by Mark Teppo
It would have been easy to read into the meeting with the Poet, to read that encounter as lucky, but Deke hadn't felt anything when the writer had accosted him on the street. He had been spotted—it had been bound to happen, eventually—and he had turned the encounter to his advantage. The resolution was fortuitous, a result of a quick tongue and some people skills, but it wasn't lucky.
He could have raised the money via other tricks. If not the old grifter switch, then through some other methods. But the Poet offered an easy solution, and he had sworn him to secrecy and passed off the history of Freddy Redhand as his own. The Poet hung on every word, scribbling notes in the worn notebook he carried with him.
The Poet was transparent. Five minutes into the story, Deke had known he could have told the Poet anything and the man would have believed him. Now, at the card table, Deke knew what the Poet had in his hand; his eyes were as easy to read as a newspaper headline.
It’s not that he doesn’t believe in secrets, Deke thought, he just can’t keep them.
IX
Clio hadn’t received any messages from Dee—Duke to the other members of the South American expedition, Duchess to her father (much to her mother’s chagrin)—in more than three weeks. The inland push through the jungle to the reported location of the lost city was scheduled to have started two weeks ago, and Dee had warned Clio it might be up to a month—three weeks in, one week back—before they could get any messages out. Four weeks. It was a long time to wait.
Vilmo’s poker game was a distraction, one of several Clio had taken up since Duke had gone on her most-recent expedition. It had been bankers and physicians the first week she had come, and the following week had been a game between accountants and musicians. Her last game had ended early, too many cops and gangsters who hadn't been able to completely lay aside their street differences. Mistral had been with her each time.
The Poet had fallen in with them on the way to the butcher’s shop. He was a garrulous storyteller who often quenched his persistent thirst at her bar, working the room with his outrageous stories for glasses of whiskey. He was a gifted talker—she had heard enough stories told poorly over the years to know the sound of a golden tongue—but an inveterate liar. He was unable to speak without embellishment, unable to report a fact without coloring it with a palette of roseate hues. It was an armor of sorts, a way of protecting himself from the world.
There was a lot of similarity in her relationship with Alexander Urban Champlain’s daughter. Duchess Urbania—Duke to her peers, Dee to her in the privacy of their shared bed—followed her father’s footsteps only because they traced an exciting and dangerous route. Otherwise, she made her own way in the world, inventing her own routes, taking her own chances.
Invariably she was successful, a brilliant star even her father couldn’t ignore. Invariably, such a super-heated trajectory required incredible armor, an impermeable shell of glazed ceramic to protect and shelter her heart. Clio knew—as was the case with her own heart—that such a sealed chamber could only be opened with inside help.
She and Duke had managed the exchange. Duke had slipped her the key in a kiss, had given her the secret combination of her hermetic vault with a touch. Clio knew—four weeks, eight weeks, a year, a decade—that Dee would send her a message, that Dee would never forget her.
Still, waiting was hard. There was too much emptiness in waiting, too many ways for an idle mind to ensnare itself. You could look inside your secret heart and wonder if it was full or empty, or if you knew the difference.
X
Ralph wasn't a superstitious man. He didn’t have time for any of that egocentric hocus-pocus or mind-melding with the planet crap. As if he could influence the universe with a pinch of salt, or that the presence of a certain color about his person would attract a honey-eyed woman, or that spitting after using words with the letter ‘x’ would redirect evil energies. It was all childish bullshit, excuses held tight by those who were naive enough to not realize how they were being manipulated by the Gears.
Ralph knew who really ran the Sprawl. He wasn’t so dim to think his small-time numbers game was in the same league as anything run by the Parkway Triad, or that he moved enough money to influence any of the races out at Mont Vanneir. His betting pools fleeced the neophytes and the recovering gamblers, and kept them from upsetting the statistics in the bigger game. As long as he stayed within that strata, he'd be fine.
A year ago he'd run into a squeeze, and the debt had been manageable. He kept telling himself that it would be gone in a month. Or two. Or maybe by the spring.
And then his—there was no way to say it, really, as much as he hated to use the word—his luck went bad, and that red flag in his book gained a friend. Within a month, the second one gave way to a third and, finally after trying to dodge it for most of the fall, Ralph had taken on a fourth. This last one was for twenty-five grand with ten percent on the tip, which meant clockwork visits from those fuckers who worked for the Blind Man.
After putting up with them spooking his other clients for three weeks, Ralph had decided he needed a new perspective on his situation. The old way wasn’t working, and if he didn’t find some release from the grind of his debt soon, the Minotaurs were going to start taking body parts instead of cash.
A week ago, Ralph had caught himself trying to figure out how many fingers he could lose and still hold a glass. Two nights later, he had started carrying a knife again. Just in case.
The same justification crept into his internal dialogue as he found himself watching for signs, for indicators of supernatural agencies and influences that might be influential. Just in case, he told himself. You can back out of it later, but for now, it can't hurt to keep an open mind.
“Three,” he said, mucking the useless cards in his hand. He held up three fingers to Mistral, and the man gave him a look that said, I heard you the first time. Ralph dropped two of his fingers more quickly than the third as he reached for his draw.
