Grifter's Game

by Lawrence Block

  I looked at the walls and waited for him to come back. He did, holding a little paper sack neatly rolled. “Thirty nickels for a dollar,” he said. “Bargain day at the zoo. You picked a good time. The store is overstocked so we have a sale. You want to count ’em?”

  I shook my head. If he wanted to cheat me, a count wouldn’t make any difference. I was reaching for my wallet when I remembered something else that I needed.

  “A kit,” I said. “I could use a kit.”

  He looked amused. “For you?”

  “For anybody.”

  He shrugged. “That’s a dime more.”

  I told him that was okay. He went away again and came back with a flat leather box that looked as though it ought to contain a set of draftsman’s tools. I took the box and the sack and gave him one hundred and ten dollars—a dollar and a dime in his language. He folded the bills twice and stuck them into his shirt pocket. For small change, maybe.

  On the way back to the center of town he became almost talkative. He asked me what I was doing in Vegas and I told him I was just passing through, which was true enough.

  “I travel a lot,” I said. “Wherever there are people. Places get warm if you stay too long.”

  “Depends how well connected you are.”

  I shrugged.

  “See me when you hit Vegas next,” he said. “I’m always in the same place. Or ask and they’ll take a message for me. Sometimes the price gets better than it was today. We can always deal.”

  “Sure.”

  Just before he let me out of the car he started to laugh. I asked him what was so funny.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I was just thinking. It’s such a groovy business. Depressions don’t even touch us. Isn’t that a gas?”

  I left my bags in my room at the Dunes. I wasn’t ready to check out, not for the time being. And at 3:30 I caught the bus to Tahoe. It was not crowded. Neither were the roads and we made good time. It was a good trip—hot sun, clear air. I sat by myself and looked out the window and smoked cigarettes. The bus was air-conditioned and the smoke from the end of my cigarette trailed up along the window pane and disappeared.

  We hit Lake Tahoe in time for dinner. And I was hungry. I found the washroom in the bus station first, tossed a quarter in a slot and let myself into a private cubicle with fresh towels and a big wash basin. I washed up, straightened my tie and felt almost human.

  I ate a big dinner in a hurry. But I barely tasted the food. Then I left the restaurant and made the rounds. It was too early at first but I was looking anyway. If she was in Tahoe she would be gambling. And there just weren’t that many casinos. Sooner or later we were going to run into each other.

  In the first casino I went over to the crap table and made dollar bets against the shooter. When my turn came up I passed the dice and left. I was a few dollars ahead and could not have cared less.

  In the second casino I put the crap table profits into a slot machine. I kept looking around for her but didn’t find her. So I left.

  Then I passed a men’s shop, saw a hat in the window, and remembered that it might be better all across the board if I saw her before she saw me. A hat was supposed to be a good prop, altering the shape of your head or something. There are places where a man with a hat on stands out. The owners themselves don’t know enough to take their hats off inside.

  I went inside and bought the hat. It was an Italian import, a Borsalino, and it was priced at twenty bucks. It seemed sort of silly, shelling out twenty bucks for a hat I was going to wear once and throw away. But I reminded myself that it no longer mattered what anything cost. A five-dollar hat might do as well, but I was not in a store that sold five-dollar hats. I bought the Borsalino and wore it out of the store.

  It didn’t look bad. It had a high crown and a narrow brim. It was black, very soft.

  I studied my reflection in the store window. I experimented until the hat looked good and did its job well. Then I went to the next casino.

  I picked them up a few minutes past nine in the Charlton Room. I was nursing a bourbon sour and watching the roulette wheel when I saw them. They were at the crap table just a few yards away. I took my drink with me and moved off.

  I had known he would be with her. I could even have told you what he looked like. Black hair—black, not dark brown—and broad shoulders and expensive clothes. Hair combed too neatly, hairs always perfectly in place. Clothes worn too well, too casual to be true. And an easy laugh. The looks and effect of two types only, gigolos and fags. He wasn’t a fag.

  I knew the rules of the game. She would give him a certain amount of money to play with and he would keep it, win or lose. Of course he would tell her that he’d lost, and she could believe it or not, depending upon her own state of mind.

  What she probably didn’t know was that he also got a cut of her net losses. This was the house’s idea, so that he would keep her playing as long as possible. She couldn’t have known this, but she wouldn’t have cared anyway. The money didn’t matter to her, not if she was getting all that she was paying for.

  I tried to hate the gigolo and couldn’t. He wasn’t hurting me, for one thing. For another, the reason I knew so much about his particular method of earning a living was that I had played the same record myself from time to time. It’s tough feeling superior to yourself.

  She had the dice now. But she wasn’t conforming to the stereotype of the woman with the kept man in her pocket. Usually a woman in that position is trying her damnedest to have all the fun in the world. A perpetual smile, wild gesturing and brittle laughter. And underneath it all a profound uneasiness. The last shows up in the hand clutching too tightly at an elbow, the laugh at something not at all funny, the general impression of being a semi-competent actress at a very important audition. Auditioning for what? The world? Or for herself?

