The Music of Chance

by Paul Auster

  They played seven-card stud for the next three hours, using torn-up pieces of Plaza stationery to stand in as chips. With only two of them in the game, it was difficult for Nashe to measure the full scope of Pozzi’s talents, but even under those distorted circumstances (which magnified the role of luck and made full-scale betting all but impossible), the kid beat him soundly, nibbling away at Nashe’s paper chips until the whole pile was gone. Nashe was no master, of course, but he was far from inept. He had played nearly every week during his two years at Bowdoin College, and after he joined the fire department in Boston, he had sat in on enough games to know that he could hold his own against most decent players. But the kid was something else, and it did not take Nashe long to understand that. He seemed to concentrate better, to analyze situations more quickly, to be more sure of himself than anyone Nashe had faced in the past. After the first wipeout, Nashe suggested that he play with two hands instead of one, but the results were essentially the same. If anything, Pozzi made faster work of it than the first time. Nashe won his share of hands, but the take from those wins was always small, significantly smaller than the sums that Pozzi’s winning hands invariably produced. The kid had an unerring knack for knowing when to fold and when to stay in, and he never pushed a losing hand too far, often dropping out after only the third or fourth card had been dealt. In the beginning, Nashe stole a few hands with wild bluffs, but after twenty or thirty minutes, that strategy started to backfire on him. Pozzi had him figured out, and in the end it was almost as though he could read Nashe’s mind, as though he were sitting inside his head and watching him think. This encouraged Nashe, since he wanted Pozzi to be good, but it was a disturbing sensation for all that, and the unpleasantness of it lingered for some time afterward. He began to play too conservatively, relying on caution at every turn, and from then on Pozzi took control of the game, bluffing and manipulating him almost at will. The kid did not gloat, however. He played with dead seriousness, showing no trace of his customary sarcasm and humor. It was not until Nashe called it quits that he seemed to return to himself—suddenly leaning back in his chair and breaking into a broad, satisfied smile.

  “Not bad, kid,” Nashe said. “You beat the pants off me.”

  “I told you,” Pozzi said. “I don’t fuck around when it comes to poker. Nine times out of ten, I’m going to come out on top. It’s like a law of nature.”

  “Let’s just hope that tomorrow is one of those nine times.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m going to kill those suckers. I guarantee it. They’re not half as good as you are, and you saw what I just did to you.”

  “Total destruction.”

  “That’s right. It was a nuclear holocaust in here. A goddamn Hiroshima.”

  “Are you willing to shake on the deal we made in the car?”

  “A fifty-fifty split? Yeah, I’m willing to do that.”

  “Minus the initial ten thousand, of course.”

  “Minus the ten grand. But there’s still the other stuff to consider.”

  “What other stuff?”

  “The hotel. The food. The clothes you bought for me yesterday.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Those things are write-offs, what you might call a normal business expense.”

  “Shit. You don’t have to do that.”

  “I don’t have to do anything. But I did it, didn’t I? It’s my present to you, Jack, and we’ll leave it at that. If you want to, you can think of it as a bonus for getting me in on the action.”

  “A finder’s fee.”

  “Exactly. A commission for services rendered. Now all you have to do is pick up the phone and see if Laurel and Hardy are still expecting you. We wouldn’t want to go there for nothing. And make sure they give you good directions. It wouldn’t be nice to show up late.”

  “I’d better mention that you’re coming with me. Just so they know what to expect.”

  “Tell them your car is in the shop for repairs and you’re getting a ride with a friend.”

  “I’ll tell them you’re my brother.”

  “Let’s not exaggerate.”

  “Sure, I’ll tell them you’re my brother. That way they won’t ask any questions.”

  “All right, tell them whatever you want. Just don’t make it too complicated. You don’t want to start off with your foot in your mouth.”

  “Don’t worry, pal, you can trust me. I’m the Jackpot Kid, remember? It doesn’t matter what I say. As long as I’m the one who says it, everything is going to turn out right.”