The new guy, Deke, found the interchange funny, though he hid his smile behind his hand. Ralph noticed faded lines on the back of the other man’s hand. Tiny scar tissue raised over an old knot of twisted flesh. It looked like a tiny diamond. Or a spade.
Mistral had given him red cards—diamonds, in fact, a whole flood of them. Ralph looked at Deke again, but new guy had put his hand down on the table and the light was all wrong now. The scar didn't look like anything.
I got them in my hand, Ralph thought, twisting in his seat in an effort to throw off the chill on his neck. Doesn't matter what I thought it saw. I got diamonds in my hand.
Ralph was trying very hard not to succumb completely to superstition because it was a fathomless hole. You could never be sure, anyway, and you were just pinning your hopes on something that didn't exist. You'd never be sure if your luck was as good as you thought the signs were telling you.
He had a flush of diamonds, though. King high. That much was true. “Hundred bucks,” he said, when the bet came to him. “I’m in for a hundred.”
The words felt right—saying them was good. He was in control of the table. You don't need luck if you're in control.
XI
During the winter of his twelfth year, Vilmo fell through the ice on Lake Astrid. The Verones had been visiting family—his aunt on his mother’s side—and the clan had gathered at the lake house. On the day after Christmas, Vilmo and his two cousins—Ariana and Guiseppe—had gone down to the lake to play with other displaced city children.
The lake froze over every year, and the local children all knew how to spot the thin ice. Ariana and Guiseppe had given Vilmo a brief lesson: stay where the lake is white, avoid the dark patches, spread your weight out if the ice started to speak.
Vilmo followed the rules—white, black, flat—but the ice splintered under him anyway. A hole opened beneath his feet, and the lake reached up with dark hands to pull him down.
When they revived him, the EMTs said he had been gone for nearly two hours. Th
e water, so cold and empty, had frozen him on the cusp of death. His brain and his heart were suspended, caught between beat and thought, and every nerve center waited for the next signal. After pulling him out of the water, the medical technicians stabbed him with Epinephrine, filled his body with electricity and, finally, cracked his ribcage so one of them could reach into his chest and massage his heart. It was this touch—this human contact—that brought him back, as if his consciousness had found the EMT's hand and let it guide him back to the world.
He was lucky, they said, the luckiest kid in the whole world. He believed it until he turned sixteen, and after the summer when he nearly didn't become a man, he was more careful about cultivating luck. It had come to him—unbidden, but not unwelcome—twice now, and there was a marker on his life. A not unwelcome one, but it was a debt he owed regardless. A debt he meant to pay.
Though, repaying fortune was a delicate task. Cultivating too much random chance was like trying to influence the whim of a wildfire, and too little effort was like spitting in the ocean.
He had some control over the weekly poker game. The Wednesday night gathering wasn't just about the redistribution of illicit money; there was the touch of luck, drifting through the fingers of the players, and the illusions left in the wake of fortune. He wasn't as sensitive to these phantoms, not like some of those who came to play, but during the course of the game, he could feel something in the room. The world shifted as the cards moved around the table, like the slow birth of a whirlpool. He was a tiny raft floating in its waters, trying to stay on the outer edge. Trying to figure out a way to steer with its current.
XII
Once, deep in the night with only the moon as a witness, Mistral had told the Poet a story. They were drunk, as solitary itinerant men tended to be at that time. Was it fear or loneliness or frustration that caused Mistral to tell his story? The Poet didn’t ask. He knew better. Sometimes it was best to record a moment intent on flight. To analyze it would be to miss it.
Listen, Mistral had said, this is how it began . . .
My mother, like you, had a gift for speaking in public, though she dreamed of using it to foment revolutionary fervor. As there hadn't been a true revolution since before she was born, she diverted this energy into society luncheons and charity fund drives. We weren't part of those circles by birth, but she knew what they needed, and they, not surprisingly, knew what to do with tools that begged to be used.
And she was good at it: the clockwork scheduling of a garden party; the delicate balance in the decorations at coming-of-age luncheons, that fine line between the adoration of innocence and the presentation of worldly readiness; and what sort of hip counter-culture trappings for a party that would ensure column inches in the society pages. All of these things soothed my mother's dream for a societal upheaval that craved a fiery orator.
My father had a hunch. It wasn’t a congenital deformity, nor was there any psychological reason for his stoop. He sold shoes, and spent most of his day bending over women's feet. I guess he grew tired of lifting his head. His voice faded too, as a result of the permanent pressure of his chin against his chest.
This ate at my mother, as you can imagine. He was on his knees all day, serving at the beck and call of those same ladies who would never truly accept her as one of their own, regardless of how vital she was to them. They never fought in front of me, but I could feel the heat in the house. I could feel the way her anger burned the back of his neck.
“Are you going to stare at the floor for the rest of your life?” she asked him one night at dinner.
He made the effort then. He lifted his chin and looked up at her face. He stared at my mother for a long time, and then he smiled at me. “Yes,” was all he said before he returned his attention to his plate.
