The Bottomless Pit in the Back Room of Nick’s Speakeasy

Daniel Galef

Tom waited on the corner of 115^th Street with his little harp case in hand and a new suit on his back. He was waiting for the devil. Presently, he broke into a wide grin and waved to catch his attention.

It was not uncommon at this time for musicians to have dealings with devils. The only alternatives were talent, hard work, or being able to do the big chords all at once, and Tom had short fingers. Besides, infernal contracts were as traditional in the business as tuning your harp from the far end or tripping viola players, so Tom didn’t see any sense in bucking the trend.

Tom’s own infernal liaison was a genial little member of the demonic horde called Pinch, who had a taste for spectator shoes and enthusiastically misremembering jokes told him by Cesare Borgia. He looked, for the most part, like any devilish human walking around north of the park in those days, except for his three-foot turkey-red tail, which he used to open oysters, and his eyes, which always left Tom with little floating afterimage spots when he looked away from them.

Pinch was a not atypical specimen of his race, which is to say that he largely spent his time around saloons, crossroads, and the details, playing the violin competitively and whispering in the ears of politicians. Like any strong-minded individual, for devils are as a rule strong-minded, he also had his own quirks and idiosyncrasies that were less typical, if abnormality can be a norm. His flat, which was surprisingly clean and well-appointed, was also further downtown than might be expected, and the shelves, on which Tom had expected to see Twain and Poe, Milton and Dante, instead held a number of slim volumes of modern poetry and some collections of Saki and Collier. He sang, with or without an audience, danced, with or without music, and smoked, with or without a cigarillo in his teeth. He had a drawer full of ties, several angular hats, and one yellow suit. He was universally well-liked at first impression and did an amusing trick with his eyebrows that really killed at parties.

Once the business aspect of their relationship had been completed, and Tom spent a few weeks enjoying unlikely levels of success and frankly irresponsible amounts of sex, they had remained in touch as casual acquaintances, as people do who unconsciously identify in each other those traits that bring out the worst in them.

Last weekend they had gone to the meer to make rude jokes at the expense of the ducks. Today the devil was taking Tom to meet a friend and go to a game. This first involved picking up the friend from a small speakeasy near the river called Nick’s, with a handwritten sign in the window reading, GOOD FOOD, OKAY MUSIC—NO BOOZE HERE. Tom was convinced.

The front room of Nick’s looked essentially like the front room of Austin’s, or Dunn’s, or any one of dozens of smoky clubs the size of a miniature matchbox, at which Tom had been a reliable institution before his big break. At one end, against the wall, was a single stair step that a snatch of curtain and some broken footlights indicated was a stage. At the other end was the bar, with a single line of ptosed stools that seemed to be about fifty percent by volume sawdust, cigar smoke, and various human effluvia. In between, a small studding of tables and an unmarked door against a far wall. All in all, a glimpse of home. The bartender, evidently well aware of his role, was to no particular end running a rag over the clean glasses while a distant radio reported on an escaped lunatic wandering the park and arguing with the benches.

“Pinch,” the barman said.

“Nick,” Pinch said. “This is Tom. I’ll have the usual, and he will, too.”

“Tom the jazzman?”

Tom had grown used to recognition, but would never grow tired of it. He smiled in an off-putting manner he had probably picked up from Pinch and held out a hand. “That’s right. First harpist on Victor’s CC Jazz label.”

The hand went unshaken. “Jazz harp? Now who in the hell ever asked for that?”

Pinch cut in before Tom could respond. “He did. And you can bet he got what he asked for.” Pinch grabbed Tom’s outstretched hand and pulled him away from the bartender, toward the far door. “That’s my guarantee.”

They passed through the door. Tom braced himself for a dazzling pandemonium of boschian perversions, or at least a little infernal ambience.

But the back room was a perfectly ordinary back room—maybe slightly shabbier—well, almost certainly shabbier—but otherwise mundane and entirely devoid of brimstone or boiling pitch. Besides a faint smell that might have been from the bar.

