Chapter 16
I entered the Aphrodite through the wine cellar above the joint, gave the guard the password—Lepanto—and slipped past. A narrow staircase led me down, the air getting warmer with each step. At the bottom, red curtains parted
to reveal the cellar-turned-casino.
The space unfolded in tiers, a multilevel room draped in deep carpets. Though I could see its full layout from where I stood,
it still felt deep enough to disappear in. Poker tables, gilded slot machines, and game setups crowded the floor in a riot
of color and movement, filling every inch of the place.
Women in rompers sat at bars smoking from sticks, some swinging their hips to the ragtime blues that blasted through the Aphrodite.
Men in suits and hats came to flirt with them. Smoke blurred all their faces, so they appeared and then dissipated.
Everyone is Italian, I realized, careful not to let my nerves throw me off my mission.
Some people looked at me funny as I entered the room because a well-dressed Negro was a remarkable sight. I was wearing a white shirt from Arrow, slacks from Dickies, and a gold chain from Bailey, Banks, and Biddle. They were anything but cheap, altogether or separate.
I settled on a stool by an empty poker table, where I could people watch in obscurity. Daisy arrived from a different entrance,
a vision in shimmering gold and green, sideways bangs curling out of a black hat. She barely looked at the men who watched
her walk in—she headed straight for the bar while absorbing their attention.
A voice erupted behind me. “You some kinda pusher?” A drunk Italian with a big round head was leaning off his chair, holding
out his empty glass.
Already? I pulled a flask filled with Daisy’s stash of liquor from my jacket, filled his glass to the top, and told him, “15 cents.”
The man slapped some coins in my hand. “My brotha! Keep the change!”
Well, at least there’s money to be made here!
I tucked away my flask and teased my suspenders at the bottom to adjust them. They were too tight and then too loose! My clothes
did not fit as well as the older people’s did.
Jay entered the casino from where I came, in a glittering black shirt and white slacks, and walked over to a row of slot machines.
He put a nickel in a slot and pulled the handle. I watched as his eyes lit up at the patterns in the window.
Now we had all made it inside, while Zihan waited outside for us. He’d offered to be our lookout and getaway driver.
I approached Jay as he pressed the glowing buttons. I could tell he was hoping for a line of matching symbols to appear.
I took a padded stool beside him. “Any luck yet?”
“It’s been thirty seconds,” he said. “The chances we find Pierre that quickly are slim to none. Any one of these guys could
be him.”
“I meant with the machine.”
“Oh. Ha! Not yet. I’m looking for a line of cherries.”
I surveyed the room until my eyes landed on a rolling catering cabinet. Its attendant was working something out on the back
of the machine, and it gave me a mischievous idea.
“Watch this,” I said.
I crouched down and slipped through the doors of the cabinet. I reached out and carefully unhooked a key from his waist and
then returned to the slot machine and used it to pop the plating off it. I pulled the lever that would release the back door
and lifted the back panel upward, finding the stack of nickels that controlled everything. Then I pumped the lever to dispense
the coins into my hand.
“Nick!” Jay exclaimed, in a loud whisper. “You can’t do it that way.”
“Why not?” I said, laughing. “You get the money faster.”
“It’s not about the money.” He tried to reattach the back of the machine. “It’s about the fun of playing, hoping you get a
match. You take the fun out when you up and steal all the goods! Now reattach that thing and return the key before they catch
us.”
I dumped the nickels in my pocket and reapplied the backing.
“Okay.” Jay returned to the front of the machine. He pulled that lever, hoping for the best, and then yelled, “Dammit!” when the symbols didn’t line up.
“See—it’s all a waste of time!”
“Well, what else is there to do?” He dropped his hands and looked at me.
I pulled him away from his game and weaved through the people until I saw the sign for a bathroom. I had to be somewhere private
with him, only for a moment, so I pulled him into the bathroom and closed the door behind us. We stood chest to chest between
the narrow walls.
I grabbed the chain glinting around his neck. “What is this? Silver?”
“Nickel-plated.” Jay unbuttoned his shirt some to reveal a locket with a picture of his mom inside. “Why did you drag me in
here?”
I struggled to stay focused on his eyes, but it was hard. He was doing this on purpose—I was sure of it.
“Because I don’t like Italian casinos,” I said. “We’re the only Negroes—haven’t you noticed? There’s weird energy from these
people. Who knows if we’ll even find the guy, or what he even looks like? A lot of those Italians got pistols hanging off
their waists tonight too. If we’re found out, we’re goners.”
