Trace (Trace 1) (3 page)

“If you win, nobody complains,” the shift boss said. “You met Ernie?”

“Just now. We were having a nice chat,” Trace said.

“Our new man,” the boss said. He clapped Ernie on the shoulder. “Listen, Ernie. This is Trace. Whatever he wants in here, he gets.”

Ernie gulped and nodded. “I thought he was a card counter,” he said. “I was going to heave him.”

“Count?” the shift boss said. “He couldn’t count the change in his pocket.”

“He split a pair of tens,” Ernie said.

“That’s nothing. I saw him once count a blackjack as eleven and double down on it. He’s the worst blackjack player in the world.”

“He’s winning,” Ernie said.

“He always wins. Leave him alone. Last year we were nipped for a half a mill by two wise guys before Trace figured out how we were being taken. And before that—Well, forget all that. He’s the owner’s friend. Leave him be.”

Ernie nodded and the shift boss turned to Trace, then heard his name called from across the room. “Gotta go, kid. See you later.”

“
Zei gezunt
,” Trace said.

“Thanks. Leave some money for the other players.” The shift boss walked off and Trace turned back to Ernie.

“Now, Ernie, we’re going to get something straight,” he said.

“I didn’t—”

Trace interrupted him. “I’m going to save this tape, and anytime I need to, I’ll march into the owner’s office and play it for him. Now you remember that and you remember this too, you cretin. You stay off Chico’s case. You mouth off to her again or you embarrass her in front of anybody, and I won’t just play this tape. I’ll play it and then I’ll shove it down your throat. Don’t get her mad because that gets me mad.”

“I’m…I’m sorry,” Ernie said.

“Yeah,” Trace said as he rose, shoved his tape recorder in his pocket, and walked away.

He stopped at Chico’s still-empty table. “I’ll wait for you at the bar,” he said.

“Everything all right?” she asked.

“Everything’s fine. How bad can a night be when I win two thousand dollars?”

“And you didn’t tip me anything, you cheap bastard,” she said.

“I’ll take care of you later,” Trace said.

Later, the phone in their bedroom rang and Chico snaked an arm over to the end table by the bed and lifted the receiver.

“Hello,” she said, then listened for a few moments.

“Actually,” she said, “I’m already having that work done.” And she hung up.

Trace looked up. “Who was it?”

“An obscene call. Keep going; you’ve got about eight hundred dollars more to work off.”

“I’d forgotten how much I hate to fly with you,” Chico said as they waited for their bags at New York’s Kennedy Airport.

“I was the model of propriety,” Trace said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Why did you tell that stewardess you were on a strict Muslim diet?”

“Because otherwise you get codfish or chicken and I wanted lamb,” Trace said.

“So you had to convince her by spreading a blanket in the aisle and salaaming toward Mecca?” Chico asked.

“I thought it might help my case. I wouldn’t have tried it if I wasn’t so sure that we were heading east. I just had to pray to the nose of the plane. Actually, I was praying that the pilot was sober. Pilots drink like fish.”

“And why did you keep asking for magazines and then sending them back?”

“’Cause they had all those goddamn cards in them,” Trace said. “I’ve got this new rule I live by. I’m not reading any more magazines that have postcards in them. They always fall out in your coffeecup. What’s on those cards anyway? I never even look at them. If advertisers are spending money for that crap, they’re getting taken.”

“I hate to fly with you,” Chico said.

“Well, you’re not much either. You aren’t really a bundle of fun at forty thousand feet.”

“Because I didn’t want to ball under a blanket?”

“You wouldn’t even go into the bathroom with me,” Trace said, then made a lunge as their luggage came roaring by on the carousel. He got Chico’s three bags but missed his own and had to wait for it to come around again.

Chico called a skycap, gave him her ticket, and he wheeled her bags away.

“I’ve got to go,” she told Trace. “You be careful.” She stretched upward to kiss him on the lips. For a moment, he thought about putting his arms about her and hugging her, but instead he just pecked at her mouth.

“Where can I reach you?” he asked her as she turned away.

“I’ll call you,” she said. And then she was gone.

Trace watched her walk off, neat, trim, exquisitely beautiful. Whenever she left, he always had a sinking feeling that when he saw her again, things would somehow be different between them. His eyes followed her as she walked through the terminal, oblivious to the stares of men passing by, and he thought about the three years they had been together. He had gotten Chico—Michiko Mangini, actually—her first job as a blackjack dealer when she came to Las Vegas. Her added job, helping the casino out by “entertaining” visiting high rollers in town, she had gotten on her own.

