King of Cards

by Ward, Robert

  Out of this steaming mass of junk stepped Raines, looking as boyishly happy and buoyant as ever. Though there were what looked like Polish Johnnie Hotdog stains on his un-pressed cord suit, and his cowlick was standing straight up, like some weird exclamation point on his head, he somehow gave the impression of perfectly innocent happiness. He may as well have been a smiling five-year-old running up the steps toward a group of loving relatives. Such sweet happy trust lit up his face that it was impossible for me to do as I had planned, which was to tell him straight away. Instead, like Lulu and Val and the Babe and Eddie, I stared down at the front porch.

  On the top step, Raines looked down at us all and cleared his throat in his ironical comical manner: “Ahem, ahem, what is all this? Somebody get cancer around here?”

  “No,” I managed to croak out. “That is not it.”

  “Oh, and nobody’s parents died or anything. Nuclear war has not been declared, have I got that right?”

  “Worse. Hogg called,” I said.

  “And there’s no grant and he thinks we should all move to San Francisco and live on the streets and pretend we’re moonbeams and we are flat broke with mucho bills to pay. Is that all that’s bothering you, troops?”

  Raines smiled his most charming smile and ran his fingers through his cowlick as if he were trying to flatten it, a useless task.

  “Jesus,” I said. “Isn’t that enough? Have you seen the invoices? Identi-Card is beyond bankruptcy. If there were still poorhouses, we’d all be shipped there tomorrow.”

  “It really does look bad, Jeremy,” Val said, leaving my side to go hug him.

  Never one to be outdone in the nurturing department, Lulu Hard well jumped from her rocker and joined him at the hip on the other side.

  “Well, at least if I have to go,” Raines said, “it will be with two beautiful women at my side.”

  “Looks like the end of the line, King,” Eddie said, rubbing his stump across his face.

  There was a general mumble of tortured agreement with this assessment, but suddenly Raines unhitched himself from his two voluptuous pallbearers and jumped up on the old porch railing. Holding himself by one of the thick white columns, he swung toward me like some kind of frayed-suited Robin Hood: “You all are so damned hopeless. You see how easily you cave in. That, my dear friends, worries me much more than our temporary lack of funds. It’s not our lot to give in to mistrust and despair. In fact, my buckos, it occurred to me just tonight that we are not just selling cards here at all. No, what we are doing is remaking our own selves, if you will, taking time-lapse pictures of our identities that don’t even exist yet. You see that, don’t you? I believe that once our true pictures are developed we’ll no longer think or feel or walk or talk or fuck the same, and surely our photos will never look the same. Mistrust will disappear from our eyes, and fear and paranoia will be vanquished from our mouths. We’ll be walking, talking angels, dear friends, shining so bright we burn out the lens of any camera known to this sad and dreary world.”

  His speech left me spellbound. I couldn’t resist such a combination of vision and jive. Nor did I want to, and yet, it seemed that someone had to interject this poetry with a little hardscrabble reality.

  “That’s all well and good,” I said in a voice too sharp with sarcasm, “but how will we reach this visionary state without the aid of good old-fashioned dinero.”

  Raines leaped from the railing and grabbed me by the shirtfront. He stared at me with his coal-black eyes, and I felt fear suck through my chest.

  “Money?” he said. “I am talking about your mortal soul, and you keep riffing about goddamned money. Haven’t you heard? Money is shit. Let me ask you a question: How easy is it to take a shit? Well, that’s how easy it is to get money. Comprendez? So do not worry your overheated head, my boy.”

  He pushed me away then and walked into the middle of the group, and we stared at him with fear and awe in our hearts, but something else, too, some love that was so deep and so wide and so powerful that it seemed to pour from my body like camera light. We all reached out to one another like some band of wigged-out apostles and held hands, and Raines beamed in on us like the eye of the ultimate fiery lens. I heard a click and saw a flash of white light and each of us then knew that we had been seen and known and that there was only one picture, one smiling face, and it was Raines’s face and my own and Babe’s and Eddie’s and Val’s and Lulu’s, and we all dissolved into one huge, watchful tender eye.

  In the morning I found myself once again driving downtown in Raines’s nearly destroyed Nash. The day was black, the streets filled with blowing newspapers, as we drove by the abandoned ice-skating rink at North and Charles.

