Crooked Hearts (10 page)

“Chinese guy gave it to me.”

This time Doc didn’t smile. “Do you know what this is?”

“No, that’s why I’m—”

“This.” He tapped a spatulate forefinger over the pen-and-ink flower at the top of the page. “It’s a white lotus.”

“So? What’s it mean?”

“I’ve heard of it,” Grace blurted out. “It’s a religious sect in China, isn’t it?”

“About five hundred years ago it was, yes,” he confirmed. “It was a secret organization, mostly Buddhists, dedicated to overthrowing the Mongols. It died out eventually, but flourished again briefly in the late seventeen hundreds, only this time the object was to expel the Manchus and restore the Mings.”

“Obviously it failed,” observed Grace, who knew that the Manchus ruled China today.

“Yes, it was crushed. The Manchus denounced it by name in their penal code.”

“So what’s this?” asked Reuben, rattling the paper.

Doc blew smoke through his nose and didn’t answer for several moments. “If you want to find out, it’s going to cost you some money. More than you might think.”

Reuben bristled. “Why? All we want is a translation—how much could that cost?”

“A great deal, if everyone I ask is afraid to look at it.”

“Afraid? Why would they be?”

“Come back tomorrow and find out. Bring lots of money.” The brown teeth gave him a cadaverous look when he smiled; Grace thought he was doing it on purpose. Reuben grumbled for a while longer, but eventually agreed. She was beginning to understand that he and Doc had a contingency arrangement flexible enough to cover all kinds of business situations.

“Wait, please, before you go.” Doc held up a bony, tobacco-stained finger, stopping them. “Two seconds.” He disappeared through the curtain, and was back in half a minute. “Reuben has a new ring,” he said, placing a small jeweller’s box on the counter. “Voilà. Something for the lady.”

When he opened the box for her, Grace saw a silver brooch on a bed of dark blue velvet. “Oh, it’s beautiful,” she exclaimed politely, automatically—before her eyes registered the fact that it truly was beautiful. “It’s an angel.” She picked it up in careful fingers, marveling over the delicacy of the piece. It was half an angel, from the waist up, with the pretty face in profile and the arms and wings outstretched, and long, wavy hair streaming to one side as if a heavenly wind were blowing into the angel’s face. It made her think of a book of drawings she’d once seen, by the poet William Blake. “It’s lovely, it truly is. Exquisite. I’m afraid I couldn’t take it.”

“But you must,” Doc replied, his voice deep and gentle. “It’s a gift.”

“But—”

“Grace,” chided Reuben, with a wholly mercenary glint in his eye. “It’s a gift.”

In the end she took it gladly, moved by the gesture because behind it she could see no motive except kindness. Even when Doc swore that he’d thought of the brooch as soon as Grace had walked into his shop, she was certain he had no intentions beyond generosity. Her nature wasn’t cynical, but it was astute; if he’d been laying a groundwork of flattery for some future deceit, she believed she’d have known it.

Outside on the pavement, the sun blinded them. Reuben pulled her along with a long, purposeful stride; she had to walk fast to keep up. “Where are we going?” she asked, catching her breath while a carriage passed in front of them on Powell at Bush Street.

“Gambling, Grace.”

“Where?”

“There,” he said, pointing.

“The Golden Nugget,” she read on the side of a long, clapboard-sided building on the far corner. “My, what an original name.”

“Maybe not, but the play’s reasonably square.”

“What are you going to play
with?”
she inquired politely.

“Money. The blackjack dealer’s a friend of mine, advances me a little credit from time to time when the owner’s not looking.”

“Why?”

“I told you: friendship.” Taking her hand, he stepped off the curb and headed for the Golden Nugget.

5

Take all the fools out of this world, and there wouldn’t be any fun or profit left in living in it.

—Josh Billings

T
HE BLACKJACK DEALER’S NAME
was Alice, and she had the biggest bust Grace had ever seen on a woman who wasn’t nursing.