It was her decision and he had never been really able to understand it, but at least it had kept things between them simple.

She was a whore and he was a drunk and half a crazy, but at least they were honest with each other about it.

Until now. Until this sudden interest in visiting relatives in Memphis, Tennessee.

Trace turned and missed his bag again as it went by.

New Jersey got a bad rap from the world, Trace thought as he left New York and the George Washington Bridge behind him and headed out, in his rented car, toward the New Jersey countryside.

Most people who passed through the state did just that: they passed through, usually along the New Jersey Turnpike, which sliced through the heart of some of the most unredeemedly ugly industrial areas ever, devised by man, and so got the idea that that was what the entire state looked like.

Trace, after getting his divorce, had moved from New Jersey to New York City and spent the most dismal three months of his life there. It cost him $31.75 to park his car in a lot on East Forty-eighth Street for five hours. After two days of driving in the city, he realized that the only effective way to get from West Side to East Side was by National Guard airlift. New Yorkers didn’t mind that because New Yorkers, he realized, didn’t own cars. If they owned them, the city streets would tear out their transmissions and they’d have to own an oil well to be able to afford parking. Restaurants were overpriced, waiters were surly, and cabdrivers were homicidal. He paid $1.79 for a can of tuna fish. His telephone didn’t work for three weeks, and when somebody at the phone company told him that if it really upset him, he should start his own telephone company, he moved to Las Vegas. He had never regretted it.

As he drove his car toward the gentle rolling hills ahead of the horizon, Trace thought there were only four things wrong with New Jersey: his ex-wife, his two children, and Richard Nixon.

With luck, he wouldn’t be around long enough on this trip to meet any of them. But if he had to pick one, he’d take Nixon.

The town of Harmon Hills was fifty miles from New York, in country so foxy that it might have been in England.

When he pulled through the high brick columns that marked the entrance to the Sylvan Glade Country Club, he was faced with four roads that trailed off in different directions through the trees. There was no sign pointing the way toward the clubhouse, so Trace picked one road at random and drove around aimlessly between fairways, past putting greens and teeing areas, for ten minutes, until he saw the clubhouse as he came over a hill. The clubhouse sat in a glade, down so deep that Trace got the feeling that if someone came out at night onto the porch of the clubhouse and stamped his foot hard, all the golf balls that had been lost on the course during the day would roll down to the pro shop.

Trace parked in front and walked through the large double doors of the main entrance. He had expected a golf-course inn to have some jock in a turtleneck sweater and four-tone plaid pants working as a clerk. But at the reception desk was a man with oiled, slicked-back hair that pressed so tight to his skull that it looked as if it were trying to prevent his head from escaping. He wore a pencil-line mustache and a three-piece suit, and both looked painted on, mustache and suit.

“Do you have a single?”

“Yes, we do.” Trace noticed the man looking with open curiosity at his ratty, scarred canvas valise.

“Something wrong?”

“Err, no. Do you have golf clubs, sir?”

“Should be here any day,” Trace said. “Actually, I scratched the finish on the shaft of my mashie spoon niblick. It’s at the jeweler’s being resilvered.”

The clerk nodded as if it happened every day, and handed Trace a registration form and a gold-plated pen. It was the only hotel registration form he had ever seen that asked for a lodger’s occupation and for work references.

Trace dutifully filled in: “Advance man.”

When Trace was done, the clerk took the form back and read it carefully before doing anything else.

“Devlin Tracy. That’s Irish, isn’t it?”

“Only on my father’s side,” Trace said. “My mother is Jewish. Sits near the stove and moans most of the day.”

The clerk looked pained and bent over the registration form more closely.

“For whom do you advance?” he asked.

“I’m not at liberty to say, er, what is your name?”

“Dexter, sir.”

“Well, Dexter, I really can’t talk about it, but let’s just say that I represent an official of the Vatican who does a great deal of traveling and just may be coming to your great state in the near future. I am here to make arrangements. More than that I can’t say.”

“Ohhh. The Vatican,” Dexter repeated numbly.

“Don’t hold it against me. It’s a job. Actually, it’s a pretty good job. I used to be advance man for a punk-rock band. Farmer Brown and the Cowflops. Ever heard of them?”

