Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

I gotta move, Stanley says. A plainclothes cop’s been working this stretch.

One more round. Double or nothing.

Stanley settles onto his knees again, throws the cards, takes away the guy’s sawbuck.

The hotrodder is giving him a hard look. The smart thing would be for Stanley to clear out now, but he’s not ready to go. He’s tasting blood: this clown is a choice mark.

Tough break, my friend, Stanley says. One last round? Double or nothing?

The hotrodder is taking rapid breaths, tapping a foot, grinding a fist into his palm. He looks pretty comical, but Stanley keeps his face empty. There’s a sloppy tattoo on the back of the hotrodder’s hand: what looks like a crow. Stanley smells liquor each time the guy exhales.

C’mon, Mike, the girl’s saying. Let’s just go.

You’re down twenty bucks, chum, Stanley says. You sure you want to walk away now? Look — I’ll give you a real easy one.

Stanley holds up his cards — the king behind the seven of diamonds — and throws them, working the switch. The shuffle so slow a child could follow it. Are you watching me here, Mike? he says. Last chance. This is a good investment, chum.

The hotrodder looks up from the cards, narrows his eyes, and looks down again. He draws two tens from his billfold. The middle, he says. It’s the one in the middle.

You sure about that?

Yeah.

Stanley takes the two bills from the guy, snaps them into a rigid rectangle, and turns over the middle card with their upper edge. The seven of diamonds.

What the fuck , the hotrodder says. His nostrils dilate; his hands wad into fists.

Well, shit, Stanley says, glancing away. Here comes the goddamn cop.

The cards and the bills vanish into his shirt pocket; he slings the jacket over his shoulder. The girl is scared now, wild-eyed, looking around, but the hotrodder is sputtering in Stanley’s face. Scram, Stanley tells him. Go the other way.

Stanley turns on his heel and walks. Claudio is right there behind him, coming in fast from the opposite direction, and he lurches past Stanley into the hotrodder’s path, tripping him up. Did you win? Claudio asks him. Did you win back my money?

Stanley hears scuffles and shouts as the hotrodder shoves Claudio against another boardwalk stroller, but he doesn’t turn around. Two quick consecutive right turns bring him to the Speedway, where he dashes in front of a slow-moving De Soto to the opposite side of the narrow street.

He’s behind the Bridgo parlor now, out of sight of the boardwalk. A few blocks ahead a whitewashed enclosed footbridge spans the road, linking the second stories of two battered hotels; it frames the flashing neon of Windward Avenue like a view through a peephole. Pedestrians run against each other in the boxed space — figures in silhouette, crossing and overlapping — but nobody turns Stanley’s way. He slows his step, waits for the De Soto and the line of cars behind it to pass, and turns left down the first sidestreet.

Horizon Court is truncated by T-junctions — the Speedway here, Pacific Avenue opposite — and like all the local streets it’s lit down the center by incandescent bulbs that droop from fat electric cables. Halfway along the block there’s a dark zone where a few days ago Stanley knocked out a streetlamp with a slingshot and an egg-shaped pebble of rose quartz; now he hurries to that spot —skips quicksilver on your ancient stones , he thinks — and slips through the shadowed doorway of a boarded-up storefront as soon as the coast is clear.

Once off the street, he wedges a two-by-six pinewood plank between the shop’s wrought-iron doorknob and its rough concrete floor. Then he strikes his father’s MIOJ pocket lighter, holding the flame to a candle stub mounted in a rinsed-out vienna sausage tin, and weak yellow light creeps into the corners of the room.

Stanley still can’t figure out what this place used to be. The dusty glass-topped counter and the wallmounts for absent display cabinets remind him of his great-uncles’ jewelry store in Williamsburg — he saw it once as a young kid, and again last year when he helped burglarize it — but he doesn’t think that’s what this was. In the backroom are two workbenches, finger-wide holes bored into their tops for bolting down heavy equipment, and strange objects keep turning up in dim corners: tiny screws, semicircles of wire, drifts of glittering white powder that Claudio says is ground glass, although Stanley can’t think of why he’d know that.

The mile of oceanfront between Rose Avenue and Washington Boulevard is full of abandoned buildings — outlawed bingo parlors, fly-by-night factories, the hulls of other defunct enterprises — but Stanley picked this particular storefront as a hideout because it’s small, inconspicuous, centrally located, and because its back window opens onto a parking lot. After two days of casing the place, two sleepless nights ducking beat cops and shivering on the beach, Stanley broke the streetlamp and jimmied the entrance, and he and Claudio set to work fortifying their new lair: cracking windowglass against their pillowed jackets, pushing a workbench against the back wall to ready an escape route, and knocking a hole through a gypsum panel to stash their scant possessions.

Now Stanley picks up the candle and kneels at the gap in the wall. His father’s Army fieldpack is there, tucked out of sight, and he unsnaps the canteen and gulps some water before tugging it out and opening it. He keeps everything he owns squared away and ready to go at all times — blanket, tinned food, change of clothes — in case he needs to dust out in a hurry; now he unloads enough to make space to hide the cash. He counts it, although he knows exactly what’s there: fifty-nine dollars. He and Claudio just tripled their stake on a two-hour grift, and nobody collared them. Not yet.

But Claudio ought to be here by now. Stanley has no watch, hasn’t been minding the time, but it shouldn’t have taken more than a few minutes for Claudio to shake the hotrodder and return to base. It’s possible that Stanley just didn’t hear his triple-knock signal to unblock the door. Possible, but unlikely.

He flattens the cash and the three playing cards between a couple of sardine cans — keeping a fiver and some singles in his pocket, just in case — and repacks the bag, pulling The Mirror Thief from his jacket and placing it at the top before buckling it again. For an instant he pauses, feeling the book’s shape through the worn canvas, reassured by its promise that all this will soon be very different. Then he shoves the pack behind the gypsumboard, and with a quick puff he kills the candleflame.

Stanley doesn’t want to walk with his back to traffic — the hotrodder could be behind the wheel by now — so he jogs three blocks to Windward, crosses the street, and makes a right turn toward the ocean. His eyes echo the rhythm of his steps, bouncing between faces in oncoming windshields, amblers rotating to and from the boardwalk. By now the lights along the avenue have picked up misty halos, and the squarejohn crowd has all but gone home. Familiar 42nd Street types emerge from the darkness: rowdy sailors and soldiers, pavement princesses cruising for trade, sharp-dressed Negro hustlers, hollow-cheeked junkies looking to cop. Stanley studies their features as they’re lit by the rescue mission’s buzzing JESUS SAVES sign, each pair of eyes hooded in the red glow, each nose throwing a shadow like the gnomon of a sundial.

He crosses the boardwalk to the beach side, out of the foot traffic, and takes a long look in both directions. The hotrodder and his girl are nowhere in sight, but Stanley spots Claudio without much trouble: he’s slumped on a wooden bench two hundred yards away, a block north of the Fortune Bridgo arcade. Three greaseheaded hooligans in pegged jeans and motorcycle jackets are gathered around him. At first Stanley thinks they’re strongarming him, but then he sees how they’re standing: at ease, bored, like they’re waiting for someone. Claudio’s cradling his head in his hands, still doing his lush bit. Stanley grins. The kid’s no Brando, sure, but damn if he can’t act a little after all.