“All right, all right.”
The proprietor made a resigned gesture. Then he nodded to the girl and returned to his magazine. Disappointed, the guys in their mid-thirties concentrated on their drinks.
“And where is your phone?”
The proprietor took his time. Then he looked up and said: “We don’t have one. We use smoke signals.”
Was that ever a riot. The guys at the bar almost fell off their stools, and the proprietor had to wipe tears from his eyes. While the three kept on erupting into renewed guffaws, the girl put a phone on the counter and pushed it toward me, flashing me an embarrassed smile under cover of the beer taps. After the wild merriment subsided, I dialed Slibulsky’s and Gina’s number. I let it ring for a long time. Then I hung up and received my beer. I sucked it down in one go, nodded to the girl, and walked to the door. A roar came just as I grabbed the doorknob: “Hey, you haven’t paid!” I opened the door.
“I’ll send you a buffalo hide by the end of the week. That should pay for the beer.”
9
“Come on, come on, try it, double your money-keep your eye on it and win! Where’s the ball? Here? No. Here? No. Here it is! Let’s keep going-a hundred marks on the table, no tricks, no double bottom-this is an honest game. Keep your eye on it.…”
The small white ball skittered from left to right, up and down, bounced off the sidewalk, reappeared sometimes between his fingers, sometimes under one of the three matchboxes, and finally disappeared. Once more he switched the boxes around, stopped, waved a wad of hundred-mark bills in the air and looked around with an innocent expression.
“Where’s the ball?”
He had been kneeling on the sidewalk for ten minutes, whirling things around, and had taken two intoxicated Japanese and a small-town loudmouth in a deerskin outfit for four hundred marks. Twenty or so male heads waved skeptically in the April wind. All of them knew it was impossible to win, but all of them kept staring at his wad of bills.
The wind gusted heavily, cars honked, people ran, and a loudspeaker voice proclaimed a revolution in the realm of dishwashing brushes, but silence reigned in the circle around the shell game guy. After he clapped his hands and got ready to rattle off his spiel again, a Pole took two steps forward, placed a boot on the box to the left, extracted a hundred-mark bill from his wallet, and said: “Show.”
The men in the circle came alive; some of them nodded approval, some turned away, shaking their heads.
The man contemplated the boot. “Do I look like a shoeshine boy?”
The Pole shrugged and bent down. But just as he was about to pick up the box, a short fat guy stumbled out of the void, uttered some drunken babble, and knocked him over. A loud murmur rose from the audience, and before the Pole had gotten up, cursing, and brushed off his pants, and the other guy had vanished again, the ball had changed places.
I leaned against the display window of a sex shop, smoked a cigarette, and studied the entrance to the Eros-Center Elbestrasse.
It was almost six o’clock. The street vendors were packing up their wares.
Just as the Pole got ready to punch out the con man, the plastic door-flaps flew open and Slibulsky came bouncing down the stairs. I waited until he had reached the crossing. Just as I tossed my cigarette away, the Pole came crashing into my side. I fell down on the sidewalk, he fell on top of me, and both of us ended up in the gutter. He was groaning and not making any attempt to get off of me. They must have punched him with a knuckle-duster. One of his incisors was gone, and his mouth was spraying blood like a leaky hose. I pushed him aside, got to my feet, and looked around. Slibulsky had disappeared.
“Sorry, but how could I know that the Pollack would lose his cool that way?” He was a member of the shell game gang; not yet eighteen, milky skin, an old man’s pouches under his eyes. He, too, had made a bet, but he had won. A decoy. Now he shifted his weight from one leg to the other, rubbed his ironclad fist, and waited for my reaction. Maybe he thought I was one of the boys of the red-light district it’s better not to mess with. “But I am sorry, ’cause of your suit, I mean.”
I checked and noted that I did, indeed, look as if I had just come from a butchering party.
“Yeah, that’ll be some dry cleaning bill …”
He retreated a step. “Yeah, well-”
“But maybe we can settle this some other way. I’m sure you know Ernst Slibulsky, the guy who works over there at the center?”
“The guy with the lumpy nose?”
“That’s him. He’s got a broken arm. I’d like to know where that happened.”
“Where he broke his arm? No idea. I just run into him once in a while. And I hear people talk.”
“And where do you run into him?”
“Around here. He’s always in and out of there, and sometimes he’s over there in The Die.”
“Ah-”
“Hey, man, you’re not a cop, are you?”
I looked up and shrugged. “Something like that.”
Looking as if he had stepped on something, he said “Shit!” He ran over to his buddies and gave them the scram sign. Within two seconds, the shell game arena was empty.
In the meantime, the Pole had managed to sit up. He leaned against a car tire and patted his lips with a corner of his shirt.
I lit a cigarette and stuck it between his fingers. He nodded absentmindedly. That was his only reaction. Maybe he didn’t smoke. I slapped him on the shoulder, mumbled a few encouraging words, and crossed the street.
The Smiling Die should really have been called “The Smiling Chinese.” The probability of a smiling die was as unlikely as the probability of an unsmiling Mr. Wang. No matter if men who had lost everything crawled weeping to his doorstep, the police conducted a raid, or the Mafia broke every fixture in the place-the small man from Hong Kong sat behind the counter, his arms crossed over his chest, and smiled as if the world were one big spring roll. At the time it was said that he was abroad. Two months ago, someone had strangled Mrs. Wang and tossed a young fellow and a wardrobe out of her bedroom window on the fourth floor. Since then, Mr. Wang’s bodyguard was in charge of business. Schlumpi, or “Ass-with-Ears” Peter, never smiled. Even if he had smiled, no one would have noticed: after a car racing accident, the skin on the lower half of his face had been replaced by a graft from his backside.
The two small rooms and bar were down in the basement. They were furnished with tables for roulette, blackjack, and craps, chessboards and timers. The joint, once elegant, had come down in the world. Everything was ramshackle and stained, even the dealer. He was wearing a dark suit and a bow tie, but a button was missing on his shirt, and his cuffs were frayed. Narrow windows permitted a view of high heels ambling back and forth. Eleven guys were sitting around the roulette table, drinking beer and losing money. I stood at the bar, drinking beer and waiting. The woman behind the counter kept glancing at my suit with a mildly horrified look but did not say anything. No one said anything except for the dealer.
Ten minutes later a door next to the bar, marked “Office”, opened and Schlumpi, wearing a white wolf fur coat, stepped behind the cash register. After he had tossed in a bundle of bills and closed the drawer, he looked up and remarked, after a brief pause: “What do you know, it’s the Robin Hood of Istanbul.”
The door opened again, and Slibulsky came out with a man I didn’t know. Slibulsky gave a start. “Kayankaya-what are you doing here?”
“Having a beer, and listening to Schlumpi’s old jokes.”
“Oh …”
While Slibulsky took his leave from the guy I didn’t know, Schlumpi leaned on the counter, pointed at my suit, and whispered through his scarred and lipless hole of a mouth: “Here’s another joke-brand new: Kayankaya’s been giving head to a cunt on the rag.”