  But Mona wasn’t like that. She seemed so desperately bored it was astounding. The guy next to her was pretty as a picture and she hardly seemed to know he was there. The action at the crap table was as fast as it ever gets and it bored her stiff. She threw the dice, not as if she hated them, but as if she was trying to get rid of them.

  I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. I kept looking at her face and trying to reconcile the beauty and, yes, innocence, with the person I knew she was. I looked at her, stared at her, and once again took all the pieces of the puzzle and glued them together with library paste. I tried to imagine living with her, and then I tried to imagine living without her, and I realized that either alternative was equally impossible.

  Looking at Mona made me remember the other girl, the girl at the Eden Roc. I had forgotten her name, but I remembered that she lived in the Bronx and worked for an insurance company and wanted to have fun on her vacation. I remembered the love we had made, and I remembered how she looked when she dropped off to sleep. I remembered thinking how good it would be to fall in love with her, and marry her, and live with her.

  But I had forgotten more than her name. I tried to picture her face and failed. I tried to recall her voice and missed. The only picture I got was an abstract one composed of the qualities of the girl herself. They were fine qualities. Mona lacked almost all of them but beauty.

  Yet everything about Mona stayed in my mind.

  I found a slot machine that took nickels and gave it one of mine. I pulled the lever very slowly and watched the dials to see what would happen. I got a bell, a cherry and a lemon. The nickel slots, I discovered, were more fun than the dollar slots. I couldn’t win anything and I couldn’t lose anything. I could only waste time and watch the dials spin.

  I tried again. This time I lucked out with three of something or other. Twelve nickels galloped back at me.

  I could not live with her and I could not live without her. An interesting problem. I had imagined, earlier, what it would be like to have Mona for a wife. I knew how her mind worked. Keith was dead, not because she had hated him, not because she had wanted me, but because she no longer needed him. He was ex
cess baggage. And, because he was excess baggage, he had been jettisoned in flight. It would make no tremendous difference if I took his place. Not that she would kill me, but that she would leave me, or do her damnedest to make me leave her. It would not be any good at all.

  And I knew damn well what would happen if I tried living without her. Every night, no matter where I was or who I was with, I would think about her. Every night I would picture her face, and remember her body, and wonder where she was and who she was sleeping with and what she was wearing and—

  One of the most common murder patterns in the world is that of a man who murders a woman, proclaiming If I can’t have her, nobody can. It had never made any sense to me whatsoever. Now I was beginning to understand.

  But I had decided that I could not kill her.

  I could not live with her or without her. I could not kill her. And I certainly did not intend to kill myself. It looked insoluble.

  I dropped another nickel in the slot machine and thought that I was very clever to have hit the answer all by myself. I pulled the lever and watched the dials.

  They hit one more casino after that one. It was midnight when they left the second one, midnight or a little after. They’d had a few drinks and they both seemed a little bit high. They walked and I followed them to the Roycroft. It was the best hotel in Tahoe and I had more or less figured all along that they’d be staying there.

  I waited outside, then hit the lobby after they were already in the elevator. I looked around the lobby but this time I didn’t even notice the money-smell in the air. Hell, the Eden Roc was just as plush. And I’d paid the tab there all by myself. Well, almost. At any rate, I was getting tougher to impress.

  I saw the bell captain and walked over to him. He looked me over carefully from the new Borsalino to Keith’s shoes on my feet. Then his eyes and mine got together.

  “That couple that just came in,” I said. “Did you notice them?”

  “I may have.”

  Straight from Hollywood, this one. I smiled gently. “Mighty fine-looking couple,” I said. “You know, I bet you aren’t too observant. Here they are, staying here, and you don’t notice them at all.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “What I mean,” I said, “is that I’ll bet you twenty dollars you don’t even know what room they’re staying in.”

  He thought about it. “Awright,” he said. “Eight-oh-four.”

  I gave him the twenty. “That was very good,” I said. “But it doesn’t move me. I’ll bet you a hundred you don’t have a key that would open their door.”

  He almost smiled. “No trouble,” he said.

  “Not for the world.”

  He vanished. He returned. He traded me a key for a hundred-dollar bill.

  “If there’s trouble,” he said, “you don’t know where you got that key.”

  “I found it under a flat stone.”

  “You got it,” he said. “Keep it quiet, huh?”

  “Sure.”

  He looked me over, very carefully. “I don’t think I get it,” he said.

  “For a hundred and twenty you don’t have to.”

  He shrugged elaborately. “Curiosity,” he said. “The human comedy.”

  “It killed the cat.”

  Another profound shrug. “You her husband?”

  I shook my head.

  “I didn’t think so. But—”

  “That guy upstairs with her,” I said. “You’ve seen him? The one with the shoulders and the hair?”

  The expression on his face told me just how much regard he had for the boy upstairs.

  “He’s her husband,” I explained. “I’m her jealous lover. The bitch is two-timing me.”

  He sighed. It was better than a shrug. “You don’t want to talk straight,” he said, “maybe I’ll watch television. They’re funnier on television.”

