But contrary to what I’d been bitching about, I decided to be daring and take a hit. I drew three.
That made it twenty-one.
“Ah,” said Ibrahim triumphantly.
That did it, all right. The right cards kept coming across the table and the dealer ran into a streak of bust, bust, bust. He had to hit himself--according to the rules--up to seventeen, and he kept going over twenty-one. It was beautiful. My luck was so terrific that when I drew on fourteen I’d get a seven; sixteen I’d get a five. The ultimate sign of good luck was that I kept beating him by single points; my nineteen to his eighteen, my twenty to his nineteen.
I was motoring. I made the big money when I split eights. I drew a three on the first, a two on the second and doubled down on both, so that I had $4 million riding. I drew two picture cards to the dealer’s eighteen and made myself a profit of $4 million.
Or rather, made it for Ibrahim.
Sure I lost a few hands now and then but it never got bad.
At anchor--the pivotal and most crucial spot since it was last on the player’s side and thus determined the dealer’s next draw to himself--I played a cunning game. I stayed on a nine (a sin) to his up three, anticipating a ten for him to bust--and he did.
I kept saving Ibrahim by these tactics, many against the book. The book wasn’t there, and I was and I was hot. This was it, that sublime occasion when you can do no wrong. You ride on your self-confidence, you soar on your instincts.
I drew a murmur from the pit and a rebuke from the dealer when I called for a hit on eighteen--to his nine up card. This was absolutely never done, except perhaps by professional card-counters.
“Hit?” said the dealer.
I nodded.
Ibrahim smiled. I was his man.
The dealer announced my decision to the pit. “Player takes a card on eighteen,” he said, so there’d be no doubt that it was my choice and not the house’s error. He dealt me an ace and this resulted in no more than a push, but it did save the hand.
Ibrahim was amused. That smile again, so paternal. He was about my age, maybe even younger. Such perfect teeth. They seemed to go round and glistened as though they’d been polished and waxed. His nails obviously were. His black hair climbed up like a staircase. His eyes, he could switch them on and off and I noticed the difference. With me it was one way; with the dealer and the people in the pit he was abrupt, almost rude.
“You must lead a good life,” he said.
I was surprised. He should know better than to interrupt the flow.
He had grown bored, it seemed.
It is possible, I thought, to grow bored with anything, even good things.
They say you can’t be too rich or too thin. Well I don’t know about too thin, but rich? Maybe you can be too rich. Maybe you can even be too handsome and maybe life can be too good, so good it gets boring.
Sure enough, the tide turned.
I knew it was time to quit when I got blackjack and the dealer matched me with blackjack of his own. This was the signal that things were about to start going the other way.
Ibrahim, mediocre blackjack artist though he was, knew this, too.
He rose from his chair as a king rises from his throne, and this act told everybody it was over.
“Thank you,” he said, and all the men in the pit nodded. A few bowed. The big boss said:
“Our pleasure, Mr. Hassan.”
I wondered, can’t we stay right here for a little while longer? We do not have to play. Just stay here, I thought, under this spell, this cloud of glory.
But it was over.
As he had ignored me there at the outset of this, so he ignored me now at the end.
What? I get nothing?
I was like the fox who lusted for the fruits of the garden. He starves himself to fit under the fence, squeezes in, has himself a feast, and then must starve himself again to get back out.
Go in empty, fill up, go out empty.
That, I’d been taught, was a parable about life--and it sure as hell was.
But I had no gripes. The money had never belonged to me--just like the fruits in the garden. I’d had my fun, even lived out a fantasy, and that was enough. Though maybe...maybe I had earned the right to some recompense.
Ibrahim Hassan did not think so. He had already forgotten me. But then he broke from the people who had him flanked and said, “Thank you Joshua Kane.” He shook my hand. He said, “We will do business.”
Yeah sure, I thought.
Chapter 2
WHEN I GOT BACK to our room at the Galaxy Hotel and Casino--about five minutes down the Boardwalk from the Versailles, where I’d been with Ibrahim--it was past midnight and the TV set was on, talking to Joan as she slept. Even in slumber she was golden. She was my Main Line blonde, my high-born darling from Bryn Mawr.
All right, I thought, so you’re not lucky in money. But look at this. Look at this...
If she wasn’t the most beautiful woman on the planet, then who was?
More than that, she had brains and that special American kick--insolence.
What made it really good was this: She was mine!
I sometimes wondered how it had happened between us. My best guess was that we fell in love because we didn’t understand one another, and stayed in love for the same reason--that thrill of renewal, that magic of everlasting discovery. In her poetic moments she said we “replenished” our lives by our conflicts. We had plenty of those.
The first came on our honeymoon when she got her period. She thought it hysterical that I refused to make love to her.
She said, “What am I--unclean? Josh, I keep telling you that’s so old.”
Maybe that was it, she was the future, I was the past. She was America, I was Europe. Forget Europe--I was Abraham setting out from Ur of the Chaldees. Yet it was that very “Hebrew-ness,” she said, that spirit of going forth that drew her to me.