That night, the wind started talking to me. It was winter, and the windows were all sealed tight. The radiator in my room rattled when the steam rose, and it had been my nightly companion for many years. But that night it was quiet. Out of deference to the wind, maybe. The radiator held its breath so I could hear what the wind had to say. It crept into my room and held me and said it was sorry, but there was only one person breathing in my parents’ bedroom.
And then? the Poet had prompted, trying to keep the moment alive.
Everyone got what they wanted, Mistral had said, and his voice was strained with the weight of this history. She buried him on the bluff overlooking the Hammerstone, and then married a man who lived within walking distance of the cemetery. And that was it.
The Poet wrote Mistral's story down in his notebook and eventually wrote another story on the facing page. The story of the young beat cop who, fresh from the academy, young and earnest and well-meaning, was on-scene at the Humboldt fire, the four-alarm blaze at Pier 12 six years back. The cop saved five immigrant children who had been abandoned in a shipping container deep within the decrepit building. There are still more, he had said to the firemen who had tried to restrain him, I can hear them. He went back in, and before others could follow, the flames spread and the building was lost. Everything was lost.
When the demolition crews were able to haul away enough of the wreckage to uncover the twisted shapes of the metal containers, they found corpses. Some of them were the bodies of children, some of them were older, but none of them was ever clearly identified as belonging to the young cop.
On that day when the Poet went to write this second story into his book, it opened randomly to this page, and the available space was the large enough. A happy accident, a tiny trick of fortune. This was the way every position of every story was decided, the Poet would argue, because he was nothing more than a mirror of the world around him. The stories collected in his notebook were one version of life in the Sprawl, no more or less true than what could be found in other books or even what was reported in the morning paper.
They were just stories.
XIII
The Poet finally ran out of money shortly before midnight. Ralph had been whittling away at the writer’s stack for the last hour. His chips, on the other hand, were toppling over, and instead of stacking them up again, he had been making large bets. By forcing the Poet to go all-in or fold on every hand, Ralph had kept the writer on the defensive—ante, check, fold—for some time.
The Poet was stalling, waiting for something to happen, some bit of luck to come his way. But it's mine, Ralph thought. His fingers drummed impatiently on the table. I own this table.
He was holding a seven and a king, and after the turn, there were two sevens on the board. All that was left was the river, and even if it wasn’t another king, he was still sitting on three of a kind. Enough to push him out.
The Poet was down to a tiny stack of blue chips, barely enough to ante on the next hand.
“There’s no point in folding, is there?” the Poet asked Vilmo, who had already folded. “I won't be able to place another bet. Should I go all-in?”
“Might as well,” the butcher replied.
The Poet rifled his blue chips. “Doesn’t really seem fair that I get to skimp on my bet, and the rest of you have to meet this gentleman’s wager. What is it, again?”
“Two hundred,” Ralph said, liking the way the number rolled off his tongue. Pot was about a grand and a half. Game was finally getting interesting, and more so after the dandy was pushed out. The writer's play had been erratic and annoying all night, and it been hard to find any rhythm. Now, though, all that was about to change . . .
“Two zero zero. That number has been chasing me all day,” the Poet said. “A pity that it comes up now, when I only have twenty—a two and a zero. One zero missing. And the zero is so close to the letter ‘O,’ is it not? An ‘O’ gone from our—” He smiled at Clio. “‘Our’ what? That doesn’t really work, does it? The trouble with poetic language is that it collapses so quickly on you. One wrong word and—”
“Are you in or out?” Ralph interrupted.
“Ah, yes.” the Poet said. “‘Out.’ Se
e? That's the word I should have used.” His teeth flashed as he slipped his cards under his four blue chips. “Yes, I may be able to provide you with something after all, something to give my tiny bet that extra ‘O’ it needs.”
Reaching under his chair, he grabbed his knapsack and brought it into his lap. The bag had only one strap, and after he loosened it, he opened the flap and retrieved his notebook. He put it on the table, and it fell open to a random page. “Hidden within ‘wonder,’” he said as he tore the page out, “there is but one ‘O.’ And is one enough to keep the world alight? I do wonder, yes, I do.” He tossed the page toward the center of the table.
It fell slowly, like a feather dropped from the passage of a great bird, and finally settled on the pile of chips. A single white sheet, covered with the black scrawl of tiny words.
“That’s a library book,” Mistral said, noting the gold paint on the notebook’s spine.
“Yes,” the Poet said. “Or, rather, it will be once I have finished writing it.” He showed them the blank title page.
“They’ve already catalogued it,” Mistral said.
“They’re very thorough,” the Poet acknowledged. He closed his notebook with a snap and slipped it back into the knapsack. “What does my assembled host think? Does this page hold any value? Is there enough wonder for it to suffice as my missing zero?”
XIV
In the wake of the Poet's question, the atmosphere in the basement room felt like the morning of the first winter frost: the world held captive beneath a thin layer of ice, held quiet by the grip of a seasonal chill. No one wanted to be the first to acknowledge the page, as if such recognition would leave a mark, forever implicating them as the catalyst for some quantum change unleashed upon the world.