Fortune of Fear Read online

  “If they are good ones,” said Heller.

  “Oh, this is a good one,” said Gobbo reassuringly. “The Scalpello Casino Corporation owns, in all, five beautiful casino-hotels here, including this one. They are only eight to twelve years old. They have the most modern and fanciest fittings. The corporation also owns tons of real estate around them and a quarter of a mile of Boardwalk, two miles of waterfront along the Intracoastal Waterway, a game preserve, a yacht marina and two piers. Sound impressive, kid?”

  “Indeed, it does,” said Heller.

  “You, on the other hand,” said Gobbo, “have several million cash around somewhere. Now, I will make you the proposition. In return for that cash, I will sell you the whole corporation and every share of stock in it.”

  I flinched. Was Heller going to land squarely on his feet in spite of everything?

  “My consigliere,” continued Gobbo, “happens to be right here. He has all the deeds and shares right in that briefcase. Show the kid,” he ordered.

  A scholarly Italian stepped forward, adjusted his glasses and opened his case. He took out a huge stack of deeds and maps and laid them where Heller could see them and still watch the room and started leafing through the documents. That done, he took a bundle of stock out, showed Heller it was all of the authorized issued shares of the Scalpello Casino Corporation of New Jersey and left them in a pile on a chair.

  “Well . . .” said Heller.

  “Good thinking,” said Gobbo. “Show him the contract,” he ordered the consigliere. To Heller, he said, “I had this drawn up just in case you saw it our way and your own, too.”

  The consigliere laid the contract on a table to Heller’s right. He tendered a pen.

  Gobbo said, “You better use your own name, not that of Johnny Cattivo. We happen to know he’s dead and you, I might point out, are not a ghost. When we saw this ID on the floor this afternoon, we checked on the computers. So at supper we had your pocket picked. The man got your real wallet before he tried to lift your gun. Only one man would have Johnny Cattivo’s passport and that would be Jerome Terrance Wister.”

  The gunmen in the room stiffened, took their hands out of their pockets, showed empty, open palms and backed up.

  Gobbo continued, “And so it says, directly on your own passport and driver’s license.” He opened the wallet he had taken out and read it. “Jerome Terrance Wister, the Whiz Kid himself. So maybe you didn’t bribe the croupiers. Maybe you had a system, the first one in history that worked. But however that may be, not even Brinks could get that dough out of Atlantic City tonight or any other time, so you better sign that contract purchasing the whole of Scalpello Corporation. And with your right name.”

  “If you look at that passport you will find that it says,” said Heller, “that Wister is only seventeen. As a minor, the contract would not be binding.”

  “Well, I’m looking at this passport,” said Gobbo, “and I find that Wister had a birthday just three days ago and is eighteen and according to the new laws of New Jersey, that’s of age. It’s legal as legal. Call it a birthday present, and a nice one at that. Five casino-hotels and all those other things. I got a notary right here, ready to witness the signatures. You’re buying the whole thing for ‘one dollar and other legal considerations.’ I’ll even leave the two Gs in your wallet when I give it back so you can pay me the dollar out of your own money and no hanky-panky. It’s not even bought with gambling winnings and all these here can witness it is so. So sign and give me the privilege of wishing you a Happy Birthday.”

  Heller took the pen and signed. Gobbo, his son and the consigliere also signed as the only ones who held shares. The notary notarized everything.

  Then Gobbo put his hand on the contracts, holding them to the desk. “You get these as soon as you produce the money. Don’t be uneasy. We are all just honest businessmen here. And you can even take Don Julio along and blow his guts out if, when you give us the money, we don’t give you the contracts. He’s my own son. How can you lose?”

  Heller touched his collar. He said, “Dear, would it be convenient for you to bring the money to room 201? It is on the second floor. Just look at the numbers and arrows. I am sure the armed men here will give you no trouble.”

  They waited.

  There was the clang of an elevator. Then sounds of something coming down the hall. A gunman there, keeping his hands very empty, gingerly opened the door.