The room was just large enough for one big circular table in the middle, surrounded by three folding chairs and hung over with a single bulb fitted with a tobacco-clouded isinglass shade. Most of the light, however, came from the one smoked-up window at the back facing east over the river. In the corner, by one of the empty chairs, was a square panel of flooring that, to the canny eyes of someone who’d spent a lifetime in the back rooms of speakeasies waiting for a run-on opening act to shove off, shouted trap door. It was good to know for certain that the sign had been lying. Tom carefully chose the only other empty seat of three.

The room was not empty. There was already a figure at the table, sitting perfectly still as if meditating, or perhaps asleep. Although the white figure was the most unusual thing in the room and immediately in the line of sight of the door, it was the last thing Tom noticed. Somehow its extreme out-of-place-ness made it blend completely in to its surroundings until it opened its eyes.

The white figure opened its eyes.

Tom didn’t know why he thought of him as the white figure—he wasn’t wearing white, and he wasn’t a white man. In fact, his suit was a dark charcoal and fit tightly all around the figure’s slender trunk, with only two breaks in the fabric for the wings.

The figure, he realized, was an angel. “Hello,” the figure said. “I am an angel.”

That cinched it. “Hello,” Tom said. “I’m Tom.”

“The harpist? How delightful.”

“Jazz harp,” Tom explained by way of protest and apology.

“What an intriguing juxtaposition.”

The angel, as came to light in formal introduction, was named Zoras. As soon as the newcomers pulled up to the table, he was busy laying out a deck of cards into a complicated, sigil-like pattern radiating toward two small stacks.

“There is time, I hope, for a few rounds?”

Tom looked at his watch while simultaneously angling it to best put on display its price. Unfortunately, this made it impossible to read, so he dropped his hand. “Don’t think so. The game starts at two.”

“Oh, there’s always time for a quick hand or two.” Pinch had already picked up his cards and had just begun to thoughtfully arrange and rearrange them. Tom had not been dealt any.

The table was wide and round, resembling the baized card tables at casinos, and Pinch and Zoras sat at twelve and three o’clock. Tom stood behind the chair nearest the door and raised his watch again, more obviously this time.

“Cards? Is this how you wage your war, or just how you pass the time? It seems a bit frivolous for either, if you ask me.”

Neither Pinch nor the angel looked up. “The neverending game of Good and Evil is played on the bellicose fields of battle, in the marble-paneled halls of state, in unscrupulous newspaper columns, churches, cathouses, and in the hearts and minds of all mankind. Why shouldn’t it be played in a smoky backroom in Harlem? At least here they have gin.”

Tom conceded that this was a good point and sat down.

 

Tom watched as the first hand played out and concluded that the sport, while strange in appearance and executed with disconcerting speed, was a disappointingly ordinary subspecies of gin or poker. The rush of last night’s music and the dream of tomorrow’s still heady in his veins, Tom grew bored with watching. Here were Important People doing Important Things, and the rising star of the local scene was just sitting by dumbly. He slammed his harp case onto the table, making all the little stacks of cards leap briefly into the air and instantly drawing the attention of the players.

“Deal me in,” Tom said, “I’m good for it.”

“Don’t listen to him!” Pinch choked himself laughing in anticipation of his own joke. “That’s a damned, dirty lyre! Haha! Haha!”

Tom didn’t particularly care whether he joined or not, but was indignant at the slight. He hadn’t just played to a packed room above Milcom’s and made a deal to cut a second record for nothing. No, he had done it for a huge amount of cash, one corpulent bundle of which currently sat in his pants pocket in a new clip he’d just bought with another bundle. Of course, he wouldn’t tell the pair he had it on him at the moment, any more than he would announce to the brass section that he happened to have with him a plug of Canadian whiskey that he planned on enjoying at his leisure after the show, if they would just keep an eye on the flask and make sure nobody tried to take too close a look at it. Tom kept all but a hint of the red out of his voice.

“Hey,” he said. “I’m doing all right. I said deal me in.”

