Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

He was brave. He was good at being a soldier, and he liked it. He never said too much about his country.

Welles smiles, puts the pipe in his mouth. He strikes a match, lets it burn for a second, and moves it in tight circles over the briarwood bowl. When the tobacco is smoldering, he tamps it out, packs it again. I was in the Army myself, he says. I was at Anzio, in the summer of 1944. But I was in payroll — I am by trade an accountant — so I was able to avoid the worst of the fighting. I was very glad when the war ended. It upset me profoundly.

He looks up from the pipe and narrows his eyes. I met you once before, he says. You were running a card game on the boardwalk.

Yeah. That was me.

I won a dollar from you.

Stanley looks down, bashful. You were smart to quit when you did, he says. I don’t let nobody win more than a dollar.

You’re a gambler! Welles says. You live by skill and fortune. Goddamn it, I’m intensely envious of you. That’s been one of my romantic fantasies, ever since I was a lad. To be a riverboat gambler. With a white linen suit, and a derringer in my pocket.

You got me pegged wrong, Mister Welles. That boardwalk game is a straight con. I play cards a little bit, sure, but I’m no gambler.

Oh, of course you are, Welles says. Of course you are. At any given moment, you may be certain of the cards, but the other man — your opponent, your mark — you can never be certain of what he perceives, what he thinks, what he will do. You still place yourself, more or less reverently, at Fortune’s behest. And that’s all gambling amounts to. Isn’t it?

Stanley furrows his brow. I guess so, he says.

Welles lights his pipe again, puffs to get it going, slowly shakes out the match. He drops the blackened curl of the matchstick in the ashcan, stares at the space where it fell, smoking intently. Then he takes the pipe from his teeth and points its stem toward the arches and columns of the penny arcade on the corner.

This may be of interest to you, he says. These buildings along the boardwalk all date from 1905. Abbot Kinney’s original construction. They’ve changed quite a bit over the years — fallen into disrepair, as one says — but you can still get a sense of how it was. Notice the quaint approximation of Byzantine-Gothic architecture in the loggia. Done, if I’m not mistaken, in the style of Bartolomeo Bon. Shall we walk to Windward?

The dog lurches ahead as if it knows the route. Fog rings the streetlamps with aureoles; a few figures huddle beneath them. Two blocks up, a group of five bored Shoreline Dogs is playing mumbledypeg in the sand. Some look familiar: from the Fox theater, or maybe from the chase through the neighborhood, Stanley can’t be sure. They sneer and glare at Stanley as he and Welles pass, but Welles seems not to notice.

The Fortune Bridgo parlor is coming up on the left, and Welles gestures toward its boarded-up windows. You picked a good spot to run your game, he says. An historic spot, even. That was Bill Harrah’s old place. At one time — this would have been the 1930s — Bridgo was a big draw around here. Bridgo, Budgo, Tango. All those bingo games. Are you familiar with bingo?

Not really. I heard of it. I never played.

I thought not. You don’t seem the type, frankly. It’s an odd game. Unusually authoritarian, as games of chance go. You pay your money, you take your cards, you sit and listen and await revelation. You accept what is given to you. Since the game’s origins are intertwined so closely with those of the Italian state, I suppose this shouldn’t be surprising. In any event, despite this strict assertion of authority — or maybe because of it, who can say? — the municipal apparatus here in Los Angeles has been rather hostile to it, which is why Bill Harrah eventually moved his operation to Nevada, where he met with quite a lot of success. This is a pattern that recurs. Tony Cornero, the mobster who operated gambling boats just off the coast here, also in the 1930s, went on to found one of the largest casinos on the Las Vegas Strip. Have you ever visited Nevada, Stanley?

I’m not sure. I maybe passed through it.

I used to go there quite often. On business, after the war. Its present territory used to be covered by great lakes. Did you know that? Inland seas, really. This would have been during the Pleistocene Epoch, which is fairly recent in geological terms. Nevada is quite dry now. A desert, in fact. Where did those lakes go? Might they return one day? Let’s turn left here.

They cut through the portico of the St. Mark’s Hotel and head inland, passing department stores, the Forty-Niner restaurant, a hotdog vendor, a Tee Pop stand. Everything is closed down, dark, and has been so for several hours. The illuminated clock on the hardware shop gives the time as nearly one a.m. Down the block, in the shadows cast by the JESUS SAVES sign, a figure is moving: a very large dog, or a person crawling on all fours. Before Stanley can decide which, it’s gone.

So, Welles is saying, what brought you to Los Angeles?

Stanley guesses it would be unwise to tell the truth, at least until he’s figured out how to ask Welles what he wants to ask. Just drifting, he says. Seeing the country. I happened to be in L.A., so I figured I oughta track you down.

Well, I’m very flattered that you did. Where did you come across my book?

I picked it up from a guy I knew on the Lower East Side.

Manhattan? Welles says. That’s remarkable. We only printed three hundred copies, you know. A hundred of those are still sitting in my attic. How on earth did it find its way to New York, I wonder?

I got it from a pile of books that belonged to a fellow who’d just started a hitch at Rikers Island. There was a bunch of poetry books in the batch. But this fellow was getting sent up for trafficking stolen goods, so it’s hard to say where he might’ve got it.

Perhaps the title appealed to him.

Maybe so.

A halfdozen Harleys are doing laps around the traffic circle, and Stanley and Welles fall silent in the thunder of their engines. Welles follows the curb clockwise to the circle’s opposite side. The dog stretches the leash to its full length, straining away from the street, lowering its head and cocking back its ears against the roar.

When the bikers are two blocks behind them, Welles speaks again. It’s a bit silly of me to ask, he says, but I’m curious. You said that there were several collections of poetry in the group of books that your friend had. Did you take any of the others?

No sir. Just yours.

I’m wondering why that is. Why you took mine. Not the others.

Stanley takes a few paces before he responds. I wonder about that myself, he says. I remember I liked the way it looked, for one thing. The rest all looked sort of cheap. Either that, or like you were supposed to be in awe of how great they were. But something about ’em was fake. Your book looked like somebody made it. I liked that.

My publisher would be gratified to hear it, Welles says. Were he not in Mexico avoiding his creditors I would certainly pass your comment along. Let’s cross here.

When they reach the other sidewalk, Stanley speaks again. Something else, he says. When I opened up your book, I couldn’t follow hardly any of it. I couldn’t figure out what it was supposed to be , even. I could tell somebody worked on it really hard, and spent a lot of time on it. And that really got on my nerves. Because, okay — here’s this complicated thing that somebody made. And I come across it just by accident, in a pile of crap on some hoodlum’s floor. And I can’t understand any of it! It made me mad, to tell you the truth. I’m not saying I rescued it or anything. It didn’t seem like it gave a damn what happened to it, whether anybody read it or not. But every time I open it up, it makes me think of all the crazy stuff in this world that I don’t know nothing about. That I never even heard of. And I guess that’s a feeling that bothers me, Mister Welles.