Lay the Favorite (24 page)

Wearing little more than a sheer sarong and wooden banana earrings, Maritza approached our table. Up close, moonlight accentuated the shine of her hair and the whites of her big brown eyes. By midnight, Bernard had paid off Maritza’s boss and freed her of the club’s ninety-day contract. Passing the travel-sized English-to-Spanish dictionary from hand to hand, Bernard gazed into Maritza’s eyes as though he relied on them to breathe.

Three days later, Bernard resurfaced. Wearing inside-out pajama bottoms and his oversized, off-the-shoulder T-shirt, he looked another twenty pounds thinner, unshaven, and disoriented.

“Bernard. We’ve been worried about you,” I said.

Though Curaçao is a Dutch colony, tulips and tolerance it is not. If anyone at ASAP had picked up a copy of the
Vigilante
that weekend, they would’ve seen a front-page colored picture of a young black man, lying sideways in a weed-choked alley, the seat of his jeans blood-soaked from a gunshot wound to his sex organs. He’d been cheating with a girl and her boyfriend shot him in the balls.

“From now on,” I said, “you call.”

“I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.” His speech was sluggish. “I’m in love. Buried in love! Why do we have so much on the Expos run line?”

“Because when you’re not here everything goes to shit,” I said, and handed him the activity reports. “We lost eighty-eight thousand dollars on the early games. We got middled on everything. Sorry.”

Uninterested, he set aside the report. “Beth, I’m in trouble. I look at Maritza, I smell her hair, and all I can think is I want her to have my baby. Baby Bernards. All over the island!”

Bernard’s obsessional love spread through the office like an epidemic. Hardly a day passed without some heavyhearted soul searching the Internet for advice on postnuptial agreements or
reverse vasectomies. They took chances on new wardrobes, bought cologne, and attempted exercise. Computer passwords changed from Lombardi, Soriano, and Barkley to Vivianna, Magdalena, and Beatrice. I didn’t speak up until talk turned to a serious discussion on polygamy.

“You guys. Can’t you just enjoy these experiences? Can’t you just appreciate your dirty secrets and be happy? Do you really have to go straight for the full-fledged double life?”

“Yes,” they said unanimously.

Divorce was too expensive, not to mention risky. “Christ, Beth,” they said, annoyed by my naïveté. “Who do you think out there actually
calls
the friggin’ FBI hotline?”

Ex-wives, that’s who.

Days later, during a typically busy shift, a clerk called to me from across the room. “Betty?” she said. “The lady on my phone is very
opset
and cryeeng. I do not understand what she says. May I transfer her to you?”

Perplexed, Bernard looked at me. Save for the ringing telephones the room fell silent. Then, speaking on behalf of every man in the office came a quiet, defeated voice.
Oh my God. It’s my wife
.

My line flashed.

“Sports,” I answered.

A sad female with a high voice began to cry and I tried calming her. The guys couldn’t stand the suspense. Their whispers flew at me.

Beth! Say bad connection and hang up. Beth!

No matter what, I’m not here
.

Beth! “He had to fly to Santo Domingo. Big banking emergency.” Say it!

I held up my hand to shush them.

“I’m just not sure what you’re asking me,” I said to the woman. “What is it you want me to do?”

I pressed mute and looked up to a sea of watery, pleading eyes.

“It’s a customer’s wife,” I said. “She says her husband has a gambling problem and wants us to shut down his account.”

Oxygen returned to the room. Worried mouths eased into sly little
smiles. Sheep, also known as Bah-Bah, the most affable member of the Italian crew, crossed himself and snatched the phone from my hand.

“Hello? This is sports, how ya doin’?” he said. “Go ahead and gimme your husband’s name.”

Bah-Bah pulled up the customer’s account and I leaned in closer to see the balance. The husband had placed so many bets it took us minutes to scroll through his wagering history. Ending balance: minus thirty-six thousand dollars, for the month.

“Lady, lady. Calm down! I’m lookin’ at his account right now. Your husband doesn’t have a gambling problem, all right? He’s got a losing problem.”

Bah-Bah continued to scroll. “Oh my God, is he phenomenal at picking losers! Three months without hitting one. The odds of that are astronomical!”

The rest of the Italian crew rushed over to look at the husband’s account. Pointing in horror to specific wagers on the screen, they gasped and chuckled and covered their eyes. This kind of degenerate gambling was unbearable to witness.

“Lady, it’s an uncanny sense to be wrong. It’s the same sense as being right. You understand that? He doesn’t have a problem, all right? It’ll turn around for him. You watch. Odds are in his favor. Show him some support. Thank you for calling ASAP.”

