Bluff Page 18

  The sun had already gone down, but the streets were lighter than usual because of the snow, which fell softly, no need for windshield wipers, and made even the ugly storefronts look like a painting. On the parkway, closer to the shore, the snow became a heavier sleet. As Ellen drove we both tried to stay calm, stay cool. We talked a bit, running through the plan we already knew so well. I listened to the rhythmic whip-whip of the windshield wipers. And then, so fast, we were exiting the parkway and getting closer to those rising, winding Highlands roads.

  Ellen slowed the car and went just past Victor Flowers’s driveway, where several other cars were already parked, stopping at the curb in front of his home, which, as it had all those years earlier, stood curtained behind a row of high hedges. She left the engine on, and together we sat in the dark, listening to the car’s low idle and the irregular drumming of sleet against the windshield.

  The dashboard clock said 8:22.

  “Are we really going to wait another three minutes?” I asked, just as the clock changed to 8:23.

  “Two more,” she said.

  I wanted to be calm and confident, but already I felt fear’s insidious creep. It was the preshow jitters I hadn’t felt in years, only magnified. Ellen placed her hand on my arm and said, “I’m gonna stack the cards, Victor’s gonna cut the deck, and you’re gonna reverse the cut and deal the cards. That’s all there is to it. Easy peasy.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Not maybe. Definitely.”

  “Not definitely.”

  “Natalie, it’s gonna work. We planned it right, and we practiced it. We’re ready. Remember, cheating at cards is what I do.”

  “Not like this. Not for this kind of money.”

  “It’s just another performance,” she said, though I detected a slight hitch in her voice. “It’s going to be fine,” she said. “We’re going to win all the money.”

  I tried to visualize the money, what it would be like to have it. “When this is over,” I said, “I’m going to buy one expensive bottle of wine. We’ll drink it together.”

  She smiled. “I love the thought. But when this is over, you and I will part ways and never cross paths again.”

  Maybe this shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Still, I found myself resisting a twinge of betrayal.

  “In twenty years,” she said, “maybe we’ll trade brief, nostalgic emails. I like you. I really do. This has all been … I don’t know.” She paused, finding the right word. “Nice.” She shook her head. “You know what I mean. We can’t be seen together after this.”

  I knew she was right. She and I were, in the end, partners in a risky endeavor, and while our business was about to conclude, the risk would last. No, we could not be seen together after this.

  “The money’s too big for it to be any other way,” she said.

  “Sure,” I said. “I totally get it.”

  “Just focus on the cards and we’ve got this. Natalie?”

  I was no longer in the passenger seat of Ellen’s car. I was at my father’s graveside on a hot August afternoon. The casket was being lowered into a hole. Winning tonight wouldn’t get my father out of that hole. Everything could go exactly as planned, and my father would never know I’d gotten the better of Victor Flowers.

  Victor would never know, either. I would have to live with that.

  “Nat?”

  “What?”

  “Have faith in us.”

  She shut off the engine, and together we stepped out into the sleet. Sharing a single umbrella, we rounded the hedges and walked past several snow-ready vehicles parked in the driveway—two Mercedes SUVs, a Ford Bronco, a Jeep Wrangler—up to the path that led to Victor Flowers’s front door.

  The last time I had come here was a warm May afternoon with everybody in spring clothes, with music and sunshine. It took me a moment to square that image with the cold stone structure before me now, dim under the outdoor lights, the sleet striking the slate roof and the saturated, brown grass and the naked, skeletal trees. I shivered.

  “Are you ready?” Ellen asked softly.

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  She gave my arm a gentle squeeze. “You’re gonna do this, Natalie. You’re a pro. You’re the greatest card handler I ever saw. I’m lucky to be working with you.”

  I’ll admit to loving Ellen in that moment in the dreary dark. She was a cheat through and through, everything Jack Clarion detested, yet she had made me work harder than anyone else ever had, including Jack. Just a few weeks earlier, I’d believed I was one of the best, but now I knew I hadn’t been. I had needed Ellen. I had needed her fiercely honest assessment of who I was and what I was capable of becoming. Ellen was many things, but a flatterer wasn’t one of them, and a compliment from her—here, now—meant more to me than if it had come from Cardini himself.

