Dead Man's Hand

by Otto Penzler

  "All we need is for you to attend a private poker game in Brooklyn Heights—and win."

  "I can play, but I can't promise to win." I put my hands on the arms of the chair, indicating that it was time to go.

  "Game is fixed. You use this"—he threw down two tight bundles of what looked to me to be one hundred $100 bills each—"and when the night is over, you take either $10,000 or ten percent of the winnings, whatever's more. You don't have to worry about the game being fixed; my client will repay any losses by the other players."

  I settled back into the chair. I'd promised Felicia a trip in October and my funds were low. There was my emergency cash, but that was inviolate. Then again, I'd have to look long and hard to find another woman like Felicia. She didn't mind my odd hours or sporadic, sometimes days-long, absences.

  "I trust you, baby," she'd say in her high voice, "but you got to treat me right."

  "How's the game fixed?" I asked Clive Ford.

  "By an expert," Ford said. "All you have to do is play and bet heavy if you have more than two of a kind."

  "Deuces?"

  "If it's three twos in your hand, you're gonna win—probably."

  "How much?"

  "No less than a hundred grand."

  I didn't like it. But the ugly man was referred by Crow, and Crow was as good an agent as you could have. Still, Clive Ford was ugly and didn't care who knew it. If that was what he was like on the surface, what might there be hidden underneath?

  "Why don't you exercise?" I asked him, unable to keep the disgust out of my tone.

  "What?"

  "Why don't you go to a gym? You got something wrong with your legs?"

  "What the hell does that have to do with the game tonight? Bernardi told me that you were professional."

  "I carry things from one set of hands to another. I deliver, but I don't work for just anybody."

  "My references are good. Play the game, take your winnings, and bring them back to me tomorrow."

  "What if I lose?"

  "You won't."

  I hesitated a moment past the comfort zone of a normal conversation.

  "Besides," Ford said, "you're covered by Bernardi. He's the one I go to if anything goes wrong."

  I had never met Bobo Bernardi. He was an ex-professional wrestler who had gone into the private delivery business. He only contacted me through Crow. Crow had a one-room office on 146th Street near Malcolm X. That office was the highway on-ramp that led from Harlem to the rest of the world.

  "Take this job as a gift," Crow had whispered over the phone. "It's the best-payin' gig you evah gonna get."

  Ten thousand dollars was a good payday, and cash was the cleanest package to carry. It wasn't like prescription drugs or stolen property; it wasn't like counterfeiters' product or stock-market tips that couldn't be trusted to electronic media. Real money was clean; something the cops could question, but they could not, legally, confiscate.

  "We're not talkin' counterfeit here, are we, Mr. Ford?"

  "Clean American currency ... Master."

  I knew then that Ford was no fool. He saw my vain spot as soon as I told him my name.

  We spent the next forty minutes going through the details of the pickup.

  Pickup, drop-off. These were the two terms that bound my world, the bookends of my entire professional life. If an FBI agent wanted to speak to a prostitute he'd gotten fond of, I would deliver the valentine. If an informant deep within a criminal organization needed a line out, I was his connection.

  With Crow as the router, Mr. In-Between was the express-mail system for a dozen and more shadow worlds. There was nothing that I wouldn't move except for slaves, the condemned, and terrorist communiqués.

  "I'm not an assassin or an assassin's helper," I told my intern, Mike Peron, a youngish New Yorker of Peruvian descent.

  "But what if it was a message to some CIA guy in Cuba to wipe out somebody down there?" Mike asked.

  "No. Once you open that door, then anything—and everything—goes."

  Mike nodded once and filed the information away. He would make a good bagman one day.

  I had a loft apartment in Tribeca that didn't require rent. I'd once done a favor for the landlord, Joe Moorland, which had earned me a lifetime get-out-of-rent-free card.

  The ceilings were eighteen feet high, looming over three thousand square feet of mostly empty space.