  They set off for the town of Ockham at one thirty the following afternoon. The game was not scheduled to begin until dark, but Flower and Stone were expecting them at four. “It’s like they can’t do enough for us,” Pozzi said. “First they’re going to give us tea. Then we get a tour of the house. And before we sit down to play cards, we’re all going to have dinner. How do you like that? Tea! I can’t fucking believe it.”

  “There’s a first time for everything,” Nashe said. “Just remember to behave yourself. No slurping. And when they ask you how many lumps of sugar you want, just say one.”

  “They might be jerks, those two, but their heart seems to be in the right place. If I wasn’t such a greedy son of a bitch, I’d almost begin to feel sorry for them.”

  “You’re the last person I’d expect to feel sorry for a couple of millionaires.”

  “Well, you know what I mean. First they wine and dine us, and then we walk off with their money. You’ve got to feel sorry for bozos like that. Just a little bit anyway.”

  “I wouldn’t push it too far. No one goes into a game expecting to lose, not even millionaires with good manners. You never can tell, Jack. For all we know, they’re sitting down there in Pennsylvania feeling sorry for us.”

  The afternoon turned out to be warm and hazy, with thick clouds massing overhead and a threat of rain in the air. They drove through the Lincoln Tunnel and began following a series of New Jersey highways in the direction of the Delaware River. For the first forty-five minutes, neither one of them said very much. Nashe drove, and Pozzi looked out the window and studied the map. If nothing else, Nashe felt certain that he had come to a turning point, that no matter what happened in the game that night, his days on the road had come to an end. The mere fact that he was in the car with Pozzi now seemed to prove the inevitability of that end. Something was finished, and something else was about to begin, and for the moment Nashe was in between, floating in a place that was neither here nor there. He knew that Pozzi stood a good chance of winning, that the odds were in fact better than good, but the thought of winning struck him as too easy, as something that would happen too quickly and naturally to bear any permanent consequences. He therefore kept the possibility of defeat uppermost in his thoughts, telling himself it was always better to prepare for the worst than to be caught by surprise. What would he do if things went badly? How would he act if the money were lost? The strange thing was not that he was able to imagine this possibility but that he could do so with such indifference and detachment, with so little inner pain. It was as if he finally had no part in what was about to happen to him. And if he was no longer involved in his own fate, where was he, then, and what had become of him? Perhaps he had been living in limbo for too long, he thought, and now that he needed to find himself again, there was nothing to catch hold of anymore. Nashe suddenly felt dead inside, as if all his feelings had been used up. He wanted to feel afraid, but not even disaster could terrify him.

  After they had been on the road for a little less than an hour, Pozzi started to talk again. They were traveling through a thunderstorm at that point (somewhere between New Brunswick and Princeton), and for the first time in the three days they had been together, he seemed to show some curiosity about the man who had rescued him. Nashe was caught with his guard down, and because he had not been prepared for Pozzi’s bluntness, he found himself talking more openly than he would have expected, unburdening himself of things he normally would not have
shared with anyone. As soon as he saw what he was doing, he almost cut himself short, but then he decided that it didn’t matter. Pozzi would be gone from his life by the next day, and why bother to hold anything back from someone he would never see again?

  “And so, Professor,” the kid said, “what are you going to do with yourself after we strike it rich?”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” Nashe said. “First thing tomorrow, I’ll probably go see my daughter and spend a few days with her. Then I’ll sit down and make some plans.”

  “So you’re a daddy, huh? I hadn’t figured you for one of those family guys.”

  “I’m not. But I have this little girl in Minnesota. She’ll be turning four in a couple of months.”

  “And no wife in the picture?”

  “There used to be one, but not anymore.”

  “Is she out there in Michigan with the kid?”

  “Minnesota. No, the girl lives with my sister. With my sister and brother-in-law. He used to play defensive back for the Vikings.”

  “No kidding? What’s his name?”

  “Ray Schweikert.”

  “Can’t say I ever heard of him.”

  “He only lasted a couple of seasons. The poor lummox smashed up his knee in training camp and that was the end of him.”

  “And what about the wife? Did she croak on you or something?”

  “Not exactly. She’s probably still alive somewhere.”