  “Who are we hustling today, Jeremy?” I said, using the cynical tone I affected when I felt myself too overwhelmed by admiration for him.

  “Here’s the deal, my boy. When we go in for this interview, you make certain that you smile and agree with everything I say. But try not to talk if possible. Mr. A. doesn’t much go for talk. Nothing personal, it’s just his style.”

  “Mr. A?” I said. “As in Rudy Antonelli?”

  But Raines only smiled and ran into a parking meter down at crumbling, ramshackled Pier 2. After I had removed my forehead from the windshield, I stepped out of the car and was immediately struck by an overwhelmingly powerful odor of spices, and I realized we were just across from the old McCormick Spice Factory. The richness of the smell made me dizzy, as though I were enmeshed in an Arabian dream. As we walked over the old condoms, candy wrappers, and wine bottles, I felt giddy with burning spices—paprika, marjoram, basil, mint—in my nose, eyes, and mouth.

  We walked by the old tugs tied up at Pier 1 and the old Port Welcome, the funky and charming little tourist boat that my grandfather and I sailed on so many years before. Then we crossed Pratt Street and walked directly toward the spice factory, and every step of the way I got dizzier and dizzier. It seemed as though we were going to walk into the factory itself, but instead Raines led us down a redbrick alley in between two tin-roofed warehouses.

  Soon we came to old faded redbrick steps that led down to a basement restaurant with a bright blue doorway. But we didn’t ever get to the steps. From the alley behind us, two men quickly moved in on us, and I found, to my horror, a gun in my back.

  “Move,” said a harsh voice.

  “Just a minute,” Jeremy said, but this was a mistake.

  “Shut the fuck up, you Shamrock scum,” the other voice said.

  We were pushed down the steps so hard that I lost my balance and my head crashed into the bar door. I half fell inside the place and found myself being shoved again, so much so that I fell onto the floor in a heap and Jeremy came sliding in behind me. When I looked up I saw two darkly burnished faces holding guns to our heads.

  “Hey, we’re not Shamrocks,” I said. I thought of Johnny Apollo. Was this possibly his bizarre revenge?

  “Right, you Irish fuck,” the bigger of the two men said, kicking me in the ribs.

  I groaned heavily and held my burning side.

  “Be calm,” Jeremy said. “Be very calm. We’re not Shamrocks, believe me. We’re just businessmen here to see Mr. A.”

  “Right, and I’m fucking Jackie Kennedy,” the fat one said. He had three distinct fat ridges in his forehead, so that it looked like a pink accordion.

  The thinner one with him made appreciative laughing noises that sounded like a man drowning in his own blood.

  “You two little fucks are Shamrocks, sure as shit,” the fat man said.

  “I assure you we’re not,” Jeremy said.

  “He fucking assures us,” the smaller man said, waving the pistol around.

  “That makes me feel a lot better,” the fat man said.

  “Let’s take these two assholes for a ride out to Fort McHenry,” the thin one said. “You look like a couple a patriotic Irishmen. You can sing the Star Spangled fucking Banner while we ventilate your Mick faces for you.”

  “N
o,” Jeremy and I said.

  “Yes,” the thin one said. “Right now.”

  “No, no, no,” said a voice behind us.

  I thought for a second it was a voice I had hallucinated. But slowly I turned and looked, and there standing behind us was a man so big that he made the fatter of the two gunmen seem like a dwarf by comparison. He stood in the shadows and rocked back and forth on his heels, swaying to some unheard beat. His face was lost in shadow; all I could see were his huge hands, which he clasped together in front of him like an opera star about to sing an aria.

  “Mr. A.,” Jeremy said. “Great to see you.”

  “You know these two fucks, Mr. A.?” the fat one asked. There was real disappointment in his voice.

  “Of course. Now you two fucks take off and try and find some of our real enemies, okay?”

  “The Shamrocks?” Jeremy said as he scrambled to his feet.

  “You got it,” Mr. A. said. “Nasty Irish boys from out inna county. Bobby Murphy cut one of our boys, Tony De Luca, up real bad last week. They’re real cute, too. When they ice somebody, they always leave one of these as a souvenir.”

