While this was his dream home, Marcus also was trapped on a tiny island. He needed a waterman on his payroll; someone with a boat who knew every island, cay, and beach within a hundred-mile radius. Someone who could pick him up on the beach below the house and get him to safety in less than an hour. He also needed an airplane, even a prop job, that he could keep on Beef Island. He had to learn to fly if he was going to live in the islands.
Shortly after Christmas, Marcus grew restless and decided to throw a party — a house warming. He’d become a regular in the two restaurants and the bar located in the Scrub Island resort, which had about 50 hotel rooms and a dozen or more rental villas of varying sizes. He’d befriended the resort manager, Wesley Pennington, and invited him to lunch at the house. As a result, the manager, a single, thirties-something guy, was happy to introduce him to many of the locals. Marcus, who had never met a stranger, quickly established a circle of new acquaintances. He needed friends he could trust with his life, as he had trusted his life to Jemmy, Widja and Richey.
Marcus also asked Wes to invite some of the resort guests to the party, preferably the generational rich and successful businesspersons. Marshon also recalled the Willsons and rang them up. Robert asked if they might invite a German couple they’d met on the island, and Marcus said he’d be delighted. Additionally, he invited the Scrub Island marina manager, who claimed to know every sailor in the American and British Virgin Islands. Marcus also asked him to bring some of his friends. All in all, it promised to be a diverse gathering of about twenty individuals.
Initially, Marcus had Tallu show his guests to the veranda, where he directed them to the bar and a table loaded with hors d’ouvres. He pointed out the cabanas and said each included men’s and women’s swimsuits in various styles and sizes. There were many comfortable, padded deck chairs arranged around the pool.
After everyone had arrived, Marcus conducted a brief tour of his home, beginning in the living room, through the dining room and past the kitchen. The connecting hallway opened into a sitting room and a library. The parallel ground floor wing had three guest bedrooms.
The interior courtyard contained a terraced garden planted with brightly colored Caribbean flowers and trees — including bougainvillea, palm trees, dwarf coconut trees, giant crotons, and other flowers and plants whose names and characteristics Marcus had yet to learn. Two sidewalks crossed the courtyard.
Marcus and his guests walked up a circular, wrought iron staircase to the second level. The upstairs interior wing was a duplicate of the one below it, with three more guest bedrooms. The connecting hallway contained two rooms: a music room, and a billiards room.
The wing above the living and dining rooms included a large master bedroom, with a balcony extending over about half of the veranda. Also on the cliff side were an exercise room and breakfast area.
Back on the terrace, his guests each voiced their amazement at his new home. Several had brought gifts, including a silver coffee service, an oil painting by a local artist, and an antique sextant from the marina manager. Marcus was genuinely surprised and pleased.
His guests settled in with their drinks and food; a few made use of the pool. Marcus congratulated Tallu on the bountiful buffet table loaded with breads, meats, cheeses, and plenty of fruit, including mangoes, pineapples, plantains, and ugli. Tallu had brought it two women from Tortola to help serve. Later, they would grill steak and chicken.
There was a brief moment when Marcus/Marshon imagined another scene, in which Richey sat by the pool, drinking martinis and talking about movies, while Carmen painted and Marisa exchanged text messages with new friends. In that mental dream, Gail walked up and slipped her arm around his waist, and pressed herself again him, as she’d done so many times before. She breathed his name and told him that the family finances and investments were triple-A, and that they didn’t have to work, nor worry about anything. Ever. Their life existed in a fabulous house, on an island, in an ocean, on a rock orbiting around the sun. All was well in the universe.
It should have worked out that way. In the end, Marshon had decided that Skinny Walker’s philosophy of life was only partly right. Getting money guaranteed independence and safety, sometimes. But, as Richey might say, that’s just scenery. It was the message of the play that was important, and the people on stage who brought it to life and made it real. The message had to be uplifting. Life had to have a purpose beyond the material, but, at the moment, Marshon didn’t know what that was. The scene of what should have been faded to the reality of the moment.
“I hear there’s a festival this month on Montserrat and a regatta on St. Vincent,” said Consuela, a neighbor who lived nearby. “Will you be going, Marcus?”
“I would, if I had a boat.”
“You can come with my party on my boat,” she offered.
“Good. Perhaps you can give me sailing lessons.”
Consuela, a hot Latin number whose elderly Brazilian husband traveled frequently on business trips, had been coming on to him since he met her several days ago in the resort bar. Marcus naturally was wary of offending her obviously rich and powerful husband.
“Marcus, where do you come from in the states?” Wes, the resort manager, asked.
“Chicago,” he said.
“And I hear you are in the import-export business,” one of the resort guests asked. Marcus couldn’t remember his name.
“Yes.”
“I believe Marcus is affiliated with Phillip Dahlgren of Nassau,” Willson said, and Marcus acknowledged this statement with a brief nod of his head.
“I saw Dahlgren’s yacht over on Beef Island,” the marina manager said. “It’s spectacular. Have you sailed on it, Marcus?”
“Yes, recently, from Miami, with Gus and Olaf. As you say, it’s one of a kind. When Phillip told me the price, I’m certain my jaw dropped a bit.”
