“Not anymore,” Flower said. “We know exactly what we’re going to do with them. Don’t we, Willie?”
“Absolutely,” Stone said, suddenly beaming with pleasure. “We’re going to build a wall.”
“A monument, to be more precise,” Flower said. “A monument in the shape of a wall.”
“How fascinating,” Pozzi said, his voice oozing with unctuous contempt. “I can’t wait to see it.”
“Yes,” Flower said, failing to catch the kid’s mocking tone, “it’s an ingenious solution, if I do say so myself. Rather than try to reconstruct the castle, we’re going to turn it into a work of art. To my mind, there’s nothing more mysterious or beautiful than a wall. I can already see it: standing out there in the meadow, rising up like some enormous barrier against time. It will be a memorial to itself, gentlemen, a symphony of resurrected stones, and every day it will sing a dirge for the past we carry within us.”
“A Wailing Wall,” Nashe said.
“Yes,” Flower said, “a Wailing Wall. A Wall of Ten Thousand Stones.”
“Who’s going to put it together for you, Bill?” Pozzi asked. “If you need a good contractor, I might be able to help you out. Or are you and Willie planning to do it yourselves?”
“I think we’re a bit too old for that now,” Flower said. “Our handyman will hire the workers and oversee the day-to-day operations. I think you’ve already met him. His name is Calvin Murks. He’s the man who let you through the gate.”
“And when do things get started?” Pozzi asked.
“Tomorrow,” Flower said. “We have a little job of poker to take care of first. Once that’s out of the way, the wall is our next project. To tell you the truth, we’ve been too busy preparing for tonight to give it much attention. But tonight is nearly upon us now, and then it’s on to the next thing.”
“From cards to castles,” Stone said.
“Precisely,” Flower answered. “And from talk to food. Believe it or not, my friends, I think it’s time for dinner.”
Nashe no longer knew what to think. At first he had taken Flower and Stone for a pair of amiable eccentrics—a trifle daft, perhaps, but essentially harmless—but the more he saw of them and listened to what they said, the more uncertain his feelings had become. Sweet little Stone, for example, whose manner was so humble and benign, turned out to spend his days constructing a model of some bizarre, totalitarian world. Of course it was charming, of course it was deft and brilliant and admirable, but there was a kind of warped, voodoo logic to the thing, as if under all the cuteness and intricacy one was supposed to feel a hint of violence, an atmosphere of cruelty and revenge. With Flower, too, everything was ambiguous, difficult to pin down. One moment, he seemed perfectly sensible; the next moment, he sounded like a lunatic, rambling on like an out-and-out madman. There was no question that he was gracious, but even his joviality seemed forced, suggesting that if he did not bombard them with all that pedantic, overly articulate talk, the mask of fellowship might somehow slip from his face. To show what? Nashe had not formed any definite opinion, but he knew that he was feeling more and more unsettled. If nothing else, he told himself, he would have to watch carefully, he would have to stay on his guard.
The dinner turned out to be a ridiculous affair, a low-level farce that seemed to nullify Nashe’s doubts and prove that Pozzi had been right all along: Flower and Stone were no more than grown-up children, a pair of half-wit clowns who did not deserve to be taken seriously. By the time they came downstairs from the east wing, the huge walnut table in the dining room had been set for four. Flower and Stone took their usual seats at the two ends, and Nashe and Pozzi sat across from each other in the middle. The initial surprise occurred when Nashe glanced down at his placemat. It was a plastic novelty item that appeared to date from the 1950s, and its vinyl surface was emblazoned with a full-color photograph of Hopalong Cassidy, the old cowboy star from the Saturday matinees. Nashe’s first thought was to interpret it as a piece of self-conscious kitsch, a little stab at humor on the part of his hosts, but then the food was brought in, and the meal turned out to be no more than a kiddie banquet, a dinner fit for six-year-olds: hamburger patties on white, untoasted buns, bottles of Coke with plastic straws sticking out of them, potato chips, corn on the cob, and a ketchup dispenser in the shape of a tomato. Except for the absence of paper hats and noisemakers, it reminded Nashe of the birthday parties he had attended as a small boy. He kept looking at Louise, the black maid who served the food, searching her expression for something that would give away the joke, but she never cracked a smile, going about her business with all the solemnity of a waitress in a four-star restaurant. To make matters worse, Flower ate with his paper napkin tucked under his chin (presumably to avoid splattering his white suit), and when he saw that Stone had eaten only half his hamburger, he actually leaned forward with a gluttonous light in his eye and asked his friend if he could finish it for him. Stone was only too happy to comply, but rather than pass his entire plate, he simply picked up the half-eaten hamburger, handed it to Pozzi, and asked him to give it to Flower. From the look on Pozzi’s face at that moment, Nashe thought he was about to throw it at the fat man, yelling something like Catch! or Think fast! as the food sailed through the air. For dessert, Louise brought out four dishes of raspberry Jell-O, each one topped with a little mound of whipped cream and a maraschino cherry.
