Fools die

Chapter 14

When I got off the plane, Cully was waiting for me at the door of the terminal. The airport was still so small I had to walk from the plane, but construction was underway to build another wing to the terminal-Vegas was growing. And so was Cully.

He looked different, taller and slimmer. And he was smartly dressed in a Sy Devore suit and sports shirt. His hair had a different cut. I was surprised when he gave me a hug and said, “Same old Merlyn.” He laughed at the Vegas Winner sports jacket and told me I had to get rid of it.

He bad a big suite for me at the hotel with a bar stocked with booze and flowers on the tables. “You must have a lot of juice,” I said.

“I’m doing good,” Cully said. “I’ve given up gambling. I’m on the other side of the tables. You know.”

“Yeah,” I said. I felt funny about Cully now, he seemed so different. I didn’t know whether to follow through with my original plan and trust him. In three years a guy could change. And after all, we had only known each other a few weeks.

But as we were drinking together, be said with real sincerity, “Kid, I’m really glad to see you. Ever think about Jordan?”

“All the time,” I said.

“Poor Jordan,” Cully said. “He went out a four-hundred grand winner. That’s what made me give up gambling. And you know, ever since he died, I’ve had tremendous luck. If I play my cards right, I could wind up top man in this hotel.”

“No shit,” I said. “What about Gronevelt?”

“I’m his number one boy,” Cully said. “He trusts me with a lot of stuff. He trusts me like I trust you. While we’re at it,

I could use an assistant. Anytime you want to move your family to Vegas you got a good job with me.”

“Thanks,” I said. I was really touched. At the same time I wondered about his affection for me. I knew he was not a man who cared about anyone easily. I said, “About the job I can’t answer you now. But I came out here to ask a favor. If you can’t do it for me, I’ll understand. Just tell me straight, and whatever the answer is, we’ll at least have a couple of days together and have a good time.”

“You got it,” Cully said. “Whatever it is.”

I laughed. “Wait until you hear,” I said.

For a moment Cully seemed angry. “I don’t give a shit what it is. You got it. If I can do it, you got it.”

I told him about the whole graft operation. That I was taking bribes and that I had thirty-three grand in my jacket that I had to stash in case the whole operation blew up. Cully listened to me intently, watching my face. At the end he was smiling broadly.

“What the hell are you smiling at?” I said.

Cully laughed. “You sounded like a guy confessing to a priest that he committed murder. Shit, what you’re doing everybody does if he ever gets the chance. But I have to admit I’m surprised. I can’t picture you telling a guy he has to pay blackmail.”

I could feel my face getting red. “I never asked any of those guys for money,” I said. “They always come to me. And I never take the money upfront. After I do it for them, they can pay me what they promised or they can stiff me. I don’t give a shit.” I grinned at him. “I’m a soft hustler, not a hooker.”

“Some crook,” Cully said. “First thing, I think you’re too worried. It sounds like the kind of operation that can go on indefinitely. And even if it blows up, the worst that can happen to you is that you lose your job and get a suspended sentence. But you’re right, you have to stash the dough in a good place. Those Feds are real bloodhounds, and when they find it, they’ll take it all away from you.”

I was interested in the first part of what he said. One of my nightmares was that I would go to jail and Vallie and the kids would be without me. That’s why I had kept everything from my wife. I didn’t want her to worry. Also, I didn’t want her to think less of me. She had an image of me as the pure, uncorrupted artist.

“What makes you think I won’t go to jail if I'm caught?” I asked Cully.

“It’s a white-collar crime,” Cully said. “Hell, you didn’t stick up a bank or shoot some poor bastard store owner or defraud a widow. You just took dough from some young punks who were trying to get an edge and cut down their Army time. Jesus, that’s some unbelievable scam. Guys paying to get into the Army. Nobody would believe it. A jury would laugh themselves sick.”

“Yeah, it strikes me funny too,” I said.

