The Wheel is Fixed

by James M. Fox

  The woman next to me threw her head back and laughed out loud. She had the kind of laugh you’d expect to hear in a zoo, if they had a bar for hyenas. Her sudden movement jiggled my elbow and spilled some of my drink. She finished laughing, noticed me and made a fuzzy double take.

  “Sorry,” I said like a little gentleman.

  “Ooo, nice mans! Burt, lookie here. See the nice mans?”

  The fellow with her inspected me dutifully. He was a skinny, sawed-off runt in a dinner jacket, whose few remaining wispy locks of gray clung stubbornly to an otherwise pink and perfectly egg-shaped skull. “Now, angel face—” he protested weakly, pursing his lips at me in anxious deprecation.

  “Buy nice mans another drink,” the woman ordered him. She hung on to me with one of those I-could-eat-you-with-a-little-silver-teaspoon looks. She was a blonde who could still make the grade, but only just; there is a point where they don’t fool around with slacks or a bathing-suit any more, but in a white lamé peekaboo dress under artificial light they can still knock you dead. The small, plump, freckled hand she laid demurely on my sleeve sported a wedding ring with several square-cut diamonds of a fairly impressive size.

  The skinny fellow bought a drink and mumbled something insincere as he offered me three bony little fingers. I remembered Joe Cornero’s briefing and caught the name. She’s married, he’s with her. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Jones. Where you people from?”

  “Pretty mans! We-uns comes from ’way down South in Campbell, Georgia, honey chile.”

  “Now, angel face—”

  That was all right. I’d been in bars before. I could have kept it up for hours, waltzing them around in a circle and no harm done. I bought another drink, and that made us Rick, Burt, and Rita. They would have made me wonder, if I hadn’t had my own straight to fill. The Southern accent was an obvious phony, and somehow the guy seemed worried about bigger problems than his wife making a pass at me.

  Then, clear across the room, I saw Lorna Ryan.

  They had shown me a photograph, one of her cigarette ads in color, but in this group a child could not have failed to pick her out. She had a table over by the wall, half hidden behind a pillar, and she sat very straight, sipping her sherry and watching the cowboy singer serenading her. She looked poised, cool, young, and not especially attractive; at that distance her only good points seemed to be a certain graceful slenderness and that indefinable quality women call chic, in a dark Latin manner, but her expression appeared to betray the fact that she was disdainfully aware of them. She was wearing a cotton print evening dress, the off-the-shoulder kind with a dirndl effect that doesn’t seem like much and takes a steady hand when you write the check for it. I disliked her on sight, rather strongly.

  There was another, older woman with her who was showing me her back and a somewhat disorderly mop of gray hair. I bit my lip; the Joneses had caught on and were staring, Burt with something of a twisted grin, Rita squinting in a way that was either malicious or myopic, or both.

  “You two seem to know the young lady,” I said.

  Burt started, guiltily, and turned back to the bar in a hurry. Rita gave me a venomous little chuckle.

  “Let up on the throttle, handsome,” she admonished me. “You’re burning out a bearing.” She didn’t sound tight any more.

  “Now, angel face—”

  The dinner gong clanged its merrily insistent summons.

  Chapter Six: LUCKY BREAK

  IN the card room four early diners were already clustered around a bridge table when I walked in with my hatches battened down over a load of lobster cocktail and breast of guinea hen Provençal. There was quite an argument going on over the correct penalty for a revoke. I kibitzed awhile until somebody mentioned they were playing for all of a nickel a hundred.

  Just looking at the cards made me restless and set up the old stinging in my veins. Joe Cornero came in, plainly uncomfortable in a stiff black tie, and proceeded to distribute backgammon and cribbage boards. He cocked an eyebrow at me when I asked him.

  “Sure, there’s lots of ’em around,” he told me. “I’d try the Tahquitz Casino, if I was you, Mr. Bailey. Turn left into the county road at Onowanda Park, about two miles. I hear they’re middling honest.”

