The Great California Game

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

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THERE’S a vital difference between being a tourist and being in your own town. That difference is a bed, nothing more, nothing less.

A tourist has nothing, because even the bed, loo, water tap, is rented by the minute. Laying your head down is at somebody else’s behest. But if it’s your own pad, you can tell everybody else to clear off and shut the door on the blighters. The difference is Tourist Tiredness, that state of utter weariness where you get taken for every penny, when you buy stupid things, when con merchants come out to play on the bones of the gullible. Exhaustion’s a grim mutagen. Even the smartest tourist eventually begins trading dollars for dimes, hard currency for zlotniks.

This was me. I was worn out. Not physically, but my instincts were a dud battery.

Friends come in useful about now. But Magda and Zole I’d sent into exile. Bill had died on these very streets. Busman had agreed to a deal, which was likely to start working soon, but somehow I felt under threat. I realized what was bothering me. That gesture I’d seen reflected was the one he’d used before, when telling Trazz to hit Charlie Sarpi’s transgressors. I know finality when I see it. It’s different from dismissal. That there’d been an element of regret in Busman’s manner didn’t allay my tear.

I was in theatreland, none yet loosed, so the nosh bars and stalls weren’t crowded. I found a darker place to sit and stoke up with grub. I’ve been hunted before, and know that food and loos lend alacrity. I kept an eye out for enemies, and thought.

Fredo’s bar might still be open, but so what? Josephus, Della, Fredo, Lil, Jonie—what was I to them? A ily-by-night, that’s what. And I’d flown. That too is the American way, zoom off to a better take. I didn’t know where any of them lived, either.

Sophie Brandau, the one I was really drawn to? Her husband wasn’t likely to welcome me. Melodie van Cordlant might, but I suspected she was too embroiled among the gamesters for me to fling myself on her mercy. Fatty Jim Bethune? I’d done him a favour, but he wouldn’t regard it as such. Orly hated me. Nicko? Jennie? Two unknowables. Was there refuge among the lower orders, like Blanche? Not while she and Tye were shacking up there wasn’t. Rose and the Hawkins family? But Moira was Denzie Brandau’s busty lusty. Rose ran silent and deep. Maybe she hated me too. Chanel was out.

Which left Prunella, erstwhile lover, Miss Reliability. And I knew her address.

The bus took me some of the way. I walked from Lexington, turning left at the little supermarket into East 36th, and found Prunella’s impossible surname on the Apt. 6B voice box. I had the sense to disguise my voice, trying for nasality and a Central Europe accent. The squawk answered with Prunella’s inflexion.

“Passel serviss foor, uh…”

“Be right down,” she said, careful girl.

I flitted down the slope as far as the Third Avenue corner, and stood hunched. I could see into the well-lit porch. Tye Dee came to the glass vestibule, cautious and slow, looking obliquely, then did a rapid step to stare uphill. The stress was unmistakable. I saw his head rotate, a deliberate scan of the tall terraced houses opposite. I didn’t move. A displaced shadow points better than a flashlight. Tye’s bulk withdrew. I waited, leaning on the corner, and was right. A full minute later, his head came slowly into view, did its pan, then vanished. And so did I.

SOKOLOWSKY was in the phone book. I had the sense not to bother, instead got a taxi to Perry Street, and walked. The street was more like a street than any I’d yet seen, every house accessible, no transparent double doors manned by vigilantes, local cafes and nosh bars on the go even at this late hour.

The old man was suspicious when I buzzed. I said who I was, but for old time’s sake did the lurk-and-lour trick in case he too had a battalion of goons, then trotted forward and up his steps just before he closed the world out.

“Evening, Mr Sokolowsky. Lovejoy.”

The corridor behind him was feebly lit. He nodded, reluctantly admitted me. He arranged complicated chains on the outer door.

“You’re hard to remove, Lovejoy. Like my Aunt Esther’s lemon tea. Carpets it stained stayed stained.” He snuffled ahead, turning out lights as he went. “She’s staining Heaven’s carpets with her tea. You come when the water’s off. Can you explain it? Manhattan an island you can spit across, without water twice a week? You give money. For what? For them not to give you water?”

