by Alan Trotter
Childs told the salesman that he felt like playing some more, so he’d appreciate him sitting back down. ‘I don’t mean to put you out of pocket,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you a sawbuck, if you win with it you pay it back, if you don’t then you won’t be in any debt to me.’
The salesman looked at Childs, weighing his thoughts. Either a man was offering him a friendly loan to keep a game of cards going, or else he was being taken hostage, and he was trying to figure which it was.
Maybe he thought the dimness of the room and the hanging smoke made the offer feel hostile. Maybe it was the look on _____’s face, which had a way of throwing a sinister cast on proceedings—his smirk like he was testing the edges of a person with the tip of a needle. Maybe the salesman thought that he obviously wasn’t good at reading the table—he’d sat there and lost hand after hand after all—so he could be imagining a threat where none existed.
He tried to laugh, and then tried to put his coat on again.
Childs slapped the surface of the table and chips leapt from their stacks in alarm. His hand stayed on the table and along the back of his knuckles and folding around them ran a strip of metal. The salesman vibrated with the table top. Childs turned to me. He said, ‘You a mute?’
I shook my head no.
He said, ‘Get round the table and go through him, would you?’ I went to the salesman, and patted him down. ‘And the coat,’ Childs said. Holcomb had his notebook out again, and was writing something down.
I peeled the coat from the salesman: there was a folding knife and an over-stuffed wallet in one of the pockets. ‘Put them back in there and pass it,’ said Childs and for no reason I can think of I did. He took the coat and walked it over to the hat-stand on his metal pole with its rubber hoof. He hung up the coat and then walked back to his space at the table and sat down. The salesman stuck hanging like a kite in a tree until Childs told him to sit down as well.
Childs slid the deck across the table to him, and then slid alongside it a pile of chips from his own stack. At some point, the strip of metal had gone from the back of Childs’ hand, and again I’d missed the change.
He told the salesman to shuffle and deal. The salesman couldn’t look at him, but he took the cards and he shuffled, and the game carried on, though quieter than it had before. A couple of hands later, pre-flop, the salesman started to shake. Then tears curled from his eyes and a mewling sound from his mouth. He started to ball up on himself, and Childs had to guide his cards upright so he kept them hidden. The game carried on while he wept.
*
I felt sore for the salesman, or bored now that the conversation had died in the game. Anyway, I heard myself say to Holcomb something about the machines in his stories—the ones that let you see into the future or communicate with the past. I said, ‘What if you had something like that?’
He had been watching the crying salesman, and looked irritated that I was trying to speak to him. I asked him if he’d thought about what he might do with a machine like that.
‘I’ve written stories about it. Of course I’ve thought about it,’ he said, and that was it.
To keep myself from beating his face off his skull, I watched my cards.
With a machine I’d have gone back and kept myself from saying anything. I’d not have said anything but also I’d have known that the salesman was going to be kept in his chair by Childs and why. I’d have found out whether _____ knew it was going to happen, and I would have kept myself on the same page as him. Instead the only thing I could think to do was ask this snot kid about his machine, because I didn’t know what I was about. I was sick of being shrapnel, spinning out from something I had no say in.
I shouted something at the salesman to get him to stop his weeping, and when he didn’t I cuffed him around the mouth, harder than I meant, and he started bleeding, until he was drooling blood towards his cards, for which _____ looked sore at me, which seemed to me an unkind response, seeing how little involved I’d been in making this scene. Anyway, I stood up and got a towel and threw it to the salesman to hold to his cut. And we sat there, playing cards in silence with a weeping, bleeding man until Swagger walked in.
*
We heard his footsteps so clear—all the way from the front door of the apartment building—that they sounded made for the radio. When he opened the door I noticed that we’d all been watching in anticipation, staring at the entrance as if we were at the greatest leg show on earth: no one had said a word, mid-hand we’d forgotten the cards. The salesman had stopped mewling, probably hadn’t even remembered to bleed.
