CHAPTER THREE

IT was a juncture for Norma and Gainer, a time point. Norma would always think of it as the year of the three weeks. After the hospital, as soon as he regained his street legs, Gainer went out to find regular work. It was imperative to him that he pull his share, not on a hustling maybe basis, but dependably. No doubt, Norma’s bailing him out of Mount Sinai was the influence. Gainer was about eighty percent sure he knew how the money had been raised by her. He didn’t try to put it out of mind, the idea that she loved him that much.

The job he got nearly suited his school hours. He went around in a panel truck with a man named Jim, servicing instant photo machines. Those four-poses-for-a-quarter machines located in Grand Central and LaGuardia, Woolworth stores and other such places.

Gainer lugged the heavy containers of developer and fixative and refilled the tanks inside the machine. Jim checked the automatic mechanisms and emptied the coin box.

Jim was a horseplayer. The sort who considered not losing much almost the same as winning. While riding around between stops, Gainer read the Daily Racing Form and handicapped. After hitting five out of eight, including a forty-some dollar horse, he had Jim’s confidence. He also had the key to the coin boxes of the photo machines. But he never used it.

One summer Gainer worked for Parke-Bernet, helping handle the items that were sold in sequence to and from the lighted auction stage. One day it would be weighty Boulle commodes and gigantic Regence bronze doré chandeliers or rugs such as an Isfahan with over seven million knots that needed three men to display. Next day it might be antique faience from Choisy or eighteenth-century Canton porcelains requiring delicacy and absolutely sure hands. He came in touch, literally, with many of the world’s most precious paintings and got to see the backs of those as well, the scribblings, codes and seals on the canvas stretchers, cross-braces and frames, like decipherable commercial histories.

Another summer he cooked fifty-two thousand hot dogs at the cafeteria of the Central Park Zoo.

For quite a while, when he was nineteen and going to City College, he worked at the New York Public Library, the main branch on Fifth Avenue. His duties were down in the stacks, locating books and sending them up the conveyor or returning books to the shelves where they belonged. He liked it there. One reason was that at any time he could reach in almost any direction and learn something. The other reason was Edna Scott.

Edna Scott was thirty-two. A career librarian with a degree from the University of Vermont. She was in charge of the stacks, serious about their order and intolerant when a book was mistreated. She had straight brown hair and a face with fine features unenhanced by make-up. When she wasn’t wearing her eyeglasses, they hung from a plaited brown ribbon around her neck.

Edna Scott was indeed bookish.

Hands plain as blank pages. Clothes linear and concealing as the conservative bindings around her. Her speech was almost uninflected. She pronounced Gainer’s name like a book title, always both his names. Andrew Gainer.

It made him wince inside.

One morning he was pushing a cartload of returns along one of the deadends of Biography when he saw Edna Scott alone down an intersecting aisle. It was a moment unexpectedly meeting a moment. She had her skirt lifted, was reaching up in under to tug her blouse neat.

Gainer continued on. She’d been so preoccupied he doubted she was aware that he’d seen.

He was wrong.

It was like an activating switch.

That night, as usual, he left the library by way of the Forty-second Street access. It was snowing, large floaty flakes. Edna Scott was standing on the library steps, apparently waiting. A brown wool cap pulled over her ears, low-heeled rubber boots. Waiting for Gainer. She told him that right off.

He kept his balance, not a blink from him. Smiled his best smile and said what was right in an easy way, so they could walk together.

She lived in the Murray Hill district.

He was surprised to see a pair of Head skis standing in her entrance hall and even more unexpected was the carnival red bulb in the socket of her bedside lamp. The red took the innocence from her skin, exaggerated its warmth.

Edna Scott’s body was a completed woman’s body. Unlike those Gainer had previously experienced, girls with intermediate shapes.

Edna Scott uncovered.

All her well-done planes and affiliated parts were, Gainer realized, what his own had been wanting. He believed she was beautiful, the way she insisted on pleasure through him, entirely relinquished herself to it with him. He was only slightly diffident about her open-leggedness and then only at the beginning.

Edna Scott’s body seemed pleased. She had anticipated vigor and quantity, but not the quality of his lovemaking. Only a little of it had been technique. He just knew how.

Never again would she call him Andrew Gainer.

He carried on with her every possible night and weekend for eight months. Until Edna could not refuse a better library job in San Francisco.

At that time Norma and Gainer were living on East Eightieth Street between Park and Lexington in the third and fourth floors of a brownstone with high ceilings, three fireplaces.

Money was no longer a problem.

It hadn’t been since Norma’s year of the three weeks.