“Mhhh.”

We shuffled inside. An iron expanding gate blocked the stairs.

“You wonder why I’ve a gate across the stairs? I’ll tell you why I’ve a gate across the stairs.”

“No, honest. I wasn’t”

“I’ll tell you anyhow, because you’re wondering. I’ve a gate across the stairs because they break in. People who know nothing break in, like weather. Always there.” He paused, took my arm at the entrance of a small cluttered room, shoved me as though I was inert until I could move no further and had to flop into a chair. “Technology we got like Africa’s got drought. We teach the young miracles my grandfather wouldn’t believe. For what? So they can learn nothing. Instead of a job, they break in and steal what they can reach. It’s life. Who says life isn’t terrible?”

“Thanks for letting me in, Mr Sokolowsky.”

He creaked into a chair. “Visitors who come through the door I can live with. You’ll have some tea. It’s Russian style, so the glass burns your fingers. You know anything Russian doesn’t? It’s life.”

I nodded thanks, unsure whether it was an act. I knew he was an alert jeweller, who saw much and spoke little.

He poured hot water through tea leaves in a sieve, added a slice of lemon, heaped sugar in, stirred, kept the spoon. I felt my eyelids drooping. It was all so peaceful, so innocent. He raised the kettle to remind me of the scandalous water problems, shrugged in his shawl, gently went “Scheesch!” and painstakingly set about bringing some thick apple cake thing.

The room had a bar fire. Books lined the walls. A globe and worn rugs lent a medieval air. It could have been any century, except for his electric kettle and the water problem.

“You wondering why I have only one table lamp?”

“You have a question nobody answers, that’s suffering. So I’ll tell you. I have only one table lamp because electric’s had it good too long. I could afford two, three, a dozen. Count the lights in this house. I could have them on every minute every day, but why should I? The electric company’s better than the water company? Don’t insult my intelligence, Lovejoy. Eat. You’ve a way to go.”

“Thanks, Mr Sokolowsky.” It was good, a sort of thick apple pie. Was it the famous strudel they mention in pictures?

“You got killed in New Orleans, Lovejoy. I for one don’t believe it. I didn’t then, I don’t now.” He spoke with a grandfather’s comforting gravity, everything debatable whatever the evidence of your senses.

“No. I made it.” Somebody had reported I’d got topped. Hirschman wouldn’t have, so it must have been the goons themselves. Perhaps they’d have copped it from their bosses if they’d reported a failure? To them I was only a stranger passing through, my killing a job to be paid for and forgotten.

“I thought as much.” He was in a rocking chair. He plucked occasionally at his shawl, the habit of age. “You see this street, Lovejoy? The notices, what they write?”

“There were lots of posters —”

“And such posters,” he said severely. “You read them? Karate lessons? Chinese contemplation? Gays, lesbians? Macrobiotic cooking? This is civilization they learn Chinese think, can’t think American a’ready?”

“Well, I suppose change is everywhere —”

“Run, Lovejoy,” the old man said sadly. “Run.”

I’d lost the thread. “Eh?” He’d just been talking about cooking.

“Run.” He reached and closed the book on his small table. “Lovejoy. They’ll know you’re alive sooner or later. My advice is run, run till you’ve no need. Then you can stop. It’s life. I’m telling you because I know.”

“I don’t know what I’m running from, Mr Sokolowsky.”

He removed his spectacles, replaced them. “That’s something I don’t know, Lovejoy.”

“Run where?” He knew I was honestly asking.

“My advice isn’t good, Lovejoy. So tell me what you’ve done since you didn’t die.”

More or less, I told. He poured more tea, holding up his kettle to condemn the water company. I worried it was all some delaying tactic to keep me here while he secretly signalled Tye and Al and Shelt.

“The California Game’s a legend, Lovejoy,” he said at last. “I’ve lived a lifetime and can tell you legends are nothing but trouble. Like New York’s water supply,” he interposed bitterly. “Legends you’ve got to handle like bombs. Cover them up, hide from their effects. The rest of the time, ignore them. But their fame spreads. People want to walk with legends. See the problem?”

