It wasn’t.
It wasn’t.
It wasn’t.
As it turned out, he needn’t have bothered. Martinez got the pot with a full house.
He had lost as much blood as he comfortably could, so he sat out the next hands munching Nibblies and gassing with the bar decoration, who was also the croupier. It was said she had a third interest in the club, but so dumb, could she? She was a yesser and yessed everything Ab cared to say. Nice breasts though, always damp and sticking to her blouses.
Martinez folded after only his third card and joined Ab at the bar. “How’d you do it, Lucky?” he jeered.
“Fuck off. I started out lucky enough.”
“A familiar story.”
“What are you worried—I won’t pay you back?”
“I’m not worried, I’m not worried.” He dropped a five on the bar and ordered sangria, one for the big winner, one for the big loser, and one for the most beautiful, the most successful businesswoman on West Houston, and so out into the heat and the stink.
“Some ass?” Martinez asked.
What with, Ab wanted to know.
“Be my guest. If I’d lost what you lost, you’d do as much for me.”
This was doubly irking, one, because Martinez, who played a dull careful game with sudden flashes of insane bluffing, never did worse than break even, and two, because it wasn’t true—Ab would not have done as much for him or anyone. On the other hand, he was hungry for something more than what he’d find at home in the icebox.
“Sure. Okay.”
“Shall we walk there?”
Seven o’clock, the last Wednesday in May. It was Martinez’s day off, while Ab was just sandwiching his excitement in between clock-out and clock-in with the assistance of some kind green pills.
Each time they passed one of the crosstown streets (which were named down here instead of numbered) the round red eye of the sun had sunk a fraction nearer the blur of Jersey. In the subway gallery below Canal they stopped for a beer.
The sting of the day’s losses faded, and the moon of next-time rose in the sky. When they came up again it was the violet before night, and the real moon was there waving at them. A population of how many now? Seventy-five?
A jet went past, coming in low for the Park, winking a jittery rhythm of red, red, green, red, from tail and wing tips. Ab wondered whether Milly might be on it. Was she due in tonight?
“Look at it this way, Ab,” Martinez said. “You’re still paying for last month’s luck.”
He had to think, and then he had to ask, “What luck last month?”
“The switch. Jesus, I didn’t think any of us were going to climb out from under that without getting burnt.”
“Oh, that.” He approached the memory tentatively, not sure the scar tissue was firm yet. “It was tight, all right.” A laugh, which rang half-true. The scar had healed, he went on. “There was one moment though at the end when I thought I’d flushed the whole thing down the toilet. See, I had the Identi-Band from the first body, what’s-her-name’s. It was the only thing I got from that asshole White. … ”
“That fucking White,” Martinez agreed.
“Yeah. But I was so panicked after that spill on the stairs that I forgot, see, to change them, the two bands, so I sent off the Schaap body like it was.”
“Oh Mary Mother, that would have done it!”
“I remembered before the driver got away. So I got out there with the Newman band and made up some story about how we print up different bands when we send them out to the freezers than when one goes to the oven.”
“Did he believe that?”
Ab shrugged. “He didn’t argue.”
“You don’t think he ever figured out what happened that day?”
“That guy? He’s as dim as Chapel.”
“Yeah, what about Chapel?” There if anywhere, Martinez had thought, Ab had laid himself open.
“What about him?”
“You told me you were going to pay him off. Did you?”
Ab tried to find some spit in his mouth. “I paid him off all right” Then, lacking the spit: “Jesus Christ.”
Martinez waited.
“I offered him a hundred dollars. One hundred smackers. You know what that dumb bastard wanted?”
“Five hundred?”
“Nothing! Nothing at all. He even argued about it. Didn’t want to get his hands dirty, I suppose. My money wasn’t good enough for him.”
“So?”
“So we reached a compromise. He took fifty.” He made a comic face.
Martinez laughed. “It was a damned lucky thing, that’s all I’ll say, Ab. Damned lucky.”
They were quiet along the length of the old police station. Despite the green pills Ab felt himself coming down, but ever so gently down. He entered pink cloudbanks of philosophy.
“Hey, Martinez, you ever think about that stuff? The freezing business and all that.”
“I’ve thought about it, sure. I’ve thought it’s a lot of bullshit.”
“You don’t think there’s a chance then that any of them ever will be brought back to life?”
“Of course not. Didn’t you see that documentary they were making all the uproar over, and suing NBC? No, that freezing doesn’t stop anything, it just slows it down. They’ll all just be so many little ice cubes eventually. Might as well try bringing them back from the smoke in the stacks.”
“But if science could find a way to … Oh, I don’t know. It’s complicated by lots of things.”
“Are you thinking of putting money into one of those damned policies, Ab? For Christ’s sake, I would have thought that you had more brains than that. The other day my wife …” He rolled his eyes blackamoor-style. “It’s not in our league, believe me.”
“That’s not what I was thinking at all.”
“So? Then? I’m no mind-reader.”
“I was wondering, if they ever do find a way to bring them back, and if they find a cure for lupus and all that, well, what if they brought her back?”
“The Schaap?”
“Yeah. Wouldn’t that be crazy? What would she think anyhow?”
“Yeah, what a joke.”
“No, seriously.”
“I don’t get the point, seriously.”
Ab tried to explain but he didn’t see the point now himself. He could picture the scene in his mind so clearly: the girl, her skin made smooth again, lying on a table of white stone, breathing, but so faintly that only the doctor standing over her could be sure. His hand would touch her face and her eyes would open and there would be such a look of astonishment.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Martinez said, in a half-angry tone, for he didn’t like to see anyone believing in something he couldn’t believe in, “it’s just a kind of religion.”
Since Ab could recall having said almost the same thing to Leda, he was able to agree. They were only a couple blocks from the baths by then, so there were better uses for the imagination. But before the last of the cloudbank had quite vanished, he got in one last word for philosophy. “One way or another, Martinez, life goes on. Say what you like, it goes on.”
Everyday Life In The Later Roman Empire
1
The three of them were sitting in the arbor watching the sun go down over her damp melon fields—Alexa herself, her neighbor Arcadius, and the pretty Hebrew bride he’d brought back from Thebes. Arcadius, once again, was describing his recent mysterious experience in Egypt, where in some shattered temple the immortal Plato had addressed the old man, not in Latin but a kind of Greek, and shown him various cheap-jack signs and wonders—a phoenix, of course; then a crew of blind children who had prophesied in perfect strophe and antistrophe, the holocaust of earth; finally (Arcadius drew this miracle from his pocket and placed it on the dial) a piece of wood that had metamorphosed to stone.