  “A disappearing act, huh?”

  “I guess you could call it that.”

  “You mean she walked out on you and didn’t take the kid? What kind of bimbo would do a thing like that?”

  “I’ve often asked that question myself. At least she left me a note.”

  “That was nice of her.”

  “Yeah, it filled me with immense gratitude. The only trouble was that she put it on the kitchen counter. And since she hadn’t bothered to clean up after breakfast, the counter was wet. By the time I got home that evening, the thing was soaked through. It’s hard to read a letter when the ink is blurred. She even mentioned the name of the guy she ran off with, but I couldn’t make it out. Gorman or Corman, I think it was, but I still don’t know which.”

  “I hope she was good-looking anyway. There had to be something to make you want to marry her.”

  “Oh, she was good-looking all right. The first time I saw Thérèse, I thought she was about the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. I couldn’t keep my hands off her.”

  “A good piece of ass.”

  “That’s one way of putting it. It just took me a while to realize that all her brains were down there, too.”

  “It’s an old story, pal. You let your dick do your thinking for you, and that’s what happens. Still, if it was my wife, I would have dragged her back and pounded some sense into her.”

  “There wouldn’t have been any point. Besides, I had my work to do. I couldn’t just take off and go looking for her.”

  “Work? You mean you have a job?”

  “Not anymore. I quit about a year ago.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I put out fires.”

  “A troubleshooter, huh? Company calls you in when there’s a problem, and then you go around the office looking for holes to plug. That’s top-level management. You must have made some good money.”

  “No, I’m talking about real fires. The kind you put out with hoses—the old hook-and-ladder routine. Axes, burning buildings, people jumping out of windows. The stuff you read about in the paper.”

  “You’re pulling my leg.”

  “It’s true. I was with the Boston fire department for close to seven years.”

  “You sound pretty proud of yourself.”

  “I suppose I am. I was good at what I did.”

  “If you liked it so much, then why did you quit?”

  “I got lucky. All of a sudden, my ship came in.”

  “You win the Irish Sweepstakes or something?”

  “It was more like the graduation present you told me about.”

  “But bigger.”

  “One would hope so.”

  “And now? What are you up to now?”

  “Right now I’m sitting in this car with you, little man, hoping you’re going to come through for me tonight.”

  “A regular soldier of fortune.”

  “That’s it. I’m just following my nose and waiting to see what turns up.”

  “Welcome to the club.”

  “Club? What club is that?”

  “The International Brotherhood of Lost Dogs. What else? We’re letting you in as a certified, card-carrying member. Serial number zero zero zero zero.”

  “I thought that was your number.”

  “It is. But it’s your number, too. That’s one of the beauties of the Brotherhood. Everyone who joins gets the same number.”

  By the time they came to Flemington, the thunderstorm had passed. Sunlight broke through the dispersing clouds, and the wet land shimmered with a sudden, almost supernatural clarity. The trees stood out more sharply against the sky, and even the shadows seemed to cut more deeply into the ground, as if their dark, intricate outlines had been etched with the precision of scalpels. In spite of the storm, Nashe had made good time, and they were running somewhat ahead of schedule. They decided to stop for a cup of coffee, and once they were in town, they took further advantage of the occasion to empty their bladders and buy a carton of cigarettes. Pozzi explained that he normally didn’t smoke, but he liked to have cigarettes on hand whenever he played cards. Tobacco was a useful prop, and it helped to prevent his opponents from watching him too closely, as if he could literally hide his thoughts behind a cloud of smoke. The important thing was to remain inscrutable, to build a wall around yourself and not let anyone in. The game was more than just betting on your cards, it was studying your opponents for weaknesses, reading their gestures for possible tics and telltale responses. Once you were able to detect a pattern, the advantage swung heavily in your favor. By the same token, the good player always did everything in his power to deny that advantage to anyone else.