Swagger opened the door to _____’s apartment and took it in like it was a well-remembered part of a vast kingdom. He gave a nod to Childs, and hung his hat. He stood almost as tall as me and his jacket was well made, so it left barely a hint of the big revolver that sat in his shoulder rig. The salesman started up crying again.
Swagger walked to the table, saying, ‘I hope you don’t mind me intruding on your game.’ He flashed a Photostat licence that said:
Mike Swagger.
He was shamus, not cop. ‘I’ve got a few questions I’d like to ask Polk here about why he’s in my town, and a few notions I’d like to put in his head about the importance of learning lessons and appreciating good luck.’
Childs had carried his chair over to beside the salesman—Polk—and now Swagger sat. He pulled the towel away from Polk’s face to look at the wound, and then up at Childs. Childs gave an almost invisible nod in my direction, and Swagger sized me up. He gave what felt like a look of appreciation, and said to the salesman, ‘Looks like that could have been a deal worse. In all else neither the long or the short of it looks good for you, Polk.’
Polk sniffled angrily. He was still holding his cards as if the game might start up again at any second, and it was them he spoke to. ‘I think I told you everything I had to say already today, Detective Swagger. I was helpful, I was accommodating, but if it’s thanks to you I’ve been kept here’—he gestured angrily at Childs, his voice growing loud and piercing, like an insect almost buzzing into your ear—‘and I’ve been beaten’—then at me, and his face and neck bloomed with colour like he was being dipped in ink—‘then I’m going to find that policeman, that Cromarty, and I’m going to report this harassment.’
‘When you were good enough to talk to me earlier, Polk,’ said Swagger, ‘you made clear you knew nothing about a sordid little gang, a club of photography enthusiasts, that I was trying to locate a member of—the queen of the place. This gang have something like a membership badge, or a key.’ He slid one of the playing cards along the table, and tore it along its length, pinning one corner so he could make a neat jagged rip through it. He held the two halves up separately at shoulder width. ‘This private club holds a deck of half cards,’ he said, ‘and every member comes along, and has their own half card.’ Swagger put the two halves together and showed how neatly they fit. Polk sweated.
Swagger took something from his pocket and put it flat on the table under his hand. ‘You were smart enough not to keep it on your person, but you couldn’t bring yourself to get rid of it could you, Polk? You figured you’d skip town a short while and when you came back, you’d go back to your little club, and enjoy some more of your games.’ He lifted his hand. Underneath it was half of a queen of diamonds. She had been cut longways down the middle, between the eyes, leaving a serrated, knife-cut edge. ‘I’m afraid, Polk,’ Swagger said, ‘I’m cancelling the trip you’re all packed for. Instead we’re going to see Cromarty, and I bet he’ll have his own thoughts on where you’ll take your vacation.’
Polk gulped like he was swallowing a bad year. ‘Detective Swagger,’ he said, and his voice was almost calm. ‘Swagger, I know I’ve made mistakes.’
Swagger shook his head. ‘Typists make mistakes, Polk. A girl’s dead—two if you count the child she was carrying. That’s not a mistake. What do you figure the odds are that child was yours?’
‘Swagger,’ said Polk, ‘I k
now it’s bad, and if I had nothing to offer I’d have nothing to say. But I’ve got something to offer and you want to hear it.’
Swagger put the cut card back in his pocket, ‘You think you can buy me, Polk?’ he said.
‘Swagger, look, if I didn’t have anything to sell, I’d have nothing to say, but I’ve got something to sell, and we need to go somewhere to talk about it.’ He gestured at us, at their audience.
Swagger yawned unhurriedly, then said, ‘I gave you a chance to talk, Polk, and you fed me a line. I spent half of today chasing down what you sold me, and it was a rotten bill of goods. About as rotten as I’ve ever seen.’ He slammed his big hands down flat on the table. ‘But, we do have to go. You can talk all you want on the way, Polk, but I’m weary from listening.’
