THIRTY-FOUR

Early in the afternoon of the twenty-ninth a blue norther howled in off the Panhandle plains and the temperature dropped thirty-one degrees in nineteen minutes. Large flakes of snow whirled and eddied through the air as we drove to the hotel. Della sat at the wheel wrapped snugly in her mink with the car’s heater turned on high. When I kissed her good-bye and stepped out onto the pavement I was hit by a north wind that felt like razors against my face. I stood shivering on the sidewalk and watched with a mixture of sadness and elation as the little Ford disappeared into traffic. When I could see its tail lights no more, I turned and pushed my way through the revolving door. As soon as I stepped into the Plainsman Suite and looked at the card table, I felt a wave of revulsion rise in me, and I knew in that instant that for the first time in my life I was tired of poker. And I understood something about the nature of the game I’d never seen before: it was the commonplace become unbearable, the mundane raised to a fever pitch and turned into a lifelong obsession. I knew then as I stood there amid the familiar rustle of cards and clatter of chips that no matter what else happened that night, the game would no longer have its old allure for me.

Will Scoggins was already there and dressed to the nines in a three-piece suit of charcoal gray. He’d had the sense to take off his hat—something he hadn’t done in my office the day he’d arrested me—and his hog-leg .44 was nowhere to be seen. There wasn’t a bulge under his arm either, which caused me to think that if he was armed he carried no more than a little ladies’ pocket automatic in one of his pockets. Probably pear handled and nickel plated, too. He gave me a polite nod and a wary handshake, but I was as courteous to him as I was to everyone else.

Robillard was playing when I came in the room. When he finished the hand he rose from his chair and approached me with a false smile on his face. “Time for our little match, it seems,” he said, his eyes never leaving mine.

“Yes, it’s time,” I replied with more cheer than I felt.

The management had sent up a bridge table for us. Made of heavy oak, it was covered with felt like the poker table, though it was somewhat smaller. It sat to one side of the room, behind the sofa, flanked by two comfortable-looking chairs.

“Why don’t you break open a pack of cards,” I told him. “I want to get a drink.”

He nodded and walked over to the table. I bought ten thousand dollars’ worth of chips, then did something I’d never done before while gambling. I asked the porter to mix me a scotch and soda. A stack of clean ashtrays sat on the bar beside the glasses and I took one. At the table I unwrapped one of my Coronas and carefully touched a wooden kitchen match to its end.

“Table stakes, dealer’s choice, pot limit … How does that sound to you?” Robillard asked.

“Why don’t we just play five-card stud, Mr. Robillard? That’s all either of us ever deals anyway.”

He nodded. “That suits me fine.” He noticed my scotch. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you drink up here before,” he commented as he fanned the cards out on the table. “Or smoke, either.”

“This is a night of firsts, Mr. Robillard. And lasts.”

I drew a three to his jack and he had the deal. As he shuffled the cards he said, “Lasts? Why, don’t let me run you out of the game, young man.”

I smiled at him calmly. “Hardly. Besides, I seem to be the one who’s a little ahead overall.”

“Yes, so it seems. But we’ll just have to do something about that, won’t we?” he said, and promptly relieved me of $1,600 with a natural straight against three aces.

That night it was not necessary for me to win. I merely had to stay in the game and kill time. But my natural sense of competitiveness and my need to embellish pushed me to play aggressively and slam him whenever I could. Twice I bet heavily with large pairs showing before the fourth card and forced him to fold when he was working on a flush. I was a few hundred dollars ahead sometime after nine o’clock when we both rose from the table to stretch our legs and freshen our drinks. I made myself a second scotch, this one stronger than the first. As I turned away from the bar I felt a hand on my elbow. “How’s it going?” Wilburn Rasco asked.

“Well enough. I’m a little ahead at the moment.”

“I never liked these one-on-one matches, and I wish they weren’t allowed.” He sighed. “But back in the ’20s old man Weilbach’s son started them, and they’ve been a tradition ever since. Every now and then a couple of fellows will square off, but it almost always leads to hard feelings. Don’t take it too seriously.”