Cully was all business suddenly. “OK, tell me what you want me to do right now. It’s done. And if the Feds nail you, promise you’ll call me right away. I'll get you out. OK?” He smiled at me affectionately.

I told him my plan. That I would turn in my cash for chips a thousand dollars at a time and gamble but for small stakes. I’d do that in all the casinos in Vegas, and then, when I cashed in my chips for cash, I would just take a receipt and leave the money in the cashier’s cages as a gambling credit. The FBI would never think to look in the casinos. And the cash receipts I could stash with Cully and pick up whenever I needed some ready money.

Cully smiled at me. “Why don’t you let me hold your money? Don’t you trust me?”

I knew he was kidding, but I handled the crack seriously. “I thought about that,” I said. “But what if something happens to you? Like a plane crash. Or you get your gambling bug back? I trust you now. But how do I know you won’t go crazy tomorrow or next year?”

Cully nodded his head approvingly. Then he asked, “What about your brother, Artie? You and him are so close. Can’t he hold the money for you?”

“I can’t ask him to do that for me,” I said.

Cully nodded again. “Yeah, I guess you can’t. He’s too honest, right?”

“Right,” I said. I didn’t want to go into any long explanation about how I felt. “What’s wrong with my plan? Don’t you think it’s any good?”

Cully got up and began pacing up and down the room. “It’s not bad,” he said. “But you don’t want to have credits in all the casinos. That looks fishy. Especially if the money stays there a long time. That is really fishy. People only leave their money in the cage until they gamble it away or they leave Vegas. Here’s what you do. Buy chips in all the casinos and check them into our cage here. You know, about three or four times a day cash in for a few thousand and take a receipt. So all your cash receipts will be in our cage. Now if the Feds do nose around or write to the hotel, it has to go through me. And I’ll cover you.”

I was worried about him. “Won’t that get you into trouble?” I asked him.

Cully sighed patiently. “I do that stuff all the time. We get a lot of inquiries from Internal Revenue. About how much guys have lost. I just send them old files. There’s no way they can check me out. I make sure files don’t exist that will help them.”

“Jesus,” I said. “I don’t want my cage record to disappear. I won’t be able to collect on my receipts.”

Cully laughed. “Come on, Merlyn,” he said. “You’re just a two-bit bribe taker. The Feds don’t come in here with a gang of auditors for you. They send a letter or subpoena. Which they will never even think of doing, by the way. Or look at it another way. If you spend the dough and they find out your income exceeded what you earned on your pay, you can say you won it gambling. They can’t prove otherwise.”

“And I can’t prove I did,” I said.

“Sure you can,” Cully said. “I’ll testify for you, and so will a pit boss and a stickman at the crap table. That you had a tremendous roll with the dice. So don’t worry about the deal no matter how it falls. Your only problem is where to hide the casino cage receipts.”

We both thought that over for a while. Then Cully came up with an answer. “Do you have a lawyer?” he asked.

“No,” I said, “but my brother, Artie, has a friend who is a lawyer.”

“Then make out your will,” Cully said. “In your will you put in that you have cash deposits in this hotel to the amount of thirty-three thousand dollars and you leave it to your wife. No, never mind your brother’s lawyer. We’ll use a lawyer I know here in Vegas that we can trust. Then the lawyer will mail your copy of the will to Artie in a specially legally sealed envelope. Tell Artie not to open it. That way he won’t know.

All you have to tell him is that he is not to open the envelope but hold it for you. The lawyer will send a letter to that effect also. There’s no way Artie can get into trouble. And he won’t know anything. You just dream up a story why you want him to have the will.”

“Artie won’t ask me for a story,” I said. “He’ll just do it and never ask a question.”

“That’s a good brother you got there,” Cully said. “But now what do you do with the receipts? The Feds will sniff out a bank vault if you get one. Why don’t you just bury it with your old manuscripts like you did the cash? Even if they get a search warrant, they’ll never notice those pieces of paper.”

