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Parkway, figuring to make it down to the city in two or two and a half hours. As Nashe soon learned, Pozzi’s initial silence had been an aberration. Now that the kid was out of danger, he began to show his true colors, and it wasn’t long before he was talking his head off. Nashe didn’t ask for the story, but Pozzi told it to him anyway, acting as though the words were a form of repayment. You rescue a man from a difficult situation, and you’ve earned the right to hear how he got himself into it.
    “Not one dime,” he said. “They didn’t leave us with a single fucking dime.” Pozzi let that cryptic remark hang in the air for a moment, and when Nashe said nothing, he started again, scarcely pausing to catch his breath for the next ten or fifteen minutes. “It’s four o’clock in the morning,” he continued, “and we’ve been sitting at the table for seven straight hours. There’s six of us in the room, and the other five are your basic chumps, chipsters of the first water. You give your right arm to get into a game with monkeys like that—the rich boys from New York who play for a little weekend excitement. Lawyers, stockbrokers, corporate hot shots. Losing doesn’t bother them as long as they get their thrills. Good game, they say to you after you’ve won, good game, and then they shake your hand and offer you a drink. Give me a steady dose of guys like that and I could retire before I’m thirty. They’re the best. Solid Republicans, with their Wall Street jokes and goddamn dry martinis. The old boys with the five-dollar cigars. True-blue American assholes.
    “So there I am playing with these pillars of the community, having myself a real good time. Nice and steady, raking in my share of pots, but not trying to show off or anything—just playing it nice and steady, keeping them all in the game. You don’t kill the goose that lays the golden egg. They play every month, thosedumbbells, and I’d like to get invited back. It was hard enough swinging the invitation for last night. I must have worked on it for half a year, and so I was on my best behavior, all polite and deferential, talking like some faggot who goes to the country club every afternoon to play the back nine. You’ve got to be an actor in this business, at least if you want to move in on the real action. You want to make them feel good you’re emptying their coffers, and you can’t do that unless you show them you’re an okay kind of guy. Always say please and thank you, smile at their dumb-ass jokes, be modest and dignified, a real gentleman. Gee, tonight must be my lucky night, George. By golly, Ralph, the cards sure are coming my way. All that kind of crap.
    “Anyway, I got there with a little more than five grand in my pocket, and by four o’clock I’m almost up to nine. The game’s going to break up in about an hour, and I’m getting ready to roll. I’ve figured those mugs out, I’m so on top of it I can tell what cards they’re holding just by looking at their eyes. I figure I’ll go for one more big win, walk out with twelve or fourteen thousand, and call it a good night’s work.
    “I’m sitting on a solid hand, jacks full, and the pot’s beginning to build. The room is quiet, we’re all concentrating on the bets, and then, out of nowhere, the door flies open and in burst these four huge motherfuckers. ‘Don’t move,’ they shout, ‘don’t move or you’re dead’—yelling at the top of their lungs, pointing goddamn shotguns in our faces. They’re all dressed in black, and they’ve got these stockings pulled down over their heads so you can’t tell what they look like. It was the ugliest thing I ever saw—four creatures from the black lagoon. I was so scared, I thought I’d shit in my pants. Down on the floor, one of them says, lie down flat on the floor and no one will get hurt.
    “People tell you about stuff like that—hijacking poker games, it’s an old hustle. But you never think it’s going to