  “Thanks, Emily,” I said.

  “You’re welcome, Nora.”

  We walked up the path to the front door. With the eaves keeping us dry, Ellen closed the umbrella, took a deep breath, let it out, and rang the bell.

  PART THREE

  A

  The man who opened the door must have been close to seventy. He looked not so different, though, from the person who’d been time-capsuled in my mind all these years—same razor-fine part of his now gray hair, same crystal blue eyes, same smile that said, Relax—I’ve got it from here. My memory failed to take note of his stature. Victor Flowers stood no more than five and a half feet tall. Towering over him, however, I didn’t feel like a tower. I didn’t feel powerful.

  I felt like Big Bird.

  But I had Ellen by my side, the arm of her coat grazing the arm of mine. She was stunning—unrecognizable as the frumpy and frenzied woman I’d met and quickly dismissed in Ethan Garret’s bakery.

  “I was starting to worry,” Victor said.

  Ellen’s smile under the porch light was nothing I’d seen from her before, a dazzling blend of mild flirtation and major confidence. “Well, if it isn’t the distinguished gentleman from New Jersey.” Her voice, too, was alien to me—melodic, a few pitches deeper, a speck of gravel. She stepped into the house and pecked Victor on the cheek. “I would have thought a man like you could at least order up a drier evening.”

  I followed her into the house, into the heat.

  Victor took Ellen’s umbrella and placed it into an umbrella stand by the door. “I would have felt terrible if anything had happened.” He turned to me. “I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure of meeting. I’m Victor.”

  I held out my hand. “I’m Nora Thompson,” I said. We had met only that one time, at his Memorial Day party nearly two decades earlier. Now I was a grown woman. I had cut and colored my hair and doused my face with foundation, blush, cover-up, mascara. Even I didn’t recognize me. Still, for a moment I felt certain he’d see through all that and know it was Dan Webb’s daughter returning after all these years to steal his money.

  “Emily speaks highly of you,” he said, taking our coats and hanging them in a closet. “She says you’re quite the player.”

  I thanked him, though I knew he was lying. When she had called up Victor to ask his permission for me to join their game this month, she hadn’t said quite the player. She’d said good, but not exceptional.

  “So you’re an event planner?” he asked.

  Ellen had also passed along the biography we’d made up: that I worked as an event planner, and that my family owned several hotels.

  “I am.”

  “Then I hope you won’t judge my hospitality too harshly—though at least the bar is fully stocked.”

  I could feel the tickle in my throat I got when I was nervous, but I made myself smile and say, “A fully stocked bar is pretty much the secret to event planning.”

  I was doing okay, even if my voice quavered a little. And why shouldn’t it? This was a high-dollar game. The men were probably banking on these nerves of mine to make me a worse player tonight: less aggressive, or maybe more aggressive. They believed
I was out of my element and my league.

  “The other apes are in the kitchen,” Victor said. “We’ll collect them on the way to the game room.”

  I could fit at least five of my kitchens into this one. I had observed over the years that people with all the cabinet space in the world preferred to display their pots and pans and cutlery and appliances in plain view. A restaurant’s worth of cookware sat on the counters and hung over Victor Flowers’s large kitchen island, everything immaculate, the stainless steel on the pans so shiny I could have used any of them to pluck my eyebrows.

  Three men stood by the island holding drinks. From our preparation, I knew each of them before being introduced. Danny Squire, car dealership mogul, with biceps big enough to stretch the sleeves of his black golf shirt; Ian McDonald, hedge fund manager, with the cowboy boots, razor stubble, and carefully messy hair; Jason Panella, thin and fit, surfer hair, closer to my age. I even knew Jason’s drink: vodka tonic with a slice of lemon floating on top. Irrelevant, but Ellen had noticed. She noticed everything.