The men stayed gathered around Bah-Bah and me, discussing the situation’s true moral dilemma: should they inform the husband—the good-natured Lakers fan who always said please and thank you when placing a bet—that his snoopy, suspicious wife was on to his gambling? They should do him a favor, they agreed, and warn him to cover his tracks.

Looking up, I found myself centered in a huddle of heavy, oily manliness. The air grew thick with body odor and hair tonic and stale breath. They belched and blew into the face of whoever was standing beside them. For the most part, I liked these guys. I enjoyed watching them work and listening to the dramatic scope of lies they invented to explain away odd credit-card purchases and abrupt changes of banking passwords. I felt for them as they suffered
through the guilt triggered by family visits, arranged by their loving, adoring wives so the kids could see how hard Daddy worked.

But I missed the company of women.

So when the local brothel temporarily shut its doors, I welcomed a few of the girls into our home. My afternoon schedule spun from the plagued, paranoid interior of ASAP to sunbathing beside Vivianna, Magdalena, and Beatrice. Like the guys at the office, they spent an awful lot of time concocting lies. Parents, brothers, and husbands believed they were working at a Starbucks in Florida. It was the lie all the girls from their village used when they disappeared on a ninety-day visa to prostitute themselves through the Caribbean. At night, they lay in beds, sweaty and soft beneath the men I worked with. Beneath the beds, their stuffed duffel bags gathered dust until their visas expired. Beneath the passports, family pictures, and negative HIV documents, the gifts given to them by the Italian crew lay untouched. Clothes, jewelry, shoes, picture frames, items the girls looked forward to selling when they returned to Venezuela.

ASAP’s biggest win took place over the nine-day span of the 2004 NBA finals. In one of the biggest upsets in basketball history, the Pistons beat the Lakers in five games and we made one and a half million dollars. Dusk turned the air pink as we celebrated with lobster and Heinekens from a shoreline picnic table. Bah-Bah lifted his glass and made a heartfelt toast “to Bernard! And his brilliant arbitrage system!” But despite this astonishing feat, the warm wind in his hair, and scantily clad Maritza balancing on his knee, Bernard wore the expression of a man who had just avoided a fatal car crash.

For Bernard, celebrating any win, especially one of this caliber, was rare. He disliked patting his own back. And the truth was, underneath that big, life-loving, buoyant personality of his, Bernard was a pessimist. If we lost two days in a row, he became anxious and depressed and would rearrange the sodas in the fridge while convincing himself we’d never win again. Not that winning made
him feel much better. Keeping track of the money made him too nervous to sleep. As he tossed and turned, his hyperactive mind circled around one central question: how were we going to hide the money?

To receive our license from the Curaçao Gaming Commission, we had to meet many strict guidelines. For instance, an American couldn’t operate a gaming business on the island without the sponsorship of a Curaçaoan and bank accounts had to be in the sponsor’s name, a policy that never sat well with any of us. It took us months to adjust to the island’s slow-moving banking systems and the nerve-racking apprehension we felt before sending off thousands of dollars via Internet wire services. After repeated calls to the online payment service Neteller regarding issues of anonymity, limits, and fees, they flew their corporate training manager to the island for our very own PowerPoint presentation. Moving money was no longer as simple as hopping on the D train with a Jansport backpack and meeting Lenny in the Bronx.

Soon, though, I discovered the real source of Bernard’s high anxiety and it had nothing to do with pessimism and banking complications. The trauma of his 1983 Broke—the fear and disbelief of watching the stacks of millions vanish in three measly weeks—had left an indelible impression on him. So much so that any mention of money, good or bad, brought back scary memories. The simplest finance questions caused Bernard’s gaze to go unfocused. He’d become jumpy and evasive, abruptly changing subjects.

“Bernard,” I said. “How much money do you want in the Catalina account?”

“Is there a Quiznos on the island?” he answered. “Or did I dream that?”

“Bernard,” I said. “Did we get the ten-thousand-dollar wire yet?”

“You know what I need more than anything in the world? Lobster fra diavolo.”

When Bernard didn’t have the energy to sidestep he’d simply say “Disaster,” pop a Xanax, and then return to what he loved most, making lines, setting mathematical traps, and watching the bets roll in.

Surprisingly, Bernard suppressed his post-traumatic stress long
enough to appoint two people to the finance department: Bah-Bah and me.

