Dead Man's Hand

by Otto Penzler

  While the others went downstairs to gather their things I sat alone at the red table with Maria as she counted 1,278 hundred-dollar bills. She counted my winnings three times and then put the cash into a cute little briefcase no larger than a woman's purse.

  "Do you have a roll of nickels in your bank there?" I asked her.

  She reached down into the safe under the table and came out with a two-dollar plastic roll.

  I handed her three hundred-dollar bills and said, "Keep the change."

  ***

  By the time I got downstairs, everyone was gone, except for the sandy-haired man who had apologized for searching me. He gave me back my phone and I wished him well.

  I had walked half a block from the house when someone shouted, "Hey, you!"

  By the time I had turned around, the three men were almost upon me. Not one of them was particularly tall, but they were all sturdy, built for the hurting trade.

  As I said, I'm tall, but not bulky or extremely strong. I will go one on one with anybody, though, because I will hurt you if I can get at you. But three men at once was beyond my physical limits.

  "Gimme the case," the leader, a blocky white guy with a squashed face, commanded.

  I heard a tiny motor rev in the distance. It was little more than the sound of a mosquito in your ear at night.

  "What did you say?" I asked as if I really hadn't understood.

  "Gimme the fuckin' case," the man said.

  He moved ahead of his friends and reached for me. I responded by striking him on the temple with the side of my right fist, in which I held the roll of nickels. I hit him very hard. He squealed like a pig caught in a fence. I hit him in the same spot again before his friends registered the attack.

  The engine in the distance got louder.

  The two men left, one black and one brown, came at me then. The one on the left brandished a knife, while the black man on the right was holding a pistol down at his side.

  As they came forward, I took a long step back. They had to go around the prone body of their unconscious boss. This gave me a six- to eight-second reprieve. It doesn't sound like much when armed men are after you and all you have is a roll of nickels in your hand. But I had faith in that small engine in the night.

  Mike Peron zipped up behind my attackers, managing to hit both of them at about fifteen miles an hour. He was thrown from his motorbike, but I moved in quickly, clubbing the muggers with my coin-reinforced hand. After I was certain that the muggers were incapacitated, I helped Mike up, and together we rode away into the night.

  I got off in Manhattan at five thirty and went to a twenty-four-hour diner on Sixth Avenue in the Village. I drank some coffee and then drank some more. I ordered a waffle with cooked apples and whipped cream and downed two more cups of coffee. I didn't read the newspaper or make small talk with the waitress. I didn't do anything but think about what had happened.

  Anyone at that table could have set me up. Clive Ford or Bobo Bernardi could have been behind the mugging. It wouldn't have been Crow. It's not that I'm above suspecting my mentor, but Crow was the one who told me to have backup on a job that felt hinky. Crow would have had someone in reserve to come in on the chance that Mike was in the wings.

  Someone had fixed the game, but it didn't make sense that he would have tried to rob me. After all, I was going to turn the money over to his agent, Clive Ford.

  It was rare for Mr. In-Between to get double-crossed. It was almost always a straightforward kind of business.

  At six fifteen I called a number.

  "Speak to me," answered a whispery voice.

  "Somebody tried to hijack me, Crow," I said.

  "Who did?"

  "I don't know. Three guys were waiting for me. If it wasn't for Mike, I might be dead by now."

  "Damn!"

  Silence fell on the pay-phone line for a full two minutes.

  "You think it's Ford?" Crow hissed.

  "I don't like him, but then again, I don't know."

  "If it was him, then it's over now, anyway. You still got the money?"

  "Yes, I do."

  "How much?"

  "One twenty-seven plus the twenty he gave me."

  "Take out your percentage and put the rest in my box. I'll call Bernardi and see what's what."

  "Okay."

  "And you know the drill, right?" Crow added.

  The drill was not to go anywhere that someone in our world might see me or be able to find me. Not my apartment. Not Crow's office.

  "Oh, yeah," I said. "I know."

