“The wild card.”
“What if this game doesn’t have a wild card?”
“Every game got a wild card.”
“How does that work?”
“I was playin’ this guy down in the Keys one time. I was too much with the rum and he was just good enough to take advantage. Almost all my money was on the table and my cards tallied seventeen. It was a strong number but I knew he probably had a face card behind his nine.”
“So what did you do?”
“I smiled.”
“Smiled?”
“Smirked, really. Usually when I play, nuthin’ shows on my face. It’s not no act. I concentrate so hard on the cards or dice or that little ball that I ain’t got no energy to mug. And that there was my wild card. He knew he could beat me. He knew he probably would. But when I gave that brief grin he started to worry. He said, hit me, and that was it — the wild card had won.”
“How did you know that just a grin would push him?” I asked.
“You never know, Detective. You never know. If you wanna know you shouldn’t be at the table. If you wanna know, really you shouldn’t even be alive.”
I glanced at Loretta as he said those words. The thrill went through her like an icy breeze.
“I think the game’s over, Officer,” Lamont said.
“I still got seventeen dollars here.”
“I see, but a good risker knows not to leave a man totally broke. It’s mean and it’s bad karma too. ’Cause, you know, gamblin’s a game, not a war.”
“Are you tired, baby?” Loretta crossed the threshold into the light.
“I am.”
“Well, I guess it’s time to go.” I stood up feeling a little stiff after so many hours’ play.
“I hope I was helpful,” Lamont said. “I’m’a put these dollars up on my trophy shelf and hand ’em out to little kids at Halloween.”
Loretta walked me out. On the way she looped her arm with mine.
When we got to the door she leaned into me, saying, “You should come by more often, Joe.”
“Really? I got the feeling you didn’t approve of me.”
“I’m sorry. I just get into protective mode. But... you make him feel alive.”
“He’s a good man.”
“I know. I’m having his child.”
21
The next address on my list was on Fifth Avenue but not so far that I needed a taxi, or a trip in the dreaded subway that reminded me so much of Rikers. I walked to Central Park, crossed over to Fifth Avenue, and then to a slender, modern-looking building on Sixty-Sixth and Fifth.
I hadn’t been there in a couple of years, and, on top of that, when last there I had been in disguise. Back then the doorwoman was a man.
She had straightened blond hair the texture of dry straw but was still rather fetching. Her eyes were light brown and, at half the blackness of Lamont Charles, she was still dark-skinned — around my color.
“Excuse me.”
“Yes?” she asked through a leery half grin.
“Nigel Beard for Augustine Antrobus.”
Her auburn eyes tightened around that questioning sneer. She waited a moment, maybe giving me a chance to change my mind.
Maybe I considered leaving.
“A Nigel Beard for Mr. Antrobus,” she said into the microphone attached to her right ear.
Then the blond Black woman pursed her lips and nodded to some inner melody that took up the space of waiting. I remember wondering if she was a dancer or musician.
“You can go on up,” she said, shifting her gaze to me.
The three women office workers were all different but still young, beautiful, and of various so-called races. Lyle was the only actual remnant from my last visit. Pixie-like and thin, smelling of rose water and deadly as Cleopatra’s asp, he wore a lime-colored suit and leaned against the doorjamb that led to his master’s domain.
“May I help you?” the apparently Native American woman receptionist asked. All eyes were on me.
“You can show me in to see Augustine.”
“And you are?”
“Nigel Beard.”
“I’m sorry, but I’ve never heard of you and there is no meeting set on the schedule.”
If somebody asked me I would have said she’d been educated somewhere in the Ivy League.
“I don’t have an appointment, true, but he does know me.”
“Maybe it’s time for you to leave,” slight Lyle suggested.
He was armed, I was sure, and he probably had other tricks.
At a corner desk sat a very tall, very thin, very black-skinned woman. She had an earphone anchored to her left lobe. Her head and shoulders jerked up suddenly and she said, “He wants to see him.”
The nervous energy in the room evaporated.
“I know the way,” I said.
Pushing himself up and away from his post, Lyle countered, “I’ll take you.”
He led me down the slender outer hall with its window slits that looked down on Central Park.
It took nineteen steps to get to Augustine Antrobus’s office / man cave with its autumnal colors and dark wood furnishings.
That day the big, big man wore a three-piece maroon suit with a pale blue dress shirt and a tie that seemed to be derived from the colors of the dark rainbow that adorns a shallow oil slick.
“Mr. Beard,” Antrobus allowed. Even his voice was muscular.
“It’s good to see you again, Augustine.”
Lyle stiffened.
Antrobus smiled and then said to his death-dealing Passepartout, “You may leave us.”
Lyle sneered at me and moved from the room, a wraith being exorcised but at the same time infusing the atmosphere with his spite.
“Sit down, Mr. Beard,” Antrobus bellowed.
There were two wide-bottomed walnut chairs set at the outer orbit of a three-foot-wide globe of the moon. I took the closest seat while Antrobus moved his bulk from around his grand piano — size desk. When he sat it was with a satisfied sigh.
“Most people have globes of the Earth,” I observed.
“That’s like having a picture of yourself doing the job you’ve done your entire life. I’d rather think about the future.”
“Luna in your future?”
“I’m an investor in an international conglomerate that means to start colonization within the next ten years.”
“Then why not have a map of Mars on the wall?”
“I have that in my son’s room in Southampton.”
The demon master’s dark eyes were on me. His words were some kind of test, though I couldn’t discern the subject.
“The last time you were here you were bald with a beard and an extra forty pounds,” he said.
“There were a few people after me at that time — including you.”
“You cost me a very good agent.”
“If he was that good you two would have never parted company.”
Antrobus laughed. It was a loud sound — cannon-like. But it was also, in its own way, forgiving.
When the crashing mirth ended he said, “Tell me your name.”
“Joe Oliver.”
“What can I do for you, Joe Oliver?”
“Talk to me about illegal oil trafficking in the U.S. and elsewhere.”
“I don’t understand.” The words felt intimate, like a good friend trying to give advice.
“What I’m asking?” I wondered aloud.
“No. It’s just that you don’t seem to be a strike-it-rich kind of fellow.”
“I’m not. I just represent people like that — sometimes.”
Again that punishing and yet merciful laugh.
“Diesel fuel is modern-day hooch and the criminals that sell it are today’s bootleggers,” he said, still smiling. “They buy the heating oil for homes at a government discount and then sell it for vehicular fuel. The markup makes billions of illegal dollars every year, in every part of the globe.”