Grifter's Game Read online

  And fell blissfully asleep. Her touch woke me. Not her voice, although much later I remember having heard it while I slept, about the same way you can remember the ringing of an alarm clock that you never got up to turn off.

  But her hands woke me. Soft hands on the back of my neck. Fingers drumming out not-too-complex rhythms. I rolled over and opened my eyes.

  “You shouldn’t sleep like that,” she was saying. “Not in this sun. You’ll get a bad burn on your back.”

  I smiled. “Thanks.”

  “You don’t have to thank me. I wanted to wake you up. I was lonely.”

  I looked at her. I looked at the very good body in the one-piece red suit. The suit was wet and it hugged her like an old friend. I looked at the blonde hair that was blonde all the way to the roots. I looked at the mouth. It was red and wet. It looked ravenously hungry.

  And, out of habit, I looked at the fourth finger of her left hand. There was a mark there from a ring, but she wasn’t wearing the ring now. I wondered whether she had taken it off before coming to the beach, or when she spotted me.

  “Where’s the husband?”

  “Away,” she said, her eyes laughing at me. “Away from me. Not here. I’m lonely.”

  “He’s not in Atlantic City?”

  She reached out a finger and chucked me under the chin. She was just a little too good-looking. That bothered me. When a woman’s beauty blinds you, your work suffers. A certain part of your anatomy leads you around. That can screw things up.

  “He’s in Atlantic City,” she said. “But he’s not here.”

  “Where’s here?”

  “The beach,” she said. “Where we are.”

  Where half a hundred other people also were.

  “Want to go swimming?”

  She made a face. “I already did,” she said. “It’s cold. And my bathing cap is too tight. It gives me a headache.”

  “So go without one.”

  “I don’t like to. I hate to get my hair wet. Especially with the salt water. You have to wash forever to get it out and it ruins the hair. I have very fine hair. I mean the hairs are thin, that is. I’m not complimenting myself.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said. “Everybody else must do that for you.”

  That one got the smile it had to get. A little experience and you learn the language. You have to.

  “You’re sweet,” she said. “Very sweet.”

  “Isn’t your husband sweet?”

  “Forget him.”

  “How can I? He’s married to the most beautiful girl in the world.”

  Another smile.

  “Well?”

  “He’s not sweet. He’s old and he’s fat and he’s ugly. Also stupid. Also revolting.”

  It was quite a list.

  “So why did you marry him?”

  “He’s also rich,” she said. “Very rich. Very very very rich.”

  We forgot her husband. She did, anyway. I didn’t, because he was an important part of the picture. The fat, ugly, old husband, who was also rich. The pretty wife, who wanted more than the old husband was giving her. It was almost standard.

  The deviations from the norm were small ones—they only bothered me a little. For one thing, she was too young. Not too young to marry a rich old goat, because you can do that at any age. But too young to chase. She was twenty-four—or twenty-five or twenty-six or twenty-seven. It was perfectly logical for her to be married to the old goat, perfectly logical for her to be interested in getting into the sack with somebody else. But at her age, and with her looks, she shouldn’t be the one to do the pursuing. She didn’t have to be chaste, but she should at least be chased, to coin a phrase.

  Later on, when the years went to work on the high breasts and the clear skin, then she could get into the act a little more. She could do the chasing, and she could do the paying. But at this stage of the game there were plenty of guys who would chase her without any encouragement whatsoever, plenty of guys who would bed down with her without expecting to be paid for their labors.

  Of course, we hadn’t talked about payment yet. We hadn’t even talked about bedding down.

  We were swimming. Anyway, we were in the water. Her bathing cap was trying to save her fine blonde hair from the horrors of the salt water, and the two of us were busy letting the waves knock us over. Then, of course, she wanted to learn how to swim, and I wanted to teach her.

  I held out my hands and she stretched across them, learning to float on her stomach. She managed to lie with her breasts on one of my arms and her thighs across the other. I could feel the sweet animal warmth of her even in the cold water.