She said, “I think of you like that, coming out of the wilderness, in search of something. I think of you as the singular man, rooted to his principles, the world on one side, you on the other.”
She thought I was romantic. French charm and all that and how, unlike other men, I looked into a woman’s eyes. I was nearsighted.
She thought I had lived a life of adventure--and I had. That trek over the Pyrenees to escape Hitler. But I had been an infant through all that. I didn’t know I was having an adventure.
But then I had gone off to fight for Israel in 1967 and that had been a choice. And there had been others. Like quitting that hot magazine job when they tried to put my byline over another man’s story. She thought that showed strength and character. They hadn’t thought so at the unemployment office.
In every way I numbered myself a failure, she scored me a success.
She said I was “perfect.” Why argue?
She said I reminded her of that long-ago movie star John Garfield. She loved my “rugged hurt” features.
“I was sort of hoping for Cary Grant,” I had told her.
“No, no, no. You’re the outsider. The underdog. The fighter. The loner. The wanderer. You’re everything I’ve been looking for.” She said other men were shallow. “A man like you comes around only once. Can’t let you get away. You’re Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And David, of course. Must never forget David.”
If I was Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, she was Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe and Lauren Bacall. Joan was more than the American dream. To an immigrant kid like me, she was America.
So I relinquished a wife and two kids for her. She gave up a husband for me, a man of wealth and social standing. Now that I had her, the job was to keep her.
In any case, you would call us a loving couple, but by no means a secure couple. No, we were afraid of each other. In return for what we had given up we demanded loyalty forever, and that was easy to promise but impossible to guarantee. Especially since our marriage was rooted in sin. She had forsaken what had been hers and I had forsaken what had been mine, and
who was to say what spitefulness fate had in store?
We had even discussed it, the chance that we might each turn to another, again--and she made it a joke.
“You believe revenge bugs are flying out there?” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Ridiculous.”
Joan believed in a God of mercy. Her God knew no vengeance. If God was good--and she believed He was--then she was good. She was made in His image, after all. While we had been married to other spouses we had been adulterous, but not in her eyes. Love could not be sinful.
To Joan, the world was as pure and as bright as a kindergarten. Everything was wholesome. Everything was right. Nothing could go wrong.
Now I sat on the edge of the bed and stared abstractedly at the TV, pondering the adventure I had just had with the Arab, an episode intangible as a dream. I had nothing to show for it, no signs, no evidence to prove it and Joan would be right to doubt that it had happened--as would I. Had it happened? Yes. What did it mean? That I did not know.
Possibly it meant that I had been put to a test and had passed. But my integrity had been stretched thin and it had troubled me that I could be so easily seduced. Not that I was, but it had been close. I was vulnerable.
No doubt about it, money had become a weakness more so with the advent of Joan. A woman like that needed things, required pampering. She deserved better and would demand more than life on a meager income.
Besides, with or without Joan, I was tired of being poor. The big score--suddenly, that’s what I was after. That’s what lured me to the racetrack, to the casinos. The big score.
I had become a gambler. I lost more than I won. But I preferred losing over stagnating, the chance of a jackpot against the certainty of need. Of course we were not certifiably poor. But we were not rich, and that’s poor. To me that’s poor.
So I was sick of it, weary of being condemned to ordinary wages as my father and mother had been sentenced to poverty for life...beginning with their adventures in the New World.
For in the Old World, in France, they had been rich. And then came Hitler. They had to sell everything to pay and bribe the smugglers who would lead them up and down the Pyrenees. By the time they reached Montreal they were penniless, especially since Father had financed the escape of twenty-two other families.
So they were destitute in Montreal and stayed destitute later in Philadelphia. “Your father, God love him, has a knack for failure,” my mother once said, and since he could not succeed in business they went out borrowing.
They borrowed from friends, acquaintances, strangers and even from those families they had saved from the Roundup of Paris. Soon even those doors were shut to them. These were not happy times when they brought me along and I heard them begging for a loan--“to get us back on our feet.”
The humiliation did strange things to my mother and one day she stopped talking and laughing and so she remained, hollow and impassive, until she died. That’s when I promised myself, none of this for me. Not this kind of life. No, no, no. Never. Yet here it was, not quite but almost the same, and the fear of turning Joan into my mother obsessed me and made each moment urgent.
So I schlepped her to the casinos, and though she was a willing accomplice she rarely played and seldom joined me in the gaming rooms. And on the occasions when she did--she was so out of place!
Her beauty was of the stately kind. She was a striking paradox against the hordes of tiny women lusting after the slot machines in their orange hairdos.
This was not Joan.
She could be quite haughty and reach back into her Main Line genes for a quick score, as when she got a ticket for speeding in Collingswood, New Jersey, and tilting her head for a regal pose, she said to the officer, “You know my father can buy this town.”
He could, too.
Oh definitely, now and then that pride kicked up. Mostly, though, she carried herself calm and self-effacing and moderate and modest. She had once been an heiress by golly and a debutante, of course, and she had degrees in English and psychology, wrote poetry, read a book a week, loved art, and cried when she listened to Concierto de Aranjuez. The question was this: What was a girl like this doing in a place like this? She was here because her husband was here, and he was here because he had an errand--to get rich!