  He reached his huge hand into his suit pocket and pulled out a four-leaf clover, which he dangled and twirled in his fingers.

  “I’m getting quite a collection of these, believe me. Those Mick bastards are getting real bold. Word is they might gonna try and hit us.”

  “Here?” I said as I got to my feet. I couldn’t imagine Bobby Murphy doing anything so dumb, but I kept my mouth shut.

  “Could be.” Mr. A. said, opening a door to a back room. “You know the Irish. They’re prone to doing wild, dumb shit. They fucking love drama. Come on, you two, I gotta finish my lunch.”

  In the yellow light of the back office I could get a better look at Mr. A. He was twice as large as huge. His thick fingers looked like tongs, and his neck was as big as a fire plug. He walked royally to his desk and only took five minutes to sit down. On the desk was a gigantic crab cake submarine sandwich, which vanished when he picked it up. On his ten fingers were eight diamond rings, which twinkled pink and blue in the half-light. On the knotty pine wall behind him was a swordfish with a disappointed look on his face, and off to one side of the room was a pinball machine called Aces High. The desk was littered with papers and pickles. The juice from the latter ran over the former.

  “Jeremy Raines,” he said in a voice that was a near whisper. “You want to have one of these subs. They got all kinds, babe. Your cappicola, your Danish ham, your Italian salami, your cheese. Thing is about these though is the sub juice; sub ain’t worf dick hard if it ain’t got juice on it, which you would think these goombahs would get right after I tell them, what nine hundred times?”

  He signaled to somebody in the corner and a skinny man with a nose like a greyhound stepped forward. The man wore a black silk suit that shimmered like crude oil in the sun.

  “Hey, Sonny,” Mr. A. said. “Lay em down, all right?”

  Sonny got an extremely reluctant look on his face but slowly put his left hand on the desk.

  Mr. A. picked up a paper weight, smiled at Jeremy, and smashed it down on Sonny’s hand. Sonny groaned, and I turned away.

  “Now, Sonner,” Mr. A. said. “I tole you once, I tole you a thousand fucking times, your sub needs pickle juice. So go over there with these pickles, and squeeze ‘em on here and don’t drench the fucker. I want a hint of pickle flavor, you follow me. Nothing fucking more.”

  Sonny had tears in his eyes, but he simply nodded, picked up the submarine sandwich and the pickles, and walked over to the jukebox.

  “And don’t get the shit onna records,” Mr. A. said. “Last week you fucked up ‘It Only Hurts for a Little While,’ which happens to be my favorite song. Had to really rap him over that.”

  He licked off one of his huge, crooked fingers and stared hard at Jeremy.

  “So, Jeremy Raines, boy genius. Hope the roof sign worked for you.”

  “It worked beautifully,” Raines said. “By the way, this is my associate in Identi-Card, Thomas Fallon.”

  “Really?” Mr. A. said. “Pleased to meet you, Fallon. Hey, that’s an Irish name. You sure you aren’t some Shamrock fuck?”

  “Believe me, sir, I’m not.”

  “No, you look like lace curtain Irish. Anyway boys, state your business. My time is wasting.”

  “I don’t want to bother you, Mr. A.,” Jeremy said. “But well, as you know my business has unlimited potential …”

  “That’s one man’s opinion,” Mr. A. said. “I’m afraid every business has its own built-in limits.”

  “True. But we haven’t even come close to reaching ours,” Jeremy said. “I won’t bug you but I need, well, temporary funds.”

  Before Mr. A. could speak, the dog-nosed man was back with the sub. It dripped pickle juice, and Mr. A. looked at it cryptically.

  “Soaks the fucking bread all the way through,” he said. “I oughta hire niggers for this job. Niggers are the best fucking submen.”

  Mr. A. took a huge bite of his sub, then sighed.

  “This is almost it, almost, Sonny, but not quite.”

  He reached up fast then and slapped Sonny with the back of his pinkie ring. Sonny tried to jerk out of the way, but the ring left a deep gash in his cheek, from which a small stream of blood began to flow. I felt my stomach turn like a washing machine and my knees felt weak.

  “Maybe next time you’ll get it right, Son. Now how much money you need, Jer?”

  “Thirty grand,” Jeremy said. “That would just about do it.”