She sat on a stool, her back to the wall, in the crotch of an L-shaped table, dealing cards to six or seven cheerful-looking men across the worn baize surface. She could’ve been twenty-five or forty, depending on your point of view. Grace put her at the high end, crediting cosmetics for her faultless complexion, and very likely her coal-black hair as well. She had on a low-cut gown of heliotrope brocade, snug as wax at the hips, and sprouting bows, feathers, and jet from the puffed shoulders. When she leaned forward to slap cards down in front of her glassy-eyed patrons, the surface area of bare powdered bosom increased by alarming exponential increments.
Talk about a diversion,
marveled Grace; Alice’s bust was more dazzling than the sleight-of-hand of the most accomplished thimblerigger in the city. And if, once in a while, some jaded player was unawed by her prodigious endowments, she could rely on the life-size oil painting on the wall behind her—of a voluptuous reclining nude, shielding her most private place with one tiny, inadequate pink hand—to distract him from the occasional palmed card or double-cut deck.

The Golden Nugget, with its fat chandeliers, gilded paintings and mirrors, and countless gaming tables thronged with gamblers, reminded Grace of pictures she’d seen of casinos from the olden days, the wild fifties when gold-rush fever had first hit San Francisco. But it was a serious house, not a nostalgic tourist attraction, judging from the swarming herds of men throwing their money away at roulette, rondo,
rouge et noir,
faro, poker, keno, and twenty-one. The clientele was mixed, from businessmen in suits to Mexicans in blankets. There were even a few flashy women, and not all of them prostitutes. Besides Alice, the casino employed a pretty, respectable-looking girl who sat at a table and sold-coffee and cakes, adding tone to the joint. She didn’t have many paying customers, though; cigars and spirits were the primary refreshments here. Tobacco smoke hung from the ceiling like fog over the Bay, and the smell of beer and brandy was almost overwhelming.

Alice’s bored but watchful face lit up with pleasure when she saw Reuben weaving toward her through the jostling crowd, Grace in his wake. The enthusiasm with which she greeted him made Grace wonder if credit was the only thing she was in the habit of advancing, out of friendship.

“Hi, honey,” Alice greeted her when Reuben introduced them, and Grace returned a circumspect hello. That did it for conversation between the ladies, because after that Alice only had eyes for Reuben.

And he for her. Watching them together, half amused, half nettled, Grace had an opportunity to observe Reuben’s technique up close. He was a killer of the first degree, she concluded in less than a minute. It wasn’t even his good looks that caused the devastation; if anything he was too handsome, a man not to be trusted on that score alone. No, what really made him dangerous was the fatal thread of sincerity that wove through his effortless charm, smooth as snake oil. Henry had it too, the ability to make you believe every word he said simply because you wanted to believe it. With men like that you couldn’t help yourself—you wanted to please them, to keep that radiant, mesmerizing good will they flashed with their warm eyes and their ravishing smiles. Alice was nobody’s fool; she looked as if she’d been around the track any number of times. But in this case she might have met her match: if it came to a showdown between Reuben and the dealer, Grace was putting her money on the gentleman.

Words were exchanged between them in low voices; Grace missed half, and the other half were in some kind of code. The bountiful Alice glanced around the hall, no doubt trying to spot the houseman. Grace followed her gaze, and by the time she looked back, Reuben was sitting at the blackjack table and pulling in a stack of chips in exchange for a bill she knew couldn’t cover them. Score one for the gent.

Whether or not Alice’s largesse extended to helping him beat her at her own game was another question; the dealer’s hands flew too fast for Grace to spot any bottom deals, crimps, or seconds. But he did win, with steady, temperate play, enlivened by unexpectedly risky bets on doubtful-looking cards—bets that never seemed to fail. Grace scrutinized the byplay for signals between them, but couldn’t detect any. After a while, she forgot about signs and countersigns and grew fixated instead on Reuben’s hands. The hands of an artist, she recalled fantasizing on the stagecoach, and she hadn’t been far wrong. His medium was cards instead of clay, but his long, crafty fingers looked as sensitive as a sculptor’s. Did he file his fingertips with sandpaper? Some sharps did, until the skin bled. But cards were only one of Reuben Jones’s games, so she thought he probably didn’t. She suspected he was a natural. A born prestidigitator.

He was wearing black again today; even his shirt was black, and the natty string tie around his stiff white collar. If the idea was to look like a gambler, then he’d succeeded. And yet, somehow his face didn’t fit the role. It was too … complicated. Not slick or purposeful or ruthless, like the faces of most professional gamblers she’d observed, in Henry’s company, in her young life. There was too much going on behind Reuben’s dark-lashed eyes and his beaked nose, his clever mouth. Too many possibilities attracted him, and he was good at all of them—blind Spanish scholar, roof salesman, correspondence-school principal, blackjack magician. She didn’t trust him farther than she could throw an andiron.