  “Like this?”

  I told her she had it down pat.

  “Now what do I do?”

  “Move your arms.” She moved more than her arms. She moved them in an overhand crawl so that her breasts bounced around on my arm. She kicked gently with her long legs and her thighs worked on the other arm.

  I wondered who was getting a lesson.

  We clowned around some more. She told me her name was Mona and I told her my name was Lennie. She was a lot of fun, besides being a sex symbol. From time to time I even managed to forget that she was somebody else’s wife, a potential meal ticket. I thought we were just two nice people having fun on a beach.

  Then I would remember who she was and who I was and the pleasant illusion would fade and die.

  “Lennie—”

  We were on the sand again and I was drying her back with a big striped towel.

  “I have to get back to the room, Lennie. I think he’s waiting for me. It’s been a while.”

  I knew who he was.

  “When can I see you again, Mona?”

  “Tonight.”

  “Can you get away?”

  “Of course.”

  “Where and when?”

  She thought for all of three seconds. “Right here,” she said. “At midnight.”

  “Isn’t the beach closed at night?”

  She smiled at me. “You’re a clever man,” she said. “I’m sure you can find a way to get out here all by yourself. Don’t you think so?”

  I thought so.

  “Midnight,” she said. “I hope there’s a moon tonight. I like it when there’s a moon.”

  She turned and left. I watched her go—she had a good walk, just a step on the right side of whorishness, as much provocation as a woman could get away with without looking like a slut. I wondered how long it had taken her to learn to walk like that. Or if it was natural.

  The sun dried me. I walked back over hot sand to the passageway, through the passageway to the bathers’ entrance. I tossed my towel back to the attendant and smiled at him. I rode up in the elevator to the top floor and walked to my room. I had buttoned the room key into the pocket of my swim shorts. I brought it out, wet, and opened the door.

  I took another shower, this one to get rid of the salt water. It took longer than it should have, because the hotel had a cute set-up whereby you could take a salt water shower or a fresh water shower, depending upon how you felt about life in general. I goofed the first time around. It was a nice shower, but it left me as salty as ever. Then I figured out the system and rinsed with fresh water.

  By the time I was done it was time for dinner. The idea of wearing the same damn clothes I’d worn on the train didn’t particularly appeal, and I decided to have a look at L.K.B.’s donation. With luck, his clothes might fit. With more luck, he might have packed some cash in his suitcase. Some people do, believe it or not.

  The bags were locked. But suitcase locks, like trunk locks, are all the same. I found a key that fit the little bag and opened it.

  Whoever the hell he was, he was the wrong size. His pants were too short and too big in the waist and the behind. His underwear fell off me. But his feet, God bless him, were the right size. There were two pairs of expensive shoes in the little bag and they both fit me. There were also ten pairs of socks which I didn’t bother to try on. If the
shoes fit, the socks would fit. Unless the guy had very unusual feet.

  That took care of the little bag. I put his junk in my drawers and stuck the bag back in the closet. I got the big bag and propped it up on my bed, then opened it with the key.

  I hung up the jackets in the closet without looking at them. I was pretty sure they wouldn’t fit anyway, and I didn’t want to chance running into the bum with his jackets on. Shoes and socks he wouldn’t notice, whoever he was. A suit he might.

  I got lucky again with his shirts. We were built differently, he and I, but his arms were the same length as mine and his neck the same circumference. His shirts fit me, and he had a lot of shirts. I put them in the drawers.

  There was the usual junk—tie pins, cuff links, shirt studs, miscellaneous junk. I went through everything and put everything away. His clothes were from New York and I wondered if he was, too, or if he simply went shopping there.

  Then I came to the box.

  I thought of money, first of all. It was a small wooden box made of teak or mahogany and it was about the same size and shape as a dollar bill. I took a deep breath and prayed that it held a stack of hundreds. Maybe the bastard was a doctor and he wasn’t depositing his receipts, working some kind of a tax dodge. Maybe a hundred different things.