  A big laundry cart rolled in, piled to the top with laundry bags. What appeared to be an old chambermaid stood up. It was the Countess Krak dressed in hotel worker clothes and lines of age drawn on her face.

  “Mother of God,” said one of the men, “I passed her three times with that cart when we were looking on the sixth floor!”

  But Gobbo was not interested in who had brought the cart in. He stood up. He signaled. The consigliere and two others began to lift the bags out. They opened the covering laundry sack and peered in at the money. They turned the open ends, one after the other, to Gobbo.

  He went over and into each sack plunged his hand and verified there was no stuffing but money. He looked at many of the bills to make sure they were not counterfeit.

  Bags were lying all over the floor! Big and fat.

  Gobbo clapped his hands together twice and, with a gesture, had the bags closed and piled back into the laundry truck.

  The capo then, with a gesture, had two men speed the laundry cart out of the room.

  Heller’s gun came up. But Gobbo was walking over with the contracts. Gobbo waited until he heard the elevator door bang shut and the car start down. With an elegant bow he handed the contracts to Heller. Then, with a very imperious gesture, like an orchestra conductor, he began to wave his arms at the men in the room.

  “Happy Birthday,” said Gobbo, in English.

  The others in the room immediately began to sing. They sang:

  Happy Birthday to you,

  Happy Birthday to you,

  Happy Birthday, dear Whiz Kid,

  You’ve been fun to screw.

  Then they all started laughing.

  Gobbo said, “Put your gun away, Whiz Kid. Nobody would think of shooting you, now that you are the sole owner of the Scalpello Casino Corporation and all its vast properties. Three days ago, the New Jersey Gambling Commission told us that at the end of the week all our licenses were going to be canceled for nonpayment of bribes and ordered us to sell the whole thing to anyone else who would buy it.

  “But you see, Whiz Kid, nobody at all would touch any part of this corporation, for at noon tomorrow, by the clock, the Grabbe-Manhattan Bank, that owns all the mortgages, first and second, on all these hotels and property, is going to foreclose and take over everything it owns. They even blocked efforts to file bankruptcy by threatening criminal proceeding on other counts against the directors if we did.

  “All the money that you won, Whiz Kid, went through the computers as legal gambling losses paid out to unknown people. It’s all laundered money and untraceable. So you let us follow the New Jersey Gambling Commission ruling and it’s you that Grabbe-Manhattan will now be foreclosing on! AND you’ve given us all these lovely millions as run money to go someplace nice and retire on. So Happy Birthday, Whiz Kid. The Virgin Mary herself must have sent you. Although, when we spotted you earlier today, I will admit we gave her lots of help.”

  He went over to his desk. He took a letter basket and piled a few personal knickknacks in it. He handed the basket to Don Julio to carry and directed him out the door.

  The rest of the men filed out. Gobbo, the last one at the door, made a sweeping gesture with his hand. “It is all yours, Wister. Every bit of it. But there’s just one more thing. I don’t know why they call you the Whiz Kid. You’re the dumbest (bleepard) in a business deal that I ever met!” He bowed. He was gone.

  Heller stood there for a moment. Then he dived for the phone. He punched the buttons frantically.

  A sleepy voice at the other end said, “Hello.”


  Heller shouted, “IZZY! HELP!”

  PART THIRTY-NINE

  Chapter 1

  The next day I lay in bed, overtaken by uncontrollable bursts of chuckling. I had been up all night due to time differences between Turkey and Atlantic City, and would have slept all morning in any event. But every time I thought of getting up after that, I would go into spasms of guffaws and would have to lie back.

  Clever, clever Gobbo Piegare! What a friend I had in him! Between spasms of glee, I pondered the possibility of awarding him in some way: maybe send him a stuffed blue jay, that ace of robbers, mounted on a gold base. Or maybe get Senator Twiddle to put him up for the Congressional Medal of Honor or get Rockecenter’s attorney Bury to nominate Piegare for the Nobel Prize as hit man of the year.

  Gobbo Piegare was an absolute master. If and when Lombar Hisst took over Earth, that stellar crook should be a candidate for Earth Apparatus staff.

