A Handbook to Luck (15 page)

A fedora was perched on the edge of the china cabinet. There was a gun on the carpet alongside an overturned vase of lilies. Clots of blood like dull cherries studded the mirrors and walls. What was left of Ahmed's head was shaven, like a prisoner's. He must have put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Leila stared at her brother-in-law's hands, which were lying peacefully at his sides. His oxford shoes were clumsily tied together. There was no note, no explanation but the implied one: Take me home.

Sadegh covered his face with his hands and cried so violently that it frightened Leila. His suffering was unfamiliar, stark and separate from hers. She was much more transfixed by the sight of her grieving husband than by her dead brother-in-law. Mehri woke up and saw her father crying, then started wailing herself. She dropped to the ground and ran around the dining room, tracking tiny footprints of blood.

“No one must know of this,” Sadegh said hoarsely, wiping his glasses.

“What are you talking about?” Leila asked. Her jaw hurt, as if she'd been chewing for days.

“No one must know of this,” he repeated.

Leila ran to the telephone but Sadegh grabbed her wrists and held them behind her back. His mustache scraped her lips as he spoke, deliberately, flattening her resistance. She felt utterly trapped by his stare.

“If you breathe a word of this to anyone—anyone, do you understand?—as God is my witness, I'll take Mehri from you.”

“But why?” Leila whimpered. He was twisting her wrists so hard she feared he might break them. She remembered what Sadegh had told her when they'd first met: Everyone watches a man for his weakness.

“Red! Red! Red!” Mehri shouted.

“What do you want me to say?” Leila rasped.

“That he was murdered.”

“Murdered? But the police won't believe it.”

“To hell with what they think. I'm talking about the family.”

Leila knew instantly that their relatives back home would believe his story. It would confirm their worst fears about America, save them from scandal, from the malicious gossips that picked at others' miseries like vultures. Sadegh would preserve his family's
aberoo,
his honor, at all costs. He would make certain that Ahmed would be portrayed as a great martyr, sacrificed to the evils of the West. But to the police in Los Alamos, he would be just another suicide.

Leila envisioned the procession of men carrying her brother-in-law's coffin to the cemetery. How the mourners would keen and weep, caught up in the euphoria of grief. Overhead a parade of dark clouds would follow them through the winding streets. And the lies. The lies about Ahmed's death would multiply until they covered the truth like graveyard dirt.

“I'm going to call the police,” Sadegh said. “Let me do the talking—and don't interrupt me. Answer only if they speak to you directly and repeat everything I say, word for word. If you do or say anything else, I'll kill you.”

“You're crazy.”

Sadegh twisted her wrists tighter and pushed his forehead into hers.

“Please, you're hurting me,” Leila cried. “At least let me put Mehri to bed first.”

“Make it fast,” Sadegh said, releasing her.

Leila collected their daughter off the sofa, where Mehri had found a dusty licorice stick behind the throw pillows. Her hands and knees were smeared with her uncle's blood. What would Mehri remember of this night? And Sadegh? Could they ever find an excuse for ordinary happiness again?

“Bedtime, Mehri
joonam.
” Leila held out her arms and her daughter climbed into them, her small heart ticking hard inside her chest. The night air slipped in under the door. A sudden wind stirred the saplings, bringing a fresh scent of green. How nice it would be to sleep, Leila thought, a deep forest of sleep. Tomorrow was Monday and she would stay in bed all day. “Sleep well, my darling,” she whispered in her daughter's ear.

(1983)

Enrique Florit

E
nrique looked out over the poker pit and was satisfied with what he saw. Every customer was deep in play. Nobody was wandering around, restless or waiting for a table. The dealers were crisp and sharp looking, and there were enough of them to keep the players happy. Anyone who came to his pit knew they could expect the best service. No riffraff. No hangers-on. No maniacs or disruptive drunks.

During his first months at the casino, everyone had tested him—the general manager, the customers, even the busboys and bartenders. It was natural. They wanted to see what he was made of, how far they could push him. The word was that he was too friendly to be fierce. They were wrong. Oh, he took good care of everyone all right, high rollers or low. But certain things weren't tolerated. There were rules. Enrique wasn't above using a little in-house muscle to enforce them. For that he'd hired Jensen, six feet four inches of solid persuasion. One nod to him and the offender was out the door. Enrique was tired of poker's low-life image. He didn't want his children growing up feeling ashamed of him.

Enrique surreptitiously checked his watch. There were no clocks in the casino and the temperature was a steady sixty-eight degrees. The one concession to decor was an aquarium teeming with tropical fish. Enrique didn't want his customers reminded of anything else—not wives, not mortgages, not jobs or errands or anniversaries. Last summer he'd gone to Saint Bartholomew's church across the street and convinced the pastor, with a sizable donation, to stop their hourly tolling of bells. Profits at the casino went up twenty percent after the bells were silenced.