“You brought that staff, didn’t you?”
I had. Even though it was retractable, I could feel the cold rod in my sock.
“You have trouble having fun, Nick,” Jay said. “Why don’t you relax a bit?”
“I don’t have trouble with anything. Back off, Jay.” But I thought about what he said. Was I someone who struggled to relax? Perhaps I was. He was getting to know me quite well.
We were inches apart now. I caught the scent from his neck, and it smelled like a bar of eucalyptus soap.
“Let’s go back to the slots.” Jay took my hand as if shaking it backward and pulled me from the bathroom.
Once we were outside, he instantly let go. Of course he did. He started playing the slots again, and I left him there to go
up to the balcony, where I could survey the room for Pierre.
Was he that man with the bulbous nose who laughed loudly every two minutes? Or was he someone quieter and more discreet?
From afar, I saw Daisy lean over a casino roulette wheel, whispering things to a smiling tan man she’d just met. Was that
Pierre? If we were ever going to locate the guy, she’d be first to find him what with her magnetic personality and captivating
beauty.
A security man came up to me, blocking my view. “Hey, big guy. Who’s your boss?”
“Um . . . Mister . . .” I scanned the room, landing on a blinking concessions sign, offering snacks. “Mr. Pretzel . . . ton?”
I said. “Mr. Pretzelton?”
“Who the hell’s Mr. Pretzelton?”
“He’s my boss,” I said, as if it should be obvious.
The man held out a meaty hand. “Where’s your ticket? Ain’t no such thing as a Mr. Pretzelton. You ain’t part of Uptown Crew.”
“Ticket? My boss is friendly with those guys, sir. See, it’s all about camaraderie.”
“Ticket?”
“And friendship!” How long could I bull my way through this encounter?
I looked at Jay to signal that it was time to find Pierre now, but he was focused on the machine. Daisy unwrapped her arm from around a man and saw from my eyes that we were in trouble.
“I’ll have to ask my friend there,” I told the big guy.
When I tried to walk past him, he grabbed my elbow. “Not so fast.”
Clapping my hands around my mouth, I screamed, “Pierre!”
That was the loudest I’d ever been!
Then I surveyed the room. Most people were looking to see who had screamed, but one man’s eyes stayed on me—in confusion and
then concern. A man in a leather jacket with a greyhound at his side.
I slipped out of the man’s grip and ran while Daisy rushed to grab Pierre. Jay looked around like he was lost. I pulled a
mask from under my shirt over my face and jumped over the balcony, landing on the edge of a table. It flipped, and cards and
chips flew everywhere.
I was on the floor with an ache in my back, a collection of chips on my lap. The lights of the ceiling created a glare around
the people whose poker game I’d bombed, but I could tell from the chaos around me that they were not happy.
Some of the people fled, but one man brought a cane down on me to whack me in the head. A shoe flew out of nowhere, catching
the stick in the crook of its high heel.
It was Daisy—she’d dived through the crowd to stop the swing before hitting me. With only half a second to pull the retractable staff from my boot and extend it, I swung upward, smashing it into the man’s arm, so Daisy could recover.
She reached through the slit of her dress to pull out her knife, but a man trained a pistol at her. I couldn’t get up fast
enough to stop him should he shoot her! All I could do was pull a coin from the pocket of my shirt and flip it into the air
to distract the gunman. By some miracle, the man was so stupid, so money-obsessed, that he let his eyes follow the coin through
its upward tumbles.
As he watched the quarter flip between Lady Liberty and the bald eagle, I sprung forward, tucked backward into his body, and
clock-hand spun him in a different direction. His finger jerked against the trigger, but the bullet went into the shoulder
of one of his own boys.
The shot man screamed and tipped over in his chair. Before I could even process that, Daisy used the tipped table like a launchpad
and moved with a speed and precision I’d never imagined she possessed. Using the table for leverage, she jumped the shooter
and wrapped her legs around his neck. I spun away from him, and she twist-flipped him into a face plant.
Another table was overturned by the man’s feet, flinging a shot glass into a pillar. Glass rained over the both of us as Daisy
recovered to one knee, knife still in hand. She wrenched the gun from his hand and then aimed it in a circle at the goons,
who’d begun to close in.
“Back up,” she demanded, causing all the men to back away with their hands up.
I caught sight of Jay chasing Pierre and his dog from the venue—they both escaped through the emergency exit in the alley.
And then, the room burst into even more chaos as cops flooded in. Our luck would have it that tonight was the night that they