The Music of Chance (11 page)

“And then,” Nashe interrupted, “you suddenly struck it rich.”

“Just like that,” Stone said. “A bolt from the blue.”

“It was almost seven years ago,” Flower said, trying not to stray from the narrative. “October fourth, to be precise. No one had hit the winning number for several weeks, and the jackpot had grown to an all-time high. Over twenty million dollars, if you can believe it, a truly astonishing sum. Willie and I had been playing for years, and until then we hadn’t won so much as a penny, not one plug nickel for all the hundreds of dollars we had spent. Nor did we ever expect to. The odds are always the same, after all, no matter how many times you play. Millions and millions to one, the longest of long shots. If anything, I think we bought those tickets just so we could talk about what we would do with the money if we ever happened to win. That was one of our favorite pastimes: sitting in Steinberg’s Deli with our sandwiches and spinning out stories about how we would live if our luck suddenly turned. It was a harmless little game, and it made us happy to let our thoughts run free like that. You might even call it therapeutic. You imagine another life for yourself, and it keeps your heart pounding.”

“It’s good for the circulation,” Stone said.

“Precisely,” Flower said. “It puts some juice in the old ticker.”

At that moment, there was a knock on the door, and the maid wheeled in a tray of iced drinks and tea sandwiches. Flower paused in his telling as the snacks were distributed, but once the four of them had settled back into their chairs, he immediately started up again.

“Willie and I always went partners on a single ticket,” he said. “It was more enjoyable that way, since it didn’t put us in competition with each other. Imagine if one of us had won! It would have been unthinkable for him not to share the prize money with the other, and so rather than have to go through all that, we simply split the ticket half and half. One of us would choose the first
number, the other would choose the second, and then we would go on taking turns until all the holes had been punched out. We came close a few times, missed the jackpot by only a digit or two. A loss was a loss, but I must say that we found those
almosts
rather exciting.”

“They spurred us on,” Stone said. “They made us believe that anything was possible.”

“On the day in question,” Flower continued, “seven years ago this October fourth, Willie and I punched out the holes a little more deliberately than usual. I can’t say why that was, but for some reason we actually discussed the numbers we were going to pick. I’ve dealt with numbers all my life, of course, and after a while you begin to feel that each number has a personality of its own. A twelve is very different from a thirteen, for example. Twelve is upright, conscientious, intelligent, whereas thirteen is a loner, a shady character who won’t think twice about breaking the law to get what he wants. Eleven is tough, an outdoorsman who likes tramping through woods and scaling mountains; ten is rather simpleminded, a bland figure who always does what he’s told; nine is deep and mystical, a Buddha of contemplation. I don’t want to bore you with this, but I’m sure you understand what I mean. It’s all very private, but every accountant I’ve ever talked to has always said the same thing. Numbers have souls, and you can’t help but get involved with them in a personal way.”

“So there we were,” Stone said, “holding the lottery ticket in our hands, trying to decide which numbers to bet on.”

“And I looked at Willie,” Flower said, “and I said ‘Primes.’ And Willie looked back at me and said ‘Of course.’ Because that was precisely what he was going to say to me. I got the word out of my mouth a split second faster than he did, but the same thought had also occurred to him. Prime numbers. It was all so neat and elegant. Numbers that refuse to cooperate, that don’t change or
divide, numbers that remain themselves for all eternity. And so we picked out a sequence of primes and then walked across the street and had our sandwiches.”

“Three, seven, thirteen, nineteen, twenty-three, thirty-one,” Stone said.

“I’ll never forget it,” Flower said. “It was the magic combination, the key to the gates of heaven.”

“But it shocked us just the same,” Stone said. “For the first week or two, we didn’t know what to think.”

“It was chaos,” Flower said. “Television, newspapers, magazines. Everyone wanted to talk to us and take our pictures. It took a while for that to die down.”

“We were celebrities,” Stone said. “Genuine folk heroes.”