Enrique had been hired to run the Grand Casino's poker pit in Gardena a year and a half ago. He wasn't sure he was going to like it. He was more accustomed to being at the center of the action than on the sidelines watching others play. People used to buy
him
drinks, mob
him
after he'd won those poker tournaments, told
him
he should write a how-to book like some of the hotshots in Las Vegas. Enrique didn't think he'd reveled much in the limelight—certainly nothing on the order of his father—but he'd gotten used to the attention all the same.

It was eleven o'clock on a Saturday night. Enrique was keeping an eye on Madge Gowan at Table 14. The woman was in her fifties, petite, a chain-smoker, and a formidable opponent. When she won, which was often, she vibrated like a hummingbird. There were complaints from the regulars that Madge was a cheat but Enrique watched her closely—he'd had a video camera trained on her for weeks—and found no evidence of foul play. The fact was that men didn't like losing money to a woman. It turned them into spoilsports.

Sammy Nguyen walked through the double doors of the casino with his cronies. He wore a thick gold chain around his neck, and his fingers glittered with diamond rings. Usually Sammy wore a jade pendant of the Buddha that festively clashed with his red silk shirts, but not tonight. Tonight he was looking more subdued. What did he have up his sleeve?

“My man, how's it going?” Enrique asked, clapping him on the back. He spoke into Sammy's left ear because his right one was deaf. What Enrique understood about his Vietnamese clients was this: they'd already lost everything—family, businesses, their whole fucking country—so poker was no big deal to them. They played full out, took no prisoners. What kind of chance did some furnace repairman from Reseda have against them?

Enrique distributed the Vietnamese guys to various tables. When he sat the Nguyen gang together, customers complained that nobody could understand what they were saying and suspected them of cheating. The losers complained the loudest. They flourished like weeds in a casino. Enrique could smell them, stale and bitter like everything old, with wet-cement complexions. Their rare lucky streaks didn't last long either. It only encouraged them to lose some more. One of them, a stuttering car dealer from Mar Vista, sat at Table 29. Nobody liked playing with him because he slowed up the game so damn much.

It was quieter than usual. Nothing but the murmuring of the dealers, the clicking chips, the shuffle and tick of the cards. The stillness seemed to be waiting for something, but Enrique couldn't figure out what. Newcomers were surprised by how peaceful a good casino was. They expected fistfights, hell-raising, which happened less than anyone might guess. Or else somebody got lucky and everyone crowded around for the excitement. Mostly, though, the playing was sullen and intense. Not even a good-looking woman—and there were generally a few lingering around—could distract a serious poker player; forget one with a winning hand.

Waitresses in hot pants and shiny stockings trundled across the floor with their food trolleys. The offerings were at the opposite ends of the nutritional spectrum. The Vietnamese ordered fruit plates, staying lean and sharp through the night. The big-bellied Americans relied on chili dogs and fries to keep them going, and more beer than was advisable. Customers griped that it took an hour or more to get a cup of coffee, but this was a top-management decision. Coffee was the casino's enemy. Alcohol, on the other hand, you could get with a snap of your fingers.

A few of the regulars were losing money to Freddy Silva at Table 42. Freddy came from a casino family in Havana and drank only weak Ceylonese tea from tea bags he brought himself (he suffered from paranoia). His father had run the gambling operations at the Tropicana for years before he was murdered. His grandmother, Carolina Diamante de Silva, had been considered the best blackjack dealer on the island. Gamblers had come from around the world to play at her table. Freddy had left Cuba with the Mariel exodus on an overcrowded boat that capsized off the Keys; he'd headed straight to Gardena, where he'd heard there were new card parlors opening up.

Enrique was busy organizing the Grand Casino's second annual poker tournament, scheduled for next month. He was pleased when his father had shown up with their Las Vegas friends to compete last year. It was a veritable Diamond Pin reunion. All the regulars were there: Johnny Langston, Cullen Shaw; even Jim Gumbel put in an appearance. Papi surprised Enrique by coming with a huge bankroll (where had he gotten the money?) and wanting to play with the pros.

His father was hopeless at poker. He'd always been hopeless at poker. He would always
be
hopeless at poker. A blind person could read the expressions on his face. But Enrique knew it was useless to argue with him, and decided to let him play. Papi lost five grand in the first round, betting wildly and making a general spectacle of himself. To make matters worse, he went back to his hotel room, returned as Ching Ling Foo, and insisted on rejoining the tournament.

“You can't play again,” Enrique said, trying to stay calm. “You've been eliminated.” How could his father embarrass him in front of everyone like that?

“Fernando Florit was eliminated,” Papi began in his phony Chinese accent. “But I, dear boy, am the reincarnation of the Great Court Conjurer to the Empress of China. Now step aside and let me play.”

“Papi, please.”

“I beg your pardon. Have I made your acquaintance? My name is Ching Ling Foo. And you are…” He held his hand out politely. His rubber wig shone dully under the fluorescent lights.