During those three weeks one of the arrangements Vicky had made for Norma was Laurence Davidson. Two hundred for most of a night.

During the course of that night, actually when the purpose of it was accomplished, Davidson wanted to know about Norma and she told him the truth because it sounded like fiction.

Davidson believed her. “Try something else,” he advised.

“I know I’m not very good at this …”

“Have you ever considered becoming a broker?”

“What kind?”

“Stockbroker, you can take courses to get a license. There’s a school downtown on Pine Street especially for that.” He jotted the name of the brokerage school on the back of one of his business cards. “If you’re really interested give me a call.”

“Here?”

“At my office.”

Only later, from the card, did she realize he was an account manager with L. E. Horton, the prestigious Wall Street investment firm. She chalked it all up to just talk under the circumstances.

Davidson called Vicky again, wanting to arrange another evening with Norma, but her available time didn’t coincide with his and when he next called her three weeks were up.

It was purely chance that Davidson saw her again. At the restaurant in the financial district where she waitressed. When she was serving him he said, “I want to see you again.”

“I don’t work there any longer.”

“I still want to see you.”

“No.”

“As a friend …”

They got together the following night. A pleasant, casual dinner with no mention of their previous piece of business. Davidson still believed she should try being a stockbroker. He’d be her mentor. His firm, L. E. Horton, would pay for the courses.

“Do well, get your license and there may even be a spot for you at L. E. Horton,” he told her.

“Why should L. E. Horton pay my way?”

“It’s not unusual. Like most other large firms it has a fund set aside especially for that purpose, rather like a scholarship. Besides,” he shrugged, “it’s deductible.”

She went to school.

Three nights each week from five-thirty to eight. The courses assumed that one would have some relevant background and the language was technical. Norma felt out of place, but she kept at it and soon found that stockbrokering, like many professions, was made to seem extremely special and complicated to protect the self-importance of those in it. She had to learn the precise answers to many questions that would rarely, if ever, come up.

In three months, under the sponsorship of L. E. Horton, she took the examination required by the New York Stock Exchange and the National Association of Security Dealers. She passed the exam easily and received her broker’s license.

In her twenty-six years, she’d never been more delighted with herself. L. E. Horton took her on, as Davidson had said they might. To start, her draw was fifteen hundred a month. Within a year, her commissions averaged twice that.

Davidson remained her friend and business confidante. Now strictly a platonic relationship. She trusted him. He never disapproved of her being so ambitious. To the contrary. He encouraged it, advised her to take some advanced courses at a school in Boston where she could learn the intricacies of foreign trading. No loss of income while she attended, he assured her.

After doing exceedingly well in Boston, Norma was assigned by L. E. Horton to deal exclusively with foreign stocks and commodities. It was then necessary for her to make frequent trips to London and Paris and she was so often in Zurich she maintained an office at the L. E. Horton branch there.

ON a late autumn day in 1971 she went for a country drive with Davidson. The leaves were at the peak of change, blazing, the roadsides layered gold. As they drove along Norma fell into a reflective mood, thought how ironic it was that the high in her life had come as a consequence of such a low.

They stopped in Banksville for a dinner at Le Cremaillere. They ordered extravagantly and about two hours later, when their hands were warming and swirling Remy Martin, Davidson complimented her on how well she’d done with her career.

“Thanks to you,” she said.

“I only saw to it that you were always headed in the right direction.”

“Only?”

“Those advanced courses you took in Boston positioned you perfectly.”

She agreed.

“As a specialist in foreign trading for L. E. Horton you have the most credible sort of reason to make trips overseas, now and for years to come.”

“I enjoy the traveling.”

“Good. From now on that’s just about all you’ll have to do.”

She thought he was exaggerating.

“From now on you don’t have to give any attention to brokering or otherwise servicing your accounts or, for that matter, concern yourself with making an impression with your supervisors at L. E. Horton. Just act the part, make it look good.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“To be blunt, I’m saying you’ll use your L. E. Horton job as a front,” Davidson told her.

He was straight-faced.

“A front for what?”

“To carry money.”

Norma still wasn’t sure he was serious. She kept her eyes on him, hoping she’d discern some contradiction to his words. “What do you mean carry?” she asked.

“Exactly that. Every time you go out of the country you’ll take cash along with you. Large amounts. Cash that needs to be, as the saying goes, laundered.”

Norma took two deep breaths to let it sink in. Her color left her and then returned, an angry flush. “I don’t want any part of it.”

“You’re already in it, Norma, you’ve been in from the start.”

“That’s not true.”

“I recruited you, saw that you got along. Consider yourself fortunate.”

