Lucky at Cards

by Lawrence Block

  With clothes on she had been almost beautiful.

  Now, nude, she was a goddess. The tips of her flawless breasts were stiff with preliminary passion. Her hips flared in an obscene invitation to Paradise. Her eyes were all fog and smoke.

  “What do I want, Bill?”

  Joyce walked toward me. Gears locked within me. I didn’t move toward her or away from her. I stood very still and she came closer. Her breasts jutted out like mortar shells. I could smell her perfume mingling with the hot animal scent of her body. She came closer, and I felt her body heat, and her lips were inches from mine. If I raised her face or lowered mine I could have kissed her. I didn’t.

  “Bill—”

  Then I did.

  At first our lips just touched. Then a few bombs exploded and a few bells rang and all bets were off. I crushed her close, felt her breasts press hard against my chest, tasted her bittersweet mouth. Her arms were about me and I felt her and smelled her and tasted her and ached for her. My hands moved over her flesh. She was soft and sweet and warm.

  Somehow I slipped out of my clothes. Somehow we steered ourselves to the bed where I filled my hands with the bounty of her breasts and she made little animal sounds from somewhere deep in her throat. I kissed her and her nails dug into my shoulders and the world took off on a joyride.

  I ran my hands all over Joyce’s body like a skeptic searching for a flaw. No flaws, just perfection. I touched her legs, her thighs. I brushed my face over her flat stomach and she took my head in her arms and cradled it between her breasts.

  Her voice was far away, husky, deep. “What do you think I want, Bill?”

  We answered the question in the unmade bed with the lights on and the shades up. The room was on a high floor, so no one could have seen us, but we never thought about that at the time one way or the other. The lovemaking was too fast, too furious, too compulsive. There was deep need and dark hunger, and flesh merging with flesh, and an orchestral swell out of Tschaikovsky that led to a coda of pure Stravinsky. That vital dissonance was always there. That harsh and bitter beauty that tossed the conventional harmonies out the window…

  The world took a long time coming back together again. Joyce lay back and smoked a cigarette. I curled up beside her warmth and took the pins from her hair. She smiled like a cat while I took down her hair and spread it out over the pillow. Fresh chestnuts on new snow.

  “How did you start, Bill?”

  “You started. You called me up and—”

  “No. How did you start cheating at cards?”

  I hadn’t told the story in a long time. When you live your life according to a certain pattern and when you fit part and parcel into a certain world, it’s hard to remember another living pattern and the other world you used to inhabit. When one world is law-abiding and the other is the gray world of the card mechanic, the two spheres are especially far apart. I remembered the first world, of course, but I seldom thought much about it.

  Well, I hadn’t told the story in a long time, and Joyce had asked, so I felt talkative. I told her the story of a young guy named Maynard the Magnificent who had done magic tricks. Sleight-of-hand with cards and matchboxes and silk scarves. A batch of pretty decent bits tied together with some easy patter and a certain amount of stage presence. Add some mentalist routines, toss in the white tie and the tails and a supposedly debonair moustache, and you had Maynard.

  I had never been big. For one thing, I hadn’t been that good. For another, there aren’t a hell of a lot of big magicians around. Can you name four magicians offhand? And don’t name Thurston or Houdini or Blackstone, because they were all a long time ago. They played vaudeville houses then and they were big draws. A magician isn’t a big draw nowadays. He’s something to fill up the card at a burlesque house, something only slightly more amusing than the shop-worn blackout bits. He’s an added unattraction in Miami Beach hotels and borscht belt resorts. He’s something they pay twenty-five bucks to for entertaining a batch of snotty kids at a ten-year-old’s birthday party.

  Maynard the Magnificent. I had had to fight like hell to snag lousy billings, and it was a nothing road to nowhere. From time to time I thought of junking magic and finding a job in a widget factory. This never happened. For one thing, I didn’t know or care very much about widgets. For another, I was still a young guy who pulled a kick out of magic tricks. I didn’t need the big money or the comfy security.