At thirty-eight, Bah-Bah was a friendly, though highly agitated, father of five. Before his brother-in-law introduced him to the business, Bah-Bah tended bar in Philly. Astonishingly computer illiterate, Bah-Bah was ASAP’s “head figures guy,” handling all of our complex financial records and transactions. At times of acute stress, he’d snag Bernard’s Xanax, crack open a jug of Wild Turkey, and sputter long, senseless monologues about his desire to work for FedEx and live a clean, stress-free life. He fantasized about taking his kids to school in the FedEx truck, then working the swing shift, “droppin’ off boxes.”

“Figures girl,” as I was called, was an unglamorous job that no one else wanted but I enjoyed. Players called me to check their balances and I like to think that the cheer in my girlish voice, even as I said, “You’re down seventy-two thousand for the week,” slightly softened the blow of losing money. If they claimed a balance discrepancy, I listened to the tapes. Scratchy phone lines, accents, and mispronunciations lent themselves to misunderstandings, plus a lot of people lied and tried to cheat. ASAP recorded every phone conversation for this very reason. Sitting at my desk, wearing puffy, oversized headphones that made my ears sweat, I listened to our serious action players slam receivers and cuss out our clerks. But the phones were also used for personal calls, so sometimes, following the angst and madness, there’d be a click. Steady breaths, and then:

“Dad? I got an A in art.”

“I had your mother over for dinner last night, pizza with the girls.”

“Good talking to you. I miss you, man. And remember, if my parole officer calls, make sure you tell him we weren’t friends until 2001.”

Coming upon such tender moments of human interaction within the aggressive inner atmosphere of ASAP was like stumbling upon a favorite bittersweet song while driving through a tornado. Though going offshore had given me a chance to make
money and experience a new country, I hadn’t realized it would be so isolating. Much of my workday was spent on the phone, or at the fax machine, or in front of a computer, tracking wires and changing odds. My co-workers and roommates (brothel guests excluded) took little interest in the outside world. They had girls, Viagra, and sports. They were happy. I was just grateful for the sweet snippets of ordinary human life. They took me out of the vacuum and recharged me. This was especially so when I came across my conversations with Jeremy. At the flash of his sweet, unexpected voice, I’d press the headphones to my ear and listen in on our conversations from days before.

“I told my dad about you,” he said.

“Oh no. Did he ask what my job is?”

“No, he asked if you were Jewish.”

Sometimes I’d hear Otis bark from his spot beside Jeremy’s bed and I’d get sad and dreamy. My life was wide open and ready, but for what? It was sweet of Jeremy to keep Otis while I was away, but I wanted Otis in my day-to-day life. And I thought about Jeremy all the time. And I missed living in Vegas. If I really set my mind to it and pulled together all my resources, perhaps I could split my time between New York, Vegas, and Curaçao. Jeremy could quit his job and freelance and we’d shift residences depending on the seasons. To be the hustling breadwinner of a gypsy family wandering the world seemed like something I could be good at.

“Do you think of me a lot?” I asked Jeremy.

“Yes, but I have to go. I’m at work.”

“No! Stay on the phone. How often do you think of me?”

“Every seven seconds. I’m on deadline, Beth. Good-bye.”

A staticky click. Furious buzzing. Shouting rolled over me and I was torn from the bliss and forced back into the chaos of “Tar Heels minus four. Tar Heels minus fourRRRRR!!”

Everyone at ASAP, Americans and locals alike, worked extremely hard, putting in long hours and making themselves available for
overtime on short notice. In terms of productivity, there was absolutely no difference between the clerks and the American employees. The difference lay in the salaries. American employees made five, six, seven times more than even the most experienced locals. Not to mention the beautiful homes we lived in and the big, air-conditioned company cars we drove. The clerks who worked for ASAP part-time to save for luxuries they couldn’t afford from their teaching or real-estate jobs didn’t concern themselves with the income inequality. But for the locals who viewed sports betting as their profession, the injustice drove them to near insanity. Some of the gamblers Bernard brought to the island were truly despicable people who referred to the clerks as “natives,” deeming them too stupid or lazy to grasp the oh-so-complicated gist of sports betting. It never occurred to these hangers-on that the clerks were educated, friendly people who spoke multiple languages and often held college degrees. The only justification I ever heard for the hangers-on being there was that their mothers kicked them out of the house—and when asked for a favor, Bernard was incapable of saying no. By the time of preseason football, poor management combined with cultural insensitivity and hazardous testosterone levels turned ASAP from a corporation made up of human beings into a hotbox snaking with dozens of short fuses waiting to explode.