Bluff

by Michael Kardos

  The whole time, it was the bell she was after.

  “I don’t understand.” Harley knelt down closer to me. “What happened to your hand?”

  Ellen got them all watching the TV screen, staring at it at the exact same time. They wanted to see my false deal. They were dying to see it. No one would dare look away for even an instant. The bell was hidden in the room. While everyone stared at the TV screen, she stole it.

  “She told Victor Flowers I was a cheater.”

  “Wait. Victor Flowers? She knows him?”

  “She tipped him off, and he recorded me.” I was her misdirection. Me. “She set me up.”

  “Listen to me, Natalie. I’m going to call—”

  Her words got interrupted by the commotion outside: “Son of a—what the fuck are you doing?”

  Even from in here I could see what Calvin was doing. He was dumping snow onto the wheels of Ellen’s car. Oh, Calvin, Calvin, I thought. She’s dangerous. Let her go. But he was blocking her in because he didn’t like her and there was no readily available dog shit to set aflame in all that fresh powder.

  “Stop fucking doing that!” Ellen spat.

  He didn’t even grace her with his gaze, just quietly scooped up another shovelful of snow and deposited it by her front tire. He turned the shovel over and patted the snow into place. Then he did it all again. Finally, she went over to him. “I said get the fuck away.” She gave him a shove.

  Still he said nothing. Just gave her a bored teenage half-glance and made a slow, shuffling retreat toward his own apartment building, dragging the snow shovel behind him on the unplowed road.

  Ellen searched her car again—the back, the front, the seats, the floor, the dim beam from her phone’s flashlight darting around the car. This time she was making sure, and she took her time about it. Then she froze. For ten, fifteen seconds, nothing happened. But everything was happening. It was all changing for her. Clicking into place. Then the flashlight beam moved again. I should have told Harley to lock the door, but I couldn’t imagine it would have made a difference, and I was still hoping for Ellen to depart without ever thinking I knew anything. But in those quiet seconds, Ellen had decided that I knew more than I was letting on. And so while I couldn’t see exactly what she was doing in the car when that flashlight’s beam began to move again, she must have been opening and closing the glove box. That’s where I assume she kept the gun, which she held in her hand when she stomped back into my apartment.

  Her expression was different now. Or maybe it looked different because she was holding a gun. I saw less fear, more fury. She looked—and there is only one way to say this—murderous.

  “You have it,” she said, “so don’t even bullshit me.”

  5

  Harley took several steps backward, nearly knocking into my bookshelf. “Is that real?” she asked.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Where is it?” Ellen wasn’t pointing the gun at me, but holding it was enough. The handle was black, the rest of it silver. It wasn’t large—it could have been a kid’s toy—but I knew it wasn’t a toy, just as I knew the bell wasn’t a toy, just as I knew that Ellen wasn’t my friend and had never been my partner. My face was sweating, I was trembling, my hand screamed, and hovering above it all was the understanding that the world I thought I knew was an illusion. I had been fooled, and I had been a fool. But I wasn’t a fool now, and the gun she carried wasn’t a toy because one thing I knew for certain was that Ellen didn’t play games.

  I turned my head toward her. “Where is what?”

  She told Harley to empty her pockets.

  Harley turned her pockets inside out.

  “Empty that bag,” Ellen said.

  Harley stayed frozen a moment, then took a tentative step toward the first-aid kit. She dumped everything out.

  “Back up again,” Ellen said. She reached down and felt around inside the bag. Then she pointed the gun at Harley, whose eyes widened. “What do you know about this?”

  Ellen was losing it, and she held a gun. I didn’t doubt for a second it was loaded, or that she would use it. To her, at that moment, everything was worth the risk. She turned and trained the gun on me.

  “Tell me where the fucking bell is,” she said. “Tell me right now or that hand injury is going to seem like a paper cut.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  She approached Harley and with her free hand patted her down, feeling all over the outside of her clothes: her arms, breasts, stomach, inside her waistband. Outside her clothes she felt Harley’s thighs, her crotch, her calves. “Take off your shoes.”

