19 Purchase Street (10 page)

Also, the largest type in the ads made the apparently generous proposal:

WIN FIRST—PAY LATER

A subscriber was not required to send a fee until
after
the game or race,
after
the handicapper had delivered a winner as promised. The handicapper was that sure of his sure thing, it seemed. Fair enough? Actually, it allowed the handicapper to take unfair advantage. For instance, say the game involved was the Rams versus the Cowboys and, say, two hundred subscribers called in. The handicapper gave the Rams as the winner to half those people and the Cowboys to the winner to the other half. That way, no matter which team won, the handicapper could count on his sixty dollar fee from at least a hundred subscribers, make six thousand in absolutely sure money. And he would have those hundred subscribers hooked, eager to send in the following week.

Gainer would have none of that.

He took a full page ad in the sports journals such as
College and Pro Football Newsweekly
. Announcing the inception of Pointwise, Inc. and his affiliation with it. There in print he pledged there would never be any one-way gimmicks or double-dealing with Pointwise. To get acquainted and demonstrate that his handicapping was as good as his word he offered his “best play of the week” free, without qualification. Also, for starters, a bettor could call Pointwise and ask about any game being played that week. Gainer would personally give his opinion. No charge.

Thus, he really put himself on the line, bare ass out in the open. If he didn't come up with a winner straight away he'd be out of business, at least relegated to the category of just another handicapper on the hustle.

He got a lot of response from that first ad, and he could feel every other handicapper in the country pulling against him. No doubt many had called to learn what he was giving out.

His winner won.

He was in business.

Pressing, he ran the same sort of introductory ad for the next two weeks, made the same offers.

Winners, both weeks.

Three in a row made believers out of a lot of people. It made Gainer hoarse from talking on the phone almost constantly fourteen hours a day.

From then on it was for money. Never, however, did Gainer stop reassuring his subscribers that they weren't being double-dealt. He displayed his losers as well as his winners in ads where everyone could verify them, and each week he put his best selection in escrow, so to speak, placed it in a sealed envelope that he left in the care of Price Waterhouse, the same who kept secrets for the Academy Awards. It was a nice piece of ethical showmanship, and effective.

Within a year, Pointwise, Inc. was grossing two thousand a month and the following year, half again as much. Most of it came in as money orders, good as cash.

Too much cash. The crime would have been to report it all, so five hundred and thousand dollar chunks of it went into a bank deposit box.

Still, Gainer needed tax help, some secondary business that would help him keep more of his money by seeming to use up a lot of it.

Several such propositions found him. Most suitable was the one proposed by Ruth Applegate, a woman who had worked part-time with Gainer back in his library days. She was fifty, not attractive, but persistently pleasant, an honest brightness about her. Her squat, waistless figure gave the impression that she might very well be awkward, even clumsy. However, she was surprisingly agile and had quick decisive hands. Applegate, as Gainer called her and she rather enjoyed being called, wasn't married, never had been, wasn't looking to be. The one thing that occupied and preoccupied her, that she believed in right down to her bones, was herbs.

Herbs.

Gainer opened a shop for her. The ground floor of a narrow brownstone on East Sixty-second Street just around the corner from Lexington Avenue. The rather small place was decorated in weathered barn-wood and used brick. Not too well-lighted, the atmosphere was cozy, special. One would feel good about having discovered it. Shelf above shelf of antique, glass-lidded jars contained the various herbs and displayed their names.

Some were familiar. Sorrel and coriander, fennel, cumin, saffron and sarsaparilla.

Then there was maidenhair and pennyroyal, stargrass, sweetflag, coltsfoot, devil's-claw, beggar's-blanket and witch's-candle. Wake-robin, deer's-tongue, snakeroot and even one called Lizzie run-in-the-hedge.

For cooking, for teas, medicaments and cosmetics, but by no means limited to those uses. There seemed to be a herb good for just about every imaginable thing.

