Aces and Eights

by Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  The dead gunman was Jorge Martinez.

  We had known each other for just three months, more than a decade ago, but in that brief time we were in many ways closer than brothers.

  Sergeant Martinez was at Khe Sanh the day I was hit, and he risked his life to pull me out of the line of fire. He had been my platoon leader.

  And my friend.

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  But those who equated the two spoke without thinking—or, at any rate, without careful reading. The wages of sin may, as the apostle says, be death. But...are the wages of power death also?

  SIX

  Sound is the signature of our times. Millions of dollars are spent daily to drive a mind-battering aggression of music into the workplace and the home and the automobile, invading even the fleeting shelter of public transportation and the elevator. New and expensive sound systems capture the fancy of the consuming public to the tune of billions per annum, and vibrations just above and below the threshold of audibility are commonly used to alter mood, homogenize milk, and cook food.

  Meanwhile, still more millions are spent to cancel out ambient amplification.

  Earplugs are the secret solace of a with-it generation constrained by peer pressure to attend the more acoustically hazardous rock concerts; scientifically designed ear shields are standard survival gear for those who work amid the jet blast of modern airports; electronics magazines are bright with advertisements for “counter-sound” devices that nullify intrusive noise by generating interdictive resonance; owners of cheaply built and stupidly designed office buildings camouflage the sound-permeable thinness of wall partitions by installing noisy air conditioning that smothers hearing and thought in an all-consuming sea of extraneous sound.

  And the body has defenses of its own.

  Over the millennia of evolution, human beings have learned to protect themselves by constructing mental filtration systems that reduce familiar and repetitive sound to something like true inaudibility, through selective disregard. We hear these sounds, but we do not heed. This is one of our best and most complex adaptations. But it has its limitations. Sudden changes in the local sound pattern still require conscious adjustment. The damn filter leaks.

  Outside the hotel, the omnipresent buzz and rattle and whoosh of highway traffic had been partially blocked by the bulk of the building itself and by certain adroit plantings not selected entirely for their visual aesthetics. Together, they left an impression almost of tranquillity in the zone so adroitly quarantined by the police cleanup detail; someone blessed with vivid imagination might even have thought he heard the distant song of the meadowlark.

  Reality, however, was as close as the emergency exit, and I was forcibly reminded of this as I followed Corner Pocket back into the maw of the Scheherazade.

  The door we used was not normally a means of ingress; police emergency had required that it be fitted temporarily with a rough wooden shim that kept it slightly ajar, and we were careful to leave it in place when we passed through. But this was mere habit, the unconscious cooperation of the civilized animal. Our minds were not on the door or on the little wedge of plywood or even on the all too mortal remains we had just left to the mercies of the coroner’s retrieval unit.

  Our minds—and bodies—were for the moment fully occupied with an act of resistance. An insistence of thought and ego, assertion of self in the face of contradiction by a tyranny of sound.

  Las Vegas hotels are, in their way, a true flowering of the architectural designer’s art; pseudo-elegant and mock-efficient in the hospitality that would be their aim and function anywhere else on earth, they are utterly without peer in the service of their actual mission, which is to make certain that no visitor misses an opportunity to visit the casino to which each overblown hostelry is, after all, a mere adjunct.

  The builder assumes that you are in town to gamble. And he means to see that you do it. Right now.

  Hotel registration and cashier’s desks, bellman desks, lobby accommodations, and vehicle ports all are flow-patterned to make it impossible for you to engage in any activity whatsoever, from the moment of arrival to the final tip-hungry palm of departure, without passing through the main concourse of the casino.

  And the sound is part of the come-on.

  It is unique, a thing composed equally of the singsong chant of the blackjack dealer, the greed-laced shriek of the craps shooter, the dignified click of the roulette ball, and the raucous summons of the keno player demanding that someone come and take his money away from him—all minced and mingled and mangled and melded in the air-conditioned milieu of the casino, then spread, homogenous and all-pervading, across the jingle-clatter base rhythm supplied by those ranks and banks of slot machinery that are the truest expression of the Las Vegas mystique.

  Here it is, folks—a machine!

  Just what you need: It doesn’t play music and it doesn’t show movies and it doesn’t pour coffee and it doesn’t make change or dispense stamps or even shine your shoes. If you pull its handle often enough, it will swallow every coin you have or can get your hands on, and it doesn’t do a single damned thing! You just push your money into the slot for the hell of it.

  I halted for a moment, just inside the door, reacting to the sudden impact and allowing my senses to catch up with the rest of me, wondering if the noise sometimes affected Corner Pocket in the way it did me. He had been born here in Las Vegas. Brought up in places just like this one. Perhaps it was different for him, too much a part of the normal and accepted world to be worthy of conscious acknowledgment.

  Inhaling deeply to rid my lungs of the clear morning desert air, I risked a covert glance in his direction and found myself obscurely pleased to note that he was no more immune to the overload of sound than I. It was all there in his face.

  But with a difference.