  At length, my stomach hurting with laughter, I called for breakfast and shortly began to laugh still more to see that the waiter now had a purple cheek and Karagoz wore two black eyes. Melahat, the housekeeper, looking like she’d been raped, stood in the door, wringing her hands and hoping that the kahve was just the right temperature. Musef and Torgut were doing their job properly. Oh, it was a lovely day. Cold and bitter outside but nice and gleeful within.

  About four o’clock, I went into my secret room and uncovered the viewers. I sat down to enjoy any further discomfiture of Heller and Krak.

  It was midmorning in Atlantic City. They were in bed in a palatial bedroom. The bed had a canopy of white gauze and bows. It must be the bridal suite. The furnishings were all decorated with flowers and were very posh.

  Heller got up and went into the ornate sitting room. He pulled a drape cord and disclosed a big picture window. The room was evidently high up and the window overlooked a vast expanse of the cold, gray Atlantic Ocean. He looked at the slow and sullen swells rolling in upon deserted and forlorn amusement piers. There were several wrecks on the beach and black oily smoke drifting around.

  He went back into the bedroom and opened the drapes there, disclosing a stretch of desolate Boardwalk, deserted except for a TV crew that was shooting something.

  Krak was sitting on the side of the bed, half dressed, ruefully regarding the scars on the side of her white Moroccan boot, probably caused by her slide down the laundry chute. She looked up. “They certainly don’t know how to make animals grow proper hides.” She threw it down and went into the bathroom and spin brushed her teeth.

  With her mouth full of foam, she said, “Jettero, who is this ‘Whiz Kid’ they are talking about?”

  Heller was picking through the suitcase. He sighed. He said, “He’s the dumbest (bleepard) in a business deal that anybody ever met—begging your pardon, miss. You wouldn’t want to know him.”

  She rinsed out her mouth and came back into the bedroom. “Will all this help us to get home?” she asked.

  “We’ll be lucky if we don’t get booted off this planet and kicked the whole twenty-two light-years back home.”

  She went into a slight shock. She stood there, staring at him. “Oh, dear,” she said. “And return as failures?”

  I knew what she was thinking about: Those two forged “Royal Proclamations,” which she’d given her word to keep from Heller, would not be valid if the mission failed. He would still be put onto dangerous assignments, she thought, and, as she was a nonperson, they could not get married.

  “Oh, dear,” she said again. She began to get dressed. Heller was still poking into the suitcase, looking glum. The Countess Krak got into her chinchilla coat, put on her white fur hat and picked up her pocketbook. At the door, she stopped and called back, “I’m going to see Mamie Boomp. We have a lot to talk about. See you later, dear.” She left.

  Well, one thing I didn’t want to hear more about was fashions, fashions, fashions and clothes, clothes, clothes. What the homosexual designers were proclaiming would be spring styles was my idea of pure static. I didn’t want to spoil my euphoria. I turned off her viewer. Heller’s depression was the source of my extreme well-being.

  He really understood he had plunged himself to ruin. The neat gray flannel suit and silk shirt were a long way from how he felt, apparently. He dug, out of the bottom of the grip, a suit of workman’s denim. They were the style for beachwear and maybe he had thought they’d have some time on the sand, as he looked at the cold gray sea from time to time.

  Slowly, he began to get dressed. The most recent denim men’s styles required the material be torn, patched and grease-stained like true workmen’s clothing. And although he might now be dressed in the beachwear height of fashion, my, didn’t he appear a ragged wreck as he looked at himself in the mirror!

  Then he sat for a long, long time, staring out the window at the cold gray sea. What a treat for my eyes! Oh, how the mighty had fallen! He not only hadn’t helped their precarious situation in New York, he had become the proud possessor of incalculable sums of utter ruin. I enjoyed it and enjoyed it. He was not only slowed down, he was going backwards!

  He looked at his watch, at last. It registered nearly noon, Eastern Standard Time. I remembered that noon was the stated time of foreclosure. He looked at the door. Then he looked at the phone. I realized that he had been waiting around for news from Izzy.

