by Ken Grimwood
"I think now would be a real good time to change the subject," Jeff said curtly.
"Hey, look, I didn’t mean to insult anyone. Sharla’s quite a find; I envy you. I just feel like you’ve … I don’t know, grown up faster than anybody I ever knew. No value judgment intended. Shit, I suppose you could take it as a compliment. It’s just kind of strange, that’s all."
Jeff willed the tension out of his shoulders, sat back with his drink. "I suppose I’ve got a large appetite for life," he said. "I want to do a lot of things, and I want to do them fast."
"Well, you’ve got a hell of a head start on the flunkies of the world. More power to you. I hope it all works out as well as it has so far."
"Thanks. I’ll drink to that." They raised their glasses, silently agreed to ignore the strained moment that had passed between them.
"You mentioned that you told Sharla this would be a business meeting," Frank said.
"That’s right."
Frank sipped his Scotch. "So, is it?"
"That depends." Jeff shrugged.
"On what?"
"Whether you’re interested in what I have to suggest."
"After what you pulled off this summer? You think I’m not gonna listen to any other wild notions you might have?"
"This one is going to sound wilder than you imagine."
"Try me."
"The World Series. Two weeks from now."
Frank cocked one eyebrow. "Knowing you, you probably want to bet on the Dodgers."
Jeff paused. "That’s right."
"Hey, let’s get serious; I mean, you did one bang-up job calling the Derby and the Belmont, but come on! With Mantle and Maris back in, and the first two games here in New York? No way, man. No fucking way."
Jeff leaned forward, spoke softly but insistently. "That’s how it’s gonna go. A shutout, the Dodgers four straight."
Frank frowned at him strangely. "You really are crazy."
"No. It’ll happen. One-two-three-four. We could be set for life."
"We could be back drinking at Moe’s and Joe’s, is what you mean."
Jeff tossed down the last of his drink, sat back, and shook his head. Frank continued to stare at him, as if looking for the source of Jeff’s madness.
"Maybe a small bet," Frank allowed. "Say a couple of thousand, maybe five, if you’re really stuck on this hunch."
"All of it," Jeff stated.
Frank lit a Tareyton, never taking his eyes from Jeff’s face. "What is it with you, anyway? Are you determined to fail, or what? There’s a limit to luck, you know."
"I’m not wrong about this one, Frank. I’m betting everything I’ve got left, and I’ll offer you the same deal as before: my money, you place the bets, seventy-thirty split. You risk nothing if you don’t want to."
"Do you know the kind of odds you’d be bucking?"
"Not exactly. Do you?"
"Not off the top of my head, but—they’d be sucker odds, because only a sucker would make a bet like that."
"Why don’t you make a call, find out where we’d stand?"
"I might do that, out of curiosity."
"Go ahead. I’ll wait here, order us another drink. Remember, not just a win; a Dodger sweep."
Frank was away from the table less than ten minutes.
"My bookie laughed at me," he said as he sat down and reached for the fresh Scotch. "He actually laughed at me over the phone."
"What are the odds?" Jeff asked quietly.
Frank gulped down half his drink. "A hundred to one."
"Will you handle the bets for me?"
"You’re really gonna do this, aren’t you? You’re not just joking around."
"I’m dead serious," Jeff said.
"What makes you so goddamned sure of yourself on these things? What do you know that nobody else in the world knows?"
Jeff blinked, kept his voice steady. "I can’t tell you that. All I can say is, this is far more than a hunch. It’s a certainty."
"That sounds suspiciously like—"
"There’s nothing illegal involved, I swear. You know they couldn’t fix a Series these days, and even if they could, how the hell would I know anything about it?"
"You talk like you know plenty."
"I know this much: We can’t lose this bet. We absolutely cannot lose it."
Frank looked at him intently, tossed off the rest of his Scotch, and signaled for another. "Well, shit," he muttered. "Before I ' met you last April I figured I’d be living on a scholarship this year."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning I guess I’ll come in with you on this fool scheme. Don’t ask me why, and I’ll probably blow my brains out after the first game. But just one thing."