  For him it was balm. And welcome. The friendly insinuation of a kiss.

  “Come on,” he said, altering the timbre of his voice to give it an edge that would be clearly audible through the interference. “Let’s find a nice noisy place and have a talk.”

  That brought me to full alert.

  Eavesdropping is a cottage industry in Las Vegas. The gaming profession thrives on information—coke-head athletes who may be bribable, horse trainers in financial straits, professional golfers whose doctors have told them to slow down—and bugging devices thrive on quiet spaces.

  Truly private conversations, therefore, are usually conducted in places where extraneous noise acts as cloak and buffer against the skulking electronic ear.

  Even excessive sound can have its uses.

  A private conversation with Corner Pocket, however, was the last thing on earth I wanted just then. The night had been long, the morning even longer, and the identity of the dead machine gunner was just the kind of extra factor that could turn an already confusing situation toward the foothills of chaos. I wanted time and space, an opportunity to examine the various elements and arrange them, if possible, in something like logical order. I wanted a chance to figure out what was happening. And why.

  But I wasn’t going to get it. Corner Pocket led the way to the stand-up bar at the edge of the casino, and the morning shift bartender, who knew both of us, brought two bottles of mineral water without being told and shook his head when we tried to pay.

  “Mr. Goines’s orders,” he said. “Preacher’s money’s no good at the Scheherazade until further notice...and I guess that includes anyone who’s with him.”

  I resisted the impulse to fill him in on recent developments and took a pull at the mineral water. It tasted like frozen leaves, but I swallowed it because it was wet and available and what’s taste anyway and besides I needed something to do with my hands and face to avoid turning them toward the man who was about to start a conversation that couldn’t possibly make either of us any happier.

  “That,” Corner Pocket said, ever true to form, “is one of the things I wanted to ask you about...”

&n
bsp; I didn’t want to answer, so I just looked at him and waited.

  He didn’t mind a bit.

  “I already know the story the way old Happy Apodaca told it,” he went on, “and he is a good old boy and a hell of a lawyer and one of the smartest sonsabitches who ever walked around on two legs in this smartass town. The newspapers and the television people will eat it up. And that is just fine with me because the people I work for will like it, and they didn’t hire me to rock any boats that don’t have to be rocked.”

  He paused for a lubricating swallow.

  “But the hell of it is,” he said, “no matter how I try, I just can’t get the story he told to fit the physical facts.”

  This time, I think, the pause was to give me an opportunity to object or express innocence or something of the sort, but I just stood still and waited for him to go on.

  “Your old buddy Sam Goines,” he said, consulting a not-too-expensive wristwatch, “has been in town exactly twenty-seven hours, give or take a few minutes one way or the other, but you have to say he didn’t waste any of it. By the time you showed up—about seven o’clock last night, that would be—he had made eleven long-distance telephone calls all over the world, using a tricky electronic scrambler that was too much for even the local professionals...”

  That gave me the sorry ghost of a smile and seemed to affect him the same way.

  “...while his wife arrived on a separate airplane from a different point of origin and checked into a separate suite at the Scheherazade.”

  He gave me a moment to digest that, and I was grateful. I knew, or had heard, that the Sam Goineses had been moving around the world separately for a while, and there were rumors that they might be ready to make the split permanent. But I hadn’t known that Moira Goines—Maxey—was in town.

  And it made a difference.

  “So after he finished making the calls,” Corner Pocket said when he decided I was ready to listen again, “various citizens began to get interested in who went into the penthouse suite and who came out. The standard telephone and room bugs weren’t working because Goines travels with his own personal debugger, who is very good at his job. But a whole human being is hard to conceal even when it goes up and down in a key-lock elevator that can start at any floor, so there goes the part of the judge’s tale about how you and he and Goines and DiMarco spent the evening alone together—playing a little bridge, was it? Or maybe pinochle, four-handed? Even if the number of chairs and the size of the table and the amount of money and the chips and all the rest of the physical evidence I could see without even trying didn’t tell it a different way.”

  He finished the mineral water and put the empty bottle down on the bar and turned to look at me with his sad, pale eyes.

  “Lie to the marks and the mooches and poor bastard cops like Bill Bowers all you want, Preacher,” he said. “But don’t lie to me. This isn’t for the record and it isn’t for the newspapers and it isn’t for your book of golden memories, but I want to hear the whole story again. This time with three more people—whom we will call Holy Joe Gillespie, Manny Temple, and Colonel David Connor, just to pick three names out of the clear blue sky.

  “Think you could do that?”

  So of course I went right on lying. More or less. I told the story again with Sam and the colonel and the Voice of Heaven in it, sure, and the poker game continuing right up to the moment when two killers came through the door.

  But still without Sergeant Jorge Martinez’s dead face looking up at me.

  And without Holy Joe’s card tricks.