“I can’t take that chance,” I said. “Let me worry about the receipts. What happens if I lose them?”

Cully didn’t catch on or made believe he didn’t. “We’ll have records in our file,” he said. “We just make you sign a receipt certifying that you lost your receipts when you get your money. You just have to sign when you get your cash.”

Of course, he knew what I was going to do. That I would tear up the receipts but not tell him so he could never be sure, so that he couldn’t mess with the records of the casino owing me money. It meant that I didn’t completely trust him, but he accepted that easily.

Cully said, “I’ve got a big dinner laid on tonight for you with some friends. Two of the nicest-looking ladies in the show.”

“No woman for me,” I said.

Cully was amazed. “Jesus, aren’t you tired of just screwing your wife yet? All these years.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not tired.”

“You think you’re going to be faithful to her all your life? Cully said.

“Yep,” I said, laughing.

Cully shook his head, laughing too. “Then you’ll really be Merlyn the Magician.”

“That’s me,” I said.

So we went to dinner, just the two of us. And then Cully came around with me to all the casinos in Vegas as I bought chips in thousand-dollar lots. My Vegas Winner sports jacket really came in handy. At the different casinos we had drinks with pit bosses and shift managers of the casinos and the girls from the shows. They all treated Cully like an important man, and they all had great stories to tell about Vegas. It was fun. When we got back to the Xanadu, I pushed my chips into the cashier’s cage and got a receipt for fifteen thousand dollars. I tucked it into my wallet. I hadn’t made a bet all night. Cully was hanging all over me.

“I have to do a little gambling,” I said.

Cully smiled crookedly. “Sure you do, sure you do. As soon as you lose five hundred bucks, I’m going to break your fucking arm.”

At the crap table I pulled out five one-hundred-dollar bills and changed them into chips. I made five-dollar bets and bet all the numbers. I won and lost. I drifted into my old gambling patterns, moving from craps to blackjack and roulette. Soft, easy, dreamy gambling, betting small, winning and losing, playing loose percentages. It was one in the morning when I reached into my pocket and took out two thousand dollars and bought chips. Cully didn’t say anything.

I put the chips into my jacket pocket and walked over to cashier’s cage and turned them in for another cash receipt. Cully was leaning against an empty crap table, watching me. He nodded his head approvingly.

“So you’ve got it licked,” he said.

“Merlyn the Magician,” I said. “Not one of your lousy degenerate gamblers.” And it was true. I had felt none of the old excitement. There was no urge to take a flyer. I had enough money to buy my family a house and a bankroll for emergencies. I had good sources of income. I was happy again. I loved my wife and was working on a novel. Gambling was fun, that was all. I had lost only two hundred bucks the whole evening.

Cully took me into the coffee shop for a nightcap of milk and hamburgers. “I have to work during the day,” he said. “Can I trust you not to gamble?”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be busy turning the cash into chips all over town. I’ll go down to five-hundred-dollar buys so I won’t be so noticeable.”

“That’s a good idea,” Cully said. “This town has more FBI agents than dealers.”

He paused for a moment. “You sure you don’t want a sleeping partner? I have some beauties.” He picked up one of the house phones on the ledge of our booth.

“I’m too tired,” I said. And it was true. It was after one in the morning here in Vegas, but New York time was 4 A.M. and I was still on New York time.

“If you need anything, just come up to my office,” he said. “Even if you just want to kill sometime and bullshit.”

“OK, I will,” I said.

The next day I woke up about noon and called Vallie. There was no answer. It was 3 P.M. New York time and it was Saturday. Value had probably taken the kids to her father and mother’s house out on Long Island. So I called there and got her father. He asked a few suspicious questions about what I was doing in Vegas. I explained I was researching an article. He didn’t sound too convinced, and finally Vallie got on the phone. I told her I would catch the Monday plane home and would take a cab from the airport.

