Lucky at Cards (16 page)
I was gambling for my life.
And I remembered that moral that had occurred to me on my way to New York.
Don’t gamble. Stick to your trade and don’t take chances
. My trade was the card mechanic’s trade, and here I was staking my life in a straight card game.
It was purely crazy.
There was no question of honor involved, not as far as I could see. He had brought me here by force and he had arranged the game on threat of death. The game was being played on his terms, not mine. And honor had never been my long suit to begin with. I was playing to stay alive, and he was playing to see me dead.
So I started doing what I had always done well.
Gin is a beautiful game for a good mechanic. If you know what you’re doing you can cheat on center-stage with every eye on you and still get away with it. Knowing the position of one card in the deck can make the difference on a hand. Setting up just one or two things can make you a winner every time out.
It was nerve-wracking. The Mutt and Jeff team was sitting in close, never taking their eyes from my hands. But we had been playing for a long time and the boys had watched for a long time without seeing anything remarkable. They were tired, and they weren’t as sharp as they might have been. And Murray was under enough pressure so that he couldn’t watch me all that close and still pay full attention to his cards. He had to study the cards to beat me, and that gave me just enough room to swing.
I won the seventh set big. I knew the bottom three cards in the deck every time I dealt, and that’s a big edge—when you know what you don’t have to look for, when you know what cards are out of the hand, you’ve got a healthy advantage. And this was a kind of cheating no one could pin down. All I did was manage to see those bottom cards in the course of the deal. I didn’t move anything or stack anything, just managed a peek.
There were other tricks. On one hand, I went for an early knock. I had a lay of four kings in my hand. When I scooped up the cards for the deal, I made sure those four cowboys wound up all together on the bottom of the deck. They stayed there during the shuffles, until the last shuffle when they wound up all in a row about a third of the way up from the bottom. When Murray cut, the kings were grouped among the first twenty cards. He got a pair and I got a pair. Fair enough. Only I knew what Murray was holding and he didn’t know what I held. All I had to do was wait. He couldn’t do anything as long as he held on to the kings because I wasn’t about to break up mine. And when he did break his, finally, I picked up his discard and ginned with it. That happened to come on a spade hand, too, and it put me out in two games.
I won two games of the eighth set and he came back and won the other. With two sets to go, the tables had turned a little. I was three hundred points out in front. "You’re luck’s getting better,” Murray said.
“It’s not luck. I’m outplaying you.”
“You bastard,” he said.
I kept the needle in. “You don’t play a bad game,” I said, “but you’re not flexible enough.”
“Shut up and deal.”
“I want more coffee.”
One of the heavies went for coffee. I shuffled the cards and kept up a running stream of chatter until I had a cup of mud at my elbow. I drank it down and dealt out the hands. By this time he was so tensed up that I beat hell out of him without cheating at all.
Then, toward the end of the ninth set, he hit a streak of luck. He was doing everything right and I couldn’t get to him. We had just broken open the eighth new deck of cards, and he couldn’t seem to lose with them.
I won a hand, finally. And I shuffled the cards and stopped suddenly and boxed them and looked through them.
He had brought in a deck of readers.
I glanced up at him. He had a sick look on his face. I called the cards off one at a time, then turned them face up. I called ten cards right in a row. They were Bee brand, the diamond back design, and the markings were in the little diamonds near the corners.
Marked cards are strictly for amateurs. A pro never uses anything phony—he gets by on his own abilities at sleight-of-hand and misdirection. Whenever you see daub or marked cards or luminous readers or hold-out machines, you know you are dealing with a wiseass amateur looking for the best of it.
“These are your cards,” I said.
“I—”
“They came in at the beginning of this set,” I said. “I think we ought to forget this set and go back to the end of the eighth. I think we ought to play two more sets with straight cards.”
He just nodded.
From there on in I didn’t have to cheat. He was beaten all the way. Even when the cards ran his way he couldn’t do things right. He had tried to do some cheating on his own hook, and he had been caught at it, and he was through. On the tenth and final set I blitzed him three games straight. The bastard never won a hand.
Murray sent the boys away. He gazed at me and his shoulders sagged. “You win,” he said. “It’s all yours. Fifty thousand dollars. And Joyce, if you want her.”
I turned to her. As desirable as ever, unless you saw the death in her eyes.
“I don’t want her,” I said.
Murray was tremendously relieved. Then he said, “The money—”
“I don’t want the money, either,” I said. I pushed back my chair and turned away from him. I didn’t want to look at either Murray Rogers or Joyce now.
I got out of there and closed the door.
I traveled as far as a drug store and called a cab from there. He travels fastest who travels alone, I thought. But I wasn’t in such a hurry now. There were more important things than traveling fast.
The cabby found the high school and let me off in front of it. In the lobby a girl with straight hair and braces on her teeth told me how to find Mrs. Lambert’s classroom.
