“One in three,” she said, barely a whisper. “One in three.”
“So you’d play?”
“I’d play. Sure. I’d play.”
“So in a three-digit number game, what are the odds of picking the right three numbers?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know that,” she said, not meeting his eyes.
“You pick a four first. How many ways can you go wrong?” he asked, tender like the man at post office when she was small, the one with the whiskers who never made her wait in line, and together they counted. She lifted one finger to his, raised hands, fingers spread, and they counted.
“Nine,” she said. “Nine,” she said again.
“So pick your three numbers. What are your odds?” he repeated. Taking her hand in his, in the soft center of his palm, he spread three of her fingers over three coins.
She let her fingertips graze the coins. Turning her body, she could feel the crisp edges of the sugar burns beneath the cool.
“One in 999?” she ventured.
He nodded, so pleased with her, this girl, pulled from school by her mother at age thirteen to go to work at the Loth Fair & Square Ribbon factory before it shut down.
Reaching down, he lifted the newspaper that stood like a flag in his coat pocket. He held it folded in front of her and pointed to smudgy columns:
Exchanges: $823,411,011
Balances: $ 97,425,366
With his grease pencil, he’d circled the 2 and 3 in the first figure and the 7 in the second figure.
“The rules will be simple,” he said. “They’ll never change. The numbers in those three columns make up the number that pays that day. So today, it’d be 237. You play 237 and you hit it. The big time.”
Pointing to the columns again, he said, “The totals create a random number each day, my girl. And it’s published in the daily papers everyday for all to see. Do you see how that changes everything?”
“Because the game can’t be fixed,” she said, even as she tried to imagine a way it could. Tried to imagine a way to make him wrong. “You can’t rig the numbers.”
My, was she fast. He knew she would be. It was why he’d waited so long for her.
“That’s why this is different,” he said, but they both recognized what he was really saying: That’s why I’m different. “No drawing of numbers, no silky hands slipping favorites behind the counter. And you don’t need to spread the word about the winning number. You don’t need any operation at all except to collect and, when someone hits, pay out. I’ll pay 600-to-1 to those dear souls who hit.”
“Not 999-to-1?”
“No,” he said with a loose grin that made her eyes unfocus, her feet arch. He was very close to her on the bed and she could smell tobacco and ginger, and she could feel his weight shifting her, sinking her toward him.
“It’s all so simple,” he added, almost a whisper, as if to himself. “And yet someone needed to think of it. And now they have.”
“I’d never play those odds,” she said, her breath slightly fast.
“You wouldn’t,” he smiled. “Not you. Nor me, my girl.”
He flicked one of the coins with the tip of his finger. It flipped over on her belly, sending a wave of soft heat all the way up to her nostrils. He flicked another, and then one more.
“But lots of fine, warm, striving folks would,” he said. “For a promise.”
He set his hand down on her torso, each coin pushing into her. His hands on her, his warm palms pressing the coins cool onto her skin.
We all want a promise, she thought.
“And here’s why,” he said, and they both looked at the coins on her skin. “And here’s why.”
But it wasn’t just that. She knew that it was the same for them as it was for every cleaning lady, line worker, porter, janitor, seamstress, who would put coins down for the clearinghouse racket; it wasn’t these thin scales of copper, bronze, silver, gold. It was the promise. It was grander than that, and they were smarter. It had to mean more, didn’t it? Yes, she told herself. It was the promise. And what could be hard and mean about a promise?
And she could feel it and she rested her hands on his and they interlaced and, in the pockets between their braided fingers, she could still see that liberty-head glint.
And she smiled and kept her eyes fixed down on that flash of mercury because it was the most real thing she’d ever known, this hard-struck illusion. It would be real for them.
Legend has it that Casper Alexander Holstein, Harlem’s “King of Policy,” invented the clearinghouse totals racket while sitting in a janitor’s closet amid mops and brooms. J. Saunders Redding wrote in 1934 that Holstein “combined the prosaic traits of a financier with the dizzy imaginative flights of a fingerless Midas,” recounting how he was studying the clearinghouse totals late one night when the idea “struck him between the eyes [and] he let out an uproarious laugh and in general acted like a drunken man.” Within a year he owned “three of the finest apartment buildings in Harlem, a fleet of expensive cars, a home on Long Island, and several thousand acres of farmland in Virginia.” A generous philanthropist, Holstein became one of the foremost patrons of the Harlem Renaissance. His luck, however, would run out. By the late 1920s, Dutch Schultz had wiped out all of Harlem’s policy bankers and seized control of the numbers racket. As Claude McKay wrote, “And the ’clat in the atmosphere, which formerly made Harlem hum like a beehive, went out of the game forever.”
When Holstein died in 1944, the headline read: Former Policy King in Harlem Dies Broke
The basher
by Jason Starr
Hoboken, New Jersey
Before 9/11 and after the millennium, when most of the dotcoms became dot-bombs, I got fired from my job as a Java programmer. To say I left Delivero.com on bad terms would be an understatement. It took two security guards to get me out of the office in Jersey City, and if the goons hadn’t shown up I probably would’ve killed Alan Silver, the CEO. Although Silver was too much of a coward to admit it, he fired me for one reason and one reason only — because his wife had a thing for me. He saw her hitting on me at the holiday party, and after that he used every excuse he could think of to get rid of me — lack of motivation, poor interpersonal skills, not a team player, tardiness. Yeah, right. It was because his slutty trophy wife wanted my body. That was it. End of story.
The job market was tight back then, with so many Net companies folding left and right, and it didn’t help that I’d left Delivero on bad terms and couldn’t get a recommendation. I’d made some money on stock options, but Silver, that cocksucker, had canned me right before annual bonuses were given out, costing me about fifty grand. I explored a lawsuit, but the lawyers I talked to either told me I didn’t have a case or wanted to charge me up the wazoo. After several months out of work, I was starting to go through my money and needed a source of income, so I became a full-time day trader.
I knew I could make big money in the stock market. Yeah, I know, who didn’t feel that way in the ’90s, right? To hell with baseball; trading stocks had become the new national pastime. But for me, it wasn’t a fad. I had a knack for picking winners, spotting trends, and timing the market, and I felt like I could clean up if I put my mind to it. I wanted to take this thing seriously. I converted the bedroom of my condo in Hoboken into a home office and moved my bed out into the living room. I opened a few online trading accounts, bought all the state-of-the-art software and an Aeron chair to sit my ass down on, and I got to work.