The Fall of Princes by Goolrick Robert

Author:Goolrick, Robert [Goolrick, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2015-06-24T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Trotmeier Takes a Drive

Louis Patterson Trotmeier came up with me. He won the poker thing. It wasn’t always the same poker thing—the old man changed it every time so people couldn’t pass the answers along. Louis’s was a single hand of Five-card Stud.

Louis had jacks and fours. No telling what the old man had. The old man drew two cards, and Louis knew the man across the desk wasn’t drawing two cards to fill a pat hand. He wasn’t just holding a pair and a kicker. So Louis threw in his pair of fours, and drew three cards. One was a jack.

Louis laid his hand on the table. The big man across the desk just folded his cards and threw them on the desk.

Louis looked him in the eye. “Sir. The odds of drawing a full house after being dealt two pairs of anything are 7.7 to 1. If you had had three of a kind, your odds of drawing a full house are 10.7 to 1. I figured the numbers were on my side. Sir.”

“You’re a numbers guy.”

“Crunch the numbers then play by your gut. Numbers don’t tell you what’s going to happen. They just give you an opportunity. I’m a numbers guy with balls. I play the hard hunch, and what did I have to lose? There are other places to work.”

He started the next day. His specialty was going with the informed hunch, and it took him very far very fast.

We called him Louie. He had the looks of a verifiable Greek God. A long, aquiline nose, a perfect body after hours and years at the Sports Training Institute, and a machismo that needed no verification. Louie colored his hair, the only man I have ever known to do such a thing, and his delicate but undeniably masculine features were corona-ed by golden curls cut by Frederic Fekkai himself. I have never seen a man more beautiful, even when he was sitting in the chair with squares of Reynolds Wrap all over his head.

He was a great trader; face it, he was flawless at everything, flawless, and he ran through a string of girlfriends that impressed not only his friends but occasionally the papers as well. Trading bored him, sex did not, and so he was even better at sexual conquest than he was at trading, and he was, as I said, a damned fine trader.

Another thing he had brought with him from generations of Trotmeiers on The Street, something not one other person we knew had the least inkling of, was how to save money. The day he got his job, he went to a bank, opened an account, and borrowed a thousand dollars and put it away somewhere where even he couldn’t get it. Then he paid it off. Then he borrowed five thousand dollars, and so on, forever, even though he began making ridiculous amounts of money, while the rest of us were living like the tsars, going to restaurants like Frank’s—a meatpacking district legend where Fat Frank presided, under an enormous portrait of himself, from two a.

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