  I like space. One of my favorite pastimes is to stare out over the empty bamboo floor of my home. At the front corner of the loft, I walled off four hundred square feet for an office. This was where Mike and I worked. We could gaze out of the fourth-floor window onto Greenwich Street and discuss the best ways to go about a problem; not that I had any difficulty forming strategies. It's just that sometimes I needed an extra pair of hands, and it was always good to see how someone else would go about getting from Point A to Point B.

  And Mike had other qualities. He spoke Spanish and street, and he was small, with a New World Indian look about him. Nobody would ever suspect him on a sophisticated run.

  "Why you gonna take this job?" Mike asked that afternoon as three fire engines blared past on the street below.

  "It's good money and Crow asked me to do it."

  "But you're like a shill."

  "Crow says it's not like that."

  "When I'm'a meet this Crow?"

  "When you learn to speak proper English," I said.

  "I know how to talk."

  "Good. Now all you have to do is implement that knowledge, and the windows of the world will open for you."

  Mike glared at me but he didn't argue. He knew that I was the doorway to his dreams of dignity, wealth, and respect. He didn't even have a high-school diploma when I found him hustling for nickels in East New York. Now he'd earned his GED, and no one had stabbed him in over two and half years.

  "You got that address?" I asked him.

  "Yeah."

  "Check it out and follow procedure."

  "If there's trouble ahead?"

  "Blue cell." I gave him the new number.

  I had three pay-as-you-go cell phones, each one of a different primary color. I changed the number on one of these phones every month. When I made a change, I'd tell Mike which one to call.

  After Mike left on his errand, I went into my apartment and lay down on the chaise lounge I'd bought from my psychoanalyst at the end of six years of deep therapy. I'd spent five days a week on that brown, backless sofa. I bought it for $18,000, telling my analyst, Dr. Myra Golden, that I'd use it when I felt the need to tap into my unconscious mind.

  I lay down and closed my eyes thinking about Clive Ford and his mission.

  The more I thought, the more I worried that the whole thing was a mistake. Pickup, drop-off—that was my mantra. This poker playing lay outside my area of expertise. But Crow had asked, and $10,000 was heavy cash for a day's work.

  The red phone made the sound of Zen bells in the distance.

  "Hello."

  "Hey, baby, how you doin?"

  "Felicia."

  "You know it make me dizzy when you say my name like that, Master," Felicia said.

  "I told you that you don't have to call me that, girl."

  "How can I help it," she said in a serious tone, "when I know every time I say it, your dick gets hard?"

  "That's only when I'm looking at you, baby."

  "Is it hard right now?"

  "Why are you calling me?" I allowed her question to seek its own reply.

  "I want a steak and to see if we can do sumpin'."

  Felicia was twenty-three, fifteen years my junior. She was a large woman from Bedford-Stuyvesant. Felicia had worked partway out of the hood. A junior cashier at a grocery store in the Village, she was the least-likely girlfriend I could imagine.

  One day I was buying chicken breasts and broccoli at her register, and she asked, "You cook for yourself?"

  I said yes as I looked up, falling into her eyes. She said she'd be off at nine and that I
could buy her dinner if I was there.

  "I got a job tonight, baby," I told Felicia.

  "A job or another girlfriend?"

  "A job. A job so good that we can go to Hawaii for a week on your vacation."

  "Really?"

  "No lie."

  Felicia had a very large butt. I'd always liked skinny women. But somehow I found myself waiting for her at nine, and we've been together since.

  I stretched out on the psychoanalyst's couch after that first night of deep, passionate sex with Felicia; lying there, I could hear Dr. Golden saying, go with it, which was odd, because Golden had never given me one word of advice in 1,440 hours of therapy.

  "What is it you do again?" Felicia asked.

  She had posed that question many times, and I always gave the same answer: "I'm an assistant to a guy who hangs out on a corner up in Harlem. I help him and he gives me advice."

  "Oh. Can he give you the night off? I got a itch that I want you to scratch ... wit' yo' tongue."