Childs had taken up position beside Polk’s chair. Now he took him by the arm. Polk stood but then shook off Childs and began to make another complaint. Childs clapped him on the back of the head and drove him forward, only letting him gather his hat and his coat, then driving him on again, like an uncooperative rock he was kicking along the street.
Swagger walked to the threshold, collected his own coat, and faced us while he pulled it on. With his hat held decently at his chest, like a man passing on condolences, he said, ‘I’m sorry to have interrupted the game,’ and left.
*
As soon as they’d gone, there began a feeling of a missed opportunity. It felt as if I’d eaten well in a dream and woken hungry. But before the feeling had much of a chance to take hold, Holcomb upped and out of the room after Swagger. That left me and _____ and fifty-one cards that hadn’t been torn in half.
_____ poured the money Polk, Childs and Holcomb had left into his pocket, tipped us each a drink from Holcomb’s bottle and took his over to the couch, where he slugged it back and lay down with his eyes shut.
I went to the window and saw Holcomb and the big detective in conversation at the corner of the building, while Childs kept hold of Polk nearby. I wondered why Polk didn’t break free from the cripple, and wondered what Swagger and Holcomb were talking about, and finished the drink and went and poured myself another, and then a third. I was happy that it made me feel like a ball on a downhill slope—I’ve never much drunk, but found myself wanting it now. If a feeling like that could become something you want then maybe all things could, and Polk could be happy waiting for Swagger and Childs to escort him off to whatever justice they had ready for him, and Lydia could like sinking into her sorrow and her sheets until there was nothing left of her but a stain, and I could get to enjoy seeing lips flapping on street corners and not need an idea of what was being said, and just pour myself another slug of gin. I spun downhill a bit further and in the bedroom I lay down on _____’s bed and slept.
*
A day or a week later, and no work in between, _____ and I went to a bar—a second-floor dive without much in the way of either comfort or custom. _____ bought a pint of bourbon and drank it with a grim determination. I drank water and chewed on my tongue and counted and recounted the number of noses on each face around me and never got a surprise.
_____ got into conversation with three young men. They must have been brothers. Each of them was scrawny and red haired and they spoke in a vicious whisper that seemed to come out of all three of them at the same time. After a while _____ called me over and introduced me and told me that they had a plan for us to earn some money. I shook hands with the three of them in turn or with one of them three times, their hands slipping in and out of my grip, and they explained in their shared harsh whisper their plan. _____ and I would be two strangers out in the world. We would get into a fight. Once we had a big enough crowd interested in us, the three red-haired brothers would go through the pockets of our distracted audience. Afterwards, we’d come back to the second-floor dive and split the money.
It was the sort of scam _____ often didn’t have any time for, but it looked better than boredom. _____ agreed for us. For a while the triplets whispered at each other about where we could find the best crowd. They settled on a tourist hangout in the centre of town.
They wanted to stay and work some more on the pint of bourbon, but _____ was keen to get started, so he pushed the cork in the bottle and the bottle into his jacket and was out the door with his hat on his head while they were still holding their glasses out to his seat.
*
We took the streetcar out near a big theatre that brought in the crowds in droves. Unfortunately, it already had for the evening: the show had started and they were inside, out of reach. The most business we could find was outside a hotel, where hacks stopped to collect rich tourists and a couple of newspaper stands had a few customers flicking through the evening edition. The triplets thought we should go and share the bourbon, wait for things to pick up and come back when the show closed, but _____ wasn’t in a mood to wait. He told me to go and stand on the other side of the street.
I went over to the bigger newsstand. A gent taking his pipe out for a walk gave me a sidelong glance, twitched the pipe with alarm, then remembered an appointment he had not to be around. However it was I looked, apparently it wasn’t casual. The stallkeeper asked me if I was looking for something. I tried having my hands in my pockets but it didn’t feel right. Then _____ had managed to fall over my legs and was accusing me of tripping him.