“I won’t,” I said, regretting that he was there. He was the one regular player in the game that I had come to truly respect. He stood to lose financially that night, and he would doubtlessly suffer considerable embarrassment from the publicity. But there was nothing that could be done about it.

Back at the table Robillard and I played for a while without really talking, neither of us drawing the cards to engage the other in an interesting hand. The porter came by, and I asked him to replenish my drink. As soon as he returned Robillard picked up the cards and gave them a few quick shuffles, then laid them on the table for me to cut. I ignored the deck and took a sip from my scotch. “You know, it’s an odd coincidence that we were talking about Germany the other night,” I said. “Not long afterward somebody told me that you had been there, but I didn’t believe it because you never mentioned it while we were on the subject.”

His body stiffened for a moment, then relaxed. “Actually, I was in Germany for just a few days back in 1936,” he said smoothly. “With a delegation from the American Bankers’ Association.”

“And how long have you been a banker?” I asked smoothly.

“I’ve been chairman of the board at Mercantile Bank for two decades, and back then I was forced to take over its day-to-day operation for a few years. Just as I was again about six months ago.”

“So you’re running the bank now?” I asked.

“Only until after the first of the year. We hope to have a new president hired by then.”

“Why did the banking association send a delegation to Germany?”

“In those days the German banking system was quite different from ours. Their banks were strictly commercial banks, and almost all of them were located in the larger cities. Their government was interested in the possibility of setting up a number of banks in smaller towns to do consumer lending, and they wanted to get some ideas from us American bankers.”

“I see,” I said, and looked down at my wristwatch. It was a few minutes before ten. “When we talked before I didn’t tell you the whole story about Heydrich. At the time the offer was made to me I wanted to take it.”

“Really? But I thought you said—”

“Oh, I had no intention of becoming a turncoat. What I really wanted was to infiltrate the German sabotage network here in this country. My superiors at the State Department vetoed the idea, of course, and I’ve always thought it was a great opportunity lost. But later on I had a chance to do a little work in that area, and it was amazing the things I learned.”

“I’m sure,” he replied dryly.

I reached down and cut the cards and pushed them across to him. “Yes, those were heady days,” I said. My voice sounded dreamy and detached in my own ears, as though it was coming from someone else, or from a radio speaker far away. I took a long pull from my scotch and unwrapped another cigar before I continued. “Mosley’s fascists were marching in England, and over here we had William Dudley Pelly and his Silver Shirts and the German-American Bund. Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee were riding high, determined to keep us out of the war that everybody knew was coming, and all of them were being financed directly by the German intelligence apparatus.”

“Is that right?”

I nodded and chattered on. “Oh yes. They had a very elaborate system. The money came from Argentina and other South American countries, and was funneled directly to banks right here in the States. In almost every case they were state banks that were free of federal regulation and scrutiny, banks where it was easier for substantial sums of money to materialize and then disappear once again, leaving few traces behind.”

“Fascinating,” he murmured in his silky voice. At that moment he knew that I knew, but he thought there was nothing I could do about it.

“Yes, isn’t it?” I asked with a smile as smooth as his voice. I reached over and cut the deck and the game went on.

It was not the famous Dead Man’s Hand that was showing when the two men burst into the room just after ten. Instead, after the third card was dealt each of us held a pair of nines on top, and I had just raised my eyes to smile ironically across at Robillard when the door swung violently open. The first thing I saw was the off-duty deputy who’d been posted outside to guard the door. He came flying headfirst into the room propelled by a hard kick in the rump. The next thing I noticed was a sawed-off pump shotgun, and it was pointed directly at my head.