  Then there had been a girl named Carole—the woman I sawed in half, the girl who brought out the wagon of props and enchanted the audience with her mammary development. She was fifth in the series of my assistants. They come and they go. This one stayed awhile; she was prettier than the others and warmer than the others and I was twenty-eight instead of twenty-two. I taught her special tricks at night and we made special magic in dark rooms, and we wound up standing in front of a justice of the peace to make it all legal.

  There had been a big change. Two can’t live as cheaply as one. Two can’t live as cheaply as one plus one, either. The whole is monetarily greater than the sum of its parts. Two can’t go too far on apple pie and coffee in roadside diners and one-night stands in sleazy resorts.

  But it had been good at first. It became a little less than good, then worse, until there was that night at a waterfront motel in Miami when a dark-eyed man approached me after I’d finished entertaining my captive audience.

  “Wizard,” he said, “I want to talk to you.”

  I told him to go ahead.

  “Someplace private. I got a car outside, Wizard.”

  So I told Carole to wait for me, and I accompanied the dark-eyed man to his car. It was that year’s Caddy, long and black. He sat behind the wheel and I sat next to him. He gunned the car north on Collins Avenue, made small talk while we passed through Golden Beach where the millionaires live in oceanfront mansions. He gave me a cigarette, took one for himself, and started talking through smoke.

  “Wizard,” he said, “how much money do you make?”

  “Not much.”

  “You got a valuable talent,” he said. “You need training, but you got a valuable talent.”

  “If you’re trying to sell me correspondence courses—”

  He laughed. “Wizard,” he said, “you ever play any cards?”

  Thurston once said he never played cards—if he won they would accuse him of cheating, if he lost they would say he was a lousy magician. I had never played much. The dark-eyed man talked about cards, and about what you could do if your fingers were clever. Then he talked about money. I told him I would have to think things over. He drove me back to the motel—Carole and I had a room there during the engagement and he gave me a card. His name, his phone number.

  Nothing else.

  The next day I called my agent. The motel gig was due to end on Saturday and he didn’t have us booked for anything until the following Thursday. I put the phone on the hook and asked Carole if she felt like going for a swim. She whined something to the effect that she couldn’t wear the same damn bathing suit day in and day out. I told her to buy a new one. She said a decent bathing suit cost twenty bucks minimum and we couldn’t afford it.

  That night I called the dark-eyed man. A girl answered. He took the phone from her and asked who I was.

  “Bill Maynard,” I said. “Maynard the Magnificent.”

  “What do you say, Wizard?”

  I said, “I’ll play.”

  We played ten hours a day for the next two weeks. We played in a suite at a hotel. There was the dark-eyed man, a heavy type named Guiterno who was bankrolling the operation, a long-fingered Cuban and a nervous little blond girl. They taught me how to play straight and crooked, showed me the moves for false-dealing and palming, taught me to hold the deck in the mechanic’s grip with the index finger in front and the other three fingers around the side of the deck, thumb poised to do little tricks. They taught me gin rummy and poker and blackjack and pinochle and by the time they were finished I was good enough to roll.
/>   The start was in a solarium on top of a big strip hotel. There was a character from New York, a paunchy bastard who came down to the beach twice a year for three weeks to sit in the sun, and screw call girls and play gin rummy. We played for two dollars a point. In three days I had eight thousand dollars of his money. Sixty-five hundred went to my trainer and I was fifteen hundred to the good.

  That had been just the start.

  Carole hadn’t known about it at first. Somewhere along the line she found out, and somewhere further along the line she left. Whatever it was we’d had, it didn’t work in the new world I’d managed to find for myself. Somewhere along the line the mob split. I found a partner and played ocean-liner bridge on the Queen Mary. We sailed to Le Havre and back and let the opposition pay for the trip. Somewhere along the line I soloed. And somewhere along the line, in Chicago, I hung myself up on a bottle-blonde and looked to pick the wrong kind of people. They caught me and broke my teeth and dislocated my thumb and told me to get the hell out of town…

  4

  Outside, something was heading north on Main Street with its siren open. It was either a police cruiser or an ambulance, I couldn’t tell which, but it was making a hell of a lot of noise. I crossed to the window and stood there straightening my tie and trying to see what it was. But it had passed out of view by then.

