Stone Junction

  ‘Be serious,’ Daniel pleaded. ‘If we get busted, is that what we tell the cops – it’s okay, officer, we’re just practicing.’

  ‘We don’t tell the cops shit, ever. And we don’t steal unless it’s necessary. And we harken to Salinius’s observation that “the great enemies of honor are greed and convenience.”’

  Daniel returned the drugs and money to the safe. ‘So what is this?’ he sneered. ‘Art for art’s sake?’

  ‘You flatter yourself. It’s merely practice. After much practice, it might become art.’

  Daniel fired at him, ‘Hey! I’ve been living on a hundred dollars a month for almost a year!’

  ‘That’s plenty,’ Willie said. ‘Besides, you’ve been living on five hundred a month – a hundred for room and board, four hundred for Oriana.’

  ‘I get it,’ Daniel said wearily, ‘I suppose it’s charged to my account. You guys are merciless.’

  ‘Not really. We’re just playfully fair.’

  ‘Playful?’ Daniel repeated. ‘That’s twisted thinking.’ Daniel started to swing the safe door shut.

  ‘No,’ Willie stopped him. ‘Wait. Not only do we not take anything, we always leave then something for their trouble.’ He handed Daniel a small, elegantly printed card. On it was a quotation from Rilke:

  … there is no place

  that does not see you.

  You must change your life.

  Smiling to himself, Daniel dropped the card on the baggie of cocaine, closed the safe, and gave the knob a carefree twirl.

  For Daniel, the most illuminating aspect of cracking safes was the things people chose to keep secret. Money and drugs were the most common items, with jewels, documents, and guns close behind, but after those the list got strange:

  A quart jar of glass eyes

  A flattened typewriter

  A pair of black panties tied around a pair of roller skates (Oriana had howled when Daniel told her)

  A tree-sloth fetus floating in a jar of formaldehyde

  A small twenty-four-carat gold yo-yo with a string of finely braided silver that Daniel had wanted so bad he could taste it

  An old coffeepot

  A piece of chalk

  A petrified loaf of French bread

  And Daniel’s favorite, a neatly printed note in an otherwise empty safe: ‘Eat shit, George. I’ve taken it all and I’m on my way to Paris with the pool boy.’ (This was Oriana’s favorite, too.)

  Transcription (Partial): Telephone Call Between

  Volta and Willie Clinton

  VOLTA: A certain large library in our nation’s capital has come into possession of some old documents that rightfully belong to us.

  WILLIE: I’m on my way.

  VOLTA: What about Daniel?

  WILLIE: You know I always work alone on jobs like this. To cite a popular Southern California proverb, ‘Just because everything’s different doesn’t mean anything has changed.’

  VOLTA: Fine. I just thought it might make an interesting final exam.

  WILLIE: He doesn’t need a final exam. He’s proficient, but that’s all he’ll ever be as a safecracker. Granted, he has some feel for it, but not wholeheartedly. My sense – and I may be wrong – is that Daniel doesn’t want in, he wants out. And it was Schiller, I believe, who said, ‘Blesséd are those whose necessities find their art.’ In my opinion, safecracking isn’t Daniel’s art. It hasn’t helped that his attention has been confounded by a lovely young woman.

  VOLTA: I’ve never been a foe of sweet confoundings. After all, who’s to say what the lesson is unless you learn it.

  WILLIE: You’re shameless! You stole that from Sophocles!

  VOLTA: William, as T. S. Eliot said, ‘A good poet borrows; a great poet steals.’

  WILLIE: I don’t have time to listen to you mangle quotes all day. When do I leave?

  VOLTA: Twenty hours. Bruce on Castro is making the arrangements. What about Daniel? Any suggestions?

  WILLIE: Give him some money and some time off. A hundred a month really is a bit grim. Otherwise, I fear San Francisco will be hit with a spate of B&E’s.

  VOLTA: Well, as they say: ‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him do the backstroke or suck blood from a turnip.’

  When Daniel arrived at Willie’s Friday evening he found the door locked and a note pinned to the sill: ‘Daniel – Come on in.’ His brain still floating from the previous night’s session with Oriana, Daniel took a moment to comprehend the note.

  He picked the lock and went in.