Barb was standing at the blackboard with a piece of chalk in her hand. She looked as fresh and sweet as a mouthwash ad. I stood in the doorway for a few seconds and gazed at her. She didn’t see me.
I thought, Jesus, go away, leave her alone.
But I stepped into the room and she turned and stared.
And I said, “Did you mean it? The whole whither-thou-goest routine?”
“I meant it.”
“All the way?”
“All the way. Bill, I—”
“Have you got a car outside?”
“Yes,” Barb said.
“Are you ready to go?”
“I’ll have to pack. I—”
“No time. You can buy things.”
The kids in that class could never have understood. They sat there with their eyes bulging out of their heads while I took her by the elbow and steered her out of the room. We rushed past everybody and into her car and got going. We were on the road.
“This is crazy,” Barb said.
“I know.”
“All my clothes and everything. And just rushing away like this. Maybe we ought to stop.”
“We’ll stop.”
“We will?”
“Sure,” I said. “As soon as I find a motel.”
So here we are. The town is Phoenix, although we’re never in one town long enough for it to matter too very much where we are. And Barb’s last name is Maynard, thanks to a Baptist Minister in Orchard Falls. But she uses her maiden name in the act.
The act is nothing too very special. We’re playing a small club called the Desert Points now. I’m Maynard the Magnificent, deft and agile as always, and Barb is my assistant, the girl I saw in half, the girl who drags out the prop wagon and enchants the customers with her mammary development. We go on before the stripper and after the female impersonator. We’re not exactly the World’s Fair, but we like it.
Sometimes I meet someone who knows me as Wizard. Once in a while somebody from the bad old days wants to know if I still like to take a crooked hand in a crooked game. I don’t. Some of them discourage easy and some of them try to push, but they all give up sooner or later.
The money is nothing exciting and the life itself is chaotic and uncertain. But we like it. Barb doesn’t seem to care about heavy furniture or charge accounts. There will be a kid or two some day, but we figure they can get used to the life. They may miss out on some schooling, but they’ll learn their geography first-hand. And they’ll be pulling rabbits out of hats before they’re toilet-trained.
It could be worse. Hell, it has been worse.
It’s never been better.
Sometime in late 1963 I had a falling-out with my agent. I’d been represented by the Scott Meredith Literary Agency ever since I took employment there as an editor in the summer of 1957. I had left the job and returned to Antioch College after nine or ten months but remained a client of the agency until I chafed at some crap assignment and wound up suddenly agentless. My primary market at the time was Bill Hamling’s soft-core operation, Nightstand Books, and it was a closed shop; Scott Meredith (under a deep corporate cover) filled all their editorial needs. I had a wife and a mortgage and two kids under three years old, and no college degree or marketable skills except the ability to make up stories and string words together.
That sounds fairly dire, and I suppose it was, but it was decades later before I realized it didn’t have to be. I could have mended the fences. One phone call to Scott, a mumbled apology, and I’d have been back in the fold. In fact there
was
a phone call—
from
Scott—to clear up some unfinished business, and at its conclusion he suggested I return to the fold. And I declined. Does that sound like a principled stand? Or like wrongheaded obstinacy? I have to say it was neither, just an inability to perceive options. How could I go back to being a client? You know, I always did well on IQ tests and, when I put my mind to it, at schoolwork. But in certain basic respects, I really wasn’t terribly bright, was I?
Never mind. I had a living to make, and only one way to make it, and I went to work. I was living in a Buffalo, New York, suburb at the time, out of touch with the world of publishing. We probably should have moved back to New York City, but we stayed put and I worked to develop new markets for myself. I’d written a number of books for Harry Shorten at Midwood Tower, and that was
not
a Scott Meredith closed shop, but did I give Harry a ring and try to set something up? No, never thought of it. Instead I established a new identity as Jill Emerson, wrote a sensitive lesbian novel, and sent it to Midwood as an over-the-transom submission. (They bought it and launched Jill Emerson’s checkered career, but that’s another story; you’ll find it in the afterwords to
Warm & Willing
and
Enough of Sorrow
.)
I’d written some psychosexual nonfiction (made up case histories) for Lancer Books, and I knew Larry T. Shaw well enough to call him up and propose a book. So that was a market. I knew something about coins, and knocked out a book on coin investment that Frederick Fell published. I sold articles to a batch of numismatic (currency) magazines:
Coins
,
Numismatic Scrapbook
, and
The Whitman Numismatic Journal
.
And then there was Beacon.
Before there was Midwood or Nightstand, Beacon Books had essentially created the genre of widely distributed soft-core paperback fiction, with Orrie Hitt their leading writer. I believe
A Diet of Treacle
was my first book for Beacon, although it didn’t set out to be; I had more ambitious aims for the book, set in the beat/hip demimonde of Greenwich Village. But when other publishers passed, my agent sent the manuscript to Beacon, where it was published as
Pads Are for Passion
by Sheldon Lord. That was the pen name I’d put on my Midwood titles, and I decided to use it at Beacon as well.