The bottom was dropping out. “Are you saying that I was set up, that I couldn’t miss, that all along it was arranged that I do well?”

“No. Your accomplishments were mostly genuine. Allowing that the way was cleared, you got where you are on your own.”

“Then surely you don’t expect me to carry, as you call it. I don’t have to.”

“You must.” A shade of threat in his tone.

“Okay, I’ll leave Horton. As a matter of fact I was approached just recently by another firm.”

“You won’t get a reference. L. E. Horton will see that no one in the business will touch you.

“This is your sideline, not L. E. Horton’s,” she said.

Davidson answered with a slow shake of his head.

Norma was stunned.

It was difficult for her to accept that L. E. Horton was part of such an arrangement. Not old-line, ultra-respectable L. E. Horton. Large, powerful L. E. Horton.

“L. E. Horton is no more than a leaf on the tree,” Davidson told her.

Norma felt deceived, smaller. What it had come down to again was take it or leave it.

Davidson, as though nothing had changed between them, ran down some of the advantages that would be in it for her. He didn’t try to sell her, merely stated that as a carrier practically all her time would be her own, and, of course, anywhere she went she’d go first class.

“This cash that’s … laundered, where does it come from?” Norma asked.

“Don’t concern yourself with that.”

“But how dirty is it?”

Davidson’s shrug said money was money.

“Just out of curiosity,” she asked, “how much would I make?”

“At least a hundred thousand a year. L. E. Horton will continue paying you what you’re now making each month and that will serve as a plausible income. You’ll only have to declare that much for taxes. Whatever you receive from L. E. Horton will be deducted from your other, real earnings. The difference you will receive out of the country and will not report.”

“You still haven’t said how much.”

“If you’re conscientious you can clear two hundred, two hundred fifty thousand a year.”

Good lord.

Davidson seemed to hear her. He nodded.

“I’ll think it over,” she said.

“I have to have your decision.”

“When?”

“Now.”

“That’s ridiculous. It isn’t something one could just jump into.”

“Now.”

“The big money involves a big risk, no doubt.”

“Practically all the risk has been programmed out of it.”

“I need time to consider what I’m getting into, for God’s sake,” Norma protested.

Davidson pushed back his shirt cuff, glanced at his thin-as-possible watch. “Some people are expecting us. Tonight.”

Norma brought her brandy beaker up, inhaled from it. As though that cleared her head, she gave her decision. “No,” she said crisply, definitely, “no.”

She wanted to hear how it would sound as much as she wanted to see how Davidson would react.

Davidson merely patted her hand, signaled for the check.

Minutes later they were gone from the restaurant and under way in the car and Davidson’s conversation was on a different, casual subject.

Norma noticed that the dusk was taking the color from the autumn leaves. The rock walls didn’t look charming now, the rocks just hard worthless hunks piled up. She remembered the first night she’d worked at the bakery with Mr. Larkin, the dough caked on her bare feet, and then all the sweat, the bowing and scraping for tips in so many restaurants … even Theodor Beecher Junior’s face came back to her for review.

After three or four miles of all that, Norma looked intently at Davidson. “Okay,” she told him, “I’ll … carry.”

“Good for you,” he said, and turned the car around and headed for Harrison.

Within a half hour they were turning in at the drive of 19 Purchase Street.

It was a kind of paragraphic point for Norma, so much of a shift in her life it made her think of all other events as having happened either before or after it.

FOR Gainer, a similar important time mark was his quitting college. It didn’t matter that he was on the dean’s honor list, he was plain bored with it. Over the past three semesters he’d switched his major study four times. At that rate he might have gotten a degree in another few years, but by then it probably would have been a degree in something that no longer interested him.

He enjoyed history, all periods; but he figured that the going rate for historians was never likely to be much. Psychology was his choice for a while and maybe he could have lived with the theoretical aspects of it, but sitting on his ass soaking up other people’s twists and turns was hardly his idea of adventure.

So, he quit college. Went into a business of his own. Something he believed he was one of the best at, already had a good amateur reputation for around town.

Handicapping.

He became a professional handicapper, for anyone who wanted to wager on sports, especially football.

Gainer himself was not much of a bettor. Less active than most. The bets he’d made on some ballgames had been like finding money and a number of times he’d gotten down fairly heavy on horses that might as well have been running alone. Usually, however, he’d gotten enough out of it from just handicapping, making mind bets, a good feeling from just knowing he was right more often than wrong about these contests that perplexed so many people. (Like his father.) It was satisfying to prove again and again that he had the mental control and objectivity to keep out of range of blind enthusiasm for a certain team or horse. Also, it was certainly no harm to his ego to have people going out of their way to ask his advice.