“Goddammit.” Enrique flung out his arms in frustration. It was all he could do not to pull that fucking wig right off his father's head.

He looked around helplessly as a crowd began to gather. Everyone had an opinion. A couple of the players threatened to put on Halloween costumes, debating the merits of one superhero over another. Others questioned the tournament's organization—and Enrique's handling of it. Ching Ling Foo continued to vigorously defend his right to compete with everyone else. (How his father could convince anyone of anything in that getup was a mystery to Enrique.) Soon the general consensus was clear: Let the Chinaman play.

Enrique sucked in his breath and showed Papi to one of the center poker tables. His father played a lot better as Ching Ling Foo, and managed to stay in character for the next two hours. His opponents found it difficult to read his face under his thick makeup, much less understand a word of his pidgin English. This time Papi made it as far as the fourth round, winning a modest pot. Then he lost it all on a foolish bluff. His father seemed more pleased with himself than was rational for someone who'd just lost a large sum of money. The art of losing graciously, Papi liked to say, was much harder to master than winning.

After the tournament, which Johnny Langston handily won, the gambler ribbed Enrique about becoming a pit boss, giving up the game to go legit. “Now when you gonna come back and play some poker, boy?” For a couple of days afterward, Enrique felt listless at work, contemptuous of his steady paycheck, itching to sidestep his routine. He didn't know anymore what he was doing and why. It was pathetic to keep using Papi as an excuse.

After bumming around the Caribbean fleecing retirees, Enrique had headed to Las Vegas with Delia, whom he'd married off the coast of Barbados. (He'd lied and told her that the Persian tattoo on his shoulder was the name of his favorite Sufi poet.) Back home he won several major tournaments before deciding to retire from professional play. He wanted to go to bed at night with steady money in the bank. Was that such a bad thing? He was a family man now with twin baby girls and a ranch house less than a mile from his and Papi's old apartment in Santa Monica. (Enrique had a recurring dream that his house had no roof, just a floor on which ash was continuously falling.) Plus Delia was pregnant again.

Enrique looked down at himself. He was twenty-four years old and developing a paunch. He'd never gone to college. He had a family, a mortgage, responsibilities. His future, it seemed, was set. Only his past remained unsettled. Between work and the twins and the endless domestic emergencies (they'd needed a new water heater last week), there wasn't much time to wallow in the past. But now and then, his thoughts drifted back to Leila and he smelled her wild garden scent on his skin. This made him feel guilty, as if he was cheating on his wife.

At midnight, Frankie Soon came in to the casino looking like a luck-hungry bird. Frankie dropped thousands in a night, and not just on poker. Booze. The occasional hooker. Illegal side bets of every kind, especially college football. When he was on a roll, Frankie could hold his own at the best poker tables. Enrique didn't know much about him except that he owned a dress factory in Koreatown and was said to be living with a Salvadoran woman decades his junior, which probably accounted for Frankie's passable Spanish.

“Good to see you, Frankie! Getting younger every day, eh?”

“I'm trying,” Frankie laughed, showing off his new dentures. There was something in his demeanor, in his refusal to bow to aging (witness his jet-black dye job and manicure), that reminded Enrique of his father. Frankie always wore a guayabera, light blue and freshly pressed. None of his other customers looked this good.

Enrique steered Frankie to the bar and ordered him a double scotch on the rocks to loosen him up. Some nights he preferred tequila, the expensive kind with the pale worm in the bottle, and Enrique kept some in stock just for him. Frankie played better with a couple of drinks in him, although his behavior didn't change—upright, a gentleman, never belligerent or morose. In the years that he'd been coming to the Grand Casino, Frankie had developed a reputation for equanimity, win or lose. In short, he didn't make a nuisance of himself. Enrique couldn't point to another man in the house that he could say the same thing about.

An hour later, Frankie was winning big at Table 9, his lucky number, and ordering plate after plate of scrambled eggs. He joked that because his cholesterol was high, his woman wouldn't let him eat eggs at home. What he really wanted, Frankie said, were some fried chicken feet. When would the casino start serving those? Enrique secretly cheered Frankie on, although he knew it was unprofessional of him. He wasn't supposed to have any favorites among his customers. Yet something made him want to confide in Frankie, ask him for advice.

It was four in the morning when Frankie got up to go, eleven thousand dollars richer. Enrique walked him to the front doors, a red lacquered affair with dragon handles.

“My wife is pregnant again,” he said.

“¡Felicidades, hombre!”
Frankie looked genuinely pleased for him. “When?”

“A few months.”

“Maybe you need a babysitter?” Frankie offered Enrique a cigar, then lent him his gold-plated lighter. “Where do you live?”

“Santa Monica.”

“That's good.”

“Good?” Enrique blew out a mouthful of smoke.

“I have the perfect babysitter for you.”

“Who?”

“
Mi mujer.
She won't take any money, though.”

“Of course I'd pay her,” Enrique insisted.