  Harley obeyed. Ellen felt inside each shoe. “Don’t move,” she repeated. “And don’t test me.” Then she turned to me. “Stand up.”

  No way could I stand up.

  She grabbed the afghan and yanked it away from my body. “I said stand up!”

  I tried. The room spun hard. I instinctively pressed my hands against the loveseat to steady myself, and my left hand screamed in pain and everything started to go black. I tried again to get up, turning my body until my feet were on the carpet. Then, slowly, I lifted myself off the loveseat. The moment I was standing, Ellen reached out and dug her hands into one of my pants pockets, then the other.

  “You’re acting crazy,” I said, still believing that playing dumb was my best and only option. “I don’t understand.”

  She started running her hand along my body, same as she’d done with Harley—my shoulders, my chest—but then she stopped. She was eyeing my bandaged hand. Trying, maybe, to imagine the lengths a person might go in the name of misdirection. In the name of stealing something so valuable. And once she went down that road her conclusion came fast. She reached out and removed the dish towel. Stared some more at the mountain of gauze.

  “Unwrap that,” she said to Harley.

  “What?” Harley said.

  “You know what. Take all that off.”

  “No,” I said. Gravity was pulling me back toward the loveseat but I remained standing. “I don’t know what’s happening, but you have to leave. Go. Get out. I’m going to call the police if you don’t—”

  She reached out with the gun and whacked the fingers of my hurt hand. My universe exploded.

  I didn’t think anything could be worse than the cutting itself, or the water Harley had sprayed over the wound, but I was wrong. I heard myself scream, and the birds started beating their wings again and the dog upstairs started barking again, and I teetered and fell hard against the wall, the windowsill jabbing into my hip.

  Through the window, my eyes met Calvin’s. He was standing in the snow at the far curb. Gone was the shovel. He was carrying something else, but I didn’t know what.

  “Unwrap it,” Ellen told Harley. “Now.”

  Harley looked at me, and when I didn’t protest—there was no protest left in me—she came over and slowly, carefully, began to undo the gauze wrapping. Around the wrist, around the hand, around the space where my fingers had been. Even with the gun trained on us she was a careful technician. Her animals were lucky. Her fingers did their slow, delicate work, as one layer came undone, then another. I felt unbelievably sad. Ellen would have the bell, and assuming she didn’t kill me and Harley both, I would have nothing to show for any of this except for my wet, sickening crab’s claw.

  The next layer of the gauze came away blood-soaked, and Ellen looked away. I’ll never know for sure what exactly caused her to divert her attention at that exact moment: the gore, or the sudden burst of light outside.

  Ellen’s car was on fire.

  “My god,” Harley said.

  Gray smoke pumped itself into the air as the flames quickly overtook the hood. Ellen glanced back at my hand, the blood-soaked gauze partly unwound and dangling down. Maybe my willingness to let Harley unwrap it—gun notwithstanding—had satisfied her. Maybe she never fully believed I was hiding the bell behind all that wrapping, and in her heart of hearts she s
till believed it lay somewhere in the snow on Victor’s lawn. And if she had any hope of making it back there, she had to be gone before the first responders arrived. And she needed a car.

  “Give me your keys,” she said.

  This was the easiest request I’d ever granted. My key chain hung on a hook by the door. “There,” I said, and she slid the key chain off the hook and gave my apartment a last fleeting glance.

  “You breathe a word about any of this to the police,” she said, “and you’re gonna die.”

  The sweet parting words of a friend.

  She ran from the apartment, made a wide arc around her car, which was engulfed in flames, and unlocked my door. From where she stood it must have been an oven. Much hotter than the spot where Calvin stood across the street, carrying what I now saw was a red plastic gas can.

  Ellen got into my car and the headlights came on. Calvin had shoveled well. Ellen pulled my car away from the curb with no trouble at all, and then the BITCH car turned right at the corner and was gone.

