Fifty-to-One

by Charles Ardai

  “I’m sorry about the money,” Blandon said. “Believe it or not, I didn’t like doing it. But I was desperate. If we don’t have books to sell, we don’t have a business, and my printer was threatening to destroy the lot if I didn’t pay him at least a portion of what I owed.”

  “So you stole from me.”

  “Stole? You handed me your money, I didn’t steal it. As I recall, you were standing on a New York City sidewalk, talking loudly about how much money you’d saved up. Lady, if I’m starving and you put a roast beef sandwich in front of me, I’m going to eat it and damn the consequences.”

  “So I’m a roast beef sandwich.”

  “In this metaphor, yes.”

  “And what do you think the police would call what you did?”

  “They’d call it fraud and throw me behind bars for it. But that’s just because they don’t understand the realities of the modern business world. A small company like ours...thirty-five dollars can be the difference between life and death.”

  “What do you think it is to me?”

  “An investment,” he said. “And a smart investment, too. Think of it as buying a piece of New York’s next great publishing company. Dell, Fawcett, Pocket Books... these are million-dollar operations. And why? Because of these.” He lifted a couple of the skinny paperbacks from his desk, let them drop again. They looked like drugstore crime novels, the covers colorful and lurid and peppered with ladies in negligees and men with guns. Each book had an image of a yellow ribbon in the top left corner and one more on the spine. “Just twenty-five cents apiece, just five little nickels—but men have built castles on that foundation of nickels. They’ve built empires. And what have they got that I don’t?”

  “Ethics?” Erin said.

  “Don’t you believe it,” Blandon said. “They’ve got no more ethics than a cat. They bite and claw and fight for every penny and if it takes a thumb in the eye or a knee in the groin to do it, that’s what they deal out. It’s every man for himself, winner take all. But for the winner who does take all, the one who comes out on top of the heap...” He fell silent, a dreamy look on his face. “And that’s going to be me. That’s going to be Hard Case Crime. We’re going to come out on top.”

  “Even if you have to fight dirty to get there,” Tricia said.

  “That’s right, sister. Even if. You see this book?” He picked out one of the books on his desk, held it out to her. The cover showed a nearly bare-breasted blonde dressed as Blind Justice, an old-fashioned scale in one hand and a bloody sword in the other. She was peeking out from under her blindfold at a couple of frightened-looking men. The title was Eye The Jury and in smaller type below that it said A Mac Hatchet Mystery by Nicky Malone.

  “This was our first book, came out four months ago. That fellow who came after me in the bathroom? This is what he’s all hot under the collar about. Just because he wrote a book ten years ago with a similar title about a guy named Mike Hammer. Am I imitating it? Damn right I am. His book sold millions of copies. Ours? So far we’ve shipped twelve thousand. Doesn’t hurt Spillane at all. Guy hasn’t written a book in six years, he’s probably still raking it in. I guarantee our little book doesn’t even make a dent in his income. But what it does do is get us started. At twenty-five cents apiece, twelve thousand copies are worth three thousand dollars, and half of that comes to us.”

  “So why did you need my thirty-five bucks?”

  He shrugged, looked uncomfortable. “A copy shipped isn’t a copy sold. And even when they do sell, the stores take their sweet time paying. And the printer gets his cut off the top. Then there’s the warehouse and the trucking and the binding and the paper...”

  “I’m sure,” Tricia said, “and the author and the artist, too, but—”

  Blandon blew a raspberry. “That’s peanuts. Trucks and paper and printing—that’s where the real money goes.”

  “Listen, Mr. Blandon,” Tricia said, and then stopped. “Hold on, what’s your real name? It’s not Blandon, I’ll bet.”

  He shook his head. “It’s Borden. Like the milk. Charley Borden.”

