Cards in the Cloak

by Jeremy Bursey

  Chapter 4

  “Crash and Fall”

  In late-October 1929, Norman had his first post-war test of life’s ability to hold on. His test began on a Tuesday morning, in New York City, at a coffee shop.

  “You sure I can’t heat that for you?” Bob, the diner’s proprietor, asked him.

  Norman had been sitting at that counter for a good twenty minutes while he waited for Anderson Flatt, his latest business partner, to arrive. They’d been meeting at Hot Coffee Nook every Tuesday since March to discuss the notes they’d taken on their investments from the day before and how to lay out their marketing and production plans for the rest of the week. Anderson was always on time, which was necessary given how tight their schedules were, but today he was running late. Norman’s coffee, which had come to him steaming thicker than a sauna, had gone lukewarm almost as quickly. Coffee from the Hot Coffee Nook did that often.

  Norman shrugged at Bob the Proprietor.

  “Just gonna get cold again,” he said. He swirled the chipped ceramic mug around and sent the sloshing liquid to his lips. It was black and bitter, just as he liked it. “I’d swear you put ice cubes in this thing.”

  Bob raised his eyebrows and whistled. Norman must’ve hinted on a trade secret for keeping patrons in their seats longer.

  “Anyway,” he checked his watch; it was almost nine o’clock, “I can’t sit around much longer.”

  “Big business waiting?”

  “Always. Well, we’re trying to get it big. Depends on how well our investments return, you know?”

  Norman was still trying to fund the research for Dafodil’s ingredients, and he was looking to make some risky stock investments in order to get those funds in a hurry, but he didn’t want to tell Bob that. He didn’t know Bob beyond his proprietary skills, and he had no reason to trust him with the medicinal secrets that Maxie McWalter had left with him. He didn’t think he had the means to cheat him or steal the patent from under his nose, which Norman couldn’t yet get, thanks to his inability to reconstruct the drug, but Bob did have loose lips, and Norman couldn’t trust him to keep the secret to himself. Norman thought it was better just to leave him out of the loop on that one. Instead, he kept the details light. Kept it about the investment itself: the seeding of a small retail store west of town designed to expand the business he had built and grown in 1927 as part of his commitment to fund research on Dafodil. He thought Wall Street could cut the straightest path to his destination.

  Bob leaned forward and tapped the counter with the flat of his palm.

  “Let me tell you something, Norman. New York’s a great place to raise a business. But we independent owners are the heart and soul of this place. We live and die by our sales, not the success and failure of a fickle market. You want a solid investment, you grow your clientele. Pumping money into a nameless void just gonna break your heart in the end.”

  “What if I’m building it in Chicago?”

  “Same thing. Business is business, and the formula works everywhere. Keep it small. Keep outside investors out of it.”

  Norman set his coffee mug to the saucer and smiled at Bob the Proprietor.

  “But the future is in speed and power, Bob. Your method is too slow. There’s no such thing as a sure thing, but our investment strategies are the closest things we’ve got. You rely on customers, you rely on sunshine. Both can make your day as quickly as it can wreck it. It’s harder to wreck a trader’s market. Something truly catastrophically awful would have to occur to make that into a mistake. I think an outside investor is fine.”

  The door chime rang behind Norman. He rotated toward it to see who was walking in. Just an unfamiliar face in a suit with a dark frown and shaky disposition. Not Anderson. Norman returned his focus to his coffee.

  “I agree that customers are integral to business,” he continued. “But I think more customers are more integral than the soft trickle that I see come in here every morning.”

  “Eh, that’s because you never come in for lunch. Once I get that fryer going, it’s a different world in here.”

  “Your seating capacity is thirty. You can’t be making more than a hundred a day.”

  “Hey, I’m happy with what I make in a day.”

  “But you’re still in a single store. No money for expansion. Anderson and I are already making moves into opening a second store. We couldn’t have done it without the investments.”

  “But it’s a gamble, my friend. It’s an industry that can break your heart overnight.” Bob pulled a deck of cards out from under the bar. “You like card games, Norman?”

  “No, I’m terrible at them.”

  “Even Go Fish?”

  “Especially Go Fish.”

  “Well, that’s the market you’re investing into. It’s a financial game of Go Fish. Only the stakes are much higher and the losses so much more painful. You sure you want to be a part of that, especially if you’re that bad at card games?”

  Norman checked his watch again. He really needed to get going. He had to open in an hour. He and Anderson would just have to catch up on the business review later.

  “Hey, could you pass me a copy of the paper?”

  Bob smirked and put the cards away.

  “Sure, Norman.”

  Norman passed him a dime, and Bob the Proprietor gave him a copy of the New York Times. Then he paid for his coffee.

  When he left the coffee shop and walked to work, he noticed the mood on the streets was more dismal than usual. New Yorkers weren’t known for smiling or friendly eye-contact, but they were known for their confident striding, and no one was walking in confidence today. Every suit he passed was muttering to himself, shaking his head at the ground or his fist to the sky. Norman couldn’t figure out why.

  He opened the paper to the front page, started reading. Before he could process the headline, something flashed in his peripheral vision.

  He flicked his eyes upward and immediately halted. A man in a dark cloak was reaching out for him with his bony right hand. In his left was a scythe.

  Norman’s eyes widened as he remembered the German soldier who “flew” across the battlefield at him eleven years earlier. Right here, along the streets of New York, he was staring right at him.

  The time it had taken for Norman to stop walking and recognize the man was less than two seconds, but it was two seconds wisely spent. Even as the German soldier swiped at him and missed, Norman understood the danger he had just averted, for, as the cloaked man’s skeletal fingers swung toward the scythe, in what looked to be an attempt to grab him, the human scream that Norman had spent the last five seconds ignoring, but could tell was closing in, had now grown to deafening volume, and had culminated in the form of a body in a business suit slamming down onto the sidewalk directly between him and the cloaked soldier, sending a shockwave of such tremendous force that it knocked him backward at least ten feet, and a thud so loud that it gave him temporary hearing loss. For several seconds he’d thought that a bomb had just hit New York. It was not until sometime later, when he got to read the newspaper headline for a second time, that he understood what had really happened, and why so many people had jumped out of tall buildings that day, and why his business investments in the last few months weren’t likely to make his research dreams come true any time soon, giving cause to Bob the Proprietor’s warnings.

  And for weeks Norman sat in the corner of a dark and empty apartment wondering why the man in the dark cloak, who seemed to be in position to take his life, was, weirdly, the one who had saved it.

  “I must be invincible,” he said to himself, as he ignored the hunger pangs in his gut and the soggy apple in his hand.