We had the usual husband and wife bullshit talk with such calls. I hated the phone. I told her I wouldn’t call again since it was a waste of time and money, and she agreed. I knew she would be at her parents the next day too, and I didn’t want to call her there. And I realized too that her going there made me angry. An infantile jealousy. Vallie and the kids were my family. They belonged to me; they were the only family I had except Artie. And I didn’t want to share them with grandparents. I knew it was silly, but still, I wasn’t going to call again. What the hell, it was only two days and she could always call me.

I spent the day going through all the casinos in town on the Strip and the sawdust joints in the center of town. There I traded my cash for chips in two– and three-hundred-dollar amounts. Again I’d do a little dollar-chip gambling before moving on to another casino.

I loved the dry, burning heat of Vegas, so I walked from casino to casino. I had a late-afternoon lunch in the Sands next to a table of pretty hookers having their before-going-to-work meal. They were young and pretty and high-spirited. A couple of them were in riding togs. They were laughing and telling stories like teenagers. They didn’t pay any attention tome, and I ate my lunch as if I weren’t paying any attention to them. But I tried to listen to their conversation. Once I thought I heard Cully’s name mentioned.

I took a taxi back to the Xanadu. Vegas cabdrivers are friendly and helpful. This one asked me if I wanted some action, and I told him no. When I left the cab, he wished me a pleasant good day and told me the name of a restaurant where they had good Chinese food.

In the Xanadu casino I changed the other casino chips into a cash receipt, which I stuck into my wallet. I now had nine receipts and only a little over ten thousand in cash to convert. I emptied the cash out of my Vegas Winner sports jacket and put it into a regular suit jacket. It was all hundreds and fitted into two regular long white envelopes. Then I slung the Vegas Winner sports jacket over my arm and went up to Cully’s of-

There was a whole wing of the hotel tacked on just for administration. I followed the corridor and took an offshoot corridor labeled “Executive Offices.” I came to one of the shingles that read “Executive Assistant to the President.” In the outer office was a very pretty young secretary. I gave her my name, and she buzzed the inner office and announced me. Cully came bouncing out with a big handshake and a hug. This new personality of his still threw me off. It was too demonstrative, too outgoing, not what we had been before.

He had a really stylish suite with couch and soft armchairs and low lighting and pictures on the wall, original oil paintings. I couldn’t tell if they were any good. He also had three TV screens operating. One showed a corridor of the hotel. Another showed one of the crap tables in the casino in action. The third screen showed the baccarat table. As I watched the first screen, I could see a guy opening his hotel room door in the corridor and leading a young girl in with his hand on her ass.

“Better programs than I get in New York,” I said.

Cully nodded. “I have to keep an eye on everything in this hotel,” he said. He pushed buttons on a console on his desk, and the three pictures on the TV’s changed. Now we saw a view of the hotel parking lot, a blackjack table in action and the cashier in the coffee shop ringing up money.

I threw the Vegas Winner sports jacket on Cully’s desk. “You can have it now,” I said.

Cully stared at the jacket for a long moment. Then he said absently, “You converted all your cash?”

“Most of it,” I said. “I won’t need the jacket anymore.” I laughed. “My wife hated it as much as you do.”

Cully picked up the jacket. “I don’t hate it,” he said.

“Gronevelt doesn’t like to see it around. What do you think happened to Jordan ’s?”

I shrugged. “His wife probably gave all his clothes to the Salvation Army.”

Cully was weighing the jacket in his hand. “Light,” he said. “But lucky. Jordan won over four hundred grand wearing it. And then he kills himself. Fucking dumb bastard.”

“Foolish,” I said.

Cully put the jacket gently down on his desk. Then he sat down and rocked back on his chair. “You know, I thought you were crazy for turning down his twenty grand. And I was really pissed off when you talked me out of taking mine. But it was maybe the luckiest thing that ever happened to me. I would have gambled it away, and then I would have felt like shit. But you know, after Jordan killed himself and I didn’t take that money, I got some pride. I don’t know how to explain it. But I felt I didn’t betray him. And you didn’t. And Diane didn’t. We were all strangers, and only the three of us cared something about Jordan. Not enough, I guess. Or it didn’t mean that much to him. But finally it meant something to me. Didn’t you feel that way?”