  There was a safe on the worktable, a small Sentry combination. It was a snap. Inside was a stack of cards with the Rilke quotation, a handmade set of vanadium picks, and another note from Willie:

  I’m sorry I can’t give you my personal farewell and good wishes, but some urgent business has usurped my attention. Please accept the picks as a graduation present. It’s been a privilege to work with you. I could go on, but, as Auden has chided, ‘Sentimentality is the failure of emotion.’

  Volta asked that you call him asap through the Six Rivers exchange.

  May the doors open on what you need,

  Willie

  As Daniel finished the note his first thought was now I can fuck Oriana. But the first thing he did was call Volta as requested. Volta, who seemed preoccupied, told Daniel a five-thousand-dollar cashier’s check was waiting for him at the Hibernia Bank, and that in two weeks he should meet Robert Sloane in Room 377 of the Bathsheba Hotel in Tucson.

  Daniel cashed the check in the morning and took a cab back to Treat Street, instructing the cabbie to wait. He took only a few minutes to pack his gear. As he passed through the kitchen on his way out, he stopped to count out a thousand dollars in twenties, leaving them on the table. He directed the cab to the Clift Hotel, tipped the driver a hundred-dollar bill, tipped the doorman twenty for dealing with his luggage, and rented a suite for ten days, paying the full $1500 in advance. The suite was elegantly comfortable. He sat at the cherry-wood desk and dialed Oriana’s number. A computer-generated voice informed him the number had been disconnected.

  He spent the next three torturous days wondering if she’d gone with Willie and why she hadn’t said good-bye. He tried her number over and over and the same hideous voice gave him the same bad news. He wondered if maybe she’d been hassled by the cops or a john. He thought about asking Volta to find out what was going on. He thought about Oriana’s long body, the curve of her flanks, the warmth of her inner thighs. He hurt.

  When he stirred from a fitful sleep early the fourth day, he saw the red message light glowing on the phone. The desk informed him a letter had been left for him. In a few minutes, the concierge himself delivered it.

  The note from Oriana was brief:

  Now you’ll always have a future.

  Daniel started laughing, and right in the middle of laughing he burst into tears. He couldn’t stop until he burned the note.

  Six days later, on the night before his flight left for Tucson, Daniel relieved the Marina Safeway’s vault of ten thousand dollars and left it on the kitchen table at the Treat Street house before returning for his last night at the Clift. He believed it had been Willie the Click, quoting Schiller perhaps, who’d noted, ‘If luxury doesn’t inspire generosity, the luxury is undeserved.’

  Bad Bobby Sloane – tall, lean, greying at the temples, always neatly and conservatively dressed – looked more like a savings-and-loan vice-president than a gambling fool. If you’d been around him in his early twenties when he’d succumbed to the only burst of flamboyance in his life, he might have handed you one of his business cards – and there it was, right under his engraved name:

  ROBERT SLOANE

  Poker Player & General Gambling Fool

  I will play

  Any man from any land

  Any amount he can count

  At any game he can name

  Any place, face-to-face.

  Bad Bobby had started playing poker for keepsies when he was nine ye
ars old, just after the Second World War. He’d played his first game around a migrant campfire in a Georgia peach orchard. He’d bought into the game with his father’s new boots, for which one of the men gave him fifty cents. His father had died a week earlier, beaten to death in a barroom brawl. Before sunrise, Bobby had turned five dimes into sixty-seven dollars.

  Almost four decades later, Bad Bobby Sloane was generally regarded as probably the best all-around cardplayer in the United States, especially in Texas Hold-’Em and, since Johnny ‘He-Horse’ Coombs had recently cashed out, perhaps the best at Five-Card Stud.

  Daniel’s knock at Room 377 was answered by a hotel steward. Behind him, through the drifting smoke, Daniel saw a card game in progress. He told the steward he was looking for Mr Sloane, and after a few minutes’ wait, Bad Bobby stepped into the hall. He had flat blue eyes and large, bony hands. He was wearing a well-cut houndstooth jacket, brown slacks, a lighter brown shirt, and a black tie with a gold stickpin fashioned in the face of the Joker.