  “Mr. Borden, then. I’m sorry to hear about your troubles. But we’ve all got troubles. And I’m happy to hear about your dreams, but we’ve all got those, too. I didn’t set out to make an investment in your company, and it’s not like you handed me a stock certificate back there on the sidewalk. What you did was lie to me and take my money. If I hadn’t been lucky enough to get a job next door, I might’ve starved. You should be ashamed—”

  “Of what? It’s quite a good job you’ve gotten—yes, Erin told me. You’re going to be dancing at Manhattan’s premier nightspot. And would you ever have gotten that job if I hadn’t given you the card for this building? Think about that. We both know you came to this city for a reason; I heard what you said to your sister. Well, I’d say you’re well on your way to realizing your dream. And tell me, would you really be there this soon, this fast, if it hadn’t been for me?” And he smiled, a big guileless smile with a little desperate twinkle in his eye.

  Tricia wanted to tell him he was wrong. She wanted to slug him again, knock him off the straight-back chair he was sitting in and show him you didn’t take advantage of a South Dakota girl, no sir. But there was just enough truth to what he said, and she was tired, and the cot across the hall was no feather bed but right now it was calling to her as if it were.

  “All right, Mr. Borden. Here’s my offer to you, you can take it or you can leave it. I didn’t plan to invest thirty-five dollars in your company and I don’t mean to do so now. So we’ll call it a loan. You’re going to pay it back to me, with interest, at the rate of five dollars a week. Let’s say eight weeks instead of seven—that should cover it. If, at the end of eight weeks you haven’t paid me in full, I’ll go to the police and tell them what you did.”

  “They’ll arrest you for usury,” Borden said. “That’s something like one hundred percent interest.”

  “Well, your other choice is that I can go to the police right now,” Tricia said. “Take it or leave it, Mr. Borden.”

  He turned to Erin. “How old would you say she is? Our little usurer? Nineteen going on forty-five?”

  Erin grinned. “I think you’d better agree to her terms, Charley, before she tightens the screws some more.”

  “All right,” Borden said. “All right. I’ll pay. But there’s something you’re going to do for me in return.”

  “What’s that?” Tricia said.

  “You’re going to be working at the Sun, right? That’s Sal Nicolazzo’s joint.” He fished around on his desk, found another book and tossed it to her. Tricia caught it. This one wasn’t a Hard Case Crime title; it said Gold Medal Book in the upper left corner and I, Mobster across the top. The author was identified as “Anonymous.”

  “You’re going to work for your money,” Borden said. “You’re going to keep your eyes and ears open, and you’re going to bring back a story that’ll sell a million copies.”

  4.

  Little Girl Lost

  The lights went down everywhere but on the little podium where Roberto Monge stood, baton in hand, and the men of his orchestra waited, poised for the downstroke, trombones and clarinets raised, lips puckered. Then the stroke, and music began to flow, like an undulating river, the percussionist in the corner adding a jungle beat by smacking the skins of a bongo. A spotlight splashed the center of the dance floor, so recently filled with swing-dancing couples, illuminating first the ankles, then the legs, then the spangled torso and cleavage and shoulders and beautifully made-up face of Miss Kitty Dufresne, looking so different now from the terrified girl on the bench in Madame Helga’s office. She waited four beats and then launched into her song: When they begin the beguine...it brings back the sound of music so tender...

  It was when Kitty stepped back and returned the microphone to its stand that Tricia and Cecilia came out from the wings on either side, each dressed in a flowing, feather-trimmed skirt and halter top, each swaying
to the music. And Tricia looked different, too. Whatever had been left of the innocent eighteen-year-old girl from South Dakota was definitely gone now. Tricia was not only blonde but coiffed like a starlet out of a Hollywood musical. Her lips were pomegranate red, her eyebrows tweezed and shaped and accented with pencil, her eyelids powdered a sultry charcoal blue. Cecilia was the older of the two—by seven years, as she’d confided to Tricia in the dressing room they shared backstage—but when they were out on the floor, you couldn’t tell. They might both have been twenty; they might both have been forty, or no age at all.

  As the orchestra’s playing swelled, they danced in tightening circles around one another, not touching, and then briefly with one another in a brisk imitation of a tango, first Cecilia leading, then Tricia. They ended with some side-by-side bump and grind moves as the orchestra changed tempos yet again, giving Cole Porter’s music a jazzy sizzle. Nothing too naughty (Billy Hoffman had warned them, unnecessarily, that their clothes had to stay on), but they gave it all they had and the crowd applauded noisily.