“Still,” Flower said, “we never came out with any of those ludicrous remarks you hear from other winners. The secretaries who say they’re going to keep their jobs, the plumbers who swear they’ll go on living in their tiny apartments. No, Willie and I were never so stupid. Money changes things, and the more money you have, the greater those changes are going to be. Besides, we already knew what we were going to do with our winnings. We had talked about it so much, it was hardly a mystery to us. Once the hubbub blew over, I sold my share of the firm, and Willie did the same with his business. At that point, we didn’t have to think about it. It was a foregone conclusion.”

“But that was only the beginning,” Stone said.

“True enough,” Flower said. “We didn’t rest on our laurels. With more than a million coming in every year, we could pretty much do whatever we wanted. Even after we bought this place, there was nothing to stop us from using the money to make more money.”

“Bucks County!” Stone said, letting out a brief guffaw.

“Bingo,” Flower said, “a perfect bull’s-eye. No sooner did we
become rich than we started to become very rich. And once we were very rich, we became fabulously rich. I knew my way around investments, after all. I had been handling other people’s money for so many years, it was only natural that I should have learned a trick or two along the way. But to be honest with you, we never expected things to work out as well as they did. First it was silver. Then it was Eurodollars. Then it was the commodities market. Junk bonds, superconductors, real estate. You name it, and we’ve turned a profit on it.”

“Bill has the Midas touch,” Stone said. “A green thumb to end all green thumbs.”

“Winning the lottery was one thing,” Flower said, “but you’d think that would have been the end of it. A once-in-a-lifetime miracle. But good luck has continued to come our way. No matter what we do, everything seems to turn out right. So much money pours in now, we give half of it to charity—and still we have more than we know what to do with. It’s as though God has singled us out from other men. He’s showered us with good fortune and lifted us to the heights of happiness. I know this might sound presumptuous to you, but at times I feel that we’ve become immortal.”

“You might be raking it in,” Pozzi said, finally entering the conversation, “but you didn’t do so hot when you played me at poker.”

“That’s true,” Flower said. “Very true. In these past seven years, it’s the one time our luck has failed us. Willie and I made many blunders that night, and you thrashed us soundly. That’s why I was so eager to arrange a rematch.”

“What makes you think it’s going to be any different this time?” Pozzi said.

“I’m glad you asked that question,” Flower said. “After you beat us last month, Willie and I felt humiliated. We had always thought of ourselves as fairly respectable poker players, but you
proved to us that we were wrong. So, rather than roll over and give up, we decided to get better at it. We’ve been practicing day and night. We even took lessons from someone.”

“Lessons?” Pozzi said.

“From a man named Sid Zeno,” Flower said. “Have you ever heard of him?”

“Sure, I’ve heard of Sid Zeno,” Pozzi said. “He lives out in Vegas. He’s getting on in years now, but he used to be one of the top half dozen players in the game.”

“He still has an excellent reputation,” Flower said. “So we had him flown out here from Nevada, and he wound up spending a week with us. I think you’ll find our performance much improved this time, Jack.”

“I hope so,” Pozzi said, obviously not impressed, but still trying to remain polite. “It would be a shame to spend all that money on lessons and not get anything out of it. I’ll bet you old Sid charged a pretty penny for his services.”

“He didn’t come cheap,” Flower said. “But I think he was worth it. At one point, I asked him if he had ever heard of you, but he confessed that he didn’t know your name.”

“Well, Sid’s a little out of touch these days,” Pozzi said. “Besides, I’m still at the beginning of my career. The word hasn’t spread yet.”

“I suppose you could say that Willie and I are at the beginning of our careers, too,” Flower said, standing up from his seat and lighting a new cigar. “If nothing else, the game should be exciting tonight. I’m looking forward to it immensely.”

“Me too, Bill,” Pozzi said. “It’s going to be a gas.”