Gainer, with Applegate's approval, gave the shop an easy name:

HERBIES

Announced in handlettering on a swinging wooden sign outside, just left of the entrance.

It was a small, important pleasure for Gainer to go to the shop and breathe. The air, its equivocal fragrance, seemed to reach all the usually obscured portions of his senses. Applegate took his frequent visits as indications of interest or perhaps concern. He reassured her, told her not to worry about overhead and the lack of customers. He was delighted with the shop. Truly was.

Herbs and handicapping.

N
ORMA
and Gainer

Now they sat in Gainer's top floor apartment on Roosevelt Island. The sun was weakening, could almost be directly looked at. Before long it would turn its cast from amber to orange and like the mere disc the Egyptians believed it was, drop behind the New York skyline.

Norma had her shoes off and feet up on the same chair as Gainer. Their toes were nearly touching. The tomato and Brie sandwiches Norma had made were gone but the plates remained on their laps. Gainer wet his second finger with his tongue and dabbed up some crumbs.

“Still hungry?” Norma asked.

He was.

“Why don't I call and have the Foodworks pack a basket for you? You know, that place on Third where I got the lemon mousse you liked so much.”

“Don't bother, I'll stop somewhere along the way.”

Norma took Gainer's plate and her own into the kitchen, from which she said, “I love you, Drew.”

He was noticing a sixty-some-footer going down river as white and brassy as could be with a party aboard and gulls tagging along in hopes of leftovers. “I love you too,” he said. Was what he felt in his throat a fragment of little boy crying?

Norma returned to him with a suggestion. She'd go to Zurich, take care of business in a couple of hours and catch the first available flight out. That way she'd be back tomorrow night, late, but back.

Gainer didn't want her to put herself through that, the rush and strain.

“All right,” she said, “tell you what. I'll stay overnight in Zurich and fly back Thursday. When I get in I'll cab straight to LaGuardia for the one o'clock to Edgartown. Air New England has a one o'clock, doesn't it?”

“Yes.” He'd taken that flight a number of times.

“I'll be on it,” Norma promised brightly and gave him a hug, a punctuation to end any chance of disappointment.

“Better not,” Gainer told her. “It's only okay for them to break their rules.” He meant their rule about coming back. A carrier was supposed to stay over for a reasonable length of time, a week at least, so as not to be obviously shuttling. Norma had always abided by it, supporting the appearance that her trips were for L. E. Horton legitimate business. And recently her stays in Zurich had been longer, two weeks to a month.

“They shouldn't mind this once,” she said. “Besides, I'll have a good excuse ready if it's ever brought up.”

But he talked her out of it, told her they'd celebrate twice as much sometime soon, she should just make the carry as she normally would. Please?

She seemed both sorry and relieved.

That settled that, Gainer thought, put it out of mind. Still, there was one thing about it that didn't quite fit. If the bastards at Number 19 had an unexpected carrier problem, surely there were numerous others on their rolls they could have called on. Even given that she was their star, really, why Norma?

CHAPTER FOUR

S
WISS
Air Flight 101.

It was lined up with runway 31 left, held there by its brakes while all four of its engines were being brought to half speed. The number one starboard engine was last to get to half. When all four were stabilized, the Boeing 747 was let go.

The runway offered eleven thousand feet.

The plane needed ninety-five hundred of it.

Up it nosed into the night sky at a positive rate of climb of a thousand feet a minute. At once, as though self-conscious of evidence that it had ever been earth-bound, it hid its landing gears.

Left turn over Canarsie, old Floyd Bennett field. Under the charge of Kennedy departure control. Left again over the ocean just south of the Long Island shoreline. The next checkpoint was Hampton, then would come Nantucket Island. Boston center control assumed responsibility at twenty-three thousand feet.

Norma was in the raised spine of the jet, the upper forward area that sets off the conformation of a 747. Originally that overhead section had been a lounge for first class passengers. Now it was put to profitable use, installed with special reclining seats the airlines called “slumberettes.” Available for sixty dollars above first class fare, the seats could be let down to nearly a horizontal position, providing plenty of room for a passenger to stretch out and snooze. The atmosphere and attitude up there were as conducive as possible to sleeping. No movie. Dinner only if requested. Eyeshades, extra pillows and blankets.