  My chest throbbed and I wanted to say, "I love you," but stifled the urge. I did not understand this feeling Felicia brought out in me. She was undereducated and used crude language. She was completely unsophisticated. But still, when she looked at me, I wanted to get down on my knees and thank God even though I had been an atheist since the age of eight after seeing my parents brutally murdered.

  "I have to go, Felicia. I need to get ready for the job."

  "I might have to go see my old boyfriend then," she speculated.

  "I've told you before, honey, if you need another man, just leave. You don't even need to tell me that you're gone."

  "Don't be like that, Daddy. I'm just playin' wit' you. You don't have to get all serious an' shit."

  "You're wrong, girl. I am serious, very serious."

  "Okay. We see each other tomorrow night, then. All right?"

  "As long as you're not with your old boyfriend. What was his name? Hatton, George Hatton."

  "You remembah that?"

  "I remember everything."

  The game was to be held on the top floor of a private brownstone on Montague Street near the water, in the Heights. I arrived at eleven forty-five in order to be there for the first hand to be dealt at midnight. I was met at the door by two big men armed with electronic wands.

  "Excuse me, Mr. Vincent," the sandy-haired one said, "but we have to make sure you're clean."

  They took my blue cell phone, removed the battery, and put them both in a box. They also searched my wallet, made me take off my jacket so they could feel through the fabric, and asked me if I wore glasses. They even checked my eyes with a flashlight to see if I had contacts.

  I didn't mind the search. This was high-stakes poker. Someone would be a fool not to cheat if they could.

  There was a small elevator that went to the fourth-floor gambling room. I was met at the top by a red-haired white girl, no more than nineteen, dressed in a full-length yellow satin evening dress. The gown looked a little too new, making her seem as though she was a child playing dress-up.

  "Welcome, Mr. Vincent. I'm Maria. You're the last to arrive." She took me by the arm. "Let me show you to your place at the table."

  The young woman walked me five steps to the plush red six-sided table. The second I got there, I started thinking about how to turn back time. Four of the five men were a who's who of the real New York underworld.

  Maria introduced me, but I already knew the four.

  "Faust Littleman," the girl said.

  He was the heroin connection between Afghanistan and Baltimore. He lived in New York for the restaurants and to stymie police intervention in his business. Crow had gotten an offer from Faust for me to make regular deliveries, but my agent demurred, telling Littleman, "We're mailmen, not drug dealers."

  "Welcome, Mr. Vincent," Littleman said without a smile or even a nod.

  "Brian Mettgang," Maria said.

  He was a powerful Hollywood producer who'd gotten his start in extreme pornography. It was rumored that he'd still provide a snuff film for the right amount of cash.

  I had done work for Mettgang's company, but had never met the boss.

  I was also introduced to Tommy Arland, the infamous West Side Hit Man; Jamaica Jim, a onetime enforcer who now ran the midtown numbers racket; and a man named Mr. Wisteria.

  Wisteria wore a dark, dark red suit—a color that I had never seen in men's dress clothes. He also wore a buff-colored short-brimmed hat. He had the kind of mouth that often smiled but never laughed.

  "Mr. Vincent," the bird-boned, middle-aged white man piped. "Welcome to our little game."

  "Thank you," I said, wishing that I were somewhere else. I chided myself again for not asking who else would be playing. This company was serious business. I'd have walked out if not for my longtime friend and mentor, Crow.

  Crow must have known what was coming down, I told myself over and over.

  I took my seat, managing to look calm.

  "I'm the last one here?" I asked. "I can't remember the last time that happened."

  "We're playing five-card draw," Jamaica Jim said. "Nothing wild. The deal shifts from man to man to the left and the limit to the pot is $5,000, unless all active players agree to raise it. If you have at least five, you can't get busted."

  Maria placed a new deck by my right hand.

  I tore the tight plastic wrapper from the box, wondering who it was that had fixed the game. The men I knew of were all unlikely to do something like this, at least not in person.

  That left Wisteria.

  "Where you from, Mr. Wisteria?" I asked while shuffling the deck under the watchful eyes of my fellow players.

  "Beloit, Wisconsin," he said in his mild milquetoast voice.