“No.”

“Well, maybe they were picked up before they got this far. They were awful. Used to eat furniture. Before them, I handled the Electrical Disturbance. Ever hear of them?”

“I’m afraid not, Mr. Tracy.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t have. They’re all in jail for setting fire to a Budget Six motel outside of Tallahassee. It was all affecting my nerves, so I went to work for the Vatican. Haven’t had a hotel fire or an act of cannibalism since then. The man I work for is kind of dull.” Trace winked at the clerk. “He mostly just likes to sit around and pray.”

“Oh.”

“He doesn’t pray loud, though. He sort of mumbles. In Latin.”

“Will he…the person you work for…will he be coming here?”

“It’s kind of on the q.t.,” Trace said. “He’s a golfer.”

“He is?”

“Not much of a long game,” Trace said. “But he’s miraculous on the greens.”

The clerk, looking totally bewildered, pushed forward a room key. “Room Eleven, up the stairs at the end of the hall.”

“Thank you. Do you have a restaurant here?”

“Sorry, Mr. Tracy, but it’s closed for the night. However, you might get a sandwich in the cocktail lounge.”

“How late is the lounge open?” Trace asked as he hoisted his bag and started for the stairs.

“It varies. Sometimes till one A.M.,” the clerk said.

“Do they serve sacramental wine?”

Trace unpacked his canvas suitcase and hung his clothes any-which-way in the big room’s massive walk-in closet. He took a small leather case out of the bag, then upended the bag and dumped the rest of its contents into a dresser drawer, and when his razor, toothbrush, and deodorant appeared, he snatched them up and put them on top of the dresser.

He sat on the bed and carefully opened the book-sized black leather case. From it, he took a small portable tape recorder and a bag holding two dozen tapes. From another small bag, he took a long strand of electrical wire and an inch-high medallion of a gold frog with an open mouth.

He put a tape into the recorder, then plugged the long wire into the side of the machine. The other end of the wire fit into a slot on the back of the gold frog.

He pressed the recording button and spoke into the mesh that covered the open mouth of the frog.

“CX-Four to Control Tower. CX-Four to Control Tower. This is Hop Harrigan, coming in.”

He rewound the tape and pressed the play button. His voice echoed out through the high-ceilinged room.

“CX-Four to Control Tower. CX-Four to Control Tower. This is Hop Harrigan, coming in.”

Trace nodded with satisfaction, then dug in the leather bag until he found a roll of white surgical tape. He tore off two foot-long strips and stuck them to the headboard of the bed. Then he pulled his T-shirt out of his belt, placed the recorder against his lower back, and stuck it in place with the two pieces of surgical tape. He twisted vigorously several times to make sure the recorder was securely fastened to his body, then tucked his shirts back in.

He opened the shirt’s front buttons and pulled the wire and the golden frog through the opening just below his sternum, then rebuttoned the shirt.

He separated the golden frog from the wire, placed the frog in front of his tie, then pushed the sharp end of the wire through the back of the tie into the slot on the back of the frog. He pulled his tie tight and looked into the mirror. Satisfied that he was neat, with no wires showing, he reached behind him with his right hand and pressed the tape unit’s record button.

“This is Devlin Tracy, folks, broadcasting live from the land of the thousand terrors, New Jersey.”

He rewound the tape and pressed the play button, and when his message was repeated loud and clear, he nodded with satisfaction, turned the recorder off, put on his jacket, and went downstairs to find the bar.

Three men were sitting in a row at the end of the bar nearest the door, and when Trace walked in, they did not even glance at him. He walked past them to the far end of the bar where he sat, saw no bartender, and looked at the three men in the mirror behind the bar.

He guessed their combined age at two centuries. They were dressed for the golf course and were sipping from glasses of some dark amber liquid that he guessed was cream sherry.

They were arguing about a round of golf and from the slurred sound of their voices, they had been drinking since the round ended and it might just have been the final round of the nineteenth century.

“Ed, you left it short because you babied it. You didn’t hit it.”

“Not hit it, my ass. I hit it, Art. I hit it, but it was uphill and I didn’t hit it hard enough.”

“It wasn’t that it was uphill,” the third man said. “It was that you were putting against the grain. You forget that the grass grows toward the water. The water was behind you and so you were putting into the front of the blades of the grass. That’s why it didn’t reach the hole.”