  Nashe paid for the cigarettes and handed them to Pozzi, who tucked the oblong box of Marlboros under his arm. Then the two of them left the store and took a brief stroll down the main street, threading their way through the small knots of summer tourists who had reemerged with the sun. After going a couple of blocks, they came upon an old hotel with a plaque on the facade that informed them that this was where the reporters covering the Lindbergh kidnapping trial had stayed back in the 1930s. Nashe told Pozzi that Bruno Hauptmann had probably been innocent, that new evidence seemed to suggest that the wrong man had been executed for the crime. He then went on to talk about Lindbergh, the all-American hero, and how he had turned fascist during the war, but Pozzi seemed bored with his little lecture, and so they turned around and headed back to the car.

  It wasn’t difficult to find the bridge at Frenchtown, but once they crossed the Delaware into Pennsylvania, the route became less certain. Ockham was no more than fifteen miles from the river, but they had to make a number of complicated turns to get there, and they wound up crawling along the narrow, twisting roads for close to forty minutes. If not for the storm, it would have gone somewhat faster, but the low ground was clogged with mud, and once or twice they had to climb out of the car to remove fallen branches that were blocking their way. Pozzi kept referring to the directions he had scribbled down while talking to Flower on the phone, calling out each landmark as it came into view: a covered bridge, a blue mailbox, a gray stone with a black circle painted on it. After a while, it began to feel as if they were traveling through a maze, and when they finally approached the last turn, they both admitted that they would have been hard-pressed to find their way back to the river.

  Pozzi had never seen the house before, but he had been told that it was a large and impressive place, a mansion with twenty rooms surrounded by more than three hundred acres of property. From the road, howe
ver, there was nothing to suggest the wealth that lay behind the barrier of trees. A silver mailbox with the names FLOWER and STONE written on it stood beside an unpaved road that led through a dense tangle of woods and shrubs. It looked uncared-for, as if it might have been the entrance to an old, broken-down farm. Nashe swung the Saab onto the bumpy, rut-grooved path and inched his way forward for five or six hundred yards—far enough to make him wonder if the path would ever end. Pozzi said nothing, but Nashe could feel his apprehension, a sullen, sulking sort of silence that seemed to say that he, too, was beginning to doubt the venture. At last, however, the road began to climb, and when the ground leveled off a few minutes later, they could see a tall iron gate fifty yards ahead. They drove on, and once they reached the gate, the upper portion of the house became visible through the bars: an immense brick structure looming in the near distance, with four chimneys jutting into the sky and sunlight bouncing off the pitched slate roof.

  The gate was closed. Pozzi jumped out of the car to open it, but after giving two or three tugs on the handle, he turned to Nashe and shook his head, indicating that it was locked. Nashe put the car into neutral, applied the emergency brake, and climbed out to see what should be done. The air suddenly seemed cooler to him, and a strong breeze was blowing across the ridge, rustling the foliage with the first faint sign of fall. As Nashe put his feet on the ground and stood up, an overpowering sense of happiness washed through him. It lasted only an instant, then gave way to a brief, almost imperceptible feeling of dizziness, which vanished the moment he began walking toward Pozzi. After that, his head seemed curiously emptied out, and for the first time in many years, he fell into one of those trances that had sometimes afflicted him as a boy: an abrupt and radical shift of his inner bearings, as if the world around him had suddenly lost its reality. It made him feel like a shadow, like someone who had fallen asleep with his eyes open.

  After examining the gate for a moment, Nashe discovered a small white button lodged in one of the stone pillars that supported the ironwork. He assumed that it was connected to a bell in the house and pushed against it with the tip of his index finger. Hearing no sound, he pushed once again for good measure, just to make sure it wasn’t supposed to ring outside. Pozzi scowled, growing impatient with all the delays, but Nashe just stood there in silence, breathing in the smells of the dank earth, enjoying the stillness that surrounded them. About twenty seconds later, he caught sight of a man jogging in their direction from the house. As the figure approached, Nashe concluded that it could not have been either Flower or Stone, at least not from the way Pozzi had described them. This was a stocky man of no particular age, dressed in blue work pants and a red flannel shirt, and from his clothes Nashe guessed that he was a hireling of some sort—the gardener, or perhaps the keeper of the gate. The man spoke to them through the bars, still panting from his exertions.