  “Give me a deck,” I said. “Maybe I can work this off.” He watched me closely while I dealt a hand of solitaire, the special one I’d picked up in England during the war. Sometimes it helped me to get back on the beam, because of its peculiar, almost unlimited capacity for taxing the so-called human brain. This was one time I needed to stay on the beam. The cards felt crisp and slippery; they were the varnished, washable kind, and they kept skidding through my shaky fingers. At last I had the layout and began to study it, testing various preliminary plays and combinations in my mind before making a move. The stinging subsided a little, and my hands relaxed.

  A woman’s voice spoke up behind my shoulder, sharply inquisitive. “What in the world is that you’re keeping from us fellow morons there, my friend?”

  I glanced at her and got up in a hurry. She was in her fifties, though not quite so gray and disarranged as I had thought. There was a lean mannishness about her, and that queer sort of intellectual detachment you catch in newspaper pictures of atomic scientists. She wasn’t by any means the gregarious social-meddler type, but she certainly had no intention of allowing the conventions to interfere with her curiosity. Beside her, Lorna Ryan looked on, apparently half-amused, half-embarrassed.

  Joe Cornero cleared his throat, hastily muttered introductions, and tiptoed away. The lady’s name seemed to be Garand; I wondered if she had invented the semiautomatic rifle, but I wasn’t in the mood to quarrel with my luck just then. There were bows to be made and chairs to be offered and the usual meaningless platitudes to be exchanged. But she really wanted to know about the cards.

  “Lorna thought you were telling your own fortune.” She looked at me, brightly expectant. I glanced at the girl in the cotton print dirndl, who was smiling at me rather vaguely, and noticed that her eyes were blue: the clear, translucent blue of lapis lazuli, in strange contrast to the gleaming sable of her fashionably cut short locks.

  “Must be the gypsy in me that’s showing,” I said, trying hard for suavity. “This game is called King’s Cross, and it’s the only form of idiot’s delight I know of that requires any real mental exercise. You can win in theory almost every time, but most layouts are so difficult that it takes a chess master with a calculating machine to solve them. On the other hand you can just go ahead and play it blind, without any effort at all. Sometimes that’ll work, too, but the odds are a million to one you’ll wind up in a mess.”

  “It sounds fascinating,” Mrs. Garand said cheerfully. “Which system do you practice, or is that a fair question?”

  I realized then that she was more interested in people than in games and started digging in fast.

  “A very good question. It’s not much fun unless you try to stay with it. I suppose that goes for almost anything, from beer to religion. In this case, you arrange the deck in four straight horizontal rows of thirteen cards, face up. You remove the aces and lay them aside, which leaves forty-eight cards and four holes. Now the idea is to work out a tableau where everything runs in sequence, from the deuces to the kings and from left to right—clubs in the top row, diamonds in the second, then hearts and spades. Looks easy, but it’s pretty hard to do.”

  The Ryan girl opened her purse and took out a thin beveled gold case, the kind that holds half a dozen cigarettes, a compact, and a mirror. She posed gracefully toward the light, inspecting the cool, disdainful sweep of her lashes, repairing a tiny blemish in her make-up. I still resented her, but I had to admit to myself that she was attractive, after all, the way some orchids are attractive simply because of an unusual pattern of designs and color shade. Her cheekbones were too high, and the cheeks almost hollow, the slim, pointed ears too large, the sulky, darkly carmined mouth too small, yet somehow in their combination they achieve
d an effect, a quality of sensitiveness, a dry-Martini sort of charm. She suddenly became aware that I was watching her and returned my stare with one of almost childish composure.

  Mrs. Garand’s glance flickered between us roguishly.

  “But why King’s Cross?” she pressed me. “How are you supposed to move?”

