It came in a flash, his whole destiny flickering before his eyes, like a newsreel unspooling. A jittery image of himself, a Borsalino bowler on his head, Malacca walking stick in his hand, a topcoat of finest Italian wool, standing in an elegant drawing room with tall curtains and chandeliers. And pieces of gold, they were funneling down from the top edge of the screen, the ceiling, the sky, twirling like long sparkling ribbons in front of him and through his hands, his fingers, and to the carpet beneath him where it massed in enormous piles, a pirate’s booty out of a child’s picture book.
It came to him like that.
It was like St. Paul, wasn’t it, a mop standing in for a horse hoof. And standing there, he laughed like a drunken fool, teetering and spinning like a top because it was all there, waiting for him. He just had to take it.
It was all the clearing house totals, you see. Published each day in the financial press.
He’d kept the pages with each day’s totals in stacks tied with string. They sat in the corner of the basement next to the bags of salt. He’d kept them because he liked to watch the turn, the tilt, the romance of the rising and falling totals. He’d kept them for reasons he hadn’t known before but knew now.
Carrying those papers, strings slipped over his fingers, he walked to the mahogany-walled warren of the floor’s head broker, Mr. Thornton, the one who proudly displayed a photograph of himself astride a powerful horse, polo mallet in hand.
He sat at Mr. Thornton’s desk, pulled out a scratch pad and pencil, and went to work.
He sat there, a pile of ginger nuts, a few stray cigarettes to fire his mind, paper and grease pencil in hand. He knew it would work, had known it back in that closet. But he wasn’t taking any chances. He would play with those numbers all night, making sure...
“I sat at that desk,” he told her now, “and time passed like two beats of my heart and then it was dawn. My hands covered with ink, dear lady, and I felt drunk as a preacher, and just like a preacher, kissed by God, because I knew. I knew.”
When he told her this, she felt like she was fighting him off, heel of hand to chest, knees tucked high, and it was hard, because he looked lit from within, a Midas in a felt fedora with the voice of a soft-tongued minister with a pure, pure heart.
Even as she fought, however, she felt the something tight inside her, the thing she kept fitted tight and compact inside her all day every day, start to loosen, the hard bolts that held it together giving way slowly and falling. And she hated this feeling because she knew the tightness and it kept her and it was all she had.
When he talked, he used his hands, which were graceful, lithe, delicate, didn’t fit with his round face, his big barrel chest, his heavy lidded eyes. When he talked, he created pictures for her, with his hands, with his silver-toned voice, the way he kept his eyes on her and at the same time some imagined place over her left shoulder where, he assured them both, a shimmering future lay. A future beckoning them, artlessly.
Once it was...
Then it was...
Now it would be...
She looked at him, at his eager eyes flickering, daring her to come and join his dream like it wasn’t a dream at all but a thing you could lay your hands on and feel under each finger like the ropy filaments on a mop.
The only thing that’s real, she kept telling herself, is the pain in my curved back. No, she wouldn’t join that dream. He hadn’t earned the right. Didn’t he know all that was real to her was her five dollars a week plus bus fare? Didn’t he see he’d have to put her hands on something more than a fancy man’s story to make it matter for her now? She was twenty-eight years old, twenty-eight years too old for the soft-tongued promises of handsome men leaning over her tired bed.
It’s not enough anymore, she told him. It was once but not anymore. I have to be able to lay my hands on it. Can you do that for me? Can you make it real?
I can, he said. My dear, I can.
“So what did you figure out down there in that closet? A way to beat the bankers?” she said, forcing a toughness in her voice. “You think you’re going to make a fat pot on the stock market with your handful of dollars a week?”
He shook his head. “I’m not playing the market, my girl. I’m makin a market.”
“And what’s for sale in your market, my man? What are we buying?”
“Same as Wall Street. A glimmer down the road.”
She shook her head. “Don’t tell me you’re just talking about another numbers racket.” When she met him, he was a runner for a policy game, taking bets from hotel customers. “I don’t make time with racketeers.”
He smiled and rose from his chair, walking to the edge of the bed. “It’s no racket. It’s honest as your furrowed brow, m’lady. It’s a true thing.”
“Sounds to me like you’re just talking another numbers game, fat chances and day wages down. Bolita all over again,” she said, still shaking her head. She told him how her auntie had played every day for years, a penny down each morning and hit five dollars once in a blue moon. They drew the numbers at the cigar store, pulling numbered ball bearings from a sack behind the counter. Sometimes Auntie took her for the drawing and sometimes she was the one chosen to pluck the ball bearings from the soft muslin pouch that made her fingertips smell like sweet tobacco.
When Auntie needed that operation on her neck to take out the swollen tumor the size of a large lemon, she had no money to pay for it. The charity hospital took her instead. Everyone said the doctor who removed it smelled like apple jack. She died the next morning, her face gray and frozen. She could picture her auntie’s face now, the awful way the skin pearled along the bones, like wax.
Not three months later, word spread that the smiling cigar store owner had been rigging the numbers for years, palming duplicate ball bearings on days when it suited him. Before anything could happen, the store was shuttered up and he was long gone. Someone thought they spotted him on the platform at Pennsylvania Station, getting on a train to parts south.
A lot of the bolita bankers closed up shop after that, one after another. “When I played the game, that lady was a virgin,” one of them said. “Now she is a whore.”
He smiled when she told him this. He’d been hoping she would take him to just this point. It was what it was all about.
He recalled his favorite teacher at Brooklyn Boys High School, dark-eyed, timid Mrs. Koplon, who stayed after school with him, who filled the blackboard with glorious clouds of numbers, the chalk dust swirling around their heads.
And now he began talking softly, gently, just like Mrs. Koplon. Numbers aren’t just what you have or you don’t have in your pocket, bus fare or shoe-leathering it, steak on a fine plate or canned hash, he told her. Do you want to see what they can do? Because they have a power, my dear, if you let them work their witchery. Do you want to see what we can make them do?
Of course she did. Of course. But she said nothing.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handfull of coins gathered from his second job, porter at the Hotel Walcott four days a week.
He let them slip through his fingers onto the bedspread beside her. A penny, a nickel, a dime.
The coins resting there, shimmering a little with each breath, each faint twist of her body as she raised it to see them better, to see his hands fluttering over them.
He sat down on the bed beside her. She let him. This was something.
“What are the odds, my girl? Tell me now. What are the odds you draw that shiny liberty-head?”