It might have made a better show if I had tried to reason with him, but I know what _____’s like, so instead of wasting time I took a swing at him with my right. _____ was quick and managed to dodge it, then as I was beginning to throw out my other arm, he got in under it and lifted his knee into my side. He was trying to hit me above the hip, where it might have hurt me, but I was too tall for it. Once he’d done I swiped him with the back of my left hand. It brought colour into his cheek and I would have given him a line about his pretty blushes, but I wouldn’t have got the words in time and anyway he popped me in the jaw so hard it nearly took the floor out from under me.
That cinched the notion that I didn’t want _____ hitting me any more.
I grabbed his jacket back and off his shoulder with one hand so he staggered and the jacket would hinder his arms, and tried to put the boot into the back of his legs and knock at his neck or his face to get him on the ground. He went down on one knee, but he had his arm up to block the punch to his neck. And he pushed himself forward, throwing his weight into my legs and pinning them together.
As my head hit the sidewalk I thought I saw a policeman through the legs of the gathering crowd, walking off with a smile on his face. That was the sort of casual I had wanted to be—the casual of a button walking away from a brawl in the street. Then _____ fell on me with fists and a sharp knee.
The racket was that we would be pulled apart—the decent onlookers of our good city would intervene and the intervention would be a part of the spectacle we created while the bleak triplets worked their way through the crowd. But we were going at it too good for anyone to want to step in.
As _____ started to beat my face, I was aware of the crowd swaying. People at the back grew keen to see what was happening while the people who could see didn’t want to get too close to it.
It seemed a better idea, from a particular point of view, that I slug _____ until he passed out than that he slugged me until I passed out. Apart from anything else, I would in all likelihood lay off _____ once he was out and I couldn’t be completely sure of the same courtesy from him. So I managed to throw him away from me and had just caught him with one fairly good fist above his right eye when he was being pulled backwards.
The figure holding his left arm said to me, ‘Woah.’ The same figure holding his right, said, ‘Patty. Lay off.’
I took a couple more small steps in their direction, trying to keep the ground from squirming out from under me. The crowd swayed more, and so did the sky and the faces of the matching pair on either side of _____. Dogs looked on but they didn’t bark.
I found my feet. No one was trying to hold me back. _
____ wasn’t fighting against the two red ghouls holding him. I thought there was maybe blood on my face but I put my hand on it and as far as I could tell it was just sweat. My eye hurt. I turned around and walked away.
*
Somehow the four of them made it back to the second-floor dive bar before me. Maybe it was the limp that had started after a block or two, or that I got a bit lost after the headache began in earnest.
They had wallets and money clips spread out on the table in front of them. _____ looked happier than he’d looked in a week. His lip was split open on one side. His forehead had a pretty good lump on it. I drank a glass of water and stopped thinking about my head and shards of glass and vicious teeth. It didn’t help.
The triplets weren’t in as good a mood as _____. They were complaining to him about the haul, saying they would have made more if we’d waited, and that the fight had been too much. The same mouth made each complaint three times from different seats. They complained that they had to separate us, so we’d all been seen together. _____ shouted at them that what did they care. You couldn’t have picked one of them out of a line-up that only had the three of them in it, he said angrily, but he couldn’t stop grinning.
They whined some more, hoping for a bigger cut of the money. Whether _____ figured that was what they were hoping for I didn’t know. I was sure they’d already taken one anyway.
The barman brought over another pint of bourbon and _____ paid him from one of the clips on the table. He took the money like it was innocent as milk from the breast.
*
When the joint closed all five of us landed up back in the apartment. Immediately _____ collapsed in his bed, but for what felt like an age I had to play a tiring game: one of the three pickpockets was sprawled over my mattress and I had to lift him by the scruff of the neck and the back of his belt and put him out the way in a corner of the room. Except, when I came back another one was in the same place, and I had to grab him and clear him out my way. And then the same with the third one, or with one of the first two all over again.