It took him fifteen minutes to pay Alice back for her covert advance, and only thirty more to triple his poke. In his place, on such a streak, Grace knew she’d have kept playing, but one of his numerous virtues seemed to be knowing when to stop. He raked his winnings into his hat, planted a wet-looking kiss on the dealer’s lips, stood up, and walked away to cash in his chips at the bar. The suddenness of the move took Grace by surprise; she drifted after him uncertainly. “Have fun, honey,” Alice called to her with a good-natured wink.

She took a seat on a stool beside him in front of the long mahogany bar, resting her toes on the brass rail, resisting the blinding pull of his smile. She was back in his line of vision, so to speak, a player once more on the stage of his mind. She shouldn’t be put out, she told herself; he’d only been doing his job, which he did extremely well. Henry had the same genius for making people believe they were the sole, fascinating center of his attention, and watching him employ it had always amused, never irritated her. Nevertheless, she returned Reuben’s infectious grin with a cool stare; and when the bartender brought him a congratulatory beer, she ordered a prim lemonade.

She couldn’t remain stiff forever, though, and her reserve softened when he showed her his winnings. When he offered her half, it melted away completely.

“What now?” she asked, fanning out her four crisp fifties, tapping the edges into neat, symmetrical alignment.

He signaled to a girl selling cigars and cigarettes down at the other end of the bar. “Poker’s my game, Grace. What we want is something big.”

“Here?”

He shook his head. “I’ll take half a dozen of those,” he said to the cigarette girl, pointing to an open box of cheroots. He told her she was pretty, made her blush with his killer smile, and sent her on her way with a ridiculously large tip.

Grace snickered, stirring more sugar into her lemonade.

“What’s funny?”

“You are, Jones.”

He didn’t ask why; his self-conscious grin said he already knew. He lit a thin cigar with a bar match and stuck it between his teeth, one eye squinted against the smoke. He looked like a satisfied pirate. “Want one?” he asked, as if suddenly remembering his manners.

“A cigar? No, thanks.”

“You don’t smoke? Too bad. I had a kibitzing partner once who smoked great big stogies. He’d blow two smoke rings if a guy had a pair”—he demonstrated with two thick, perfect hoops of smoke—“three for three of a kind”—he blew three—“four for four of a kind”—four. “And furious puffing”—his head disappeared in a cloud of smoke—“for a flush.”

Grace made the mistake of taking a sip of lemonade just before he demonstrated the signal for a flush. A helpless burst of laughter caused some of it to go down the wrong pipe, and the rest to explode from her mouth in a fine spray, wetting Reuben’s shirtfront.

He patted her between the shoulder blades, chuckling with delight.

When the coughing fit ended and she finished drying her eyes, she returned to the question at hand. “Why don’t you want to gamble here? I thought you said the play was square.” She glanced around the big, busy room, alive with the hum of male voices and the clink of money.

Reuben followed her gaze through the long mirror behind the bar. “Maybe it’s too square.”

She gave him a long, speculative appraisal through her lashes, which he returned with innocent, open-faced interest. They were both leaning on the bar on their crossed forearms. She moved closer; he followed suit. “Jones,” she opened.

“Here.”

“You’ve got good hands.”

He looked down at his left one and wriggled his fingers. “Nice of you to say so.”

“How’s your nerve?”

Something danced deep in the light brown of his irises. The suave planes of his face sharpened subtly. “What makes you ask?”

“I’ve been thinking about a little brace game I once had occasion to observe. You wouldn’t happen to be any good at seven-card stud, would you?”

His slow smile caused a curious fluttering sensation in the pit of her stomach. “Honey, I’m the best you ever saw.”

“That’s good,” she said, trying to make her voice crisp. “But for this particular game we’ll need something besides skill. Something extra. We’ll need a cold deck.”

His smile turned positively diabolical. He tossed back the tail of his frock coat, reached into his back pocket, and removed a plain deck of cards. Commonplace blue-speckled backs, as ordinary as water. “Razored aces,” he murmured, lips close to her ear, voice intimate as a lover’s. “A thirty-second of an inch. If you can pick ’em out, Grace, I’ll give you everything I own.”