  The fact that he felt the need to remind me showed how seriously my mentor took this business.

  I went to Bailey's Bank on 42nd Street where Crow and I shared a safe-deposit box. In a private room, I removed my $12,500 (accounting for the $300 I'd tipped Maria) and put the rest in storage. Then I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and studied the South American and African exhibits.

  I love history because the past belongs to all of us. The saga of the human race is a kind of cultural socialism that even the richest people cannot control or truly possess. I like thinking about the past when the present is impinging on me. It makes me feel untouchable.

  I was waiting for Felicia at six when she got off work and we went to her apartment off Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. Her mother and sister came over because they had not met me before and we ordered barbeque from a delivery place—Winston's Memphis Belle BBQ.

  Felicia's mother, Helen, was the image of the woman that Felicia would become in sixteen years. She was one year older and forty pounds heavier than I. Her face was the same as Felicia's, and her laugh was the same, too. Bunny, Felicia's sister, had a whole other father. His genes had made her slight and light skinned. Bunny was a very pretty girl and she gave me looks that might have been seen by Felicia as flirtatious but Bunny never let her sister see.

  "Yeah," Helen was saying that evening, "me an' Bunny thought that Feel was makin' up her boyfriend. I mean, what a successful businessman be doin' hooked up with some wide-bottomed dark-skinned girl from Bed-Stuy?"

  I draped my arm around Felicia's shoulders. "I just looked at her, and that was it. She said to come by later, and I believe I would have fought Mike Tyson to be there."

  Helen and Bunny were stunned by my naked passion. Felicia leaned over and kissed my neck. She whispered in my ear, "I'm'a do it right tonight, Master."

  And even though I was deeply troubled, I was still thrilled by the connection Felicia made with my soul.

  She kissed my neck again and my mind flashed. It was like a flicker, a phenomenon that Myra Golden called, "the precursor to my intuition." I was about to come to some deep understanding when my blue phone made the sound of migrating geese passing overhead.

  "Hold on," I said, answering the phone as I stood.

  I took the phone into Felicia's bedroom and said, "Go on."

  "Clive Ford fell off the top'a his office buildin'," Crow hissed. "Cops lookin' for everybody been to his office in the last three days."

  "Damn. What about Bobo?"

  "He told me that he washes his hands of it. The money's ours."

  "What's happening, Crow?"

  "I'm sorry, man. The way Clive laid it out to me, nobody was getting ripped off."

  My intuition kicked in then and I realized that all the men at that table were in on the fix. I said this to Crow.

  "Most of them anyway," he said ominously.

  "What should I do?" I asked.

  "Find a hole and stay in it till the smoke clears."

  Even the fear of death did not weaken the ardor I felt for Felicia Torres. I strained over her, grunting like an old man passing a stone. I held her so tightly that she had to ask me to let up.

  The next morning at a coffee shop, I was reading the Post because that was the only paper they had. Terrorists in England had invented an exploding iPod, and a movie star of some renown got divorced from one guy and married another in a single day.

  On page three I re
ad that James "Jamaica Jim" Rolleyman had been found hanged in his apartment near 48th Street and Ninth Avenue. The police said that the death was suspicious. There was no note and no warning that he might have committed suicide.

  Wild geese cried out while I was reading the article.

  "Hello?"

  "Hey, man," Mike Peron said. "You read the paper?"

  "You got family in Peru still, Mikey?"

  "Some."

  "Go for a visit. Two weeks should do it. I'll pay."

  "What about you?"

  "I'm going to catch up on my reading."

  I went to the diner's toilet, counted out fifty $100 bills, and wrapped them in a paper towel. I folded the paper to make a pretty secure envelope. Then I went to the reading room of the main branch of the New York Public Library.

  In the northwest corner of the reading room, on any day that the library was open, from eight in the morning till closing time, you could find Nelson "The Dean" Koslowski. He was always reading a book and usually flanked by two women. For the past year, these posts had been held by Minna Olson and Arianna Tey.