  "Wisconsin," I mused. "Dairy farms and mountains of snow."

  Wisteria smiled and nodded. "My family owns a dairy out there. They make three and half percent of the butter used in the Midwest."

  He was the one, I thought. Everything about him seemed a fabrication. Even his pale gaze was faraway, deceptive.

  The stares from everyone else were intense. Their eyes were bright challenges daring anyone to defeat them.

  Each man had a drawer filled with a few hundred chips at his station; the four denominations ranged from $100 to $100,000. Each man had different-color chips: red, blue, yellow, green, violet, and orange.

  I threw out an orange chip and dealt the cards. The rest of the players followed my ante.

  "How's Pete Morgan doin'?" big black Jamaica Jim asked.

  Peter François Morgan was the man that Ford got to invite me to the game. I knew various facts about him, but we weren't supposed to be close friends. I didn't need to know much.

  "He's okay. Dolly had another kid—girl, I think. Anyway, he sends his best. He's in Miami right now."

  "Peter Morgan?" Mr. Wisteria asked. His voice could have been a satyr's reed, a barely audible, almost-impossible sound coming from a deep wood.

  "He suggested Vincent for the game," Faust Littleman said. The drug dealer's face was puffy. He had a highway map of blue veins under the almost-yellow skin of his nose.

  "What do you do for a living, Mr. Vincent?" Littleman asked.

  "I work for stockbrokers," I said as I dealt.

  "You are a stockbroker?"

  "No. I just do research for a few clients."

  "Oh."

  There was an air of tension in the room. Only Wisteria was immune to the atmosphere. His nimble little finger flipped among his cards. Everyone else seemed to think long and hard about their decisions.

  I had two queens.

  Fold if you have nothing, Clive Ford had told me. Stay for the ride on everything else. If you don't have at least three of a kind after the draw, then fold. If you get three or more, then play to the limit.

  "Check," said Faust Littleman. The drug dealer looked up defiantly as if daring anyone to question him.

  "I'll bet a thousand." Jim threw in a green chip.

 
"I'll see that," Tommy Arland, the assassin, added.

  I looked at the killer, noting that he was as nondescript a white man as I had ever met. Not tall or particularly strong-looking, he wouldn't show up on anyone's radar unless they knew him. He could be the cheat at the table; anyone could.

  Mettgang met the $1,000 limit. Wisteria and Iittleman folded.

  I called the bet and threw down three cards. When I dealt again, I still had only two queens and folded.

  "Nice of you to lose the first hand you dealt, Mr. Vincent," Wisteria said in an odd, but still-mild tone. "Otherwise we might have to kill you."

  "Good luck always follows bad," I said optimistically.

  "Amen," Wisteria said and, unaccountably, I felt a chill.

  I lost the next two hands because I didn't have anything. I had three fives on the fourth hand, but Wisteria beat me with a diamond flush.

  It wasn't until the sixth hand that I had something worthwhile. Three tens backed up by an ace and a jack. littleman and Arland battled me over that hand. I took in $8,400 when they finally folded.

  All the while I felt the gaze of Wisteria upon me.

  The men were true gamblers. They spoke very little and showed almost no emotion. Now and then Maria would bring a drink to someone. Mettgang and Wisteria each left once to go to the toilet.

  At three fifteen in the morning I got dealt three nines by Jamaica Jim. I drew only one card, which gave me a pair of fives to go with my nines.

  There was no logic to my manufactured luck, no mechanism that I could see that gave me an edge. No one dealer gave me my winning hands.

  I cleaned up with the full house: $61,000 in a single hand of poker. That put me over the top—$127,800.

  Tommy Arland was the big loser in that hand. He had two pair, sixes and eights. I wondered if he was the one paying me off. But I couldn't tell. All the men had on their poker faces. We spoke less at that table than I did to the harried counterman at the deli where I get my pastrami on rye during lunch hour on Tuesdays and Fridays.

  Soon after my big win, Wisteria yawned. Jamaica Jim stretched and said, "I t'ink it's time we go."

  And the game was over.