Once, when he was eighteen and only mildly regarded as a handicapper, an old guy Gainer hardly knew had handed him a ballpoint and a football betting card and implored with the eyes of a tired loser. Gainer circled ten choices on the card, casually, as though he were checking a shopping list. The payoff for picking ten out of ten on such a card was three hundred to one. The actual odds against it, possibly ten thousand to one. A sucker’s bet. Nevertheless, the old guy heeded his gambler’s inner voice that had so often deceived him and put fifty dollars on that card. As it turned out, Gainer’s picks were right all the way down the line. The old guy won fifteen thousand and tried his best not to lie that he’d done it himself.

Word got around. Then practically everywhere Gainer went, football betting cards were thrust at him. It was almost like he was being asked for his autograph. He refused politely and appeared modest. Smart. He realized how impossible it was that he could repeat his ten out of ten feat, or, for that matter, five out of five. No reason to spoil the image.

As time went on, Gainer was presented with numerous other more likely chances to live up to his reputation and, eventually, the smart money, that most skeptical core of big bettors, became convinced that he deserved to have an opinion. He was included in the coterie they referred to as “the talent.”

Such was the equity Gainer brought with him when he turned professional. He could have operated out of his pocket as did most handicappers, but with Norma as his backer and silent partner, he opened a regular place of business in a commercial building on Forty-fifth Street, just west of Fifth Avenue. No name on the door and nothing fancy within. Two ordinary desks face to face in front of partitions that created two rather small offices. The desks for the two girls who did the paper work and relayed incoming calls to one another as though they were floors apart, the extra office for Gainer’s sideman, a glib but honest enough guy named Billie who had been performing in the trade for a dozen years. The place was unified by a nearly indestructible gray carpet, an elaborate telephone system, including two Watts lines and the letterhead-logo that said:

POINTWISE, INC.

Gainer had plenty of confidence, and competition. Practically every sports journal was thick with ads of handicappers trying to induce bettors to call for information. Invariably the wording of the ads implied the handicapper had inside knowledge, knew which team or horse would win because of access to those who manipulated such things. It was never said straight out that a game or race was fixed but that was the inference. Such an appeal was well-aimed at the bruised, the cynics, the losers who needed something to blame other than their own bad judgment.

Also, the largest type in the ads made the apparently generous proposal:

WIN FIRST—PAY LATER

A subscriber was not required to send a fee until after the game or race, after the handicapper had delivered a winner as promised. The handicapper was that sure of his sure thing, it seemed. Fair enough? Actually, it allowed the handicapper to take unfair advantage. For instance, say the game involved was the Rams versus the Cowboys and, say, two hundred subscribers called in. The handicapper gave the Rams as the winner to half those people and the Cowboys to the winner to the other half. That way, no matter which team won, the handicapper could count on his sixty dollar fee from at least a hundred subscribers, make six thousand in absolutely sure money. And he would have those hundred subscribers hooked, eager to send in the following week.

Gainer would have none of that.

He took a full page ad in the sports journals such as College and Pro Football Newsweekly. Announcing the inception of Pointwise, Inc. and his affiliation with it. There in print he pledged there would never be any one-way gimmicks or double-dealing with Pointwise. To get acquainted and demonstrate that his handicapping was as good as his word he offered his “best play of the week” free, without qualification. Also, for starters, a bettor could call Pointwise and ask about any game being played that week. Gainer would personally give his opinion. No charge.

Thus, he really put himself on the line, bare ass out in the open. If he didn’t come up with a winner straight away he’d be out of business, at least relegated to the category of just another handicapper on the hustle.

He got a lot of response from that first ad, and he could feel every other handicapper in the country pulling against him. No doubt many had called to learn what he was giving out.

His winner won.

He was in business.

Pressing, he ran the same sort of introductory ad for the next two weeks, made the same offers.

Winners, both weeks.

Three in a row made believers out of a lot of people. It made Gainer hoarse from talking on the phone almost constantly fourteen hours a day.

From then on it was for money. Never, however, did Gainer stop reassuring his subscribers that they weren’t being double-dealt. He displayed his losers as well as his winners in ads where everyone could verify them, and each week he put his best selection in escrow, so to speak, placed it in a sealed envelope that he left in the care of Price Waterhouse, the same who kept secrets for the Academy Awards. It was a nice piece of ethical showmanship, and effective.

Within a year, Pointwise, Inc. was grossing two thousand a month and the following year, half again as much. Most of it came in as money orders, good as cash.