“No,” I said. “I just didn’t want his fucking money. I knew he was going to knock himself off.”

That startled Cully. “Bullshit you did. Merlyn the Magician. Fuck you.”

“Not consciously,” I said. “But way down underneath. I wasn’t surprised when you told me. Remember?”

“Yeah,” Cully said. “You didn’t even give a shit.”

I passed that one. “How about Diane?”

“She took it real hard,” Cully said. “She was in love with Jordan. You know I fucked her the day of the funeral. Weirdest fuck I ever had. She was crazy wild and crying and fucking. Scared the shit out of me.”

He sighed. “She spent the next couple of months getting drunk and crying on my shoulder. And then she met this square semi-millionaire, and now she’s a straight lady in Minnesota someplace.”

“So what are you going to do with the jacket?” I asked him.

Suddenly Cully was grinning. “I’m going to give it to Gronevelt. Come on, I want you to meet him anyway.” He got up out of his chair and grabbed the jacket and went out of the office. I followed him. We went down the corridor to another suite of offices. The secretary buzzed us in to Gronevelt’s huge private office.

Gronevelt rose from his chair. He looked older than I remembered him. He must be in his late seventies, I thought. He was immaculately dressed. His white hair made him look like a movie star in some character part. Cully introduced us.

Gronevelt shook my hand and then said quietly, “I read your book. Keep it up. You’ll be a big man someday. It’s very good.”

I was surprised. Gronevelt went way back in the gambling business, he had been a very bad guy at one time and he was still a feared man in Vegas. For some reason I never thought he was a man who read books. Another cliche shot.

I knew that Saturdays and Sundays were busy times for men like Gronevelt and Cully who ran big Vegas hotels like the Xanadu. They had customer friends from all over the United States who flew in for weekends of gambling and who had to be entertained in many diverse ways. So I thought I would just say hello to Gronevelt and beat it.

But Cully threw the bright red and blue Vegas Winner sports jacket on Gronevelt’s huge desk and said, “This is the last one. Merlyn finally gave it up.”

I noticed that Cully was grinning. The favorite nephew teasing the grouchy uncle he knew how to handle. And I noticed that Gronevelt played his role. The uncle who kidded around with his nephew who was the most trouble but in the long run the most talented and the most reliable. The nephew who would inherit.

Gronevelt rang the buzzer for his secretary, and when she came in, he said to her, “Bring me a big pair of scissors.” I wondered where the hell a secretary for the president of the Xanadu Hotel would get a big pair of scissors at 6 P.M. on a Saturday night. She was back with them in two minutes flat. Gronevelt took the scissors and started cutting my Vegas Winner sports jacket. He looked at my deadpan and said, “You don’t know how much I hated you three guys when you used to walk through my casino wearing these fucking jackets. Especially that night when Jordan won all the money.”

I watched him turn my jacket into a huge pile of jagged pieces on his desk, and then I realized he was waiting for me to answer him. “You really don’t mind winners, do you?” I said.

“It had nothing to do with winning money,” Gronevelt said. “It was so goddamn pathetic. Cully here wearing that jacket and a degenerate gambler in his heart. He still is and always will be. He’s in remission.”

Cully made a gesture of protest, said, “I’m a businessman,” but Gronevelt waved him off, and Cully fell silent, watching the cut patches of material on the desk.

“I can live with luck,” Gronevelt said. “But skill and cunning I can’t abide.”

Gronevelt was working on the cheap fake silk lining of the coat, scissoring it into tiny strips, but it was just to keep his hands busy while he was talking. He spoke directly to me.

