Alan Foster - Exceptions to Reality

A distinctively sharp stench caught his attention as he patrolled the rows of gaudy, garish, insistent slots. The seat in front of the progressive poker machine was empty. His nostrils quivered. It reeked of readiness. No one else in the room, no one else in the city, and in all likelihood no one else on the planet could detect the distinctive fragrance that reminded him of sweet onions sizzling in a pan that was presently emanating from the machine. It was a scent he had come to recognize without trying: the scent of a slot machine about to pay off.

Taking the seat in front of it, he took his time arranging a handful of tokens by the side of the machine. Then it was feeding time. It ate two, four, six of the shiny base metal medallions. By the time he dropped in the eleventh coin, the perfume was so overpowering that his eyes began to water. Following the application of the twelfth, five aces lined up in the window before his eyes. Instantly lights strobed, sirens wailed, bells rang, and excited fellow players in the immediate vicinity abandoned their machines to rush over and bathe in the audiovisual display that signified someone else’s great good fortune. He sat contentedly before the fireworks, trying not to look too bored, his nose wrinkling at the stench of it. Over the past year he had sat through hundreds of similarly celebratory scenarios. One more year would see him finished and done with it.

For now though, he smiled as he accepted the congratulations of the excited gamblers who crowded around him, hoping that some of the “luck” that had adhered to this undemonstrative foreigner would rub off on them. Well-wishes in German and English in addition to the ubiquitous Portuguese filled the air around him. One well-dressed businessman had in a pocket of his suit a palm computer that was about to succumb to a particularly nasty virus. Threerivers felt bad that he could not warn the man about it.

Two smiling men in neatly pressed suits arrived very soon and led him away. At the office, he received more formal congratulations from one of the casino directors. They would want to take a picture of him holding an oversized check spelling out his winnings, he knew. That was standard casino procedure in the case of big winners. He could hardly refuse without raising unwanted suspicions. It was not a big problem. He had long since developed a procedure for dealing with the situation. He would be a thousand miles or more away from Salvador before the picture appeared in any Brazilian paper.

Those who pursued him could have put a stop to his activities by passing his curriculum vitae along to every large gaming establishment on the planet. But they would not do that, he knew. Such an incredible revelation was bound to lead to inquiries public, scientific, and commercial. Those who had especially sensitive reasons for wanting to stop him did not want inquiries—they wanted him dead. Their conundrum bought him time.

He had to convert his Brazilian reals into dollars, then find a bank that would handle the wire transfer to Zurich. That took the rest of the day. By the time evening approached his latest winnings were on their way out of the country and his fanny pack contained a newly purchased first-class ticket to Lima. There was a nice casino in the district of Miraflores, he had read. He was anxious to pay it a visit.

He had chosen a hotel on Itapuã Beach north of the city, having reserved a room for the week. It had taken only two days to find the right machine in the casino. As he exited the taxi and entered the lobby of the hotel, he located a desk clerk with some command of English and informed him that management might want to send someone to check the main transformer on the street outside. Threerivers thought he might have seen a spark, or something, he explained. Actually he had seen nothing at all, but stepping out of the cab he had smelled sage and thyme—essence of capacitor overload, as he had come to know it. He couldn’t have cared less about the transformer, or the neighborhood in which it was situated, or the hotel, but he did not want to burn up in bed before he could check out the next morning.

He had inserted the plastic key into the lock to his room when he hesitated. Something on the other side of the door was tickling his nose. He always made it a point to memorize the smell of a room whenever he checked in to a new hotel. The TV, the electrical outlets, the lamps—all had their distinctive aromas. Here, now, something smelled different. The discrepancy was slight but unmistakable. Slowly he removed the key from the lock, trying not to make any noise as he did so.

Someone pushed a hard, unyielding something into his back. “Don’t turn around. Walk down the hall, toward the beach.” Reaching out, the man behind Threerivers rapped on the door twice, then twice again. It opened to reveal a tall Amerind who slipped a small gun into his pocket as he emerged.

“He knew you were in there,” explained the man behind Threerivers. “He was starting to back away. I was afraid he might bolt.”

“How?” The other man’s face was a mix of concern and confusion as he stared not at his partner but at their stoic captive. “I didn’t make a sound.”

The other man gestured. “You wearing anything electronic?”

Shutting the door to Threerivers’s room behind him, the intruder considered the question. “Only a watch. And my cell phone is off.”

“But charged,” replied his partner. “He probably sniffed it. Same way he does the machines.” The small, hard pressure in the middle of Threerivers’s back pressed sharply inward. “Didn’t you?”

Threerivers shrugged indifferently as they started down the hall. It was late, and none of the other guests was around. Hopefully he and his new companions would encounter a maid or someone checking hotel security. The hotel’s main building had only two floors and was situated right on the sand. Right now the beach would likely be completely deserted. That was not good.

“Cell phones stink of spoiled fruit juice,” he murmured absently. “A watch hardly smells at all.”

“Freak,” snapped the man who had been concealing himself in Threerivers’s room.

Bull replied in Cheyenne, which neither of his captors understood. “There’s no need for this,” he insisted as they walked him down the hall in the direction of the dark, empty beach and the wide Atlantic beyond. “Whatever they’re paying you, I can add zeros to it.”

“Sorry, brother,” responded the one holding the pistol. “It’s all been explained to us. There is too much at stake here.”

“What? One guy’s few winnings?”

“Few millions, is how I hear it,” declared the other man. “It’s not the money, though. You know that. You know what it is. The elders told you.”

“Maybe I don’t.” Threerivers was defensive. “Why don’t you explain it to me again?”

“All those hundreds of millions pouring into reservation casinos every year,” the man with the gun told him. “The salvation of dozens of tribes. The basis for the preservation and the resurrection of the pride and culture of the Indian nations. Everybody’s content with the arrangement: the white folks who happily gamble their money away and the tribes that gladly collect it. Then you come along. An Indian who can smell out a winning jackpot. What happens if the white media get hold of a story like that?”

“I’m the only one who can do it,” Threerivers told him.

“Maybe,” admitted the hired assassin. “A lot of elders and council members sure hope so. But try and tell the white man that. If they think there’s one of us who can put the fix on slot machines, they’ll start wondering if there are others. And if they start wondering if there are others, they’re liable to stop coming to the casinos on the reservations.”