The figure looked at Pinch (who grinned), and shrugged. He handed Tom a small paper playing piece about the size of a bottle cap, of the sort they used to play poker in the bar at Austin’s before Mr. Hippo shelled out for real chips. But this couldn’t have been just paper, as Tom realized as soon as the token landed in his palm. It must have been an outer label wrapped around a nickel or even a lead slug. He felt the weight of it pulling his hand down to the table and tipped it onto the baize in front of him. There was a little outlined circle in the flesh of his hand where the chip had been. That was too heavy for lead. The chip must have been gold inside. Maybe this was a ten-dollar game, like they used to say the Captain played when he went upstairs at Anselm’s with some of his heavies and a few barmaids. Tom had never thought anyone actually played anything like that. For the briefest moment, Tom wondered whether there was something the wages of sin could not afford, before remembering all the little numbers on the papers in his pocket and again feeling the warmth spread through him.

“This is a loan,” the white figure said. “You can pay me back when you win some more.”

Zoras shuffled his and Pinch’s hands back into the largest pile in the center, and they each drew four cards in replacement. As they did, they chose one of the cards and returned it to the middle, forming a new stack of face-up cards that seemed to have some significance to the pot. Even before Tom had drawn a single card, chips were migrating to and from the central pile.

Tom drew four cards from the same pile, and placed them face-down in front of him on the table. He had come to realize that this wasn’t poker, and it wasn’t gin, or Prussian Bank, or Burning Bridge, or any game he, or any other human, knew. But he had just demanded to play, and he valued his pride. It was one of his favorite sins.

He picked up his cards. They were the seven of clubs, the two of diamonds, Death, and the Fool. Tom fanned the cards and tried to look deep in thought. He could feel Pinch’s eyes on the other side of the cards. They were beginning to raise little wisps of smoke on the paper.

With a confident motion, Tom placed the seven on top of the stack and looked to the faces of his company for any indication of how he’d done. The angel’s expression was as still and serene as an embalmed corpse. Pinch, as always, had the expression of a wolf who has just heard a particularly funny joke told by a sheep.

Without a word, Zoras reached out and slid Tom’s chip back into his own pile. Pinch broke the silence. “Better luck next time, pal.”

Tom shrugged. “So how much is a chip? A dollar? Ten? A hundred?” Tom threw out the numbers as if none of them meant any more than any other, as if he were listing ice cream flavors or state capitals. Despite the stature of his company, he took great relish in withdrawing from his pants pocket the gold-plated money clip and thumbing vulgarly through the knot of bills.

Zoras looked nervously at Pinch, who leered back at Zoras. “One soul.”

Tom’s expression froze, but only for an instant. Of course!, he thought. What is mortal coin to the heavenly host? What is the currency of virtue? What is the one and only wager in the great everlasting game between Heaven and Hell? “All right,” said Tom, magnanimously, “Well, I guess you can have mine.”

“Can’t give what you ain’t got,” said Pinch.

Ah. Right. It had been worth a shot, though.

“Unfortunately,” Tom said, splaying his hands to demonstrate his helplessness, “I only ever had the one, and I don’t seem to have it on me at the moment. I suppose you’ll just have to take cash.”

Zoras smiled thinly. “That really isn’t my area,” he said. He turned to the devil, who cleared his throat.

“All the riches of the Earth are the dominion of Hades,” orated Pinch. “The love of evil is the root of all money.”

Here Tom spied the makings of debate. Here, he shined. As one stipulation of his initial contract, Tom’s tongue was sharp and thus its arguments cutting. “As I recall, souls are very often bought and sold for money. How about thirty pieces of silver? They’ve got some dame on them now instead of Caesar, but it’ll buy you a tin of … halo wax … just the same.” He paused. “Hell, I’m probably giving you a bargain at that. That price was set a long time ago, and back then there weren’t nearly as many souls around as there are now! That’s just supply and demand.”

Zoras huffed. “That price was for a body, not for any soul. And, what’s more … inflation.”

“It cost the soul of the man that took it,” said Pinch.

“That’s true,” said Tom. “And look: ‘legal tender for all debts.’”

“Temporal authority,” said Zoras. “Inadmissible. There is no cab fare to the hereafter.”

“What about indulgences?”