  I was still on my feet and desperate for the cold air. But not until Harley had unwrapped enough of the gauze to get the bell. She gave it a quick rinse in the kitchen sink and hung it in the birdcage beside the disco ball.

  Then she rewrapped the gauze, and the two of us shuffled to the doorway. From the entryway I felt the heat from Ellen’s burning car warm my face, but I also felt the cold, and the mix of temperatures reminded me of what a campfire had felt like on the one occasion, many ages ago, when my family had stayed at the beach long past sunset because you can’t see many stars in Plainfield.

  What for a moment felt like a cleansing mix of cold and heat quickly became a shivering sweat. I knew I couldn’t stay standing any longer. “Calvin!” I called into the night. My voice sounded reedy and weak, but he heard me and came up the walkway. Close up, he looked petrified. “Listen to me,” I told him. “You didn’t do this. I did. Do you understand?”

  He said, “You mean the fire? No, I did the fire.” Always the literalist.

  I coughed. “I’m covering for you. Now go home. That’s an order. If you’re my friend, you’ll do it.”

  “I don’t care who knows,” he said.

  I took a breath. “You and I are magicians,” I said. “Magicians keep secrets. Now be a magician and keep your fucking mouth shut.” I tried to smile, but it was a mistake, and I think I scared him. “I’m counting on you, Cool Calvin. Now go. And leave the gas can here.”

  He went.

  As people across the way came out of their apartments, I was crouched down, Harley’s arm around me, and I was telling her about the lawyer’s business card in my wallet. “No one else,” I told her. “Only him.”

  A siren grew louder, and then a patrol car pulled up to the curb across the street. The siren turned off but others blared in the distance. My door was still open and the birds were cooing.

  “You’ll watch my doves?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Harley said.

  A woman in a police officer’s uniform was coming across the lawn, making shoe prints in the fresh snow. “Is anyone in that car?” she called out.

  The distant sirens were becoming louder.

  “No!” Harley replied. “But she’s hurt really bad.”

  Before it went dark, I noticed everything: the streetlights and the smoke and the bright fire and the snow on the rooftops across the way.

  It was pretty.

  The officer approached us. “What happened?”

  6

  Until recently, I always thought mourning doves were morning doves. Certainly my own doves always began their call at sunrise. Once I learned the truth, I chose to disregard it. A dove’s call is hardly one of grief. It’s a wakeful, hopeful sound. It’s the call of being alive, the call of camaraderie.

  I couldn’t see this particular dove in the branches overhead, but hearing it soothed me. I temporarily lacked its freedom and was glad to be the beneficiary of its call. Several times recently in the yard I’d seen cardinals land on branches, heard woodpeckers knocking against trees, watched geese pumping their way through the sky in vast V’s, returning from their tropical vacation.

  Such was the pastoral setting of the outdoor visiting area at the North Ridge State Correctional Facility. Inside the fence there was plenty of green lawn, and the trees this time of year were either in bloom or growing new leaves. The trees were tall but not wide. They were young, younger than the prison, and I liked knowing that people had been thoughtful enough to plant them for our pleasure.

  In the center of the visiting area was a cement slab with rows of metal picnic tables and benches. Too many rows. Whoever planned out this spot had been overly optimistic about the menfolk coming to see their incarcerated women. I’d met too many inmates these past four months who never received a single visitor. It was a shame. Once the initial terror fades, prison is endlessly repetitive. Just knowing a visitor is coming can liven up an entire week.

  I was waiting at a table all to myself. Besides breaking up the boredom, visitors gave me the chance to come out here, where there was a fine view of the rolling hills of Warren County, and where on a spring day like this, with the sky a deep blue and with only a few fair weather clouds and a soft breeze and the birds cooing and chirping, I could feel as if I were deep in nature. I could unfocus my eyes and make the fences and the razor wire and the guard towers disappear. I could temporarily rid my mind of the constant standing counts, the three a.m. sobbing that echoed down the cellblock, and the musty laundry room where I earned my nineteen cents an hour.