“And you, Merlyn, you’re one of the worst fucking gamblers I have ever seen and I’ve been in the business over fifty years. You’re worse than a degenerate gambler. You’re a romantic gambler. You think you’re one of those characters like that Ferber novel where she has the asshole gambler for a hero. You gamble like an idiot. Sometimes you go with percentages, sometimes you go with hunches, another time you go with a system, then you switch to stabbing in thin air, or you’re zigging and zagging. Listen, you’re one of the few people in this world I would tell to give up gambling completely.” And then he put down his scissors and gave me a genuinely friendly smile. “But what the hell, it suits you.”

I was really a little hurt, and he had seen it. I thought myself a clever gambler, mixing logic with magic. Gronevelt seemed to read my mind. “Merlyn,” he said. “I like that name. It sort of suits you. From what I’ve read he wasn’t that great a magician, and neither are you.” He picked up the scissors and started cutting again. “But then why the hell did you pick that fight with that punk hit man?”

I shrugged. “I didn’t really pick a fight. But you know how it is. I was feeling lousy about leaving my family. Everything was going bad. I was just looking to take it out on somebody.”

“You picked the wrong guy,” Gronevelt said. “Cully saved your ass. With a little help from me.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“I offered him the job, but he doesn’t want it,” Cully said.

That surprised me. Obviously Cully had talked it over with

Gronevelt before he offered me the job. And then suddenly I realized that Cully would have to tell Gronevelt all about me. And how the hotel would cover me if the Feds came looking.

“After I read your book, I thought we could use you as a PR man,” Gronevelt said. “A good writer like you.”

I didn’t want to tell him that they were two absolutely different things. “My wife wouldn’t leave New York, she has her family there,” I said. “But thanks for the offer.”

Gronevelt nodded. “The way you gamble maybe it’s better not living in Vegas. The next time you come into town let’s all have dinner together.” We took that for our dismissal and left.

Cully had a dinner date with some high rollers from California that he couldn’t break, so I was on my own. He had left a reservation for me for the hotel dinner show that night, so I went. It was the usual Vegas stuff with almost nude chorus girls, dancing acts, a star singer and some vaudeville turns. The only thing that impressed me was a trained bear act.

A beautiful woman came out on the stage with six huge bears, and she made them do all kinds of tricks. After each bear completed a trick, the woman kissed the bear on the mouth and the bear would immediately shamble back into his position at the end of the line. The bears were so furry they looked as completely asexual as toys. But why had the woman made the kiss one of her command signals? Bears didn’t kiss as far as I knew. And then I realized the kiss was for the audience, some sort of thrust at the onlookers. And then I wondered if the woman had done so consciously, as a mark of her contempt, a subtle insult. I had always hated the circus and refused to take my kids to see it. And so I never really liked animal acts. But this one fascinated me enough to watch it through to the end. Maybe one of the bears would pull a surprise.

After the show was over, I wandered out into the casino to convert the rest of my money into chips and then convert the chips into cash receipts. It was nearly eleven at night.

I started with craps, and instead of betting small to hold down my losses, I was, all of a sudden, making fifty– and hundred-dollar bets. I was losing about three thousand dollars when Cully came up behind me, leading his high rollers to the table and establishing their credit. He took one sardonic look at my green twenty-five-dollar chips and my bets on the green felt in front of me. “You don’t have to gamble anymore, huh?” he said to me. I felt like a jerk, and when the dice sevened out, I took the remainder of my chips to the cashier’s cage and turned them into receipts. When I turned around, Cully was waiting for me.

Let’s go have a drink,” he said. And he led me to the cocktail lounge where we used to booze with Jordan and Diane. From that darkened area we looked out at the brightly lit casino. When we sat down, the cocktail waitress spotted Cully and came over immediately.

“So you fell off the wagon,” Cully said. “That fucking gambling. It’s like malaria, always coming back.”

“You too?” I asked.

“A couple of times,” Cully said. “I never got hurt, though. How much did you lose?”