“As Luther noted, less of that lucre went toward heavenly gate tolls than was spent on fancy rings for bishops. You will, I am afraid, have to produce an actual human soul.”

“But I don’t know how to do that.”

“Then learn quick!” interjected Pinch. “Go forth, and conquer. Or divide. Seduce some naïve young philosophy student to the way of Virtue.”

Zoras huffed. “Virtue does not require seduction. Sin does. A soul to be set on the path of righteousness needs no coercion, only convincing.”

“Yeah! You go convince ’em, just like his lot did with the rack and the brand.”

“If one could force people to change their minds, it would be justified. As it happens, one cannot.”

“You don’t say? As Torquemada once said to me, ‘AAAAAAAAAGGHHH!!’”

“Very amusing.”

“I thought so, anyway.”

“And if I don’t?” asked Tom, who had been thinking while Pinch and Zoras traded banter and had come to the conclusion that he probably couldn’t slip out of the room under the nose of a celestial being. “It seems that I have already, as it were, played all my cards.”

The fire that always slept behind Pinch’s odd eyes grew beyond their usual sprightly spark into the sort of inferno to consume Rome. “There are worse fates than the one I have promised you,” he said, “don’t doubt it.”

Tom was not quite out of rejoinders, and felt at last on firm theological footing. “Worse than Hell? I thought nothing was worse than Hell.”

As his grin widened to the limit of feasibility, Pinch’s tail, which seemed at times to have a mind of its own, wound itself about the leg of his chair, but Tom felt it as if it were coiled about his neck. Pinch wedged one of his flashy two-tone brogues into the iron loop on the square floor panel Tom had noticed when he walked in. “In that,” he said, “you are absolutely right.”

He heaved up the square in the floor with his foot, revealing a subbasement of rather larger proportions than Tom had thought possible. It was decorated in a sort of an obsidian-and-jet color palette, in an extremely minimalist style. As a matter of fact, Tom couldn’t actually make out the walls or floor. He looked at it until he got dizzy because he couldn’t tell which way was up.

“Nothing is worse than Hell.” Pinch’s voice seemed to come from the depths of the void. “Much worse.”

Tom found himself walking vaguely south with the sun against him and nothing but money in his pocket. He’d be the only person in history to lose their soul twice.

He wondered if either Pinch or Zoras had one of their own. He suspected they never had, and reflected that it was somehow unfair that they were allowed to deal in a product they had no true connection to. Who would buy from a bald wigmaker? Or a bum in real estate?

He was surprised from his reverie by the interjection of a voice from street level. The bum’s name (according to no better source than the man himself) was Aloysius Bartleby Croesus Crassus Van Bergen Op Zoom, and he was something of a neighborhood celebrity, having six years before been the board president of the largest vertically-integrated copper extraction and processing corporation in North America. His current sphere of influence was limited to a harem of local stray dogs who had learnt that some humans had an even better eye for diners about to clean out the stock than they. Aloysius had named them all after dead presidents and treated them as advisors. The beat cop called him Big Al.

“Wash your car for a dollar.”

“Sorry, Al. I haven’t got a car. If I get one, though, you know I wouldn’t trust anyone else with it.”

“I also repair radios.”

“I don’t have one.”

“Tell your future?”

“I don’t think I have one of those, either.”

“Darn socks.”

“I just got a new pair.”

“What? Never mind, I wasn’t talking to you.”

“You just offered to fix my socks.”

“Like hell I did.”

“You said ‘Darn socks!’”

“No, I said ‘Darn socks!’ Look! They keep switching feet without telling me and I’m getting pretty fed up with them.” Al hoisted one offensive foot to eye level. “I think I should darn well know what I mean! I don’t care if you heard ishkebibble, what I said was ‘Darn!’ and that’s what darn well determines what I damn well mean! If you think your ear can go on telling my mouth its own business then it’s going to get boxed and that’s all there is.”

Tom spied the bottom of the man’s shoe, which was coming unstuck and flapped from two nails like a leather wing from his heel. A thought crossed his mind that perhaps the man was completely right.