  The box gave me trouble. It was locked and none of my keys fit it. I gave up fooling around after awhile and set it on the dresser. It was hinged at the back. I had a little file that went right through those hinges.

  I started to open the box. Then I stopped, found a cigarette, and lit it. I was playing a little game with myself. The box was a present, and I had to try to guess what the present was. Money? Pipe tobacco? Fertilizer? It could be anything.

  I took off the lid. There was a piece of tissue paper on top and I removed that right away.

  There was nothing under the paper but white powder. I was completely destroyed. There is nothing quite so compelling as a sealed box. I had the contents turned into a mental fortune, and now old L.K.B.’s box turned out to be a bust. Powder!

  Maybe there was something underneath the powder. I got ready to blow it away, and then all of a sudden some little bell rang deep inside my head and I changed my mind.

  I stared at the powder.

  It stared back.

  I managed to finish my cigarette and butt it in an ashtray thoughtfully provided by the management of the Hotel Shelburne. Then I turned back to the box. I put one finger to my lips and licked it, then dipped it gingerly into the powdery substance.

  I licked the finger.

  It was absolutely astonishing. I blinked rapidly, several times, and then licked my finger again, dipping it once more into the box.

  I licked it another time. There was no mistaking the taste, not now, not after many years. When you work in a racket, even briefly, you learn what you can about the racket. You learn the product, first of all. No matter how small your connection with the racket or how little time you spend with it, this much you learn. I had played the game for two months, if that, in a very small capacity, but I knew what I had on my dresser.

  I had approximately sixty cubic inches of raw heroin.

  2

  For a few minutes I just stood there and felt foolish. I’d picked up more than a wardrobe at the railway station. I’d picked up a fortune. How much was the heroin worth? I couldn’t even begin to guess. A hundred grand, a quarter of a million, maybe more, maybe less. I had no idea and I didn’t even want to think about it.

  I couldn’t keep it and I couldn’t sell it and I couldn’t give it back. If L.K.B. ever found me with it he would kill me as sure as men make little green virgins. If the government ever found me with it they would lock me up and drop the key in the middle of the China Sea.

  I could throw it away. Did you ever try throwing away a hundred grand, or a quarter of a million?

  I put the lid back on the box and tried to figure out what to do with it. I couldn’t hide it. People who carry around large quantities of heroin are not amateurs. If they search a room, they find what they are looking for. And if L.K.B. and his buddy boys realized I was their pigeon, no hiding place in the room would keep the heroin away from them. And I had to hold onto the stuff. It could be my trump card, the only thing that would keep me alive if they ever caught on. I could use it to work a deal.

  I needed a hiding place for the time being, though. I rejected the standard ones, the cute places where a real pro always looked first. The toilet tank, the bed, the outer windowsill. I stuck it on the floor under the dresser and tried to forget about it.

  I got dressed in a hurry and left the hotel. The store I was looking for was two long blocks off the Boardwalk on Atlantic Avenue near Tennessee. I went in and bought a good attaché case for twenty dollars and change. It was a nice case—I didn’t know you could get them that good so far from Madison Avenue.

  I lugged the case back to the hotel, bought a pair of Philly papers at the newsstand in the lobby, then went back to my room. The little box with the hinges filed through was right where I’d left it under the dresser. I took it out, wrapped it up tight in paper so it wouldn’t come open, and put it in the attaché case. Then I crumpled up paper and packed it in tight so that nothing would rattle around. I used all of the paper, closed the case and locked it up. I made a mental note to get rid of the key. When the time came, I could always break the thing open. But I didn’t want to have the key on my person.

  I hefted the case a few times experimentally. It was neither too heavy nor too light. It could have been almost anything.

  Then I took it back down to the lobby and hauled it over to the front desk. The room clerk waited obligingly while I picked up my case and put it on the desk between us.

