The Music of Chance by Paul Auster Read Free Book Online

away, but I don’t get three feet before another one of those lawyers grabs hold of me and pins my arms behind my back. I try to break away from him, but before I can get my arms free, big George is in front of me again and letting me have it in the stomach. It was awful, man, a real Punch-and-Judy show, a bloodbath in living color. Every time I broke away, another one of them wouldcatch me. Gil was the only one who wasn’t part of it, but there wasn’t much he could do against the four others. They kept working me over. For a moment there I thought they were going to kill me, but after a while they started to run out of gas. Those turds were strong, but they didn’t have much stamina, and I finally squirmed loose and made it to the door. A couple of them went after me, but there was no way I was going to let them catch me again. I tore ass out of there and headed for the woods, running for all I was worth. If you hadn’t picked me up, I’d probably still be running now.”
    Pozzi sighed with disgust, as if to expel the whole miserable episode from his mind. “At least there’s no permanent damage,” he continued. “The old bones will mend, but I can’t say I’m too thrilled about losing the money. It couldn’t have come at a worse time. I had big plans for that little bundle, and now I’m wiped out, now I have to start all over again. Shit. You play fair and square, you win, and you wind up losing anyway. There’s no justice. Day after tomorrow, I was supposed to be in one of the biggest games of my life, and now it’s not going to happen. Ain’t a fucking chance in hell I can raise the kind of money I need by then. The only games I know about this weekend are nickel-and-dime stuff, a total washout. Even if I got lucky, I couldn’t earn more than a couple of grand. And that’s probably stretching it.”
    It was this last statement that finally induced Nashe to open his mouth. A small idea had flickered through him, and by the time the words came to his lips, he was already struggling to keep his voice under control. The entire process couldn’t have taken longer than a second or two, but that was enough to change everything, to send him hurtling over the edge of a cliff. “How much money do you need for this game?” he asked.
    “Nothing under ten thousand,” Pozzi said. “And that’s rock bottom. I couldn’t walk in with a penny less than that.”
    “Sounds like an expensive proposition.”
    “It was the chance of a lifetime, pal. A goddamn invitation to Fort Knox.”
    “If you’d won, maybe. But the fact is you could have lost. There’s always that risk, isn’t there?”
    “Sure there’s a risk. We’re talking poker here, that’s the name of the game. But there’s no way I could have lost. I’ve already played with those clowns once. It would have been a piece of cake.”
    “How much were you expecting to win?”
    “A ton. A whole fucking ton.”
    “Give me a rough estimate. A ballpark figure.”
    “I don’t know. Thirty or forty thousand, it’s hard to guess. Maybe fifty.”
    “That’s a lot of money. A lot more than your friends were playing for last night.”
    “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. These guys are millionaires. And they don’t know the first thing about cards. I mean, they’re ignoramuses, those two. You sit down with them, and it’s like playing with Laurel and Hardy.”
    “Laurel and Hardy?”
    “That’s what I call them, Laurel and Hardy. One’s fat and the other’s thin, just like old Stan and Ollie. They’re genuine pea-brains, my friend, a pair of born chumps.”
    “You sound awfully sure of yourself. How do you know they’re not a couple of hustlers?”
    “Because I checked them out. Six or seven years ago, they shared a ticket in the Pennsylvania state lottery and won twenty-seven million dollars. It was one of the biggest payoffs of all time. Guys with that kind of dough aren’t going to bother hustling a small-time operator like