  I forced a grin and said, “You asked for it, Madame. Don’t put the blame on me, later on, when the orderlies from the sanatorium call around for you with an ambulance. You’re supposed to move cards from the tableau into these holes left by the aces. That creates new holes, of course, which are filled in turn, until at last you get the layout straight in sequence, always from left to right, with the kings at the end. Each hole may be filled only with the next highest card, counting from the left in the same row. For example, here’s the ten of spades with a hole on the right behind it. I can fill that only with the jack of spades, but I’m not going to do it. Not now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the jack of spades now lies behind the four of diamonds, and because the five of diamonds, which is the only card to plug that hole, lies blocked behind the king of clubs. King’s Cross, you see; no card will go into a hole behind a king—you’ve got to move in such a way that the four kings don’t cross you up. They can be moved themselves, of course, behind their queens, until you finally work them over to the end of their row. Sometimes it’s necessary to create a temporary block or two, if you can foresee where later moves will clear those blocks again. But it takes a lot of calculating in advance, and each move with all its alternates and permutations must be carefully planned, or else in no time you’re in trouble with nothing but holes behind kings. It sounds silly, but in fact it’s almost unbelievably complicated.”

  She followed me all right, and she was even mildly interested, but when I tried out a few moves to illustrate she quickly reverted to type. “Are you an artist or a musician, Mr. Bailey?”

  “Well, lackaday,” I said, uncomfortably startled. “What goes on here? Do I really look emotionally unstable?”

  She did not even smile. The Ryan girl selected a cigarette and waited for me to come up with a match. “Eve has a hobby,” she told me. “She’s been watching your hands.” Her voice was low, slightly husky, and impersonal to the point of indifference.

  “Gamblers have hands like these,” I suggested, leaning recklessly into the wind.

  Mrs. Garand shook her head; her beady little eyes were as bright as a sparrow’s. “Steadier,” she said. “Much steadier. If they can afford this place. And you’re too careful about your appearance for an artist, so you must be a musician. A good one.”

  “Now you’re just being kind. Who’s a good musician? There’s Heifetz, Rubinstein, Bruno Walter. All I do is go through the motions. Like that cowhand in the bar with his guitar, singing ‘Tumbleweeds.’”

  The girl in the cotton print dirndl crushed her halfsmoked cigarette in the ash tray.

  “I think he is perfectly awful,” she said without any particular emphasis.

  Chapter Seven: SNOW JOB

  ON Wednesday morning after breakfast I tried the gift shop in the lobby. They had just the thing, a hand-embroidered blue chiffon scarf, extra sheer and of a shade that served to match her eyes. It was expensive enough for her to wear, and not presumptuous enough so she’d have to return it. I put a king of diamonds with it in the box to supply the light touch, and had them deliver it to her bungalow.

  The Joneses were splashing around in the pool and ignoring me. I slapped some sun-tan oil on myself and loafed the morning away on a deck chair, sweating out the deal. It was hotter than a steak fry in hell, and the heavy, cloying scent of the tangerine trees became suffocating as the day dragged on.

  By noon I was in a fine case of physical indolence and mental agitation. The swimmers walked by on their way to lunch, Burt with a scowl, Rita with a sidelong glance. Joe Cornero turned up soon after that, bullied me into a Ping-pong game, beat the stuffing out of me in three fast sets, and forced a quart of ice water and some salt tablets from the bathhouse bar into my system.

  I was fast asleep when the diving-board screamed and the pool exploded in my ears. For several seconds there was nothing but the sun striking swiftly widening rings of fire off the surface, and then Lorna Ryan bobbed up at the other end and easily swung herself back to the tile walk. She waved to me, quite casually, and ran for the tower again. On the high board she posed against the sky, rather longer and more ostentatiously than the average diver, I thought. Her white French-satin scanties, laced together with deceptive flimsiness, did not appear especially daring or seductive; somehow they seem natural on these very sylphlike, long-limbed, highbreasted bodies that have learned to control themselves, never to be caught off guard or in so much as an instant’s gawkiness. I didn’t even flatter myself that the show was for my benefit—she was merely working at her trade, not deliberately but as a matter of unconscious policy. The board groaned once more, and she jackknifed expertly in mid-air, flashing into the water like a seal.

  This time she came up less than two feet away from me, smiling mischievously.

  “Hi! Did we disturb you?”

  I glanced across to where Mrs. Garand was sitting in the shade, reading a brightly jacketed novel. “Hi, yourself,” I said. “Do I look disturbed?”