  I turned to Joyce. She was dressed now, and she was trying to manage that chestnut hair back into its French roll. I walked up behind her and kissed the back of her neck. She spun around and put her hands against my chest.

  “I suppose only a dentist like Seymour Daniels would look a gift horse in the mouth,” I said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I’m a dentist at heart. I still want to know why you came here this morning.”

  “Because I missed you, Bill.”

  I gave her a funny look. She finished playing with her hair, took a cigarette, lighted it. “I missed you,” she said again. “Oh, not you in particular. Men like you. People like you. I’ve been married to Murray for almost three years and I’m still not used to it. Life had more of a kick to it before. I didn’t spend it cooking meals and entertaining business friends and going to dances at the country club. I stayed up late and slept late and lived hard. I was hungry all the time. Hungry for people, hungry for things to do. That’s what I missed.”

  “Don’t you like what you’ve got?”

  “No.”

  “It must be a hell of a lot easier,” I said. “No worries about money or law. Good whiskey to drink and expensive clothes to wear.”

  “I had that before.”

  “All the time?”

  “No. Some of the time.” Joyce looked at her feet. “Listen, of course it’s easier. That’s not everything, Bill. Dying is the easiest thing in the world, just lying down and dying and never having to hustle again. And being married to Murray Rogers is a lot like dying. The kick is gone. There’s no motion, no excitement.”

  Maybe I’d been too close to broke to feel sorry for anybody with a world full of money. Whatever it was, it must have showed on my face. She saw it.

  “Bill, you could have stayed hooked up with a card mob. It’s safer that way, isn’t it?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t like to work for somebody else,” I said. “I wanted it a little freer than that. Hell, when I dealt for Guiterno I was just a well-paid hired hand.”

  “Now do you understand?”

  I nodded. “Cheer up,” I said. “He’s not a kid any more. He’s around fifty and he’s worked hard all his life. He’s a good twenty years older than you are. He won’t live forever. You’ll be a young widow with a pot full of dough and a lifetime to spend it in.”

  And then she was laughing. It was loose, hysterical laughter. She threw back her head and her whole body shook with the laughter, and she kept going until I grabbed her by the shoulders and calmed her down. Then she looked straight in my eyes and started to laugh again.

  “So funny,” she said. “So very funny.”

  “What is?”

  “Everything. That’s what everybody thinks—I’ll stick it out and I’ll be a rich young widow and everything will be great. That’s what I thought, Bill. Murray let me think so. I should have made him put it in writing, damn it.”

  I didn’t get it.

  “He’s richer than God,” she said. “He’s also a lawyer, and he’s got a very pretty little will drawn up. One hundred thousand dollars goes in trust for me. I get the income from it until I remarry or move out of town. If I do either, the trust is dissolved and the principal is divided between those two rich-bitch daughters of his. They also get the rest of the estate over and above the hundred thousand, and that comes to so much that they wouldn’t even miss that hundred thou. I get the house, too—but I don’t get to own it outright. The trust owns it. I live in it rent-free. If I remarry or move away from this city, I lose the house along with the money.”

  “So you don’t get a thing?”

  “Nothing. Maybe five or six thousand dollars income from the trust, if I want to spend my life rotting. Oh, something else, and you’ll love this part. If I’m still unmarried and living here on my fiftieth birthday, then I get the principal of the trust, the whole happy little pie. But by then I’ll be too old to do anything with it. Isn’t that cute, Bill?”

  It was cute, all right. Joyce had married him for a soft touch, and he had fixed it so that the soft touch ended the day he died. I asked her what would happen if she divorced him.