They were both big men, but one was much larger than the other. Both were dressed in overcoats, Shriners’ fezzes, and Santa Claus masks, and both knew their business. The first order of that business was to cow and intimidate everyone present through the immediate and unexpected application of violence. As soon as they were in the room the larger of the two clubbed the deputy nearly senseless with the butt of his shotgun. Then he turned and gave the porter a casual backhand slap that put him on the floor beside the guard. Reaching down to pull the guard’s gun from its holster, he said, “Don’t neither one of you hired hands give me no trouble. They don’t pay you enough to die for them.” Then he pointed the muzzle of his shotgun right at Will Scoggins’s chest and said, “Hi, Sheriff! You’re not packing heat tonight, are you?”

Scoggins hesitated. Manlow Rhodes had been right about the man being a coward; I believe he was the most frightened person in the room. He’d gone deathly pale and it wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d fainted.

“I said are you packing?” the big man repeated.

Scoggins managed a nod. The big man jerked his head at his companion, who quickly stepped over to give the sheriff a quick frisk. He reached his hand in Scoggins’s coat pocket and pulled out a small automatic.

Then the big man turned to look at Robillard and me. “On your feet, you two,” he growled.

Apparently I didn’t move fast enough for him. He jerked me the rest of the way up by the collar of my coat, then gave me a good belt in the mouth that split my bottom lip and chipped a front tooth. I started to raise my hand to my face and he said, “Keep still. You’re not hurt bad.”

By this time his partner had closed the door and jerked the phone cord out of the wall. Then he leveled a silenced automatic pistol at the men sitting at the poker table. The larger intruder quickly checked the bedrooms and emerged from the last one dragging a half-naked and screeching blonde by the hair. He slapped her twice and threw her on the sofa between Miss Teeny-Tunes and a dark-haired girl who was there for the first time that evening. “Shut up or I’ll cut your goddamned throat,” he growled at her.

He pushed Robillard and me roughly over to the other end of the room beside the poker table. “Any of the rest of you got a gun?” he asked. “Better tell me now because if I find one later I’ll kill whoever’s holding it.”

I nodded and pulled my coat open where he could see my Colt. The rest shook their heads. He pulled the little auto from its holster, then went over to the valise and pulled out the two drawers of chips and slung them aside. I guessed at the time that there was probably about a hundred thousand dollars in the deep cash drawer, but he wanted more. He pointed to the valise, and said, “Wallets and money clips in this suitcase. Right now, one at a time. Turn your pants pockets inside out. If I don’t see enough money go in here, I may decide to search everybody, and I’ll kill any man I find holding out.”

We filed by one at a time and dropped our cash into the yawning black mouth of the case.

“Any more?” the larger man asked.

We all shook our heads.

“All right,” the big man said. “Listen and listen careful. We’re gonna take one man with us as a hostage just to keep you worthless bastards honest. Don’t nobody go out that door for one hour. And don’t try to fix the phone and call nobody. If an hour passes and we haven’t been bothered by the cops, we’ll turn the hostage loose on the road. But if the red lights hit us before then, he’s going to die. Period. Remember … One hour.”

He motioned to his partner with a jerk of the head. “Get somebody.”

The smaller hood came over and poked me with his pistol. “Grab your coat, asshole,” he growled.

While I quickly pulled on my overcoat, the big man said to Scoggins, “Don’t get any ideas about jumping the gun on the time. If you do you’ll be killing this man.”

“The sheriff is going to sit here like a good boy,” Wilburn Rasco said, his voice steady and seemingly free of fear.

“Damn right he will,” Van Horn said.

The larger man clipped a heavy cord that hung around his neck to an eyelet in the shotgun’s stock. Then he slid the shotgun under his overcoat and let it dangle there. Buttoning the coat over the gun, he said to me, “Mr. Man, we’re gonna walk out of here like we own the damn place. We’re going down the stairs and through the back door, and if you make one peep you may as well order your coffin because you’re gonna be dead. Do you understand?”

I gave him a jerky nod, and the smaller robber prodded me toward the door. Just before we left the big hood turned back to the room, and said, “You better do what we say or your friend is deader than hell.” Then he picked up the valise and opened the door.

“You’ll get your hour,” Simon Van Horn said. “I promise you that.”

“We better,” he hissed, and then we were gone.