The strangest thing about the dinner was that no one said anything about it. Flower and Stone acted as though it were perfectly normal for adults to eat this way, and neither one of them offered any apologies or explanations. At one point, Flower mentioned that they always had hamburgers on Monday night, but that was the extent of it. Otherwise, the conversation flowed along as it had before (which is to say, Flower discoursed at length and the others listened to him), and by the time they were crunching on the last of the potato chips, the talk had come around to poker. Flower enumerated all the reasons why the game was so attractive to him—the sense of risk, the mental combat, the absolute purity of it—and for once Pozzi seemed to be paying more than halfhearted attention to him. Nashe himself said nothing, knowing that he had little to add to the subject. Then the meal was over, and the four of them were finally standing up from the table. Flower asked if anyone would care for a drink, and when both Nashe and Pozzi declined, Stone rubbed his hands together and said, “Then maybe we should go into the other room and break out the cards.” And just like that, the game began.
5
They played in the same room where the tea had been served. A large folding table had been set up in an open area between the sofa and the windows, and when he saw that blank wooden surface and the empty chairs poised around it, Nashe suddenly understood how much was at stake for him. This was the first time he had seriously confronted what he was doing, and the force of that awareness came very abruptly—with a surging of his pulse and a frantic pounding in his head. He was about to gamble his life on that table, he realized, and the insanity of that risk filled him with a kind of awe.
Flower and Stone went about their preparations with a dogged, almost grim sense of purpose, and as Nashe watched them count out the chips and examine the sealed packages of cards, he understood that nothing was going to be simple, that Pozzi’s triumph was by no means certain. The kid had stepped outside to fetch his cigarettes from the car, and when he entered the room he was already smoking, puffing away at his Marlboro with short, nervous drags. The festive atmosphere of just a short while ago seemed to vanish in that smoke, and the whole room was suddenly tense with anticipation. Nashe wished that he were going to be playing a more active role in what happened, but that was the bargain he had struck with Pozzi: once the first card was dealt, he would be shunted off to the sidelines, and from then on there would be nothing for him to do but watch and wait.
Flower walked to the far end of the room, opened a safe in the wall beside the billiard table, and asked Nashe and Pozzi to come over and look inside it. “As you can see for
yourselves,” he said, “it’s perfectly empty. I thought we could use it as our bank. Cash for chips, and the cash goes here. Once we’ve finished playing, we’ll open the safe again and distribute the money according to what happens. Does either of you object to that?” Neither one of them did, and Flower continued. “In the interests of fairness,” he said, “it seems to me that we should all go in for the same amount. The verdict will be more decisive that way, and since Willie and I aren’t just playing for money, we’ll be happy to go along with any amount you choose. What do you say, Mr. Nashe? How much were you planning to spend on backing your brother?”
“Ten thousand dollars,” Nashe said. “If it’s no problem for you, I think I’d like to turn the whole amount into chips before we start.”
“Excellent,” Flower said. “Ten thousand dollars, a good round sum.”
Nashe hesitated for a moment, and then he said: “A dollar for every stone in your wall.”
“Indeed,” Flower answered, with a touch of condescension in his voice. “And if Jack does his job, maybe you’ll have enough to build a castle when you’re finished.”