  “Wonder if you’d do me a favor,” I said. “I’ve got a commercial presentation here that I’m in the middle of. Not valuable to anybody but me, but there’s always the chance that somebody might walk off with it not knowing what was in the case. The company would raise hell if that happened. Could you stick it in the safe for me?”

  He could and did. He started to write out a claim check for me but I shook my head.

  “I’d only lose it,” I told him. “I’m not worried about it. I’ll pick it up before I go.”

  I gave him a dollar and left him with a safeful of heroin.

  I had time to kill and thinking to do. I left the hotel again and took a walk on the Boardwalk. If anything, it was worse than when I’d been in town three years back. There were more hotdog and fruit juice stands, more penny arcades, more bingo games and carney booths and flashy souvenir shops. Sex was also present. The professionals stuck to the bars on the side street, but the amateur competition cluttered every board on the Boardwalk. Young girls walking in twos and threes and fours; blondes who got their hair from bottles; fifteen and sixteen and seventeen-year-olds with their blouses too sheer and their blue jeans too tight, their makeup too thick and their strut too obvious. Victory girls who didn’t know the war had been over for fifteen years.

  The boys were there because the girls were there. They played a game as old as the world, the boys trying to score, the girls trying to be scored upon without looking cheap about it, as though there was a way in the world for them to look otherwise. The boys were clumsy and the girls were clumsier, but somehow they would manage to get together, manage to find a place to neck and pet and make sloppy love. The girls would get pregnant and the boys would get gonorrhea.

  One hotel had a terrace facing on the Boardwalk with umbrella-topped tables and tall drinks. I found an empty table and sat under the shade of the umbrella until a waiter found me, took my order, left me and returned with a tall cool vodka collins. It came with a colored straw and I sipped it like a kid sipping a malted. I lit a cigarette and settled back in my chair. I tried to put everything together and make it add up right.

  If I had a tighter connection with a branch of the narcotics trade it would have been easier. A while back I’d done a few jobs for a man
named Marcus. It was strictly messenger-boy stuff—pick up this, take it there, give it to so-and-so. I hadn’t seen Marcus in years and I didn’t know where he was. He probably wouldn’t even remember me.

  That made selling the stuff impossible.

  My other connection was L.K.B. I didn’t know who he was, but I had an idea that it wouldn’t be too hard to find out. He had arrived just that day, and he had probably checked into a hotel already. All I had to do was run down the list of recent arrivals at the six best hotels in town. Somebody would have those initials, and he would be my boy. I could get in touch with him from a distance, try to work a deal with him and sell his own stuff back to him. It might work. It also might get me killed. The best I could hope for was a few thousand, a slim fraction of the value of the stuff. And I would spend the rest of my life waiting for a knife in the back.

  I didn’t like that.

  I sipped more of the drink. A man walked by with a girl on his arm. Two old ladies rolled by in a rolling chair pushed by a bored attendant. Victory girls passed, looked at me, decided I was too old, and hurried on with their tails twitching.

  I decided to sit tight. For the time being I was in the clear. The way things stood, the worst that could happen was that I skipped the hotel and left them with a box of heroin. If everything broke right, I could get out with a box in tow, hold it for a few years until everybody forgot about it, then find a way to sell it off a little at a time without raising anybody’s eyebrows.

  In the meantime there was Mona. I thought about her and remembered that she would be on the beach at midnight, waiting for me. I almost forgot the heroin, just thinking about her.

  I dropped a buck for the drink and some change for the waiter on the table, and I left. Two blocks further along the Boardwalk I found a good restaurant where they served me a blood-rare steak and very black coffee. I lingered awhile over a second cup of coffee, then went out and found a movie.

  The movie was lousy, a historical epic called A Sound of Distant Drums, a technicolor cinemascope package with pretty girls and flashing swords and people getting themselves killed flamboyantly. I dozed through most of it. It was a little after ten when I finally got out and headed for the hotel.