  “I don’t know you well enough to tell,” she countered, and again there was about her this disconcerting simplicity, this cool childishness, as if she were totally lacking in the feminine arts and wiles. “Thank you for my pretty blue scarf,” she added gravely. It was the same tone, the same expression that would have applied if I’d offered her a bite out of my apple after school, because it was her birthday.

  “Flowers would have been more suitable,” I said a bit uneasily. “But not with a whole desertfull of them around, and I wanted to find something for you. Are you girls related?”

  “Oh, no. We’ve just met. Don’t you know about Eve?”

  “Should I?”

  “She’s a famous writer. Books and things.”

  “Oh.”

  “She’s awfully smart. I like her, don’t you?”

  “A writer,” I said. “Nice work. How about you? Haven’t I seen you in pictures?”

  Her laugh was completely unstilted, completely charming.

  “What’s funny?”

  “People are always asking me that. You’ve seen me in lots of pictures. Billboards, fashion ads, magazine covers. I used to be an Ainslee model, before I got movie-struck and flew out here from New York last year.”

  “No dice, you mean?” I asked her, quasi-incredulous.

  “Not a chance,” she confessed gaily. “I’m a terrible actress. Can’t you tell?”

  I stared at her, holding back my frown with an effort, forcibly reminding myself that she was over twenty-one and had been around, the way Seabiscuit had been around Santa Anita. Mr. Walter Hitchcock’s voice rasped in my ear. You’re supposed to get this woman out of my hair.

  “Race you across the pool?” I offered, and took a flying header off my chair into the water.

  She outdistanced me easily, and I am not a weak swimmer. I wasn’t worried about that so much, because it’s a fact that for quick success in any courtship, phony or otherwise, there’s a distinct advantage to you in allowing the female of the species to enjoy immediate superiority in something or other, so she’ll be the more impressed with your real accomplishments as they come to light. I let her enjoy hers, playing the usual games. I even made a couple of deliberately clumsy dives to amuse her, and carefully passed up opportunities for getting fresh. Then after half an hour or so I pulled out and sprawled on one of the rubber mattresses, pretending to be winded.

  “Got to take it easy. Little bit out of condition, my doctor says.”

  She sat on the lawn beside me, hugging her knees and soberly watching me. “There’s nothing wrong with you, is there?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I don’t k
now. The way you sounded.”

  “Well, not any more. Not really.”

  “I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “That’s all right. No secret about it. I’ve been out of circulation for a couple of years. Delayed C.F.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Combat fatigue. Sometimes it doesn’t catch up with you for quite a while. Like getting scared a week after you’ve been in an accident.”

  She registered the proper amount of concern. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I was lucky.”

  “But two years.”

  I shrugged it off. The sympathy angle was another one that had to be worked, but I didn’t like the taste it left in my mouth. “More like three,” I said carelessly. “Time out of mind. I’m in pretty good shape again. Going East in a couple of weeks, start a new band, get back on the ball. We’re opening in Bermuda next month.”

  “Oh, you’re a band leader.” She was politely interested, no more.

  “Yes, but don’t get the wrong idea. Guy Lombardo’s been at it a good deal longer.”

  “Guy Lombardo,” she said slowly. “He’s wonderful, isn’t he? My first year in New York I used to have dinner at the Roosevelt every time I could afford it, just to listen to him doing his stuff.”

  “That’s odd,” I said. “At your age, you should be a fan of Stan Kenton’s, or the Herman Herd.”

  “Should I? But they’re horrible! That stupid bop business. Music should make you feel better inside. More religious, more patriotic, more in love. Happier or sadder—it all depends on the kind of music. But not more restless, more uncomfortable, more jittery. Not this frightful blustering and hectoring at you they do with a lot of shrieking brasses and two or three drummers banging away like crazy. It doesn’t make sense—” She caught herself short in the rush of her own words and smiled at me contritely. “There I go again, fussing at people, picking a fight. If your band plays bop-style, you’ll think I’m just a nasty brat.”