“A castle in Spain, perhaps,” Stone suddenly chimed in. Then, grinning at his own witticism, he unexpectedly lowered himself to the floor, reached under the billiard table, and pulled out a small satchel. Still crouching on the rug, he opened the bag and started removing thousand-dollar bundles of cash, smacking each one onto the felt surface above him. When he had counted out twenty of these bundles, he zipped up the bag, shoved it back under the table, and climbed to his feet. “Here you are,” he said to Flower. “Ten thousand for you and ten thousand for me.”
Flower asked Nashe and Pozzi if they would like to count the money themselves, and Nashe was surprised when the kid said yes. As Pozzi meticulously thumbed through each bundle, Nashe slipped ten one-thousand-dollar bills out of his wallet and laid them gently on the billiard table. He had gone to a bank early that morning in New York and converted his hoard of hundreds into these monstrous notes. It was not for the convenience so much as to spare himself embarrassment when the time came to purchase the chips—realizing that he did not want to be placed in the position of having to dump wads of rumpled cash onto a stranger’s floor. There was something clean and abstract about doing it this way, he found, a sense of mathematical wonder in seeing his world reduced to ten small pieces of paper. He still had a bit left over, of course, but twenty-three hundred dollars didn’t amount to much. He had kept this reserve in more modest denominations, stuffing the money into two envelopes and then placing each envelope in an inside breast pocket of his sport jacket. For the time being, that was all he had: twenty-three hundred dollars and a pile of plastic poker chips. If the chips were lost, he wouldn’t be able to get very far. Three or four weeks, maybe, and then he’d barely have a pot to piss in.
After a short discussion, Flower, Stone, and Pozzi settled on the ground rules of the game. They would play seven-card stud from start to finish, with no wild cards or jokers—straight hardball all the way, as Pozzi put it. If Pozzi pulled ahead early, the other two would be allowed to replenish their stakes to a maximum of thirty thousand dollars. There would be a five-hundred-dollar limit on bets, and the game would keep going until one player was wiped out. If all three of them managed to stay in, they would call a stop to it after twenty-four hours, no questions asked. Then, like diplomats who had just concluded a peace treaty, they shook hands and walked over to the billiard table to collect their chips.
Nashe took a seat behind Pozzi’s right shoulder. Neither Flower nor Stone mentioned it, but he knew that it would be bad form to wander around the room while they were playing. He was an interested party, after all, and he had to avoid doing anything that might look suspicious. If he happened to be in a place where he could glimpse their hands, they might think that he and Pozzi were cheats, communicating through a code of private signals: coughs, for example, or eye blinks, or scratches of the head. The possibilities for deception were infinite. They all knew that, and therefore no one bothered to say a word.
The first few hands were undramatic. The three of them played cautiously, circling like boxers in the early rounds of a fight, testing each other with jabs and head-feints, gradually settling into the feel of the ring. Flower lit up a fresh cigar, Stone chewed on a stick of Doublemint gum, and Pozzi kept a cigarette burning between the fingers of his left hand. Each was pensive and withdrawn, and Nashe began to be a little surprised by the lack of talk. He had always associated poker with a kind of freewheeling roughhouse chatter, an exchange of foul-mouthed jokes and friendly insults, but these three were all business, and it wasn’t long before Nashe felt an atmosphere of genuine antagonism insinuate itself into the room. The sounds of the game took over for him, as if everything else had been erased: the clinking of the chips, the noise of the stiff cards being shuffled before each hand, the dry announcements of bets and raises, the plunges into total silence. Eventually, Nashe started taking cigarettes from Pozzi’s pack on the table—lighting up unconsciously, not realizing that he was smoking for the first time in over five years.
He was hoping for an early blowout, a massacre, but in the first two hours Pozzi merely held his own, winning about a third of the pots and making little if any headway. The cards weren’t coming to him, and any number of times he was forced to fold after betting on the initial three or four cards of a hand, occasionally using his bad luck to bluff out a victory, but clearly not wanting to push that tactic too far. Fortunately, the bets were rather low in the beginning, with no one daring to go in for more than one fifty or two hundred on any given round, and that helped to keep the damage to a minimum. Nor did Pozzi show any signs of panic. Nashe was reassured by that, and as time went on, he sensed that the kid’s patience was going to pull them through. Still, it meant giving up on his dream of rapid annihilation, and that was something of a disappointment. It was going to be an intense, grueling affair, he realized, which proved that Flower and Stone were no longer the same players they had been when Pozzi saw them in Atlantic City. Perhaps the lessons with Sid Zeno were responsible for the change. Or perhaps they had always been good and had used that other game to lure Pozzi into this one. Of the two possibilities, Nashe found the second far more disturbing than the first.