  The first night, Tricia had to concentrate on remembering the choreography, and didn’t manage even so; there were some unseemly stumbles. But by the third night she had it down and by the end of the week, even while dancing the more strenuous parts of the routine she found herself paying more attention to the rapt faces in the audience than to her dancing, wondering what secrets each might hide, her mind returning to the meeting in Charley Borden’s office.

  She’d caught the book he’d thrown at her, I, Mobster. “What’s this supposed to be?” she’d asked. The tag-line on the front cover said The Confession of a Crime Czar. And on the back it said,

  When we received the manuscript of this book in the office, we knew immediately we had something far out of the ordinary. We asked a prominent New York attorney to read the manuscript and arrange for the endorsement of a prominent judge, district attorney, or other high public official. Our friend, the lawyer, sent the manuscript back. “Too hot,” he advised...

  “It’s supposed to be the true story of a mobster’s life, from pinching candy as a kid up to running a criminal organization as an adult,” Borden said. “That’s what it’s supposed to be. What it is, though, is pure, unadulterated malarkey, from the first page to the last. Probably written by some hack whose knowledge of crime is limited to the nights he’s spent in a drunk tank for disorderly conduct. Not a word of it’s true—not one. But how many copies did it sell? Go ahead, ask me.”

  “How many?” Tricia said.

  “A lot,” Borden said. “It sold a lot of copies. And now they’ve made a movie out of it, too, which is bound to sell some more.” He leaned forward over his book-strewn desk. “But imagine how many they’d have sold if they’d had a true story that was actually true. A story from someone deep inside Sal Nicolazzo’s outfit.”

  “This Nicolazzo is a mobster?” Tricia said.

  “He’s from Calabria, right next door to Sicily. What do you think?”

  “I don’t think every Italian’s a mobster,” Tricia said.

  “Well, this one is. He runs illegal gambling joints up and down the east coast, two or three here in New York alone. People say there’s cards and dice at the Sun, if you find the right room. And what better way to find it than from the inside?”

  “So what you’re saying is you want me to write you a book like this one,” Tricia said.

  “Who said anything about writing? More like taking dictation. You find the right person in the outfit and get him talking, all you’ll need to do is copy down what he says.”

  “And you want me to do this for five dollars,” Tricia said. “Not even. For the portion of my five dollars of interest that you feel is usury.”

  “Nah, forget that. You bring me a story, I’ll pay a penny a word,” Borden said. “The same as I pay the rest of our authors. Up to five hundred dollars, max, for a book. How you split it with the guy whose story you tell is up to you.”

  Tricia had smiled, thinking about the portable she’d been lugging around the city, the compact little Olympia SM3 DeLuxe with its two-tone ribbon, and about the half-ream of paper wedged inside the typewriter case, filled with all the short sketches she’d written during the endless train ride. Dancing wasn’t her only ambition. She meant to visit the Algonquin Hotel, where Dorothy Parker and those other writers had congregated; she meant to write some Talk of the Town pieces for the New Yorker, perhaps about a country girl’s impressions of the big city. She hadn’t considered writing a story about mobsters, but...why not? For a penny a word, she’d give him all the story he could handle.

  They’d shaken on it. “You’re on,” she’d told him.

  But now here she was, deep inside, or as deep as a girl could get in one week, and so far there was no sign of illegal gambling, nothing to suggest anything untoward was going on at all. Sure, there were some men who loomed when they stood and whose tailored tuxedo jackets bulged suspiciously at the armpit. But those might be off-duty cops, hired to protect a rich man and his date for the evening—or even on-duty cops, for all she knew, casing the place for the same reason she was. There were some sideways glances she’d noticed from men as she left the floor at the end of her act, and once or twice a napkin pressed into her palm with a telephone or hotel room number written on it, but what girl didn’t have that sort of thing happen, even if she wasn’t dancing under a follow-spot in a halter top? It hardly made the Sun one of your worse dens of iniquity.

  Nicolazzo himself (a brooding, heavy-browed man with what looked like a jagged scar along one cheek, judging by the newspaper photos she’d dug up at the library) so far hadn’t shown his face in the club.