  ‘Glad to meet ya, Daniel,’ Bobby said in his sleepy Georgia baritone. He took a room key from his jacket and tossed it to Daniel. ‘Go on down to the room and get the clouds outa your head. I’ll be along when I get there. Whatever you need, call room service and put it on the tab.’

  Daniel nodded toward the door. ‘You playing in that game in there?’

  ‘Yup,’ Bobby sighed, ‘and I’m stuck and bleeding. That’s why it’s likely to be a spell.’

  Bad Bobby wasn’t there when Daniel went to bed, but he was there in the morning, talking on the phone, when Daniel woke up.

  ‘Denver by four! What happened? The Raider cornerbacks get caught stealing cars? The defensive line busted at customs? Sweet Jesus, I may be an old coondog but I still know what a bone is. Shit, give me twenty grand on the Raiders. What’s the overs? Well mark me down another five on the unders.’

  Daniel heard him hang up and then begin dialing again. ‘This is Robert Sloane in 377. Could you please send up some Eggs Benedict, two crisp-fried pork chops, and a quart of fresh-squeezed orange juice.’ He saw Daniel was awake and said into the phone, ‘Just a moment, please,’ and then to Daniel, ‘You eating breakfast?’

  ‘Your order sounded good to me.’

  Bobby doubled the order and hung up.

  Daniel said, ‘Is the card game over?’

  ‘Broke up about a half hour ago.’

  ‘Did you win?’

  ‘I lost twenty thousand.’

  Staggered as much by the amount as Bobby’s nonchalance, Daniel said, ‘That’s an awful lot of money, twenty thousand.’

  ‘Not if you say it fast,’ Bobby grinned. ‘Besides, you gotta remember you’re not playing for money, you’re playing for chips, and chips is just the way you keep track. The reason they make chips round is because they’re supposed to roll. And speaking of rolling, we best get our gear together. We’re leaving right after we watch the Raiders kick some Bronco ass.’

  ‘Where are we off to?’

  ‘El Paso. Promising Seven-Stud game.’

  ‘Am I going to play?’

  ‘Not for a bit. First you’ve got to learn the rules and manners, the different games and strategies, basic principles and moves. And since you’ll be playing my money till you’re good enough to win some on your own, I’ll be calling the shots. That’s the deal whenever I take someone on to teach. I call the shots until you can beat me heads-up in a gambling game, and then you’re free to do as you please. Any time you challenge me and lose, it costs you ten grand for my effort. That’s the game, Daniel, and it’s your choice. It’s also your first lesson, a bedrock gambling truth: If you don’t like the game, don’t sit down.’

  ‘Suppose I can’t beat you?’

  ‘Well, you’ll probably be so poor and frustrated and fucked up that I’ll cut you loose outa mercy, if you beg nice. That makes me out mean, but actually I’m about the easiest man in the world to get along with,’ cept for two things I can’t abide – sniveling and gloating. Don’t snivel when you lose or gloat when you win.’

  ‘Do you mind if I ask about your connection with AMO?’

  ‘No – though it’s not good card manners to press a man for information on his private life.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to offend you.’

  ‘You didn’t.’ Bobby ambled over to the TV and switched it on. ‘When I first moved up into the high-stakes games, I went bust occasionally – well, more often than not, to tell the truth – and Volta offered to back my action. Most backers naturally want a chunk of the cake, fifty-fifty being about standard, but Volta only wanted five percent a year – of the net – with me to do the accounting. Can’t hardly beat that with a stick. Plus, I agreed to take on students now and then if Volta thought they had promise. You’re only the third one. First two mighta made it, but they went crazy ’fore they got there.’

  Daniel started to ask where ‘there’ was, but Bad Bobby raised a finger and pointed toward the football game. ‘We’re gonna have months to talk on the road. Right now we got twenty-five grand that says there’s no way the Broncos can whup the Raiders by more than four points and that together they don’t score over forty-two. Let’s eat breakfast and watch our money.’

  The Raiders won outright in a defensive struggle, and later that afternoon Bad Bobby left town as he ususally did – ahead of where he came in.