Even before the plane leveled off to cruise, Norma was snuggled down for the short night. Her stocking feet warm in Swiss Air booties and the music system providing faint Debussy preludes.

Eyes shut, her mind chose first her carry for its subject. The three million dollars contained in her thirty inch suitcase. As always, there hadn't been a hitch getting it out of the States. When the limousine brought her to the curb at the International Departures Building, a skycap was immediately there to tend to her baggage. The same black skycap who had been there for her numerous times before. Perhaps that was coincidence but Norma thought not. For a moment at curbside, while the skycap was tagging her three bags, checking them directly through to her flight, her eyes and his had caught in what seemed a subtle, conspiratorial exchange. Norma was almost certain of it. She'd been told there were people to look out for her along the way, and after so many carries she ought to be able to determine who they were. What, she wondered, would have been the skycap's reaction if she'd hyphenated their connection with a pertinent remark? Probably he would have gone on tagging and scribbling as though he hadn't heard. That would have been the same as an admission. Anyway, now again, the three million was aboard, the one-hundred and twenty banded packs of hundred dollar notes, two-hundred and fifty hundreds to each pack, was somewhere in the belly of this giant and the most crucial half of her job was done.

A pleasant Debussy phrase moved her to the theme that recently seemed to take over all her other considerations. She lay face up with the airline blanket to her chin, her arms underneath, fingers laced, and her mind ran with it.

She told herself she should sleep for tomorrow. When she would be held.

Not contained, but surrounded. Held against that particular length by the pressure of her own willingness. Such a new need, that touching. The hand flat on her back, skimming as though to remove its normal surface, exposing skin far more responsive. Hand cupping her shoulder, fingers traveling one way, then the opposite, circumscribing her breasts, momentarily disappointing the nipples, giving attention to usually neglected places for a long while. Such a new need. She hadn't known her body until it was discovered for her.

She should sleep for the tomorrow she was flying to.

To those particular fingers, the tips tracing the rises and dips of her, repeating their course whenever her breath was made to catch or a grateful sound came from her. Wise fingers. She had cried more than once from the stir, the mercilessness of them. And often, animallike sounds had escaped from where she had them trapped.

She opened her eyes. Debussy had given way to Schubert, she realized, a symphony for piano that to her honed sensibility at that moment was like fine leaded crystal striking together. She removed the headset from her ears, let it drop beside her seat. Perhaps she should have some wine.

Two hours out.

The 747 was over Sable Island, Newfoundland, its final checkpoint this side of the Atlantic. It reported to Oceanic control and proceeded eastward as directed on North Atlantic track three.

The trouble in number one starboard engine was not immediately apparent. A defect had developed in the scavenge return line leading from the oil reservoir to the engine. Constant vibration had caused the fitting on that line to crystallize and crack, allowing oil to leak. The crack had become worse, and now oil flamed out into the slipstream. The oil pressure dropped below thirty pounds per square inch, and that electronically lighted up the corresponding low pressure warning signal on the flight engineer's panel. When the oil pressure continued to drop, the number one starboard engine was shut down.

The plane descended to twenty thousand feet. It was already banking in a full turn when the announcement came over the intercom system that it was returning to Kennedy. With reduced power and prevailing westerly headwinds the return took nearly three hours. The time was straight up three
A.M.
when the 747 docked and the passengers were let off to wait in the International Departure Lounge.

Norma telephoned a Zurich number but it was busy. Moments later when she tried the number again, no one picked up.

The plane was repaired right there on the apron. The troubled engine was mobilized with a starter and the oil leak located. The scavenge return line and its fittings were replaced. It only took an hour for the engine to be made right, but just as much time was needed to service and reprovision the airplane, and for a new crew to come aboard.