During those periods when I pursued the perfect blackjack table, as others pursued the perfect wave or the perfect sunset, she went “looking for clothes”--and given our finances that was about the extent of it; she could look but could not buy.
“But I don’t mind,” she always said, “so long as we’re happy and we’re together.” This was true as far as being together and only half true about being happy. I was not happy about being so utterly broke that Joan had to resort to the ultimate cliché: “Money isn’t everything.”
But it was, and this had become clear only a few days earlier, back in Philadelphia, just as we were getting into the car for this vacation, when against my advice Joan decided to check the mail.
Sure enough, there was a bill from the IRS for $1,989, remarkable for this reason: it was almost to the penny our entire savings! But--we still had money in our checking account, so the vacation was still on. Never mind that we were behind a month’s rent and the landlord refused to have our front door painted--the surface peeling off as if stricken by leprosy. Such an ugly sight that, even though we resided in a relatively nice neighborhood, Joan never invited her Main Line friends to the house.
She was ashamed. She’d never admit it but she was, she was ashamed. Said she was too busy to have friends over anyway, for she did have a job, helping others find work, the poor, the handicapped, for which she received no salary. But she had to do it, she said, because these people needed her.
She was a big fan of the oppressed and the disadvantaged and agonized over the Cubans detained in American jails, the starving children in Ethiopia, the deaf, the blind, the infirm, the aged and even Bob Brennan. Yes, Bob Brennan, the New Jersey millionaire who had been skewered on “60 Minutes” for a questionable securities business.
When they roasted him again a few months later as a summer repeat, Joan was outraged. “So unjust!” she declared, and she sent a letter off to CBS saying, “Muck-raking is defendable, but not as entertainment.”
As for our own condition, she did not see us as oppressed. Disadvantaged, maybe--but this was no big whoop. She was managing, and anyway she had faith. “Josh,” she said, “I know you’ll make it someday. Someday others will see in you what I see in you and on that day we’ll celebrate.”
Now I sat on the edge of the bed between Joan and David Letterman. He was a rerun and she was asleep and I had big news and there was nobody to hearken. I was still high over those millions--I had played for millions.
This had to be proclaimed. Joshua Kane has arrived.
I used to tell Joan the odds were turning in my favor. I was due. Now that it had happened the world was asleep and so I nudged her until she wakened partly and said, “Why are you waking me? Is there a fire?”
Joan was as intense about her sleep as about her wakefulness.
“No,” I said.
“So let me sleep. Good night.”
“I have something to tell you,” I said. “Something extraordinary happened.”
But she was back to snoozing, her face dug into the pillow, her arms around the pillowcase as a drowning woman clinging to a raft, and I thought--why the rush?
I’d played for millions, yes. But not mine!
This came as a shock.
But I had been so close--so close that my life, our lives, had already taken a turn. The drought was coming to an end. I sensed big things. Big things were about to happen!
I got undressed, slipped under the covers and stroked her golden hair. It took me hours to fall asleep, thinking. Nothing bad must ever happen to this woman. She is mine to safeguard, and I will. I will. I will show her. I will show them all. Only the best for her. Only the best.
Ch
apter 3
THE NEXT MORNING we were in the shower together and I had already dropped the soap so she would get down and just then I heard the phone ring and she said never mind the phone, but I dashed out naked and dripping, slipping on the tile, and when I got to it the ringing was over and I’d never know who it was. Or maybe I would.
I dialed the operator and she said, yes, there was a message, from Ibrahim Hassan, and he’d be calling later. I felt something between dread and ecstasy.
“Of course I believe you,” she now said, and it was obvious that she did but with reservations, meaning that she did not take it seriously, this great event of last night. She was in one of those sassy moods.
We were having breakfast in the Galaxy Coffee Shoppe, and though it was late morning, we had got ourselves a prize booth facing the ocean and the Boardwalk.
As we gazed out the big windows, the sun was beginning to burn through the clouds, haze still covered the waters and the overnight wind had calmed to a hot breeze. The joggers and bikers appeared and disappeared as if staged, and we were spectators enjoying the show. We were happy. Happy that it was summer and that we were at the shore, in Atlantic City, with the sun and the sea and the gambling so that anything might happen--and last night it almost had. If only I could convey it to Joan. The college boys from England were pushing their white two-seat rolling chairs, seeking passengers, and now the tram, half filled, slowly passed by.
Joan was wearing something loose and pink, bringing out the flush of her face, so fresh, smooth and clear. Her eyes were lit. She was incredibly beautiful. I tried to imagine her old, and could not. Impossible. I banished an image that had deceitfully invaded my mind. Joan dead.
Never! Some people should never die. It wouldn’t be fair.
I told her Ibrahim Hassan had called, at least I got a message from him, and that he’d be calling back. She said, “Is this the same Abraham you’ve been telling me about?”
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