"Name it."
"No more of this seventy-thirty crap and you putting up all the money. We both take our chances, throw in whatever we’ve got left from Vegas—including what I raked in at the tables—and anything we win we split down the middle. Deal?"
"Deal. Partner."
It was the October of Koufax and Drysdale.
Jeff took Sharla to Yankee Stadium for the first two games, but Frank couldn’t even bring himself to watch them on television.
The Dodgers took the opener 5-2, with Koufax pitching. Johnny Podres was on the mound the next day, and with an assist from ace reliever Ron Perranoski he held the Yankees to one run, while the Dodgers punched in four on ten hits.
The third game, in L.A., was a Drysdale classic: a 1-0 shutout, with "Big Don" putting the Yankees down one right after the other. In six of the nine innings, Drysdale came up against only the minimum three batters.
Game number four was a tight one; even Jeff, watching it in color at the Pierre in New York, started to sweat. Whitey Ford, pitching for the Yankees, was up against Koufax again, and they were both out for blood. Mickey Mantle and L.A.s Frank Howard each slammed in homers, making it a 1-1 tie by the bottom of the seventh. Then Joe Pepitone made an error on a throw by Yankee third baseman Clete Boyer, and the Dodgers Jim Gilliam tore into third. Willie Davis was up next, and Gilliam scored the deciding run on Davis’s fly to deep center.
The Dodgers had shut out the Yankees in the World Series, the first time that had happened to the New York club since the Giants had pulled it off in 1922. It was one of the great upsets in baseball history, an event Jeff couldn’t have forgotten any more than he’d be likely not to remember his own name.
At Jeff s insistence, Frank had spread their $122,000 bet among twenty-three different bookies in six cities and eleven different casinos in Las Vegas, Reno, and San Juan.
Their total winnings came to more than twelve million dollars.
FIVE
The betting was over; they both knew that. The word was out on him and Frank, and there wasn’t a bookie or casino in the country that would accept any sizable wager from either of them.
There were, of course, other kinds of bets, under more genteel names.
"… put the accounting section in that office there, and legal staff here across the hall. Now, down this way…"
Frank was obviously taking great pleasure in showing Jeff around the still only half-furnished suite of offices on the fiftieth floor of the Seagram Building. He’d selected the site, with Jeff’s approval, and had taken charge of all the minutiae of organizing what needed to be done, from their original incorporation as "Future, Inc." to the hiring of secretaries and bookkeepers.
Frank had quit law school, and they’d tacitly agreed that he would oversee the day-to-day operations of the company while Jeff made the larger decisions about investments and overall corporate direction. Frank no longer questioned the validity of Jeffs recommendations, but there’d been a strange pall between the two partners since the World Series coup. They rarely socialized, but Jeff knew Frank had been drinking more than ever before. His former curiosity had been replaced with an apparent growing fear of just how much Jeff knew and how he knew it. The matter was never discussed again.
"… through thi
s reception area here—just wait’ll you see the knockout who’ll be sitting at that desk a couple of weeks from now—and … here … we … are!"
The office was expansive yet somehow cozy, impressive without being intimidating. A black Barcelona chair awaited its owner behind the large oval oak desk, which faced a well-stocked bar and a handsomely cabineted TV-stereo console. Floor-to-ceiling windows on two walls offered views of the Hudson River on one side and the towers of midtown Manhattan on the other. The several flourishing plants gave a lush feeling to every corner of the room, and the framed Pollocks offered testament to the worth of human creativity. Amusingly, and with perfect appropriateness, one block of wall space was devoted to a photographic blowup of a horse bedecked with flowers: Chateaugay, in the winner’s circle after the Kentucky Derby.
"All yours, buddy," Frank said, smiling.
Jeff was touched by what his friend had done. "Frank, it’s fantastic!"
"'Course, anything you don’t like, we can change right away. Designer understands it’s all preliminary—you have to approve it. After all, you’re the one’s gotta work in here."