  Mr. A. wiped some mayonnaise off of his lip and shook his huge head. Little beads of sweat flew off his neck ridges.

  “I don’t know, Jeremy. You’re a fucking genius, no doubt about it, but you got bad organizational problems. I just don’t know if it’s good business.”

  “Mr. A., this will be the best investment you ever made. We’re almost there, sir,” Jeremy said.

  Mr. A. shook his head.

  “Remind me of your old man. A born salesman. You oughta come work for me. You’d make a fortune.”

  “We’ll make a fortune on Identi-Card,” Jeremy said. “But I need this cash transfusion. Fast.”

  Mr. A. took another bite of his sub, and the juice ran down his triple chins.

  “Okay. I tell you what. Just for old time’s sake, I’m gonna give you money, but for it I get fifty percent of the business and my associate, Johnny Martello, comes by and helps you get organized. He’s a business whiz; he’ll help set things straight.”

  Raines looked as though he had been shot in the knees. His entire body sagged.

  “Thirty percent,” he said, and there was great pain in his voice. “And with all due respect, sir, we don’t need any help.”

  “Thirty-five then,” Mr. A. said. “‘Cause I’m feeling generous, but Johnny has to be part of the deal. You’ll love him anyway. The kid’s a pro.”

  Raines looked at me and shrugged.

  “Okay,” he said. “But I still retain control.”

  “Wouldn’t have it any other way,” Mr. A. said. “After all, you’re the man. Johnny will just come around and offer some hints. It’ll be good experience for him, and maybe he can streamline your operation.”

  Jeremy started to answer him, but it was too late. Mr. Antonelli picked up the huge sandwich, opened his cave mouth, and took a massive bite.

  When we were back outside, walking along cobblestoned old Pratt Street in front of the big Greek ocean tankers, I couldn’t contain myself any longer. I stopped walking and grabbed Jeremy by the collar.

  “Listen to me,” I said. “You can’t fucking do this. This guy is a hoodlum, a killer. I mean, this is crazy.”

  But Jeremy simply took both my hands and pulled them gently away from his throat.

  “What would you have me do?” he asked. “Give it all up? When we are this goddamned close? Don’t you think I’ve already been to all the banks? They don’t make loans on new inv
entions. Believe me, Tom, this is the only way.”

  “No,” I said. “Look at what’s already happened. I mean they thought we were fucking in with Bobby Murphy. I know that fucking guy, and he means business.”

  Jeremy smiled at me then as if he were pleased.

  “You know Bobby Murphy?” he said. “Well, well, the innocent scholar.”

  “Look, we’ll talk about my identity problems at some other time,” I said. “But, Jeremy, you can’t do this.”

  He shook his head at me and kept walking toward his car.

  “You know?” he said. “You’re starting to piss me off. I mean, I’m beginning to think you’re the kind of guy who wants to have all the fun without taking any of the risk. And that’s not how I play.”

  That hurt. It hurt because I sometimes suspected it was true, and it was the single trait I most despised in myself.

  “That’s not true,” I said. “But if we get in with these guys, we’ll never get out.”

  Jeremy out and out snorted at that one.

  “You’ve seen too many mob movies, Tom,” he said. “What makes you think these guys want to be in with us for good? Look, Mr. A. and my family go back a long way in politics. Hell, he was even instrumental in getting me into Harvard.”

  “Harvard?” I said. “When did you go there?”

  “For a couple of weeks,” Jeremy said. “But there was this nonsense about, well, my trying out my hypnotic experiments without consent. Nothing actually happened. I mean a girl got slightly hysterical, unfortunately she was a senator’s daughter, and I’m afraid I found myself bounced out of there. Which was fine with me because I hated all that Cambridge Square crap, anyway. But it was a real disappointment to Mr. A. He’d made so many donations there to get his own son Dominick through law school, he thought he had the place wired. Just goes to show you, you never know what’s going on at the highest levels. Ever read any of that in old Henry James?”

  He smiled at me then in a way that really scared me, and I thought, There’s something wrong here, something that I’ll never understand. As we got into his car, I felt a chill come over me, and I thought that if I had any sense at all, I would grab Val, and both of us would get out now before the ax fell.