Too much cash. The crime would have been to report it all, so five hundred and thousand dollar chunks of it went into a bank deposit box.

Still, Gainer needed tax help, some secondary business that would help him keep more of his money by seeming to use up a lot of it.

Several such propositions found him. Most suitable was the one proposed by Ruth Applegate, a woman who had worked part-time with Gainer back in his library days. She was fifty, not attractive, but persistently pleasant, an honest brightness about her. Her squat, waistless figure gave the impression that she might very well be awkward, even clumsy. However, she was surprisingly agile and had quick decisive hands. Applegate, as Gainer called her and she rather enjoyed being called, wasn’t married, never had been, wasn’t looking to be. The one thing that occupied and preoccupied her, that she believed in right down to her bones, was herbs.

Herbs.

Gainer opened a shop for her. The ground floor of a narrow brownstone on East Sixty-second Street just around the corner from Lexington Avenue. The rather small place was decorated in weathered barn-wood and used brick. Not too well-lighted, the atmosphere was cozy, special. One would feel good about having discovered it. Shelf above shelf of antique, glass-lidded jars contained the various herbs and displayed their names.

Some were familiar. Sorrel and coriander, fennel, cumin, saffron and sarsaparilla.

Then there was maidenhair and pennyroyal, stargrass, sweetflag, coltsfoot, devil’s-claw, beggar’s-blanket and witch’s-candle. Wake-robin, deer’s-tongue, snakeroot and even one called Lizzie run-in-the-hedge.

For cooking, for teas, medicaments and cosmetics, but by no means limited to those uses. There seemed to be a herb good for just about every imaginable thing.

Gainer, with Applegate’s approval, gave the shop an easy name:

HERBIES

Announced in handlettering on a swinging wooden sign outside, just left of the entrance.

It was a small, important pleasure for Gainer to go to the shop and breathe. The air, its equivocal fragrance, seemed to reach all the usually obscured portions of his senses. Applegate took his frequent visits as indications of interest or perhaps concern. He reassured her, told her not to worry about overhead and the lack of customers. He was delighted with the shop. Truly was.

Herbs and handicapping.

NORMA and Gainer

Now they sat in Gainer’s top floor apartment on Roosevelt Island. The sun was weakening, could almost be directly looked at. Before long it would turn its cast from amber to orange and like the mere disc the Egyptians believed it was, drop behind the New York skyline.

Norma had her shoes off and feet up on the same chair as Gainer. Their toes were nearly touching. The tomato and Brie sandwiches Norma had made were gone but the plates remained on their laps. Gainer wet his second finger with his tongue and dabbed up some crumbs.

“Still hungry?” Norma asked.

He was.

“Why don’t I call and have the Foodworks pack a basket for you? You know, that place on Third where I got the lemon mousse you liked so much.”

“Don’t bother, I’ll stop somewhere along the way.”

Norma took Gainer’s plate and her own into the kitchen, from which she said, “I love you, Drew.”

He was noticing a sixty-some-footer going down river as white and brassy as could be with a party aboard and gulls tagging along in hopes of leftovers. “I love you too,” he said. Was what he felt in his throat a fragment of little boy crying?

Norma returned to him with a suggestion. She’d go to Zurich, take care of business in a couple of hours and catch the first available flight out. That way she’d be back tomorrow night, late, but back.

Gainer didn’t want her to put herself through that, the rush and strain.

“All right,” she said, “tell you what. I’ll stay overnight in Zurich and fly back Thursday. When I get in I’ll cab straight to LaGuardia for the one o’clock to Edgartown. Air New England has a one o’clock, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.” He’d taken that flight a number of times.

“I’ll be on it,” Norma promised brightly and gave him a hug, a punctuation to end any chance of disappointment.

“Better not,” Gainer told her. “It’s only okay for them to break their rules.” He meant their rule about coming back. A carrier was supposed to stay over for a reasonable length of time, a week at least, so as not to be obviously shuttling. Norma had always abided by it, supporting the appearance that her trips were for L. E. Horton legitimate business. And recently her stays in Zurich had been longer, two weeks to a month.

“They shouldn’t mind this once,” she said. “Besides, I’ll have a good excuse ready if it’s ever brought up.”

But he talked her out of it, told her they’d celebrate twice as much sometime soon, she should just make the carry as she normally would. Please?

She seemed both sorry and relieved.

That settled that, Gainer thought, put it out of mind. Still, there was one thing about it that didn’t quite fit. If the bastards at Number 19 had an unexpected carrier problem, surely there were numerous others on their rolls they could have called on. Even given that she was their star, really, why Norma?