  Victor introduced me to the men, and I endured handshakes that left my wrist sore. Ellen shook hands, touched arms, made references I didn’t understand. They all seemed glad to see her. In the last year she had become a fully embedded member of their poker game, another Midnight Rider galloping home by midnight. Every month they got together, and every month Ellen sat at the poker table and cheated them, these staggeringly wealthy, competitive men, these winners in life, these ignorant, naive puppies.

  Victor offered us drinks. Somewhere in this house, I felt sure, was the best Scotch I’d ever tasted. I longed for it to settle my nerves. Or a generous pour of wine. But I had agreed to nurse a single drink and no more. Ellen wasn’t a fool. She saw I drank too much. I felt so revved and jittery, though, that I decided not to trust myself with even the one drink. I would drain it too fast and ask for more.

  “Just a Coke, please,” I said, “if you have it.”

  Ellen shot me a look.

  “Keeping your wits about you,” Jason said, and winked. “Smart!” To the room he said, “We’ll have to keep an eye on the new one.”

  I smiled stupidly and clenched my teeth, furious at myself for going off script and vowing not to do it again.

  Victor opened his refrigerator and dug around, coming out with a can. “Let me get you a glass,” he said. I accepted the glass of soda over ice with hands that shook a little, and Victor led us all out of the kitchen and into a dining room whose walls displayed a number of large, vibrant paintings.

  “I still say that’s one ugly dog,” Ellen said, touching Victor’s arm. It was a marvel, her confidence, or her display of confidence.

  “To be honest,” Victor said, “the whole blue dog thing is starting to feel faddish to me.” He nodded to the painting beside it. “Now here’s one worth noting. You wouldn’t normally think of Babcock as representational, but this is a very early work.”

  The paintings were all saturated in color. Who cared? This was suddenly real. I had prepared, but preparation and performance were never the same. The ice cubes in my glass were rattling. I had to calm down fast. We left the other side of the dining room and were back in the center of the house, near the front door and main foyer. Seeing the wide stairway on our left that rose and turned, leading to an upstairs hallway, I forced myself to say, with as much cheer as I could muster, “Looks like the British are coming.”

  On the wall above the staircase hung a tall painting of a frantic man riding an equally frantic horse through a narrow, dusty street. One of Paul Revere’s hands clutched the reins; his other was keeping his hat from blowing off.

  “I’ve always liked that one,” Victor said, “even if it never happened that way.”

  “How do you mean?” I could do this. I could hold a conversation. And this was my job right now. To be interested in whatever Victor had to say. To make him enjoy talking to me, and then to make him want to sit beside me at the poker table.

  “Paul Revere’s mission depended on secrecy,” Victor explained. “So it made no sense to shout, ‘The British are coming’ or anything else. That’s just a legend. It’s interesting, actually.”

  It wasn’t interesting. I wiped my sweaty hands on my jeans and ran through the chain of events that needed to go perfectly: the seating arrangements, the game play and chip management. I needed to play tight and stay in the game long enough for Ellen’s signal. Then came the stacking of cards followed by the Greek deal that would give Ellen the winning hand.

  While everyone stood around with drinks listening to our host, I watched the men. They didn’t seem so different from the men I performed for at corporate gigs. Yet each was ponying up a quarter million dollars for a few hours of entertainment. Each was confident enough to believe he could walk away the winner, and rich enough not to be deterred by the risk. Their money made them different, but what accounted for their money? Brilliance? Luck? Jason had been born into the right family: the ultimate luck. According to Ellen, he was a poor poker player. All this made me feel better about taking his money.

  Ian and Danny didn’t deserve to get taken, maybe, though they wouldn’t miss their stakes. There was plenty more.

  Everyone was still courteously listening to Victor’s history lecture. “Take a guess how Paul Revere actually signaled the British advance?” he asked me. And to the other men, who’d clearly been through this lecture before, he added, “Don’t give it away.”

  Jason glanced at me and fake-whispered: “He texted everyone.”

  “I’ll give you a clue,” Victor said. “Revere was a silversmith and engraver. No?” He smiled. “He made bells out of silver. Little ones, for himself and his fellow patriots William Dawes and Joseph Warren. The three of them rode on their horses and rang the bells to let people know about the British.”