They began the tour of the house on the ground floor, walking through one room after another as Flower talked to them about the furniture, the architectural improvements, and the paintings that
hung on the walls. By the second room, Nashe noticed that the big man rarely neglected to mention what each thing had cost, and as the catalogue of expenses continued to grow, he found that he was developing a distinct antipathy to this boorish creature who seemed so full of himself, who exulted so shamelessly in his fussy accountant’s mind. As before, Stone said almost nothing, piping in an occasional non sequitur or redundant remark, a perfect yes-man in the thrall of his larger and more aggressive friend. The whole scene was beginning to get Nashe down, and eventually he could think of little else but how absurd it was for him to be there, enumerating the odd conjunctions of chance that had put him in this particular house at this particular moment, as if for no other purpose than to listen to the bombastic prattle of a fat, overstuffed stranger. If not for Pozzi, he might have slipped into a serious funk. But there was the kid, tripping happily from room to room, seething with sarcastic politeness as he pretended to be following what Flower said. Nashe could not help admiring him for his spirit, for his ability to make the most of the situation. When Pozzi flashed him a quick wink of amusement in the third or fourth room, he felt almost grateful to him, as if he were a morose king drawing courage from the pranks of his court jester.

Things picked up considerably once they climbed to the second floor. Rather than show them the bedrooms that stood behind the six closed doors in the main hallway, Flower took them to the end of the corridor and opened a seventh door that led to what he referred to as the “east wing.” This door was almost invisible, and until Flower put his hand on the knob and started to open it, Nashe had not noticed it was there. Covered with the same wallpaper that ran the length of the corridor (an ugly, old-fashioned fleur-de-lys pattern in muted pinks and blues), the door was so skillfully camouflaged that it seemed to melt into the wall. The east wing, Flower explained, was where he and Willie spent most of their time. It was a new section of the house that they had built shortly after
moving in (and here he gave the precise amount it had cost, a figure which Nashe promptly tried to forget), and the contrast between the dark, somewhat musty old house and this new wing was impressive, even startling. The moment they stepped across the sill, they found themselves standing under a large, many-faceted glass roof. Light poured down from above, inundating them with the brightness of the late afternoon. It took Nashe’s eyes a moment to adjust, but then he saw that this was only a passageway. Directly in front of them there was another wall, a freshly painted white wall with two closed doors in it.

“One half belongs to Willie,” Flower said, “and the other half is mine.”

“It looks like a greenhouse up here,” Pozzi said. “Is that what you fellows do, grow plants or something?”

“Not quite,” Flower said. “But we cultivate other things. Our interests, our passions, the garden of our minds. I don’t care how much money you have. If there’s no passion in your life, it’s not worth living.”

“Well put,” Pozzi said, nodding his head with feigned seriousness. “I couldn’t have phrased it better myself, Bill.”

“It doesn’t matter which part we visit first,” Flower said, “but I know that Willie is especially eager to show you his city. Maybe we should start by going through the door on the left.”

Without waiting to hear Stone’s opinion on the matter, Flower opened the door and gestured for Nashe and Pozzi to go in. The room was much larger than Nashe had imagined it would be, a place almost barnlike in its dimensions. With its high transparent ceiling and pale wooden floor, it seemed to be all openness and light, as if it were a room suspended in the middle of the air. Running along the wall immediately to their left was a series of benches and tables, the surfaces of which were cluttered with tools, scraps of wood, and an odd assortment of metal bric-a-brac. The only other object in the room was an enormous platform that stood
in the center of the floor, covered with what seemed to be a miniature scale-model rendering of a city. It was a marvelous thing to behold, with its crazy spires and lifelike buildings, its narrow streets and microscopic human figures, and as the four of them approached the platform, Nashe began to smile, astounded by the sheer invention and elaborateness of it all.

“It’s called the City of the World,” Stone said modestly, almost struggling to get the words out of his mouth. “It’s only about half-finished, but I guess you can get some idea of what it’s supposed to look like.”

There was a slight pause as Stone searched for something more to say, and in that brief interval Flower jumped in and started talking again, acting like one of those proud, overbearing fathers who always pushes his son into playing the piano for the guests. “Willie has been at it for five years now,” he said, “and you have to admit that it’s amazing, a stupendous achievement. Just look at the city hall over there. It took him four months to do that building alone.”

“I like working on it,” Stone said, smiling tentatively. “It’s the way I’d like the world to look. Everything in it happens at once.”