The Mirror Thief

by Martin Seay

  —ALEXANDER TROCCHI, Young Adam

  14

  Low clouds gather over the Pacific, cushioning the winter sun as it drops, and the beachcombers are coming in. For a moment the colonnades are unshadowed, and a rosy glow lights the winged lions on the frieze of the St. Mark’s Hotel.

  Across Market Street there’s a boarded-up gaming parlor—FORTUNE BRIDGO in faded letters on its southern wall—and this is where the boy has set up his game. The king of hearts, the seven of hearts, the seven of diamonds, each creased lengthwise up its middle. Three tiny roofs, gliding across a flattened Wheaties box.

  Picture him there, kneeling under the roman arches: small and muscular, maybe sixteen years old, cropped curly head already balding. He’s dressed in bluejeans and a freshly stolen pair of crepe-soled Pedwins; his pink seercheck sleeves are rolled past his elbows. A battered workjacket rests within easy reach, but though the evening air is cool and gooseflesh rises on his arms, the boy doesn’t put it on. The pavement is gritty with sand, littered with shards of windowglass and chunks of stucco from the crumbling façade. The boy rests his knees on a folded-over tabloid, a Mirror-News from last week. FAISAL, HUSSEIN PROCLAIM ARAB FEDERATION, it reads. DODGERS CLOSE TO COLISEUM DEAL. It’s seawater-warped, already yellow from the sun.

  The boy has lately taken to calling himself Stanley. When he hopped the southbound B&O in Staten Island last April he began using the alias Adrian Crivano, and that name carried him as far as Little Rock before he was rousted by cops twice in five hours and had to come up with something else; he pulled STANLEY off the side of a Rollorama coach parked at a mechanic’s shop. He was Adrian Stanley in Oklahoma and Missouri, Stanley Welles in Colorado and New Mexico, and when he finally crossed the California state line in mid-December he briefly considered taking the name Adrian Welles—like certain spiders that lure their quarry by resembling it—before deciding that that could only cause problems for him.

  Most of his names have come from a book in his jacket’s inner pocket, a book of poems that he has read many times and now knows by heart. It’s a strange book; there’s very little in it that he can claim to fully understand. But it has taught him one rule about which he has no doubt: calling a thing by its name gives you power over it. Therefore you must be careful. The boy’s own given name he does not use and never has.

  The boardwalk fills as the beach empties. The shadows of passersby lengthen and strobe, and the shuttling cards seem at times to hang in midair.

  You are thinking these things; the boy is not. His mind contains nothing but the sensation of regular motion, the steady click of the falling cards. Memory is a skill, as well as a habit. The boy is still young. What do you remember?

  15

  The sun is gone. The cloudbank, now solid, erases the mountains, blotting out the lights of Malibu across the bay. The amusement pier on the Ocean Park town line is quiet, closed for renovations, but Lawrence Welk is packing them in at the Aragon Ballroom: stocky Rotarians and their wives from Reseda and Van Nuys, pulling up in Imperials and Roadmasters, hurrying through the shabby streets in the hope of getting themselves on television. A mile to the south, the boardwalk swarms with a different crowd—roughnecks from the oilfield, airframe welders from the Douglas plant, dredger deckhands from the new marina, furloughed airmen from Edwards AFB—looking for different entertainment.

  Stanley keeps a wad of bills in his breast pocket—singles, plus two fins—and he takes small bets from people who stop, moving their money around, working the throw to keep his bankroll steady. It doesn’t take him long to spot a mark: a broad-shouldered hotrodder with a duck’s-ass haircut, a little too old for the style. The guy’s getting towed around by a fast-looking teenage girl in a neckerchief and pirate pants; he seems sober enough to be alert, drunk enough to be cocky, in the mood to spend some cash. Stanley leans back, cracks the knuckles of his right hand.

  Under a lamppost about fifty feet away, a young man has been smoking a cigarette; now he walks toward the arcades. He takes measured, unsteady steps—although he has not been drinking—and he buttonholes the hotrodder and his young date at the boardwalk’s edge. He speaks to them for a moment, gestures at Stanley, then closes the rest of the distance, flicking his smoldering stub into the shadows as he staggers to a stop.

  You want another shot, chum? Stanley says, not looking up from the three cards.