  He got up and went to the phone. He picked it up. No dial tone. Dead. He pushed some buttons for an outside line. Still dead.

  Aha! I knew what had happened. The phones had been shut off by the phone company! A surge of pleasure raced through me.

  Heller put it back on the cradle. Then he looked at the bathroom. The lights there had been on a little earlier. He went in and threw the switch. He threw another switch. Nothing happened. No lights!

  Oh, wonderful! The light company had shut off the lights!

  He turned on a water tap. Nothing happened! Oho, I gloated. The water company had shut the water off!

  He went over to a radiator and felt it. Evidently it was ice-cold. The furnaces were off!

  He was in a super-posh Atlantic City high-rise hotel-casino. He was, in fact, the proprietor. And all the utilities were shut down tight!

  I gloated. Given time, even the pipes would freeze!

  Glory, glory! Fate was driving misfortune in with a sledgehammer!

  He began to pace slowly back and forth, occasionally glancing at his watch and then at the door. Once he said, “Izzy, where are you?!”

  Twelve-thirty came. The room must be getting cold, for he threw his trench coat over his shoulders.

  He continued to pace. He continued to glance at his watch. Oh, I enjoyed every second of it!

  One o’clock came. The Countess had not come back. No slightest sign of Izzy. Heller sank down in a chair. “Izzy, you have deserted me and I don’t blame you one bit.”

  He saw some smoke rising from down the Boardwalk, quite a distance away. He went to the window. He couldn’t see it very well. Some sort of a burning vehicle. There was smoke drifting also from the direction of the beach. He didn’t bother to go into the sitting room and look. I guessed that it might be rioting and looting.

  One-ten. A knock on the door.

  Heller raced across and opened it.

  A very mournful Izzy stood there. He looked even shabbier than usual. The Salvation Army Good Will overcoat was faded and shiny with wear. His briefcase was a mottle of scuffs with paper tears showing through. And he looked far sadder and more slumped than usual, a feat which was nearly impossible. Heller let him in.

  “Oh, Mr. Jet,” said Izzy. “I told you not to do anything foolish. I have never heard of such a catastrophe in the whole history of business. I have told you and told you to keep your name off corporations. Now you’re in it up to your skull top. You should leave business to me.”

  Heller sank into a chair and put his head in his hands. “I know that now.”

  “You should have known it yesterday. Business is one of the most treach
erous tools of Fate. But it is my fault. I saw a gleam in your eye and, when you have it, you always go out and get people to shoot at you. And now they’ve used submachine guns, cannons and even a hydrogen bomb. Oy, what rubble and wreckage!”

  Heller said, miserably, “I know. I know. What is the state of affairs now?”

  Izzy said, “There is a little bit of nonpessimistic news which I don’t trust and bad news which is reliable. So I will give you the bad news first.”

  “Probably,” said Heller, “the good news is that they will feed me breakfast before they exterminate me. So go ahead.”

  “You should have been suspicious when they let you win so much for so long. In order to pay the bets you were placing with such wild abandon, they dragged down every casino’s cash, every bank account the corporation had. They even wired money in from Las Vegas. They also collected in advance from all hotel guests. They exhausted every possible source of cash they could lay their hands on so it would flow back to them through you, laundered as corporation losses.

  “The corporation cash-liquidity picture is minus millions and millions. And it also has to honor the IOU markers issued like an avalanche at the end of the night, and so we come to the nasty subject of debt.

  “Money they should have paid for utilities—phone, lights, water—for months has been going into their pockets. So the service was cut off today on all these, and to it is added heating oil. It even includes gasoline charge accounts for the extensive corporation rolling stock.

  “All staff of all the corporation’s numerous businesses are unpaid and have been for some time. The government IRS withholding tax is also missing.

  “The money which went into the staff pension funds was invested in businesses which mysteriously failed, and so the pension fund has to be made up.

  “All state and local taxes, including sales tax, are owing for the past year.

  “Most of the hotel equipment is on time-payment contracts and those companies want to take the equipment back, even the furnaces.