“You’re an asshole, Frank,” the one called Ed said. “You and your water behind you. The only water behind me was the goddamn fountain on the seventh tee. I putted it that way because the grass grows away from the mountains. I had the mountain behind me, so I was putting with the grain and I had to putt it easy, otherwise it would run away from me.”

“You just didn’t hit it. Never up, never in,” said the man named Art.

“Miss it on the pro side. No pussy putts,” said Frank.

“You two don’t know shit. You putt away from the water and the nearest water is the Atlantic Ocean. What about the frigging Pacific? That’s water too. And you, you’re so goddamn worried about mountains that the Rockies spook you.”

“Yeah? Well, we didn’t miss that putt,” said Art.

“Yeah,” said Frank.

“Hey, you,” the man named Ed yelled at Trace. “You play golf?”

“No,” Trace said.

Frank turned to him. “What do you think about a guy who leaves a twelve-footer three feet short and costs us a match?”

Trace sighed and said, “I think it was solar flares. Everybody knows that this is one of the most intense periods of solar eruptions since time began. Back when you were young. When the sun flares like that, it affects every orbital object, all the planets, all kinds of spheres. It’s why baseballs don’t carry very far this summer. If it affects Jupiter, you don’t think it’s going to affect your putts? And before you know it, it’s going to change our weather. Winter in July. You’ll see. It’s as bad as all those Russian spaceships.”

Frank turned away and said to the other two, “He says maybe it was solar flares.”

“Maybe it was. I know I hit it.”

“You didn’t hit it. It was a pussy putt.”

Frank said, “He says maybe we’ll have winter in July.”

“Good. Then we play winter rules all year round.”

“Winter rules ain’t gonna help you make a putt that you don’t hit.”

“Leave me alone,” Ed said.

They were still arguing when the bartender came from a small storage room behind the bar. He was a small gnomish man, Trace guessed in his early fifties. His face was freckled and his thinning hair was sandy. He walked with a bowlegged sailor’s roll and Trace thought he looked like Popeye. The name tag over his shirt pocket read Hughie.

“Well, Mr. Solar Flares, what can I do for you?” the bartender asked.

“Finlandia rocks. You heard?”

“I’ve listened to nothing but that missed putt for the last five hours. They’ll make you nuts.” As he poured the drink, he said, “How do you like it here?”

“Okay so far. I don’t think Whozis likes me.”

“Whozis?”

“The guy on the desk. The one with the fiberglass underwear.”

“Oh, that’s Dexter. He likes you fine. He thinks you’re going to make the place famous by bringing the Pope here. You tell him that?”

“And I told him not to tell a soul. I told him that because he seemed upset that my name’s Irish.”

“At least you’re not Jewish. That’d kill him. This is Waspland.”

“I’m half Jewish,” Trace said.

“Don’t tell him.”

“I already did. Join me?”

“Well, why not? Anything’s better than listening to that missed putt. I spent most of the last five hours hiding in the storeroom. They won’t go home. You a golfer too?”

“No.”

“How come you’re here, then?” Hughie said. He poured himself a shot of Scotch, neat. Trace reached under his jacket and pressed the tape machine’s record button.

“Ever hear of a place called Meadow Vista Sanatorium?”

“Sure. Hard Artery Village. I keep trying to get these three committed, but they won’t go. What’s with Meadow Vista?”

“I’ve got a friend in there. Stopped to visit ’cause I was in this neighborhood. You know him, Mitch Carey?”

“Sure. I know who he is. We don’t travel in the same social circles, but I know who he is. I saw him up here a couple of times playing. He tipped me five dollars both times he was here. He’s okay. Runs a computer company or something, doesn’t he?”

Trace didn’t know if Carey ran a computer company or a hardware store, but he said, “Sure, that’s Mitch. He had a stroke and he’s in Meadow Vista. My name’s Tracy, by the way. Everybody calls me Trace.”

“Hughie,” the bartender said. He shook Trace’s hand with a muscular, tendony mitt.

“So I came up to visit. What kind of place is Meadow Vista?”

“I don’t want to hurt your feelings. Your friend, you know?”

“My feelings are hard to bruise.”

“Okay, Meadow Vista’s like a morgue,” Hughie said. “People ship their old relatives up there to die. That’s what I hear anyway.”

“I heard something like that too. Almost made me think there was funny business going on somehow.”