  I was shifting my weight from foot to foot and trying to keep the ice from clinking in my glass when I glanced up at Ellen, who was staring at me, eyes wide. Right. Feign interest.

  “Wow!” I said, a little too enthusiastically. Paul Revere’s bell, Moses’s staff, Santa Claus’s beard. Who the hell cared? “So where are the bells now?” I asked, and with a wistful sigh Victor explained that none had survived the Revolutionary War: melted down, crumbled apart, lost in the Charles River. Suddenly, he brightened. “I recently acquired a Confederate army war drum from Texas. Come—let me show you.”

  I was desperate for the game to start—I needed the feeling of cards in my hands—but I followed the group into a room that smacked me with the hard force of memory. There was the black grand piano, there the trumpet on the wall, there the saxophone. After nineteen years, the instruments had multiplied. And I noticed printed cards mounted beside the instruments, explaining their origins. The saxophone had belonged to Julian “Cannonball” Adderley and had been used in the studio for Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue album; the clarinet had belonged to Skip Martin, who’d played in the Glenn Miller Orchestra. Each instrument had a story to go with it.

  “This is what I want my own legacy to be, Nora,” he told me. “I want to play a small part in American history.” I realized that each person in the room must have been subjected—once, or quite likely many times—to Victor Flowers’s musical tour through history.

  “You want to be a part of history,” Danny said, “then you gotta run attack ads. I’m telling you, Vic—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Victor said.

  “Yeah, nothing. It works.”

  “We all know it works,” Victor said. “That isn’t the point. I’m running a positive campaign.”

  “Then I’m positive you’re gonna lose,” Danny said, and laughed.

  I was looking at the guitar on the wall. I remembered it from all those years ago, except that now I could decipher the sloppy signature on the instrument: Elvis Presley. The card said this was one of the guitars Elvis played during his final tour in 1977.

  The army drum sat on a wooden stand in a corner of the room. It was painte
d red with the initials C.S.A. in gold and surrounded by painted gold fronds.

  “What’s the story here?” I asked.

  Victor bent over the drum and tapped out a shave-and-a-haircut rhythm with his fingers. “The seller claims it belonged to the man who wrote ‘Shiloh’s Hill’ and a number of other Civil War songs. My appraiser isn’t so sure. The age checks out, though: mid–eighteen hundreds.”

  “You ever sing anymore, Vic?” Jason asked.

  “Nah,” said Victor. “Who has the time? And my pipes aren’t what they were. Anyway, I’d rather keep taking your money.” This got a laugh out of Ian and a grunt out of Danny. “Come on”—he clapped twice—“let’s play poker.”

  We walked down a hallway to the end of the house. Victor reached into his pocket and removed a key, which he used to open the door. He must have seen my expression. “Not even the housecleaners go into the cave without me,” he explained. “Some of the wine in here, the liquor—it’s obscene.”

  Entering the game room gave me a profound sense of déjà vu. Unlike with the music room and kitchen, I had never set foot in here, but I knew every inch of it. Ellen had mapped it out for me, and for the last two weeks this room had taken center stage in my mind. I could close my eyes and see the poker players at the table, hear their chatter, look over at the enormous video screen across the room that was tuned softly to whatever football or hockey or basketball game the men had settled on; I could watch the rise and glow of the silent flame in the gas fireplace along the wall opposite the windows, where the blinds would be shut for the evening.

  Ellen hadn’t mentioned the exposed wooden beams overhead or the soft carpet underfoot, but she had sketched out the wet bar along the wall before the row of windows. And just as she’d said—as she’d promised—our delayed arrival at Victor’s home and subsequent tour of the house had taken long enough for the men to finish their drinks. While they went to the bar to replenish, I noted other aspects of the room: the chandelier with curved metal and black glass beads lighting up the poker table, which was made of gorgeous wood and brown velvet. The room seemed much more traditional than the rest of the house; I half expected an oil painting of hunting dogs running through a forest, but the artwork was all coastal—enlarged photographs of seagulls, terns, sanderlings. Above the fireplace was a picture of a blue heron, a nice touch even if herons knew better than to hang out in Jersey.