  I feel lucky now, the young man says. I will win it back.

  He pulls a new IN GOD WE TRUST dollar bill from his pocket, drops it, and it flutters onto Stanley’s cereal box.

  The young man—his name is Claudio—is slim and angular, with large dark eyes and a neat black pompadour; he wears a thin tie, a crisp Van Heusen, and a brown-flecked gray sportcoat that hides the deep creases in the shirt. The fingers of his right hand tap nervously against his thumb, one at a time, ascending and descending.

  Stanley flattens Claudio’s dollar on the pavement, spreads out one of his own, and puts the cards in motion. His hands rise and fall languidly. The cards stop. Claudio picks one of the red sevens, and a dollar bill goes back into Stanley’s pocket.

  I will play again, Claudio says.

  The girl walks over as Claudio is losing his second dollar; her date lags a bit behind. They watch as Claudio wins one, loses two more. The hotrodder is getting interested now.

  The left, Claudio says.

  No, the middle, the hotrodder says. The one in the middle, jack.

  Stanley turns over a seven on the left and takes away Claudio’s dollar.

  Enough of this, Claudio says. Enough. He puts a five-dollar bill down on the Wheaties box, and the hotrodder’s eyebrows rise a bit. Stanley matches Claudio with a second fin, then holds up the cards—the king in his left hand, both sevens overlapped in his right—and starts his shuffle.

  The hotrodder points, whispers something to his girl.

  Claudio stares hard at the three peaked rectangles, blinking, shaking his head.

  The one on the right, the hotrodder says.

  Stanley shoots the guy an angry look.

  Claudio bites his lip, looks around. The right, he says softly.

  Stanley turns over the king, hands Claudio the two bills, looks up at the hotrodder. Listen, buddy, he says. You better show me some cash, or keep your damn trap shut.

  The hotrodder digs out his wallet.

  The guy’s following the king easily, and Stanley lets him win a couple of singles. Can I bet on him? Claudio asks. Can I bet on this man?

  Stanley leans back, looks away, pretends to think about this. A short distance down the boardwalk, next to an icecream cart, a couple of greaser kids are watching him work. Slouching and smoking. Hard-faced and hungry-eyed.

  Okay, Stanley says. But you gotta keep quiet. It’s his play.

  Claudio puts down another five. The hotrodder hesitates for a moment, then puts down a fin of his own.

  Stanley holds up the cards: the king and the seven of hearts in his right hand, the king in front. On the throw he switches their positions. So fast that not even somebody watching for it could see. The cards float like gulls in the shuffle. Stanley arranges them on the cardboard and looks up.

  It’s the one on the right, the hotrodder says.

  Stanley turns the card over. It’s the seven.

  Shit! the hotrodder says.

  What? Claudio says. How did this happen?

  The hotrodder looks at Claudio, at Stanley, at Claudio.

  My money! Claudio says.

  Stanley takes another five from each of them on the next throw. Claudio curses the game, curses the hotrodder, and stalks off, reeling. The hotrodder stares after him, confused, his mouth working silently. Stanley takes a moment to look around. Down the boardwalk, the two greasers have disappeared. He gathers his cards and rocks back into a crouch, as if he’s about to leave. Hey! the hotrodder says. Wait a sec, buddy!

  I gotta move, Stanley says. A plainclothes cop’s been working this stretch.

  One more round. D
ouble or nothing.

  Stanley settles onto his knees again, throws the cards, takes away the guy’s sawbuck.

  The hotrodder is giving him a hard look. The smart thing would be for Stanley to clear out now, but he’s not ready to go. He’s tasting blood: this clown is a choice mark.

  Tough break, my friend, Stanley says. One last round? Double or nothing?

  The hotrodder is taking rapid breaths, tapping a foot, grinding a fist into his palm. He looks pretty comical, but Stanley keeps his face empty. There’s a sloppy tattoo on the back of the hotrodder’s hand: what looks like a crow. Stanley smells liquor each time the guy exhales.

  C’mon, Mike, the girl’s saying. Let’s just go.

  You’re down twenty bucks, chum, Stanley says. You sure you want to walk away now? Look—I’ll give you a real easy one.

