God Save the Mark by Donald E Westlake

Author:Donald E Westlake [Westlake, Donald E]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780795312038
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Published: 1967-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

20

BLACKJACK is a game where you’re dealt two cards face down, and if you want more cards they’re dealt face up, and the object of the game is to get as close as possible to twenty-one points—picture cards count ten—without getting more than twenty-one points. If at the end of the hand your cards come closer to twenty-one points than do the dealer’s cards, you win.

Poker is a game where you’re dealt five cards, and if you get one pair that’s good but if you get two pair that’s better, and three of a kind is better than that, and there are also straights and flushes and straight flushes and full houses and four of a kind.

I just want to point out that I did know all that. I don’t know why I said four-flush was a term from blackjack. The only term from blackjack is blackjack.

Anyway, when I staggered out of Gus Ricovic’s apartment I immediately took a cab back uptown to the bank, on my way to make the second withdrawal of the day.

Sitting in the back of the cab as slowly we progressed through New York’s perpetual traffic snarl, I wondered if I was in the process of being played for a sucker yet a millionth time. Did Gus Ricovic really know who had killed Uncle Matt? If he did know, would he really tell me? If he did know and he really told me, would it ultimately do me any good?

In private-eye books, of which I’ve read my share, people are always buying information, and the information is always one hundred per cent accurate. Nobody ever sells a private eye a lie, Lord knows why. But I wasn’t a private eye, and Gus Ricovic might at this very moment be constructing for my special use a green and blue, six-sided, open-topped, reversible, large economy-size thousand-dollar whopper.

But I’d buy it, I knew that as well as he did. I had no idea how else to learn anything, and I might as well throw my money away at least attempting something.

But before you can throw money away you have to get your hands on it. Not always an easy thing to do, that, not if you’ve entrusted your money to a bank.

“Lot of money,” said the teller dubiously, looking at the check I’d written and shoved across the counter to him.

“I’ll take it in hundreds,” I said.

“One moment,” he said, and picked up his phone and checked my account. He seemed troubled by what he heard, put the phone down again, and studied my check with fretful eyes.

I said, “I have enough to cover it.”

“Yes, of course,” he said, not taking his eyes from the check. “Lot of money,” he repeated.

“Hundreds,” I repeated. “In a little envelope, if you have one.”

“One moment,” he repeated, and for a second I thought I was caught in a loop of time, endlessly backing on itself, circling around and around and around and never getting anywhere. But then, instead of picking up the phone and checking my account again, the teller walked away, carrying the check with him.

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