  “Divorce a lawyer?” She shook her head. “That’s like fighting city hall, Bill. I wouldn’t get a nickel. No, there are only two things I can do. I can leave him flat and go back to the old life without taking any of his money along. Or I can keep it up the way it is and hope he lives forever. The will’s unbreakable, of course. He knows how to make a will unbreakable.”

  She checked her make-up in the mirror, seemed happy with what she saw. She turned to me and gave me a kiss, and I caught her in my arms and messed up her lipstick all over again. Her arms held on tight.

  “Damn it,” she said.

  “You could come with me, Joyce.”

  “And live on what?”

  “Other people’s money, for a starter.”

  “Why not Murray’s money?”

  “Let him keep it.”

  “I gave him almost three years,” she said. “Do I write them off now? Throw it up and say to hell with three years? You don’t get that many years, Bill. You have to hold onto them, make them swing for you. I don’t want to throw three of them away.”

  “It’s worse to throw them all away.”

  She was clinging to me and her face was pressed against my throat. She sagged, and I held onto her to keep her from crumbling. Then I felt her chest swell as she gulped in air. Her breasts were tight against me. I let go of her and she straightened up.

  “I started to fall apart,” Joyce said.

  “Forget it. You’re all right now.”

  “I’d like to stick with you. Live with you, travel with you. You’re my kind of people, Bill.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “But I like his money. I have a big thing for his money. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could find a way to put the two together?”

  She let that one hang in the air for a few seconds. Then her face changed and she gave me a fast smile. She did a patchwork job on her lipstick, tossed her purse over her arm.

  “I’ve got to run,” she told me. “I’m supposed to be downtown on a minor shopping spree. I’ll have to duck into a department store and buy a few sweaters in a hurry, then get back to our little ranch-style castle. Will you be staying in town for a while, Bill?”

  “I suppose so. I don’t have any place to go.”

  “I thought you were going to New York.”

  “So did I.”

  She looked at me, and her lips parted in a pout a little subtler than the M
arilyn Monroe pose, but not much. “Then we’ll be seeing each other,” she said. "Goodbye, Wizard.”

  After she left, I took the elevator down and let the hotel barber shorten my hair. When he was finished, I was a little less shaggy and a little more ex-Ivy League. I stopped at the desk on the way through the lobby and picked up my bill. The room clerk took my money and said something pleasant when I told him I’d be sticking around for awhile. I left the hotel and took a walk along Main Street.

  Wouldn’t it be nice if we could find a way to put the two together? Not two, though. Three. Joyce and the money and me. We three, we’re not a crowd. We’re just a starry dream.

  There was a classic answer to the classic problem.

  The problem read Boy meets Girl, Girl has Rich Husband, and the answer read, Boy kills Husband, Boy gets Girl and Money. But we didn’t fit the classic problem. If we killed Murray we didn’t win anything but the electric chair. If he died, there was no money for the weeping widow.

  It was just as well. The heavy-handed touch is not exactly the hallmark of the card mechanic. The brute type doesn’t bother slipping a deck of readers into the game or filling a flush from the bottom of the deck. The brute type takes his mark into a handy alleyway and hits him on the head with something heavy.

  A mechanic is just a con man. He cons with a deck the way another man cons with a pool cue or a pair of wrong-way dice or a portfolio of Canadian moose-pasture stocks. And a con man plays the game with certain rules operating inside of his head. The direct approach is not on the preferred list.

  Sometimes matters are ridiculous. When I had been dealing for Guiterno, we had a game set up for a Texan who liked to play big-money blackjack. That’s a dealer’s-control game—if you can deal seconds, and if you use marked cards or know how to do top-card peeks, you can make your mark lose every hand. A wide-hipped hooker steered the Texan to our game and he was the only live one in the crew. I was dealing and there were four of five shills playing with Guiterno’s money. It was all set up for the Texan.