“Remember your new friends if you stumble across something interesting in your new business ventures,” Willson said.
“I will, Robert, I certainly will.”
While Marcus searched for an enduring purpose for his life, he still wanted to play the money game. It wasn’t just that an abundance of money usually increased one’s odds of enjoying safety, comfort and independence. The game itself was challenging and, ultimately, addictive. It required intelligence, innovation and bravery. It provided excitement, power, and freedom from mediocrity. Sometimes, playing equaled pure enjoyment. Right or wrong, the money game defined life in his time, and Marcus was a player. Now was the time to begin a new game.
“Any gamblers here?” Marcus asked suddenly.
“I love a good game of poker,” Willson said enthusiastically. “Maybe some of the other chaps are interested.”
“Yeah, I’m interested,” Wesley said. The German also nodded, as did the marina manager. They gathered around Marcus as he stood near the bar.
“Before we get a poker game going, let me tell you about an intriguing new game being played in the states,” Marcus said. “Some call it The Private Lottery or simply The Richey.” He’d allow its mystery to spawn its own mythology. Maybe it would become a descriptive noun for the new gamblers. Richeys. It could become a verb for their activity: They richeyed their way to a pot of gold.
“How does it work?”
“Very simply. Every player buys at least one two-digit number between zero-zero and ninety-nine,” Marcus said, “and the winning number is the first two-digits in the pick four game of any state lottery drawn that evening.”
“How interesting. Simple, and it certainly couldn’t be rigged.”
“You’re assuming the state lottery isn’t rigged.”
“How much per number?” the man with the German accent asked.
“That varies, of course, depending on the number of players and the price per ticket.” Marshon decided on a gambit. “I’ve heard of one game involving twenty players who paid ten thousand dollars for each two-digit number.”
“A million-dollar pot!”
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br /> “A fifty thousand dollar investment per player.”
“Of course, that’s bit much for us,” Marcus said, good-naturedly.
Consuela joined the men, which gave Marcus a chance to reprise the game as his guests thought about it. Then, he helped out the decision-making process, “Just for the fun of it, let’s say we get ten people here at the party to each ante up a hundred dollars. It’ll be a thousand dollar pot.”
“I don’t have that much cash on me,” the marina manager said.
Marcus waved off that consideration. “I’ll stake anyone who’s short. We’ll settle up later. Maybe you’ll win!”
“How do we decide who gets what numbers?” Consuela asked.
“I’ll get Tallu and the help to write down all one hundred numbers, each on a small piece of paper,” Marshon said. “We’ll put all the numbers in a bowl and each of us will draw out 10 slips of paper. We’ll draw high card to determine the order of the draw. What do you say, folks!”
“I’m game,” the German said, confidently. “My wife and I will both play. That will make the odds in our favor five-to-one. I like that.”
Marcus/Marshon waved a warning finger in front of his guests and said, in a booming voice, accompanied by his best Jamaican laugh, “I must warn you all! I have been very lucky lately. Very lucky, indeed!”
Luck is a synonym for fate, which some people believe to be predetermined, in part. Clearly, there are a multitude of influences that determine whether one is healthy or sick, lives a short or long life, and lives either comfortably, or in poverty. Such circumstances can shape one’s personality, and attitude about life itself. Skinny Walker believed that, with enough money, he could make his own luck. If you can afford the best of health care, you are less likely to succumb to illness and an early death. Most people can get money only by working in the economy; otherwise, no one would perform the many, many jobs that are dangerous, degrading, boring and/or seemingly useless. A few individuals step outside the traditional workplace and attempt to make money in the easiest and fastest way, which is not always the legal way. It’s human nature to bend the rules, and legality may be a relative term within the economic marketplace, anyway. But, all individual efforts are still susceptible to fate, or luck. In fact, some people are lucky, and some aren’t. People make good and bad choices — some more consistently than others. Luck, good and bad, can be oddly transient, or cyclical. It’s difficult to calculate the odds of being lucky, because so many variables come into play, and so many events seem unpredictable, including earthquakes, war, random murder, and a host of accidents. Nevertheless, health care professionals, actuaries, insurance companies, bookies and gamblers still quote odds on the likelihood of almost anything happening. They will take your money, in the form of a wager, or premium, or service fee. You can effectively bet on how long you will live, whether you will get cancer, whether your team will win, the numbers that will be drawn in the state lottery, who will become president, and the possibility that a cruise ship will sink within the next thirty days.
One could argue that the events that took place in Kansas City did not affect enough people to be a statistically valid sample. Marshon and Carmen were clearly lucky, although Carmen didn’t necessarily feel fortunate immediately afterward. Boudra and Rinaldo Morgan certainly appear to have been lucky. Future events might reveal Gail to have lucked out, too. Richey, Jemmy, Kandie, Widja, James and Cathy Kennedy, and Ace and Country Long, were clearly unlucky. Some deserved their fate, while others clearly didn’t. Even Michael Williams was unlucky, for that matter. On that basis, Marcus arbitrarily calculated the odds of being lucky as about one chance in five, which he imagined would also be true for his new life in the islands. He planned to make every effort necessary to beat the odds, and continue to be the lucky one.
THE END
The Money Game Page 53