Then things took a turn for the better. Just before eleven o’clock, the kid hauled in a three-thousand-dollar pot with aces and queens, and for the next hour he went on a tear, winning three out of every four hands, playing with such assurance and cunning that Nashe could see the other two begin to sag, as if their wills were buckling, visibly giving way to the attack. Flower bought another ten thousand dollars’ worth of chips at midnight, and fifteen minutes later Stone sprang for another five. The room was filled with smoke by then, and when Flower finally inched open one of the windows, Nashe was startled by the din of crickets singing in the grass outside. Pozzi was sitting on twenty-seven thousand dollars at that point, and for the first time all evening, Nashe allowed his mind to wander away from the game, feeling that his concentration was somehow no longer required. Everything was under control now, and there could be no harm in drifting off a little, in indulging himself with an occasional reverie about the future. Incongruous as it seemed to him later, he even started to think about settling down somewhere, of moving out to Minnesota and buying a house with the money he was going to win. Costs were low in that part of the country, and he didn’t see why there wouldn’t be enough for a down payment. After that, he’d talk to Donna about having Juliette live with him again, and then maybe he’d pull some strings in Boston to work out a job with the local fire department. The fire engines in Northfield were pale green, he remembered, and it amused him to think about that, wondering how many other things would be different in the Midwest and how many would be the same.
They opened a new deck of cards at one o’clock, and Nashe took advantage of the interruption to excuse himself to go to the bathroom. He fully intended to come right back, but once he
flushed the toilet and stepped back into the darkened hallway, he could not help noticing how pleasurable it felt to be stretching his legs. He was tired from sitting in a cramped position for so many hours, and since he was already on his feet, he decided to take a little stroll through the house to get a second wind. In spite of his exhaustion, he was filled with happiness and excitement, and he did not feel ready to return yet. For the next three or four minutes, he groped his way through the unlit rooms that Flower had shown them before dinner, bumping blindly into doorframes and pieces of furniture until he found himself in the front hall. A lamp was on at the top of the stairs, and as he lifted his eyes to look at it, he suddenly remembered Stone’s workshop in the east wing. Nashe hesitated to go up there without permission, but the urge to see the model again was too strong to resist. Brushing aside his qualms, he grabbed hold of the bannister and started up the stairs two at a time.
He spent close to an hour looking at the City of the World, examining it in a way that had not been possible before—without the distraction of pretending to be polite, without Flower’s commentaries buzzing in his ears. This time he was able to sink himself into the details, moving slowly from one area of the model to another, studying the minute architectural flourishes, the pains-taking application of colors, the vivid, sometimes startling expressions on the faces of the tiny, one-inch figures. He saw things that had entirely escaped him during the first visit, and many of these discoveries turned out to be marked by wicked flashes of humor: a dog pissing against a fireplug in front of the Hall of Justice; a group of twenty men and women marching down the street, all of them wearing glasses; a masked robber slipping on a banana peel in a back alley. But these funny bits only made the other elements seem more ominous, and after a while Nashe found himself concentrating almost exclusively on the prison. In one corner of the exercise yard, the inmates were talking in small groups, playing basketball, reading books; but then, with a kind of horror, he saw a blindfolded prisoner standing against the wall just behind them, about to be executed by a firing squad. What did this mean? What crime had this man committed, and why was he being punished in this terrible way? For all the warmth and sentimentality depicted in the model, the overriding mood was one of terror, of dark dreams sauntering down the avenues in broad daylight. A threat of punishment seemed to hang in the air—as if this were a city at war with itself, struggling to mend its ways before the prophets came to announce the arrival of a murderous, avenging God.