I wrote two more books specifically for Beacon,
April North
and
Community of Women
. The latter was a Beacon editor’s idea; he must have been a commuter, given to fantasies about daytime life in his suburb after all the men had caught the 8:02 a.m. train to Grand Central Station.
When the books came out, I made the mistake of having a look at them; when some sentences struck me as unwieldy, I checked my carbon copies. Beacon was a strange publishing house indeed. The publisher, a fellow named Arnold Abramson, came out of the world of pulp magazines and took it as an article of faith that anything he bought from a writer had to be rewritten by an editor. And so he had a whole roomful of editors whose job it was to change the manuscripts they bought, whether they needed it or not. If the editors didn’t make abundant changes, they’d be out of a job. So they changed my compound sentences to simple sentences and hooked my simple sentences together as compound sentences and so on, all the way through to the end. They certainly didn’t make the stuff better, and I don’t suppose they made it a great deal worse, but the whole business annoyed the hell out of me. The pay wasn’t all that good, so I figured I’d write for somebody else.
But Beacon wanted more from Sheldon Lord, and Scott Meredith’s merry men figured out how to handle that. They enlisted ghostwriters to furnish Sheldon Lord manuscripts, and in return for the use of my name, I got a slice of the advance. Two hundred dollars a book, if I remember correctly.
And how many of these ghostwritten manuscripts were there over a two or three year period? Beats me. Eight or ten, something like that? I didn’t know anything about the ghosts and never saw their books or knew what they were writing. One guy was named Milo and one guy wasn’t, and my old college buddy Peter Hochstein wrote at least one of the books, with results that were interesting enough to discuss in the afterword to
April North
. But the whole ghosting operation had pretty much stopped by the time Scott Meredith and I parted company.
I don’t think I had Beacon in mind when I wrote
Lucky at Cards
. It’s a straight suspense novel, not a soft-core sex opus, and I probably intended it for Gold Medal, where I’d already published
Grifter’s Game
and
Coward’s Kiss—
albeit under other titles. But I needed a quick sale, and that’s probably what made me send the manuscript to Bernie Williams at Beacon.
Well, he loved it. I had lunch with him in New York, and we had this wacky conversation in which he told me how much of an improvement the book was on my recent work for them. It required hardly any editing, he said, and showed me some pages of a recent Sheldon Lord manuscript that had been edited to death. It was comforting to know I was better than the guys who’d been ghosting for me, but it made for a weird moment or two.
Bernie called the book
The Sex Shuffle
, perhaps thinking that the promise of sex might help offset the book’s lack of much sexual content. And he did something Beacon has never done before or since, so far as I know: He put a quote on the cover enthusing about the book. The source of the quote was given as one otherwise unidentified “William Bernard,” and my keen analytical mind leads me to suspect that it was in fact Bernie Williams.
There was a wonderful moment at that lunch. Bernie had an idea for a book I might write next, one that examined the relationship of an older husband with a much younger wife. “It’s almost a cliché in fiction,” he said, “but the thing is it’s always portrayed negatively. I’d like to see a book in which a marriage like that works out. Because sometimes it does work out. Sometimes a marriage like that can be a huge success.”
That was the only time I met Bernie, and I never did meet his wife, whom I’m certain must have been a good twenty years his junior. I can only hope they went on being happy together. He was a nice man, and he bought a book from me when I sorely needed a sale. I never did take a shot at his May-December novel because a fellow named Ken Bressett, who’d bought articles from me for the
Whitman Numismatic Journal
, showed up in Buffalo and offered me a job. We sold the house and moved to Racine, Wisconsin.
Years later, Charles Ardai snapped up
The Sex Shuffle
, restored its original title,
Lucky at Cards
,
and published it at Hard Case Crime. Here’s a review from Publishers Weekly: “The Hard Case Crime imprint has found a perfect partner in Block, as this gritty Grifter’s tale, in print for the first time in forty years, goes to show … The plot twists here, then there, then back again, rooted in Block’s strong characters and no-nonsense prose style.”
And here’s another from Bill Tot in
Booklist
:
Before Matt Scudder, before Bernie Rhodenbarr, before being named a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, Lawrence Block turned out paperback originals. This one—unavailable for more than 40 years—now receives a timely reissue from Hard Case Crime. It’s a doozy… Block unwinds his plot superbly, pointing toward a classic noir finale but then seeming to pull away—or maybe not. And, along the way, there is all the teasing sexuality and tongue-in-cheek noir style that a pulp devotee craves.
The book probably owes a little to
The Tooth and the Nail
, by Bill S. Ballinger, a fine writer who’s pretty much forgotten these days. Let’s hope he’s rediscovered. If
Lucky at Cards
can have a new life as an ebook after all these years, well, anything’s possible, isn’t it?
—Lawrence Block
Greenwich Village
Lawrence Block ([email protected]) welcomes your email responses; he reads them all, and replies when he can.