  Taking off her makeup after the second show one night, Tricia asked Cecilia if she’d seen anything out of the ordinary.

  “Like what?” Cecilia said. She was peeling off a set of fake eyelashes as she spoke.

  “I don’t know,” Tricia said. “You hear stories about clubs like this. What goes on in the back rooms.”

  “Sure,” Cecilia said. “The last place I worked, the boss lined all the girls up at the start of every week and he pointed—you, you, and you. And if you were one of the ones he pointed at you had to go back to his office with him, where he had this big fold-out couch, a Castro, you know? And if you didn’t go, you were fired. And everyone knew it.”

  “Is that why you left?”

  She nodded. “I haven’t seen anything like that here. I mean, once in a while Robbie will give you a pat on the rear, but my god, if that’s as far as it goes, I’ll be on cloud nine.”

  “What about gambling?” Tricia said. “Or drugs? Anything like that?”

  “Why? Have you seen anything, Trixie?”

  “No,” Tricia said. “You just hear stories.”

  Cecilia shrugged. “There’s probably some of that. You get that sort of thing everywhere. My advice to you? Don’t go looking for it. Keep your head down, do your job, collect your pay, and go home happy. What you don’t know can’t hurt you.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Tricia said. “I was just wondering.”

  But Tricia had a second job to do. She had a book to write. And not having found any true crime to write about wasn’t going to stand in her way. So she began to pound out a few pages a day, setting her Olympia up on the chateau’s sole writing desk around two each afternoon, while most of the other girls were out on jobs, shooting covers for magazines or private stills for “collectors.” The ones who didn’t have any work watched her type with a mixture of idle curiosity and indifference, peering over her shoulder now and again but never long enough to read more than a few words. Which was just as well. If it got back to Borden that she was at work on something, he wouldn’t be surprised—but he might be if he knew how often the story she was cooking up changed paths or a scene reached a dead end and needed to be scrapped and restarted, something that presumably would not have been the case if she’d just been, as he’d put it, taking dictation.


  She read I, Mobster and some of the Hard Case Crime books and stole liberally from them, inventing a narrator who’d grown up in the slums and found opportunity in crime. She never gave him a name, just had other characters refer to him as “kid” or “buddy” or “hey, you.” She figured she’d have them shift to calling him “mac” and then “mister” and then “sir” as he rose through the ranks. He came from Chicago to New York after the war, joined up with an old pro on a heist of grade-A beefsteaks (or was it a bank robbery? she went back and forth on this point), and ultimately became one of the senior soldiers working for a Sicilian crime family down on Mulberry Street...before finally getting lured away to work at the Sun by their chief rival, Sal Nicolazzo. And that’s where the fun began in earnest, with her nameless hero getting his hands dirty in the world of illegal gambling and all the associated pleasures. She found it exciting to write about this fellow, imagining her way into his sinister, violent life, full of gunplay and brawls and round-heeled women who welcomed him into their arms. (These she based, one by one, on her roommates, not even bothering to change their names. None of them were big readers, and she felt confident they wouldn’t sneak peeks at the growing manuscript she kept in the cardboard box beneath her cot.)

  Whenever she found herself starved for an idea, she paid a quick afternoon visit to the public library and pored through old copies of the New York Times and the Daily News, hunting for stories about mobsters and their misdeeds. Eventually the steady diet of newspaper articles, all filled with juicy betrayals, gave her the idea to have her narrator grow sick of Nicolazzo’s controlling hand and plan a robbery—a mammoth heist of his own operation that would involve opening the safe at the Sun and fleeing with a month’s proceeds from the big man’s casinos, tracks, and fight clubs. It was the sort of thing that, if it had ever really happened, Nicolazzo would of course hush up—a Mob boss clumsy enough to let himself get robbed by one of his subordinates?—and that, in turn, would account for the fact that the reading public had never heard about it. The only difficult part was coming up with a good plan for the heist—and for that she got help from a couple of experts, two young fellows she spotted bringing manuscripts to office 315 repeatedly and trailed one day to the Red Baron, a dark little bar down the block with propellers and pictures of biplanes hanging on the walls.