  El Paso. Houston. Dallas. New Orleans. Nashville. Omaha. Cheyenne. Denver. Reno. San Francisco. Always the best hotels, the finest restaurants, and the fastest action in town. Daniel watched as Bad Bobby played. He loved Bobby’s style, a balance of discipline and impulse, imbued with an aesthetic that fell neatly between plantation manners and swamp-rat savvy. He heard hundreds of Bad Bobby stories from players and spectators alike.

  The most frequent story concerned Bobby’s youth. He was already making a good living playing cards from town to town by the time he was sixteen, but he was illiterate. So Bobby took a cut of his winnings and hired tutors to travel with him, paying them wages and expenses in exchange for teaching him reading and writing, and, later on, arithmetic, geography, and history. It took Bobby nine years to read and write at a college level. He attracted tutors who liked the thrill of an occasional wager, whether it might be on the turn of a card or how many road-killed armadillos they’d see between Lubbock and Galveston, and thus Bobby was able to complete his college education at a modest profit.

  Daniel learned that Bad Bobby’s nickname had been given him by Barbwire Bill Eaton when he’d beaten Barbwire’s set of aces with a low straight in a Texas Hold-’Em game, causing the usually unflappable Barbwire to bang his head on the table and babble, ‘Goddamn, lots of players beat me, but you beat me like an ugly stepchild. Gettin’ so when I see you come through the door, I say to myself, “Fasten yr asshole, Bill, cause here comes Bad-Beats Bobby.”’ The name was soon shortened to Bad Bobby.

  When the game was over and they were back on the road, alternating at the wheel of Bad Bobby’s perfectly restored ’49 Cadillac, Bobby shared his poker wisdom and general card sense with Daniel, explaining rules, odds, strategies, how to properly shuffle and deal cards, and the small niceties of etiquette, like playing quickly and in turn. Daniel learned, if only theoretically, how to play position and manage money, when to raise, call, or fold, how to quickly assess the strengths and weaknesses of other players, the best times to bluff, how to calculate pot odds, how to spot tells, and cheaters, and marks. They reviewed recent hands as Bobby explained why he’d played them that way and what he might have done in different circumstances. He constructed practice hands for Daniel, questioning him on his decisions. He illustrated the lessons with copious stories and lore picked up in forty years on the road and at the tables.

  ‘I tell ya, Daniel, there’s no sure thing. Why, I was in a big-stakes Five-Card Draw game in Waco – we were playing with the joker – and I saw a hand with five aces get beat for everything the guy had.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Daniel said,
‘nothing can beat five aces. What’d the other guy have in his hand?’

  ‘A Smith and Wesson. A thirty-eight, I believe.’

  * * *

  When they swung through Las Vegas two months later, Daniel was burning to play. He told Bad Bobby he was ready.

  ‘Told ya, Daniel, you play your own money any time you think you’re ready. You can play my money when I think you’re ready.’

  Daniel said, more challenge than question, ‘You don’t think I’m ready.’

  ‘Nope. I think you’d get sucked down like a little muskrat swimming in a pool of ’gators. Fact is, you’re still making too many mistakes on the problems I’ve been giving ya.’

  With passion, Daniel said, ‘That’s because I’m sick of theory. From watching you play it’s pretty clear that every hand is a unique situation, because you’re involved with people, real individual players, and one of them is on a hot streak, and one just had a fight with his wife, and one has just finished his sixth whiskey in two hours. I would play my own money if I had any left, and I can always get what I need if I have to––’

  ‘No you can’t,’ Bobby cut him off cold. ‘No thieving, not even an ashtray – that’s an iron rule with me. Offends the poker gods.’

  ‘I think I’m ready,’ Daniel said firmly.

  Bad Bobby scratched his nose. ‘All right,’ he said without conviction, ‘I’ll front you five grand. But the deal is, if you lose so much as a nickel, you don’t play again for a month and you don’t badger me about being ready.’

  ‘You’re on,’ Daniel grinned.

  ‘We’ll get us some dinner and head downtown to the Antlers. They’ve got a hundred-dollar-limit Five-Stud game that’s about your speed.’ Bad Bobby gave him a laconic smile. ‘It’s a real character builder.’

  Daniel bought in for a thousand dollars and built some character immediately, his three sevens crunched by three jacks – set over set, one of the toughest beats in the game. He called for another thousand.