Дэвид Балдаччи: A Gambling Man [calibre]

HEY. HEY, YOU!”

Archer looked over and saw the woman waving enthusiastically at him.

It was Liberty Callahan, of the Dancing Birds troupe, sitting at the roulette table. She had changed out of her stage outfit and lost her condor-sized feather. While her sparkly dress was tight, her welcoming smile, promising skittish fun with few rules, was even more appealing to Archer. And yet when he more soberly took in her toothy smile and frisky appearance, Archer saw in it prison guards itching to bust his head, chain gangs to nowhere, and food that was not food at all. That was what had happened to him the last time a gal had called out to him like that. A sob story, a poorly planned escape from her tyrannical father, the arrival of the police, a change in heart by the gal after her old man put the screws to her, with the result that Archer had donated a few years of his life to busting up rocks and seeing the world through the narrow width of prison cell bars. Still, he ordered a highball from the bar and took a seat next to her. He just couldn’t seem to help himself. He was an internal optimist. Or just stupid.

“I’m Liberty Callahan.”

“I’m Archer.”

She shot him a curious look. “That’s a funny name.”

“It’s my surname.”

“What’s your given name?”

“Not one I ‘give’ out.”

Her features went slack and put out, but Archer didn’t feel unduly bothered by this. Any first meeting was a nifty place to lay out the ground rules. And his new universal ground rules were to take no one into his confidence and to listen more and talk less.

“Suit yourself, Archer .” She turned to play with her little stack of chips.

He said, “Mr. Shyner pointed you out to me back at the café. Told me your name too.”

She eyed him cautiously. “That’s right, you were at his table.”

Archer eyed the wheel and the dealer standing in the notch cut out of the elongated table, while the gamblers sipped on drinks and conspired on their future bets. He heard all sorts of talk coming in one ear about this method and that superstition coupled with that infallible telltale sign of where a spinning ball would come to rest in a bowl full of colored numbers in slots that were spinning the other way. People had colorful chips in hand that looked very different from the ones Archer had been using at the craps table.

The table had a sign that said minimum and maximum bets differentiated between inside and outside bets. Archer had no idea what any of that meant.

“He told me you want to get into acting?” said Archer.

Her smile emerged once more, showing every tooth in her arsenal, including a jacketed porcelain crown in the back that was so white it looked nearly pewter in the shadowy cave of her mouth.

She nodded, her smile deepening. “People calling out your name and wanting your autograph. Your picture in the newspapers. Somebody else driving you around and you travel with your own maid. It all sure sounds swell. So, yeah, I want to try my hand at it. Stupid, maybe. Long shot, sure, but why not me, right?”

“So what are you going to do about it?” asked Archer evenly.

“Hey, hey!” called out the dealer. He was beady-eyed and thick at the waist but with a steady hand in which the little ball already rested. “You got a seat, you got to bet.”

“Sorry,” said Callahan. She quickly put a chip on ten black.

Archer pulled out some of his crap chips.

The dealer shook his head. “No, no, you need to use roulette chips here, sonny. Let me see what you got there.”

Archer pulled out all of his chips and showed them to the dealer. The man eyed him with interest as he totaled them up, scooped them away, and placed a stack of colorful chips in front of Archer.

“Okay, what do you want each to be worth?”

“Excuse me?” said Archer.

The dealer told him what his crap chips had been worth. “But you get to pick how much each of these chips are worth, while not going over the total value of the chips you just turned in.”

“Why so complicated?”

“It’s not complicated. It’s roulette. Everybody at the table has a different color chip. They tell me what they’re worth and I keep that in my head. What’s complicated?”

Archer glanced over the chips and gave the man a number.

“Thanks, genius,” the dealer said as he placed a like-colored chip atop the rail by the wheel and then placed a number marker on it that coincided with the chip value Archer had given him.

The dealer grinned at Archer. “Memories are iffy, marker chips make it easy.”

“Yeah, I can see that, genius .” He put a chip on ten black next to Callahan’s.

The ball was dropped and the wheel spun by the dealer. People kept betting until the ball was about to drop and then the dealer called out, “No more bets.” Seconds later Archer and Callahan lost their chips because the ball decided twenty-one red all the way on the other side was a much more comfortable resting place than ten black.

Callahan took a sip of her cocktail and said, “I’m going to Hollywood. That’s what you do if you want to be in the movie business, Archer. Ain’t you heard of that place?”

“I don’t go to many movies. Never saw the point. They’re not real.”

“Well, that is the point.”

“If you say so.”

“Life is crap, Archer. You go to the movies to get away from that for a little bit. Get some pixie dust thrown on you for a precious two hours.”

“And when the two hours are up and the pixie dust falls off, your life is still crap.”

“Boy, it must be fun walking in your shoes,” she observed.

“But then you go back to the movies for more pixie dust, right?”

“Yeah, so?”

Archer said, “So you’re an addict. Might as well be smoking reefer. Movies are about making money. And putting butts in seats. No butts in the seat, no autographs, no maids, and no newspaper pics.”

She frowned. “Thanks for popping the one dream I have.”

Archer sipped his highball and tapped a finger against the tabletop. “We all have dreams. Point is, what are you going to do about it? Just going to the place doesn’t seem like enough. I’ll bet it’s chock-full of people wanting to do the same thing as you.”

“I know that. I need to take some classes and work on how I walk and how I talk.”

“You can already walk and talk. And dance, too, and sing. I’m witness to that. You do it pretty swell, in fact.”

Surprisingly, her frown deepened at this compliment. “But there’s a lot more to acting than that. You have to have what they call the ‘it’ factor. The camera has to love you. It has to capture something in you that maybe even you don’t see. That’s how a star is made.”

“Heard that a bunch of actors fought in the war. Hank Fonda, Clark Gable. Lots.”

“Oh, poor Clark Gable. Wasn’t it awful what happened to his wife, Carole Lombard?” said Callahan. “That plane crash after she was out promoting war bonds. Her mom was with her but didn’t like to fly. She wanted to take the train back. Lombard wanted to take a plane to get back to Gable faster. They said she and her mom flipped a coin. Her mom lost and they took the plane. And it flew right into a mountain.”

“Yeah, I heard about that while I was overseas. Damn shame.”

“So you fought?”

Archer shrugged. “Sure, like most everybody else.”

“I worked in a factory making bombs.”

“Dangerous work.”

Callahan took a moment to pull a Camel from a pack she slid from her purse. She held out the smoke for Archer to light, which he did, using a box of matches he took from a stack next to a green glass ashtray overflowing with smoked butts. The air was thick with so much smoke Archer thought a fog had materialized inside.