  He had a right to his opinion. I found a chair in the lobby and sat in it, giving them time to get started at whatever they were going to do. The ceiling was sound-proofed and I tried to count the little holes in it. I’m not enough of an idiot to count the holes themselves, of course. I count the holes in one of the squares, and then I see how many squares there are on the whole ceiling. And then I multiply it out.

  What the hell. It’s something to do.

  I finished a cigarette, then got up and put another one in my mouth. I set it on fire and dragged hard on it. I took the smoke way down deep in my lungs and held onto it. Then I let it out, slowly, in a single thin column that held together for a long while. You can get slightly dizzy that way, but the dizziness can make you feel more confident. I felt very confident.

  I walked over to the elevator. The op was reading the morning paper. He was studying the morning line. It is a hell of a thing when you live in Nevada and still have to play the horses. I shook my head sadly and he looked up at me.

  “Eight,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything. He piloted the car to the eighth floor and I got out. The door closed and he sailed down to the main floor again to study the racing form. I hoped he would lose every race. I felt very mean.

  I walked one way, came to a room number, and found out that I was headed the wrong way. I turned around and worked my way to 804. There was a Do Not Disturb sign on it which somehow seemed very funny. I thought that it would be fun to knock so that they could tell me to go away.

  I didn’t.

  Instead I finished the cigarette. I walked all the way back to the elevator to dunk it in an urn filled with sand instead of grinding it into the thick carpet. Then I walked all the way back and stood in front of the door some more.

  A sliver of light came through the door at the bottom. Not much. As if one little lamp were turned on.

  Which meant the stage was set.

  I took the key out of my pocket. I stuck it into the lock. It went in soundlessly and turned soundlessly. I said a silent prayer of thanks to the mercenary bell captain. A penknife is effective, but it is not subtle. I felt very much like being subtle.

  It was a very nice hotel. The door did not even squeak. I opened it all the way and there they were.

  The main light was off but they had left the closet light on, which was very considerate of them. It let me see without squinting. There was quite a bit to see.

  She was on the bed. Her head was back on the pillow and her eyes were closed. Her legs were bent and parted. He was between them. He was earning his keep and working very hard at it. He seemed to be enjoying it. So did she. But there was no way of telling with either of them.

  I stepped inside, very thankful that Keith’s shoes didn’t squeak. I turned and closed the door. They did not hear me or notice me in any way.

  They were too busy.

  For several very long seconds I watched them. Once, long ago, when I had been too young to know what it was all about, I happened to watch my mother and father making love. I didn’t really know what they were doing. But I knew what Mona and her friend were doing and there was something almost hypnotic about the performance. Maybe it was the rhythm. I’m not sure.

  Then it was time. I really wanted to come on with something extremely clever but my brain refused to supply anything really appropriate. It was a shame. You don’t get too many opportunities like that one.

  But nothing clever came to mind. And I didn’t have all night. So what I said, finally, was about as trite as you can get. Concise and to the point, but not very original.

  I said: “Hello, Mona.”

  13

  They didn’t even finish what they were doing. They stopped at once. He rolled away from her and came up on the balls of his feet while she lay there trying to cover herself with her hands. A silly gesture.

  He could have dressed, tied his shoes, and walked right past me. I had no quarrel with him. I wasn’t ready to run around proclaiming my undying love for him, but I wasn’t ready to kick his face in, either. He was out of his element. A bedroom bouncing-bee had turned into more than
that and it was time for him to pick up his pants and go home.

  That wasn’t his style. He could read it only one way—I had intruded on his privacy, interrupted his sport, made him look foolish. That was the only diagnosis those beautiful blue eyes could report to that muscle-bound brain, and there was only one way that body could react to that sort of information.

  He rushed me.

  He must have played football once. He came with his head way down and his arms outstretched. Anybody looks silly enough like that but he looked sillier. He was nude, and all men look ridiculous nude. But there was something else. He rushed me, and I stared at the top of his head, and I saw that every last strand of hair remained magically in place.

  I kicked him in the face.

  He did a little back-flip and wound up sitting on his can. The point of the shoe had come into pleasant contact with his jaw and he was dizzy—unhurt, unmarked, but dizzy.

  He tried to get up.

  The funny thing is that I still wasn’t mad at him at all. But I knew that I had to show him just where he stood in the overall scheme of things. I did not want him in my hair. I had more important things on my mind than the stupid son of a bitch.

  I did not bother playing fair. That would have been stupid. I waited until he got halfway up and then I kicked his face in again. It was a better kick this time. It split his lip and took out a tooth. He wouldn’t be pretty for the next month or so.

  He wouldn’t be able to earn a living, either. Because I put the next kick between his legs. He made a little-girl sound way in the back of his throat that turned into a strangled moan before he was done with it.

  Then he blacked out.

  I turned to Mona. She was all wrapped up in a robe now. I could tell that she was frightened but she managed to hide most of the fear. I had to give her credit.

  I waited her out. Finally she tried a smile, gave it up, and sighed. “I’m supposed to say something,” she said. “I suppose. But where do I start?”

  I lit a cigarette.

  “I would have come to Miami,” she said. “Except I was afraid if we made contact too quickly—”