummy photography?” Marty said, repressing a giggle.

  It was all I could do not to throttle him on the spot.

  “Let me use your phone, Marty,” I said. “Now.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Guess you got some explaining to do, huh?”

  “Fuck you, Marty,” Val said. “Go back to your cage.”

  He looked at her, panted a little, then handed me the bill.

  “You gotta pay today,” he said. “That’s the contract.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said, handing him the check. “Now show me the phone.”

  I won’t bother to record the entire conversation with Mr. Hawkins of Baltimore University. Suffice it to say that he (1) threatened legal action, (2) threatened bodily harm, (3) called us names that I had never heard before, one of which was “unprofessional, shit-faced, daddy-jacking, lame … third-rate con men.”

  But even so, I finally calmed him down by agreeing to reshoot the photos in one day at our expense. By the time the conversation was over, I slammed down the phone and collapsed on an old stool in that gray, dust-filled hallway. Sweat poured down my neck and back.

  “I can’t take it,” I said. “Just when things were looking up.”

  Val put her hand on my neck and gave me a massage.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go do something smart.”

  “Which would be what?” I sighed.

  “Let’s go get very, very drunk and cry our eyes out,” she said.

  “I like the way you think,” I said.

  I got up and picked up the box of surrealist postcards and together we staggered down the hall.

  We spent the rest of that afternoon and a good part of the night at the Mount Royal Tavern, drinking, playing darts, and dreading giving the news to Jeremy. Finally though, we had to stop drinking; we were out of money. So bobbing and weaving on the slippery wet roads, we ended up back at the house around ten.

  “He had such confidence in me,” I wailed as we pulled up to the curb.

  “Yes, and I’m afraid it’s worse than you know. He’s just about tapped out. I mean completely broke.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “You have to be kidding. Well, he’s a legit businessman, sort of. Couldn’t he go to a bank and get a business loan?”

  “You don’t understand,” she said, patting my leg as though I were a hopeless case. “Jeremy’s already up to his eyeballs in debts for the embosser and the lamination machine. He can barely pay those loans back as it is.”

  “Good Lord, and I failed him,” I said. My head sagged heavily against the window.

  “Not if we can make the reshoot tomorrow,” she said. “We’ll just have to give it a try. Hey, who’s that?”

  She pointed toward the front porch of the house. Someone was on the porch all right. Someone big and burly. Crouching down and peering into the windows. I couldn’t quite make him out, but I was pretty sure who he was.

  “It’s Lulu’s boyfriend, that crazy bastard Dan,” I said. “Well, he’s not going to bother anybody tonight, I can promise you that. I may have flunked as a photographer, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let that asshole bug us.”

  “Be careful, Tom. You’ve had a lot to drink!” Val said. But it was too late. I was already out of the car and headed for the porch, which in my drunken haze looked like a shining beacon of sanity, some mythical Norman Rockwell front-porch America that was now being threatened by the forces of unreason.

  Slowly, I crept up the hill, past the evergreens and the old swinging tire. As I crept along, I mumbled to myself, “Screw you, Dan.” I thought of his crowbar, but somehow it didn’t frighten me. All I knew was I could not fail again.

  I hid behind the evergreen and watched him creep close to the window. From my vantage point, I couldn’t see his face, but upon closer inspection it appeared he had a camera with him. Probably trying to get proof that Lulu Hard well was having sexcapades with Jeremy.

  This, I told my drunken self, was never going to happen!

  So saying, I leapt from the fro
nt yard grass to the porch, directly onto his back. He gave out a loud cry as I firmly lodged my forearm under his chin and squeezed as hard as I could. He began to spin around, like some crazed Apache dancer, but I kept my grip there and cracked him on the top of the head with my other hand for emphasis.

  Finally, he made a last wild spin and fell off the porch. Now it was my turn to yell, for we landed in a giant green sticker bush that had grown in the unkept flower garden just beneath the porch. The stickers were like a hundred tiny darts in my side, legs, and ass. Screaming and howling, I fell off into the lawn.

  He leapt to his feet, frantically pulling stickers out of his arms, legs, hands.

  “What in bloody hell are you doing?” he screamed at me.

  I finally got a face-to-face look at the culprit. He had a big square face and was dressed in a herringbone suit and a blue and red rep tie. On his feet were a pair of Oxford wing tips. He looked more like a lawyer than a truck driver.

  “You’re not Dan,” I said.

  “Dan?” he said in an English accent. “Who in God’s name is bloody Dan?”

  “Dan, the trucker, that’s who!” Val said, running up from the street. “But Sister Lulu’s not coming with you!”

  That stopped him. He scratched his head and rubbed his chin.

  “Sister Lulu? You are both crazed,” he said. “I was merely doing my job. Looking over this house for my employer.”

  I turned and looked slowly at Val.

  “You’re not from, ah, Kodak?” I said, my voice breaking.

  “I most certainly am,” he said. “My name is Alan Saxon-Hogg, and I was told that this address was the home office of the Identi-Card system. But … this place …”

  I was stunned, unable to speak. Oh, we were in deep, deep shit.

  “Delighted, Mr. Hogg,” Val said, smoothly switching gears, dusting him off and helping him pull out his briars.

  “I’m Val Jackson, Mr. Raines’s personal assistant. This abysmal place is simply our temporary lodgings. We are very, very cost-conscious at Identi-Card. The money we make we plow right back into the business so that we can offer the highest-quality cards.”