  The way they were seated, you couldn't get very close to Nelson, so you had to start a discussion with one of the women first.

  "Hi," I said to Minna, a thin, black woman of twenty-something years. She had a plain face, but there was sensuality in her posture.

  "Do I know you?" she asked, not unpleasantly.

  I handed her the jury-rigged envelope and she, showing me the respect I deserved, did not open it to count out my offering. She turned to Nelson, an elderly white man of seventy-eight or -nine, and whispered something.

  He looked up from his book, made a face, and nodded. Minna moved aside.

  I sat down next to the old man. He was very short and wore clothes that would have been suitable for a janitor or a gardener.

  "Master," Nelson said. "Long time."

  "As a rule, I don't need to come to you for information," I said. "Usually two addresses will do me fine."

  "So why are you here? Do you have a message for me?"

  "Clive Ford, Faust Littleman, Jamaica Jim, Tommy Arland, Brian Mettgang, and a little guy named Wisteria," I said. "Does that mean anything to you?"

  The Dean stared at my forehead for what seemed like a very long time.

  "Minna, Arianna," he said.

  The women turned their heads to regard him.

  "Go get yourselves some coffee. Mr. Vance and I need a few minutes alone."

  The ladies were reluctant, but they knew better than to question their boss. After they were gone, Nelson stared at me a while longer. The envelope with my money was nowhere to be seen.

  Koslowski was a self-made man of what Crow liked to call Nefarious Letters. The Dean knew everything that went down in the city. He never talked to the police or any other government agent, and if you fooled him into giving you information for the cops, he was likely to take revenge upon you, one way or the other. He had a full head of gray blue hair and skin that sagged with the weight of all he knew. It cost $5,000 just to ask him a question; his research could run much higher.

  "What's your interest?" Nelson asked me.

  "Trouble," I said simply.

  "Serious trouble?"

  I didn't even nod. Koslowski knew I wouldn't be there unless the guns were loaded and the crosshairs in place.

  "Ford was point man for a guy named Ring," Nelson told me.

  "The assassin?"

  "Littleman, Jamaica Jim, Arland, and Mettgang all worked for Wisteria."

  "Worked?" I repeated. "I saw them last night."

  "Jamaica Jim's fake suicide was in the paper. The rest of them probably won't show up anytime soon."

  "And Wisteria?"

  "Olaf Wisteria, I am told, suffers from a variety of mental illnesses. They all come together under the general heading of paranoia. It was said that he suspected one of his henchmen of stealing from him. For the last six months, he has had them all followed, bugged, and attached at the hip to men who answer only to him. They could not take a step that wasn't watched, listened to, and studied. They were never allowed to handle money unless it was their winnings at the weekly poker game."

  "He couldn't watch them that closely."

  "Have you looked into his eyes?"

  I had.

  "Is Ring dead, too?" I asked.

  "Ring, I hear, has switched loyalties."

  "Where can I find Ring?"

  "I don't know."

  "I can have ten thousand here in an hour, Mr. Koslowski."

  "I don't know, Master. If I did, I would tell you."

  On the Fifth Avenue steps of the library I called Crow, but he didn't answer. This bothered me because Crow always answered his personal line. He even took it to the hospital when he was having knee surgery. They gave him a local anesthetic, and he conducted business while the doctor cut, shaved bone, and sewed.

  I kept a small apartment under my mother's maiden name in Queens, not far from JFK. I went there via subway and bus. It was clean because I hired a service to come once every two weeks to dust and do whatever else was necessary.

  I sat on the springy bed and went over all I knew.

  Ford was an assassin's agent and Ring was the killer. The four men I had feared at the poker table were, in turn, frightened by Wisteria. They siphoned off their money to pay for the killing of their paranoid boss.

  The fix was brilliant. Four of the five players knew when I was betting and the parameters of what I held. If they had a better hand, they folded. If they didn't, they bluffed. Wisteria wouldn't wise up because he would beat me at least half of the time we bet against each other.