  Stanley holds up his cards—the king behind the seven of diamonds—and throws them, working the switch. The shuffle so slow a child could follow it. Are you watching me here, Mike? he says. Last chance. This is a good investment, chum.

  The hotrodder looks up from the cards, narrows his eyes, and looks down again. He draws two tens from his billfold. The middle, he says. It’s the one in the middle.

  You sure about that?

  Yeah.

  Stanley takes the two bills from the guy, snaps them into a rigid rectangle, and turns over the middle card with their upper edge. The seven of diamonds.

  What the fuck, the hotrodder says. His nostrils dilate; his hands wad into fists.

  Well, shit, Stanley says, glancing away. Here comes the goddamn cop.

  The cards and the bills vanish into his shirt pocket; he slings the jacket over his shoulder. The girl is scared now, wild-eyed, looking around, but the hotrodder is sputtering in Stanley’s face. Scram, Stanley tells him. Go the other way.

  Stanley turns on his heel and walks. Claudio is right there behind him, coming in fast from the opposite direction, and he lurches past Stanley into the hotrodder’s path, tripping him up. Did you win? Claudio asks him. Did you win back my money?

  Stanley hears scuffles and shouts as the hotrodder shoves Claudio against another boardwalk stroller, but he doesn’t turn around. Two quick consecutive right turns bring him to the Speedway, where he dashes in front of a slow-moving De Soto to the opposite side of the narrow street.

  He’s behind the Bridgo parlor now, out of sight of the boardwalk. A few blocks ahead a whitewashed enclosed footbridge spans the road, linking the second stories of two battered hotels; it frames the flashing neon of Windward Avenue like a view through a peephole. Pedestrians run against each other in the boxed space—figures in silhouette, crossing and overlapping—but nobody turns Stanley’s way. He slows his step, waits for the De Soto and the line of cars behind it to pass, and turns left down the first sidestreet.

  Horizon Court is truncated by T-junctions—the Speedway here, Pacific Avenue opposite—and like all the local streets it’s lit down the center by incandescent bulbs that droop from fat electric cables. Halfway along the block there’s a dark zone where a few days ago Stanley knocked out a streetlamp with a slingshot and an egg-shaped pebble of rose quartz; now he hurries to that spot—skips quicksilver on your ancient stones, he thinks—and slips through the shadowed doorway of a boarded-up storefront as soon as the coast is clear.

  Once off the street, he wedges a two-by-six pinewood plank between the shop’s wrought-iron doorknob and its rough concrete floor. Then he strikes his father’s MIOJ pocket lighter, holding the flame to a candle stub mounted in a rinsed-out vienna sausage tin, and weak yellow light creeps into the corners of the room.

  Stanley still can’t figure out what this place used to be. The dusty glass-topped counter and the wallmounts for absent display cabinets remind him of his great-uncles’ jewelry store in Williamsburg—he saw it once as a young kid, and again last year when he helped burglarize it—but he doesn’t think that’s what this was. In the backroom are two workbenches, finger-wide holes bored into their tops for bolting down heavy equipment, and strange objects keep turning up in dim corners: tiny screws, semicircles of wire, drifts of glittering white powder that Claudio says is ground glass, although Stanley can’t think of why he’d know that.

  The mile of oceanfront between Rose Avenue and Washington Boulevard is full of abandoned buildings—outlawed bingo parlors, fly-by-night factories, the hulls of other defunct enterprises—but Stanley picked this particular storefront as a hideout because it’s small, inconspicuous, centrally located, and because its back window opens onto a parking lot. After two days of casing the place, two sleepless nights ducking beat cops and shivering on the beach, Stanley broke the streetlamp and jimmied the entrance, and he and Claudio set to work fortifying their new lair: cracking windowglass against their pillowed jackets, pushing a workbench against the back wall to ready an escape route, and knocking a hole through a gypsum panel to stash their scant possessions.

  Now Stanley picks up the candle and kneels at the gap in the wall. His father’s Army fieldpack is there, tucked out of sight, and he unsnaps the canteen and gulps some water before tugging it out and opening it. He keeps everything he owns squared away and ready to go at all times—blanket, tinned food, change of clothes—in case he needs to dust out in a hurry; now he unloads enough to make space to hide the cash. He counts it, although he knows exactly what’s there: fifty-nine dollars. He and Claudio just tripled their stake on a two-hour grift, and nobody collared them. Not yet.