"Everything’s great just as it is. I’m astounded. And you can’t tell me some designer came up with the idea of that picture of Chateaugay."
"No," Frank admitted, "that was my suggestion. Thought you might get a kick out of it."
"It’ll give me inspiration."
"That’s what I’m counting on." Frank laughed. "Jesus, when I think how fast all this has happened, how—Well, you know what I mean." The moment of boyish glee was retracted as quickly as it had appeared. This whole experience was aging Frank: the unspoken and unanswerable questions, the shockingly sudden and inexplicable success … It was all more than he could readily deal with.
"Anyway," Frank said, looking away toward the empty reception area, "I’ve got a whole pile of stuff to take care of today. Ordered a bunch of the new office calculators from Monroe; they should have been here two days ago. So if you want to just settle in here a bit, get a feel for the place…"
"It’s all right, Frank; you go ahead. I’d very much like to sit here and think for a while. And thanks again. You’re doing a terrific job—partner."
They shook hands, clapped each other on the shoulder in a self-conscious gesture of camaraderie. Frank strode away toward the near-empty offices, and Jeff eased himself into the enfolding comfort of the Barcelona chair behind the massive desk.
It had all been so easy, easier even than he’d imagined. The races, the inning-by-inning replays of the World Series games … and with the huge amount of capital accumulated from those sure-thing bets, there was no limit to what he could do now, with equal or greater ease.
He’d already begun studying stock prices, reviewing what he knew of the world to come and applying that knowledge to an extrapolation of the current market situation. He couldn’t remember every dip and rise of the economy for all those years, but he was certain he had enough general insight to make consideration of minor recessions and setbacks irrelevant.
Some investments were obvious: IBM, Xerox, Polaroid. Others took a bit more thought, connecting in his mind social changes already underway or soon to come with the companies that would benefit from those changes. The rest of the decade, Jeff knew, would be a time of general prosperity, with Americans traveling widely for business or amusement; Future, Inc. should invest heavily in hotel and airline stocks. Similarly, Boeing Aircraft had to be in for a long upswing, even though the much-vaunted SST program would soon be canceled; the 727 and 747, neither announced yet, would become the primary commercial planes of the next twenty-five years. Other aerospace companies would have their own successes and failures, and Jeff felt sure some careful research would help jog his memory as to which had been awarded the most lucrative contracts for the Apollo program, and, ultimately, to build the space-shuttle fleet.
He gazed down at the Hudson, thick with commerce. The Japanese auto invasion would be a long time coming, as he’d noticed on that first day, and America was near the peak of its love affair with big cars; it couldn’t hurt to put a million or so into Chrysler, GM, and Ford. RCA would probably be a good short-term choice, too, since color television was about to become the standard, and it would be many years before Sony made its devastating inroads into that market.
Jeff closed his eyes, giddy from the potential of it all. The monthly financial crises he had once endured, the lifelong frustration of jobs with too much responsibility and too little pay, were now concerns not only of the past, but of a future that would never be. Who cared how this had come to pass? He was young, he was wealthy, and he would soon be immeasurably richer still. He had no wish to change any of that or even question it, much less go back to that other reality he had lived or perhaps imagined. Now he could have everything he’d ever wanted, and the time and energy to enjoy it all.
"… whether the Republican nominee is Goldwater or Rockefeller. The Baker scandal is unlikely to have any serious effect on the president’s reelection bid, although a dump Johnson movement within the White House inner circle is a possibility if the investigation escalates much further. Of more immediate concern to the Kennedy staff will be—"
"Can’t we watch something else?" Sharla pouted. "I don’t know why you care so much about all this political stuff anyway. It’s a whole year before the next election."
Jeff gave her an appeasing half-smile but didn’t answer.
"… tax cut and civil-rights bills. Unless they are enacted before Congress adjourns on December twentieth, the proposals will face an even tougher uphill battle in the spring sessions of the House and Senate, and Kennedy would be forced to begin the campaign in the shadow of continued congressional battle rather than in his hoped-for aura of dual victory."