  The money came from the bank that Wisteria controlled.

  But if Koslowski was right and Wisteria had such a tight rein on his men that they couldn't get a message out, then how did they get in touch with Ford to make such complex plans?

  Sure, they could make a clandestine call from some friend's cell phone, but that wouldn't be enough. No. They needed to get word to someone who would build the plan for them; someone who would understand their plight and set up the game for them.

  Crow.

  I sorely missed my analyst's couch, but I made do with the bouncy bed in my getaway room. Crow was the only solution to the problem. If he was aware of Wisteria and knew the men at the table, he might have set up the game, setting me up as he did so. Crow knew how to leave messages anywhere. He figured out the poker game and then got word to the players how the game should go. He called Clive Ford, Ring's agent, and then pulled me in to pay the assassin's fee.

  Crow knew I wouldn't willingly be party to an assassin's trade. He worked it out so that I would be paid well and Wisteria would be eliminated. He had all the bases covered, except for the unheard-of betrayal by Ring.

  The sun set and I lay still, my eyes closed, my breath shallow. I lay there for many hours considering the next action to take.

  The smartest thing would have been to take the money and run. Now that I understood Wisteria, I knew enough to fear him. Crow had never once failed to answer his phone, and so he was probably dead, too.

  I had $278,000 in savings. I couldn't take Felicia because she'd have to call her mother one day.

  I was ready to run. All I needed was a few morning hours to collect my savings and get on the PATH train to a Jersey bus, and I'd be gone.

  Zen bells rang near midnight.

  "Yeah?"

  "How you, baby?" Felicia asked.

  "Fine. My business had a little backlash. But I got a hold of it."

  "You okay?"

  "Uh-huh. Why you ask?"

  "I'on't know," she said. "I just got the feelin' you might need somebody to call and say they loved you."

  My throat caught and a pain set off in my chest. My intuitive dizziness set in, and for a moment I remembered being happy. It's not that I was happy, I just remembered how it once felt.

  "Felicia," I said. "Felicia, you are something else, you know that, girl?"
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  "I love you," she said. "You don't have to say it back. You don't have to do nuthin' but promise me that you will come to my house and stay here again."

  "Unless I'm dead and cold, you better believe I will be there," I said.

  Three in the morning found me on a rooftop across the street from the gambling house in Brooklyn Heights. I had a high-powered pistol that doubled as a rifle in my pocket. I had tried five times to call Crow. If he hadn't answered by then, I knew he never would.

  And even though I had been betrayed by my mentor, I still respected him and gave him the benefit of the doubt. I had worked for Crow since I was a teenager. He taught me to articulate and how to walk straight, how to dress and how to behave in the company of other men.

  Unlike me, Crow was strong and powerful. Even now, in his mid-fifties, he posed a daunting figure. I looked up to him and he showed me a way.

  For long minutes, I stared at the gamblers' house. No one came in or out but there was an odd shadow in the doorway. The longer I looked at it, the stranger it appeared.

  At three thirty I climbed down the fire escape and crossed the street. Crow had taught me how to move silently through the noisiest terrains. I could have been a cat burglar if I wasn't a delivery specialist.

  The shadow was caused by the front door to the gambling establishment being ajar. I stared at it a full thirty seconds before crossing the threshold. I locked the door behind me and located the stairs. One and a half flights up, I came upon a dead white man of middle years. His head was at the bottom of the flight and his legs were above and to the side. He'd been shot in the back. The blood pooled under him in the green carpeting.

  I decided to start in the room I knew best, so I went to the fourth floor and pushed the door open.

  Olaf Wisteria was sitting with his back to the red gambling table, smiling at me. That was when I learned that I wasn't a natural-born killer. The moment a real killer had even suspected another living being, he would have opened fire.

  But all I did was stare at Olaf as he stared sightlessly back at me.

  "I wondered when you'd get here," a crackling voice said.