  But Claudio ought to be here by now. Stanley has no watch, hasn’t been minding the time, but it shouldn’t have taken more than a few minutes for Claudio to shake the hotrodder and return to base. It’s possible that Stanley just didn’t hear his triple-knock signal to unblock the door. Possible, but unlikely.

  He flattens the cash and the three playing cards between a couple of sardine cans—keeping a fiver and some singles in his pocket, just in case—and repacks the bag, pulling The Mirror Thief from his jacket and placing it at the top before buckling it again. For an instant he pauses, feeling the book’s shape through the worn canvas, reassured by its promise that all this will soon be very different. Then he shoves the pack behind the gypsumboard, and with a quick puff he kills the candleflame.

  16

  Stanley doesn’t want to walk with his back to traffic—the hotrodder could be behind the wheel by now—so he jogs three blocks to Windward, crosses the street, and makes a right turn toward the ocean. His eyes echo the rhythm of his steps, bouncing between faces in oncoming windshields, amblers rotating to and from the boardwalk. By now the lights along the avenue have picked up misty halos, and the squarejohn crowd has all but gone home. Familiar 42nd Street types emerge from the darkness: rowdy sailors and soldiers, pavement princesses cruising for trade, sharp-dressed Negro hustlers, hollow-cheeked junkies looking to cop. Stanley studies their features as they’re lit by the rescue mission’s buzzing JESUS SAVES sign, each pair of eyes hooded in the red glow, each nose throwing a shadow like the gnomon of a sundial.

  He crosses the boardwalk to the beach side, out of the foot traffic, and takes a long look in both directions. The hotrodder and his girl are nowhere in sight, but Stanley spots Claudio without much trouble: he’s slumped on a wooden bench two hundred yards away, a block north of the Fortune Bridgo arcade. Three greaseheaded hooligans in pegged jeans and motorcycle jackets are gathered around him. At first Stanley thinks they’re strongarming him, but then he sees how they’re standing: at ease, bored, like they’re waiting for someone. Claudio’s cradling his head in his hands, still doing his lush bit. Stanley grins. The kid’s no Brando, sure, but damn if he can’t act a little after all.

  Two of the thugs are the ones he saw earlier while working the grift on the hotrodder. The third punk wouldn’t have been larking around on his own. That means there’s a fourth someplace—probably off meeting the rest of the gang. He’ll bring them back here, and they’ll muscle Claudio into leading them to Stanley, so they can brace him for th
e evening’s take. It’s a straightforward operation. Stanley’s been on their end of it himself.

  He zips his dark jacket to cover his light shirt and begins to walk toward them. Experience has taught him that people never pay attention to anything—they’re practically blind even when they do—so he’s not too worried about getting spotted. Once he’s closed half the distance he angles left onto the beach; he bears right again when he’s out of range of the streetlamps, moving parallel to the boardwalk. Mist has settled on the sand: it’s coarse and mealy at the surface, powdery where his new shoes punch into it. Stanley stops for a moment and shoves his hand down, grabs a fistful of fine dry grains, then another, and stuffs them into the right front pocket of his jeans. He puts a folded dollar bill in the left.

  With the fog thickening and the boardwalk people backlit by neon it’s harder now to see, but he’s still able to pipe the greaser cavalry nearly three hundred yards off: what looks like six or seven of them, pressing through the crowd at the corner of Brooks Avenue, visible mostly from the attitudes of people they displace. They’re slowing down as the crowds get denser. Stanley figures they’ll be here in four minutes, tops.

  Hey fellas, he says, sauntering up to Claudio’s bench. Let me take my buddy off your hands.

  The three hammerheads look up at him, baffled. The two on the right turn to the third: the boss, a little older, stockier, swarthier, sporting a thin pink scar that splits an eyebrow and reappears at his hairline. The guy’s got deep cuts on his hands, too, which Stanley takes to mean either that he’s been in lots of knifefights or that he’s not very good at it. His chums both look fresh-weaned: one’s got a gluesniffer’s red eyes and runny nose; the other is white-blond and pimply.

  Stanley shoulders past the two punks and tugs on Claudio’s arm. Man oh man, you’re really bombed, he says. Can one of you guys help me stand him up?