Sharla uncurled herself from the sofa in a silent huff, walked toward the stairs that led to the upper levels of the East Seventy-third Street town house. "I’ll be waiting for you in bed," she called over her shoulder, bare in the peach-colored filmy nightgown. "That is, if you’re still interested."
"… despite ongoing criticism of the Bay of Pigs disaster, despite bitter problems with such disparate entities as the AFL-CIO and the steel industry, the image and the man remain inseparable for the majority of the public. His windswept youthfulness, his charming wife and devoted children, the tragedies and triumphs his family has survived, the easy grace and ready sense of humor, all—"
Jeff ran back the tape on the prototype Sony VTR that had cost him over eleven thousand dollars and was doomed to failure, a product a decade ahead of its time. The black-and-white file-footage clips of John Kennedy lit the screen a second time, so familiar and yet still heart-rending: grinning in his famous rocking-chair, scooping John-John and Caroline into his arms on an airport runway, romping with his brothers on the beach at Hyannisport. So many times Jeff had seen these brief public segments of the man’s life; and always, for a quarter of a century, they had been followed by the open limousine in Dallas, the frenzied horror, the blood on Jackie’s clothes and the roses in her arms. But no such images existed now. Tonight, on this tape of a news show broadcast not two hours before, there would be no photograph of Lyndon Johnson assuming the mantle of power, no funeral cortege through Washington, no Eternal Flame at the fade-out. Tonight the man of whom they spoke was alive, vital, full of plans for his own future and that of the nation.
"… grace and ready sense of humor, all lend at least superficial weight to the notions of a New Frontier, a fresh beginning … the advent, as some would have it, of a modern-day Camelot. It is this enormously positive image, rather than any solid record of first-term accomplishments, that the newly appointed Kennedy reelection team will have to work with. Sorensen, O’Donnell, Salinger, O’Brien, and Bobby Kennedy are all well aware of their candidate’s strengths and weaknesses, and of the power of instant myths. You may be sure they know where to concentrate their attention in the upcoming campaign."
The newscast switched to a shot of C
harles de Gaulle visiting the Shah of Iran amid much pomp and circumstance, and Jeff turned off the machine. Kennedy alive, he thought, as he had thought so often in the past few weeks. Kennedy leading the nation toward who knew what—continued prosperity, racial harmony, an early disengagement from Vietnam?
John F. Kennedy alive. Until three weeks from now.
Unless, unless … what? The fantasy was irresistible, outlandish and even clichéd though it might be. But this was no television drama, no science-fiction plot; Jeff was here, in this as-yet-unshattered world of 1963, with the greatest tragedy of the era about to unfold before his too-knowing eyes. Was it possible that he might intervene, and would it be proper? He had already begun to wreak major changes in the economic realities of the time, merely by establishing the existence of Future, Inc., and the space-time continuum had not yet shown any signs of unbearable strain.
Surely, Jeff thought, there must be something he could do about the imminent assassination, short of actually confronting the killer himself in that sixth-floor room of the Texas School Book Depository on November twenty-second. A phone call to the FBI, a letter to the Secret Service? But of course no one in authority would take his warnings seriously, and even if someone did, he’d probably be arrested as a suspected conspirator.
He poured himself a drink from the wet bar by the patio entrance and considered the problem. Anyone he spoke to about it would dismiss him as a lunatic; until, that is, after the president’s motorcade had passed through Dealey Plaza, had entered and so tragically departed the killing ground. Then there’d be hell to pay, and too late to do the world a bit of good.
So what should he do, just sit back and watch the murder happen? Let history brutally repeat itself because he was afraid of appearing foolish?
Jeff looked around the tastefully appointed town house, so far superior to any residence he or Linda had ever hoped to occupy. It had taken him only six months to acquire all this, with almost no effort at all. Now he could spend a lifetime limitlessly expanding his comfort and his wealth because of what he knew; but those achievements would stick in his craw forever if he failed to act on what else he knew.