The Pole called.
Jake’s fingers were numb as he flipped his cards over. The Pole turned his over almost regally: a three and a Jack. Jake was conscious of a ripple around the table as everyone took in the cards. He didn’t bother watching the last two cards came out, and as it happened they made no difference. The dealer’s arm swept out and Jake’s last chips, the very very last trace of his Vegas money, was gone, absorbed into the Pole’s stack. Somebody nudged Jake and he stood up, letting some new player slip into his chair.
Jake didn’t care about any of it.
He was transfixed. The glasses. He was sure of it. The glasses were — what was he thinking, now? Magic? His mind skittered away from the word. Rigged, maybe. Some kind of advanced glass or something, that let you read blood pressure from six feet away. Science — all right, or magic, who cares? The glasses, it was the glasses allowed the Pole to see — not to see the cards, no, not that — the man. The glasses allowed the Pole to see the man. What he feared, what he hoped for. Call, raise, fold. What did the man across the table want you to do? That was all you had to know, really, wasn’t it? Dazed, Jake moved back against the wall, standing almost behind the Pole, where he wouldn’t have to see those lenses again. He watched the game for two hours. In that time he did see the Pole lose the occasional hand — well, after all, sometimes, no matter how good you are, just exactly the wrong card is going to come out on the river. What he never saw, not once, was the Pole doing what his opponent wanted him to do. He never bit on a bluff. He never called against the nuts. Not once.
It was the glasses. Had to be.
Take a man who’s just lost everything and show him the keys to the world, the genie’s lamp, the pot of gold. The response is automatic, Pavlov ringing need’s bell. It was the thought that echoed through Jake’s head again and again as he watched: Gotta have ’em.
Gotta.
Jake had never held a gun in his life. He tried to imagine cornering the Pole in some alley and demanding the glasses, and his brain flicked the picture off like a bad TV show. What alley, where? The Pole hardly ever left his penthouse, certainly didn’t wander through a lot of dark alleys. The Strip is kind of short on dark alleys. Burgle the penthouse, then? Again he couldn’t see it. Easy enough to get in, since he knew the place had that private elevator entrance, and Jake could still do anything he wanted with an elevator. Surely, though, the Pole never went out without the glasses, and if the Pole was there then Jake was right back to the gun he couldn’t picture in his hand. And then, of course, it was suddenly obvious.
Elevator.
Damned few people ever die in elevators. It turns out that, mile for mile, they’re the safest form of transportation ever invented. A modem elevator is pretty well impossible to crash. It’s got multiple cables, each capable of holding its weight several times over and protected by various fail-safes. It’s got brakes that kick on automatically if it starts to fall. There’s really only one way to convince an elevator to crash — and that’s to be the guy who designed it not to.
As soon as the thought crossed his mind Jake pivoted off the wall and dashed from the room, holding a hand over his mouth like he suddenly had to puke. He couldn’t risk the Pole looking at him and seeing what he wanted, which was an hour in that shaft before the Pole went home. He didn’t know how much time he had, how much longer the Pole would sit at the table. The Star was a block down the strip and Jake ran the whole way, thinking about the tools he would need and where to find them. Maintenance would have them — probably in the basement. Locked up? Maybe, but not very securely because who the hell would ever want them, and because there were so many more attractive things to steal. Find the tools, take the main elevator as high as he could, get out onto the roof — easy, the Star had a pool on the roof. Once there, find the little shack that marked the top of the Pole’s elevator and go to work.
By the time he got to the Star, Jake had the actual process — what wires and cables to cut, and where, and how to get around the backups — mapped out in his head. The hard part, the part that would make it a long, slow job, would be making it look like an accident. It was as he was breaking into the shaft twenty minutes later, having found the necessary tools just where he’d expected to, that he thought about how many enemies the Pole must have made over the last ten years. That was good; it would go a lot faster since there was no reason in the world to disguise it.
Five hours later the Pole walked into the front door of the Star. He nodded to the doorman and walked to the private elevator, tastefully screened from the rest of the lobby by a bank of ferns. The car that had brought him down was waiting there, unmoved since he’d gotten out of it. The last conscious act the Pole ever took was getting in and pushing the button for the top floor. The doors closed and the car rose nine floors at its usual stately pace — then plunged twelve rather more rapidly, turning the Pole into a whole new kind of Vegas legend.
Jake was waiting in the lowest subbasement, crowbar at the ready. The only thing that could go wrong now was for the glasses to be smashed, but he’d seen the aftermath of crashes before, and he knew that heads usually survived, the bodies below acting as giant spongy shock absorbers. Such was the case here. When the impact came it nearly knocked him off his feet, and he had a nasty moment when the crowbar seemed to get jammed in what was left of the doors, but in the end he was able to reach into the mangled box and pluck out a pair of sunglasses that could have been brand new, except for the odd spot or two of blood. Jake wiped them off and put them on, still warm from the dead man’s skin. He could hear shouts in the distance, feet pounding down the stairs. He hid around the corner and peeked out at the two casino security men who were the first to arrive, and as they came into view he saw, as though it was stamped on their foreheads, what they wanted: for nobody to have been in the box.
I don’t believe in the glasses, of course. Magic glasses that let you see what people want? Nothing would be handier in Vegas, but it’s all just part of the story. I can’t say whether Jocko believes in them or not. He certainly acts as though he does when he tells the story, especially when he gets to the end and describes Jake living just a year or two later in the penthouse that had belonged to the Pole. The way Jocko tells it, Jake still played, but just a few times a month; he was already getting too old to climb all those stairs. His daughter was still with him, still beautiful, still devoted, and every time Jake opened the door to one of her dates he saw exactly what the man wanted written in bold font and explicit detail across his face.
As far as Jocko is concerned Jake is a Vegas hero, one of the minor deities of the desert pantheon, the gambler who figured out how to beat the game. I wonder if it ever occurs to him, though, that sometimes Jake must have looked at his daughter, and seen what she wanted, and what she feared, and that it’s hard to see any way that works out to a winning hand.
Calculus for Blondes
John H. Dirckx
“A linear Casablanca between frozen vegetables,” said Mr. Wig, “is a second-rate dancer.”
Of course that wasn’t exactly what he said. And his name wasn’t Wig, either — it was Webber. But to Ashleigh Deventer, imprisoned in a dusty, airless classroom in first period on Friday morning, he might as well have said that for all the sense he was making. And he really should have been named Wig, with that funky brunette hairpiece that went with his corpsy complexion like a gob of ketchup on a prom gown.