  During my second month here my mother came to visit, bewildered Chip in tow. Jack Clarion came last month. They asked me, quite reasonably, why on earth I’d set someone’s car on fire. I couldn’t tell them the truth: “Because the teenager who saved my life didn’t deserve juvie.” Lacking a reasonable answer, I shrugged and said nothing, same as when the officers at my hospital bedside, and later at the police station, had asked me repeatedly and with increased tightening of the jaw to please just tell them what I knew.

  I thought Brock McKnight performed well, given my refusal to elaborate on anything—no details, no motive, not a word about how I’d obtained my injury. He got the D.A. to reduce my charge from second- to third-degree arson. The D.A. probably figured I was covering for someone, but no one had been hurt in the fire, and here was an opportunity to close a case quickly.

  At sentencing, a jowly man with a bald head and a “Judges Rule!” coffee mug sentenced me to two and a half years, with a chance of parole in 304 days. For handling my case, Brock charged me $1,800 plus the secret to the Four Queens trick. I thought it was a fair price.

  And now on this pretty May afternoon my visitor was being escorted toward me by Simon, one of the kinder male guards. If I hadn’t known she was coming, I might not have recognized her: hair shaved down to a buzz, no makeup, denim jacket, skin-tight jeans. Even her gait was unfamiliar, a cautious creeping that looked almost reptilian. When it came to Ellen, I had long since given up trying to construe what was real and what was an act. But she appeared pinched and angular and jittery, like an addict, and I found myself believing the desperation.

  When she got near, she did what everyone did at first. Glanced at my hand, then away.

  “I never knew they’d do that,” she said. “I swear. You believe me, don’t you?”

  The wound looked a lot better now, but that’s only because of how bad it had looked before.

  “Sure,” I said, and motioned for her to sit down across from me.

  “Does it still hurt?”

  You can’t visit a prisoner without getting invited first. For that to happen, she had to write to me. She wrote again and again. I ignored her notes for a while, but there were things I wanted cleared up, things I needed to know. Besides, as I said, prison was boring. And Ellen was many things but never boring.

  “Sometimes it hurts,” I said. “The scar tissue’s still pretty sensitive.”

  Only
a few other tables were occupied, nowhere near us, people in their intimate conversations. The guard had returned to the corner near the gate. He watched over us all but gave us our space.

  “Tell me how you knew,” she said.

  Yes, the desperation was real. She had lost everything, and to make it worse she still didn’t know how she had lost.

  “This is a really good place to watch birds,” I said, looking around. “I should get a birding book. I need to bone up.”

  “I assume you know by now what it’s worth,” she said.

  I shrugged off her question. Of course I knew. While out on bail before my sentencing, I’d found a Rutgers anthropology professor willing to chat with me in his office long enough to refer me to a colleague in art history who moonlighted as an antiques appraiser. Rutgers is a vast university, and no one seemed to question my claim to be pursuing a master’s degree in American history with a special interest in the Revolutionary War period.

  “Honestly, there would be very little to compare it to,” the art history professor told me once I had located her office deep within the windowless bowels of her department. Our conversation was all hypothetical, of course. The three Revere bells, after all, were all presumed destroyed or lost. But what if one of the bells were ever found?

  “An object like that would shimmer with history,” she said, her own eyes shimmering at the very idea.

  She explained that Paul Revere was known as a silversmith and bell maker but was not known to have made bells from silver. There were rumors, though, of him making a few inkwell bells over the years—and for a bell that small he would have had to use a metal like silver. But all the known bells made by Paul Revere were large—for churches and schools—and made of copper and tin. “So this would be an extraordinary find,” the professor said. “It would be the only confirmed silver bell that Paul Revere made. Then add to it its historical significance. The Midnight Ride?” She reclined in her chair as if she’d just finished a satisfying meal. “Such a bell would be historical magic.” I remained quiet, giving this appraiser time to appraise. “At a bare minimum, I would think five, maybe eight million dollars at auction.” She sat up again. “But really the sky’s the limit on this one.” Then she shook her head as if erasing even the fantasy of coming across such a treasure.