“Publicity would prevent the California Game.”

He sighed as only old Sokolowskys can sigh.

“You’re teaching me, Lovejoy? Oy vey. You know so much, you’re running from you don’t know with nothing in a strange land?”

“I apologize.”

“No hard feelings. Manners I remember.” I had a sudden image of him elsewhere, fumbling for a fire tiger to poke some nonexistent fire. “The California Game’s the biggest and most illegal. Take a fraction of every business in America, that’s the stake. It’s always simple faro—you know faro? Your win, my win. Nothing simpler, the one game nobody can cheat, no skill required.”

“Faro?” I’d had visions of some exotic protracted gambling game lasting through nights of smoke and drinks.

“One card’s chosen as marker. Everybody sees it. You deal a new deck into two separate piles, one your win pile, one your loser. Whichever pile the marker card falls into, so you’ve won or lost.”

“Is it worth it?” I’d heard of the great poker championship in Las Vegas, with fans saving a lifetime to enter. “You might as well do it by phone.”

“It’s a secure way of passing power, Lovejoy. Handing over power’s where all trouble starts.”

“Whoever wins gets the hacks?”

“And decides who can play next time. Nicko won last year.” His gaze was the saddest gaze I’d ever seen. “This hurts me to say, Lovejoy. Go from here. I’ve to phone or they kill me. I’ll give you time. But go now.”

I thought I’d misheard, reluctantly decided I hadn’t. I finished my tea, thanked him.

“You need a loan, Lovejoy, speak this side of the door.”

“No, thanks.” I paused in the dimly lit corridor. “If you were me, where would you go until daylight?”

“There’s all-nighters. Tell jokes until dawn. Here in America there’s so much to laugh at.” His expression was sobriety itself.

“Thanks, Mr Sokolowsky. Maybe there’ll be a time…”

“Maybe, Lovejoy,” he agreed, and I was out and on my own.

THAT night I walked, was accosted intermittently by figures and shapes that frightened me. I lurked in all-night diners where I could, ducked out when the going got rough. One seemed to specialize in brawls. Eventually I risked a taxi, got dropped off where comedians talked jokes into a hang of smoke over tables populated by an audience who never laughed. The worst was, those comedians were the best I’d ever heard. It broke what was left of my heart.

Came dawn. I decided I’d risk visiting Mr Sokolowsky to check the details of the Game. I went by Metro, riskily joining the first commuters of the day, lighting at Christopher Street on the Broadway-Seventh Avenue line. I felt death warmed up, as my Gran used to say.

The view from the end of the old jeweller’s street kept me moving on. Ambulances and police and fire engines wah-wah about New York every hour God sends, so I’d not sussed the significance of a team tearing past as I’d headed that way. But outside his house a small crowd had gathered, and a covered shape was being gurneyed into an ambulance. I didn’t look back.

A suspicious mind like mine might conclude that old Sokolowsky had told his masters that I’d called. They’d possibly hunted, failed to find me, and exacted the ultimate forfeit. My mouth was dry. I was tired, lost.

But antiques beckoned. I went into a huge commercial building that claimed to be the centre of World Trade. I believed it. I submitted to a professional shave which started me imagining gangsters bursting in to do a routine assassination, had a headwash (exhausting), manicure (embarrassing), and shoeshine (most embarrassing of all).

The tonsorialist, he said he was, talked ceaselessly, praising Thomas Maynooth’s brilliant innovation — a midnight to midnight Law Day, which was the talk of the town because it seemed to be working. Grand Central to Tenth, West 34th to 48th, not a single mugging or killing yet, a whole ten hours!

I did my best with the accent. “Who’s this Maynooth genius?”

“Here.” He showed me a morning paper a foot thick, Maynooth being honoured by one Major J. Lister. “Tommy Maynooth maintains this foreign orphanage. He’s mad the papers found out.”

Good hearted, and modest with it.

I left, into Manhattan sunshine. I felt prepared. Let me die among antiques.