“Just about two grand,” I said. “I’ve turned most of the money into receipts. I’ll finish it up tonight”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” Cully said. “The lawyer friend of mine is available, so early in the morning you can make your will and have it mailed to your brother. Then I’m sticking to you like glue until I put you on the afternoon plane to New York.”

“We tried something like that once with Jordan,” I said jokingly.

Cully sighed. “Why did he do it? His luck was changing. He was going to be a winner. All he had to do was hang in there.”

“Maybe he didn’t want to push his luck,” I said. I had to be kidding, Cully said.

– -

The next morning Cully rang my room, and we had breakfast together. After that he drove me down the Vegas Strip to a lawyer’s office, where I had my will drawn up and witnessed. I repeated a couple of times that my brother, Artie, was to be mailed a copy of the will, and Cully finally cut in impatiently. “That’s all been explained,” he said. “Don’t worry. Everything will be done exactly right.”

When we left the office, Cully drove me around the city and showed me the new construction going on. The tower building of the Sands Hotel gleamed newly golden in the desert air. ‘This town is going to grow and grow,” Cully said.

The endless desert stretched out to the far outlying mountains. “It has plenty of room,” I said.

Cully laughed, “You’ll see,” he said. “Gambling is the coming thing.”

We had a light lunch, and then for old times’ sake we went down to the Sands and went partners for two hundred bucks each and hit the crap tables. Cully said self-mockingly, “I have ten passes in my right arm,” so I let him shoot the dice. He was as unlucky as ever, but I noticed he didn’t have his heart in it. He didn’t enjoy gambling. He sure had changed. We drove to the airport, and he waited with me at the gate until boarding time.

“Call me if you run into any trouble,” Cully said. “And the next time you come here we’ll have dinner with Gronevelt. He likes you and he’s a good guy to have on your side.”

I nodded. Then I took the cash receipts out of my pocket. The receipts good for thirty thousand dollars in the casino cage of the Xanadu Hotel. My expenses for the trip, gambling and air fare came to about the other three thousand. I handed the receipts to Cully.

“Keep these for me,” I said. I had changed my mind.

Cully counted the white slips. There were twelve of them. He checked the amounts. “You trust me with your bankroll?” he asked. “Thirty grand is a big number.”

“I have to trust somebody,” I said. “And besides, I saw you turn down twenty grand from Jordan when you were flat on your ass.”

“Only because you shamed me into it,” Cully said. “OK, I’ll take care of this. And if things get real hot, I can loan you cash out of my roll and use these as security. Just so you don’t leave any traces.”

“Thanks, Cully,” I said. “Thanks for the hotel room and the meals and everything. And thanks for helping me out.” I felt a real rush of affection for him. He was one of my few friends. And yet I was surprised when he hugged me goodbye before I got on the plane.

And on the jet rushing through the light into the darker time zones of the East, fleeing so quickly from the descending sun in the West, as we plunged into darkness, I thought about the affection Cully had for me. We knew each other so little. And I thought it was because we both had so few people we could really get to know. Like Jordan. And we had shared Jordan ’s defeat and surrender into death.

– -

I called from the airport to tell Value I had come home a day early. There was no answer. I didn’t want to call her at her father’s house, so I just caught a taxi to the Bronx. Vallie still wasn’t home. I felt the familiar irritated jealousy that she had taken the kids to visit their grandparents in Long Island. But then I thought, what the hell. Why should she spend the Sunday alone in our project apartment when she could have the company of her happy-go-lucky Irish family, her brothers and sisters and their friends, where the kids could go out and play in fresh air and on country grass?

I would wait up for her. She had to be home soon. While I waited, I called Artie. His wife came to the phone and said Artie had gone to bed early because he wasn’t feeling good. I told her not to wake him, it wasn’t important. And with a little feeling of panic I asked what was wrong with Artie. She said he just felt tired, he had been working too hard. It wasn’t anything even to see the doctor about. I told her I would call Artie at work the next day, and then I hung up.