  Corner Pocket seemed to know it was still partly bullshit. He is a realist and he is the second generation of his family in the law-enforcement business in Las Vegas, and I think the only way I could really have surprised him would have been to tell the full unvarnished truth. So he kept his cool and nodded at all the appropriate places and waited for a moment or two as if to assimilate and take it all in when I was done and then nodded solemnly and thanked me and said he was grateful for my candor, and now would I please fill in a few details and I said I would do that, and wondered what he was going to zap me with next.

  I found out in a hurry.

  “Now,” he said, “what I would like is, I would like it if you would tell it all again, you Bible-banging, poker-hustling Tennessee highbinder.”

  “I’m from Ohio,” I said mildly.

  “You were born there, but grew up in Colorado till your folks were killed in that freaky accident and you got sent off to Sewanee, and yes, I did a whole big fancy background check on you when you first turned up out here and don’t try to change the subject, old friend of mine...”

  “Anything you say, Charlie Chan.”

  “...only when you tell it this time, I’d take it kindly if you would put in some words on how come I saw the dead man’s hand laid out on Dimples DiMarco’s chest, and why I had a personal telephone call from Francis Carrington Shaw at six o’clock this morning to make sure I got out of my nice, warm bed and came down here.”

  “I hear tell he stays up late.”

  “And when you’re done with all that, there is one other little matter I think you might clear up for me.”

  The cynical, semi-bantering tone had entirely vanished with the last words, and I responded by swallowing any reply I might have had in mind. One thing about doing business with Corner Pocket—he gives you fair warning when playtime is over.

  “A week ago,” he said, the pale–blue eyes suddenly sharp and deadly serious in the sad-lined farmboy face, “the police intelligence bureau got a telephone call from Interpol, the international police agency, and passed it on to me. Seems an American citizen named Samuel Clemens Goines who they had been keeping an eye on for ten years or more, ever since he started buying and selling things for people to kill each other with, had gone and got himself into one hell of a jam.”

  He paused to check out my reaction, but it was all news to me and after a while he went on.

  “What Goines had done,” he said, “was to tell some government in North Africa—one of the less popular ones, that even their neighbors are scared of—that he could get them an important piece of hardware, something every road-company Napoleon asks Santa Claus to bring him, and they must have believed he could do it, because they fronted him the money to grease the deal.”

  “But he didn’t produce, and now they want their money back?”

  Corner Pocket shook his head.

  “If it was just that,” he said, “I don’t think Interpol would give a damn. Cheating some goat-stealing strongman in that part of the world ranks as kind of a misdemeanor where they’re concerned. No, the hell of it is, while Goines was off stealing the item or buying it or whatever he did, the guy who made the deal with him guessed wrong once too often and there was a little tin-pot revolution and when it was over the winners shipped the former head honcho home in six different boxes.”

  I shrugged.

  “So...no problem. The deal’s off and Sam can either negotiate with the new regime or find a new buyer or maybe even keep the toy himself, seeing it’s already paid for.”

  Corner Pocket just looked sadder.

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “That’s what I guess Goines must have thought, too. But the generals and colonels who are running the show now don’t seem to see it that way. They’re saying a deal is a deal and the money was paid, and where’s the beef?”

  It had taken me long enough, but I was finally beginning to understand. And it was starting to look like a long, long morning.

  “So what you figure,” I said, “is that the attack on the pent-house was a little expression of pique from the generals. And you want to know how much I know about the deal, so you can make some informed guesses about what’s going to happen next?”

  Corner Pocket’s eyes never left my face.

  “What I want to know,” he said, “and what you are sooner or later going to tell me, is all about the game and why you were in it and why the others were in it an
d what kind of deals were made during the night and why Francis Carrington Shaw is so damn interested and why those five cards—the dead man’s hand, for christsake—were laid out on DiMarco.

  “And then, by God, we are going to get down to business and try to figure out just what the hell Sam Goines thought he was going to do with his own personal atomic bomb!”

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  We know more of power, in our time, than Paul or King David knew in theirs. And not only because we are better educated or because we live in an age when men of power and their doings are shown to us daily in living color in our own living quarters...

  SEVEN

  Neither of us said anything for a moment or two after that.

  My first reaction, of course, was to dismiss the whole thing as a bad joke. The Sam Goines I remembered might have been odder (ban a square grape—and a dedicated bluffer besides), but the wildness and the bluffing had always been tempered by a powerful streak of cold, practical realism. He had an eye for the main chance and no use at all for the kind of blue-sky adventure Corner Pocket was describing. Somebody had to be kidding someone.

  But Corner Pocket wasn’t smiling.

  “Nobody could really get an A-bomb,” I said. “That’s ridiculous.”

  He nodded.

  “That’s what I thought. But it turns out your old buddy isn’t even the first to bring it off. There was a terrorist group in Germany, one of the Red Squads according to Interpol, that actually made one.”

  I didn’t believe it, and my face must have said so.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That was my reaction, too. But think of this: Do you remember a few years back a college student—an English major, not someone from Caltech or M.I.T.—made a bet that he could draw up plans for an atomic bomb just by reading non-classified material available in any library? He won the bet, you know. Won it in just two weeks. Without half trying!”