Carefully, Tom gestured to the shoe with one hand while concentrating on his internal semantics with the other. He cleared his throat, then, pointing to the weary fin of leather, carefully said, “I’m afraid I don’t really have any use for car washing or fortunetelling. But I will gladly give you ten dollars for your soul.”

The little diogenes appeared incredulous, but no specter of suspicion had crept across his features. “Ten dollars for this sole?” he said, resetting the discourse.

Tom backtracked, avoiding agreement and pronouns and fishing for a monosyllabic response. “Just yes or no. Ten dollars for the soul. In a moment it will be five. Yes or no?”

But here Tom erred. For once a number has left the lips, it cannot be recalled. Instead of enthused, the hobo grew indignant. “I’ll have you know I paid twenty dollars for that shoe in ’28,” he said. Tom did not ask about the other one. “It was hand-cobbled by a blind Viennese cordwainer who skins his own calves every morning.”

“I deeply pity the man, but will you sell the soul?”

“If boiled for a day and a night, it may become almost palatable, and would make for welcome variety from my usual repast of flame-roast squab blackened and served on a bed of fresh white endive. I believe there is already an embossed carbuncle of bubblegum on the instep just waiting to explode into complementary flavors.”

“I’ll cook that for you and serve it on a silver platter but just answer the question: Will you sell me the sole?”

“Very well,” Al conceded, handing Tom the shoe and barely registering the cash in return. “I invite you to dine this morrow on the game. I think I shall pair it with some of our own autochthonous eau du fossé, in these handsome goblets here, introduced with a light yet memorable salad of verdolaga and arctium, and conclude the feast with my personal innovation, Aspic of Vodka a la Porphyrius. I only serve that on special occasions, as overindulgence has been known to cause blindness. Of course, overindulgence has been known to cause quite a lot worse than that, but the Sterno company really is rather dead set on preventing its products from being as useful as they might be to consumers eager to, as it were, consume.”

Tom weighed the sole in his hand. It had no more apparent metaphysical import than a fig. It was about as light as it looked, flopped over his wrist like a dead fish, and was pied and mottled with innumerable unidentified substances that Tom deeply hoped would remain unidentified.

The bum was already lost in elaborating on the dainties planned, and it struck Tom that he was going to meet his doom because a chatty hobo had mixed him up with dinner plans.

“Undamnable Putnamite!” Tom snapped. “All I wanted was for you to sell me your soul!”

“Why, you’re mad!” gasped the Putnamite. “Haggling silver dollars for my immortal soul like some Milquetoast Mephistopheles! You must be that escaped lunatic! The Devil take me if you’re not! Aah!”

This last remark, it should be noted, was not directed at Tom, but at Pinch, who had made one of his trademark unnoticed entrances during the exchange and found the tail end, so to speak, very amusing. As Tom constructed further plans, Pinch took the fellow aside and impressed upon him the honor and obligation in losing an honest wager.

“Well how do you like that,” Tom said, when the business had been concluded. “Not only am I still two souls in the hole, but I seem to have helped you along handsomely in the doing.”

“Don’t worry, I’m sure you’re on the right track!” said Pinch. “You can’t break eggs without making an omelette!”

Aloysius, by now resigned to having lost his soul just as he once had to be resigned to losing his company, patted Tom on the shoulder, leaving a greasy handprint. “There, there, m’boy. I’m sure you’ll find another shoe out there somewhere. Go to the Salvation Army. Take your pick from the shoes after folks is done with them. Me, I’m still using mine. But there are more shoes in the … sea.”

It was a thought. Not a particularly coherent thought, but it had its potential. Where did people go when they were done with their shoes, Tom wondered.

 

It was a morbid idea. It was a morbid place.

The corridors of the hospice smelled like alcohol, but not the fun kind. Its bleak and lightless rooms contained little besides a single small bed, and not the fun kind of those, either. Every now and again a lacquerwork nurse would scuttle by carrying a tray of paper cups filled with drugs. Tom couldn’t get a very close look at them, but it seemed a safe bet that they were decidedly not the fun kind at all.

In the first little chamber, Tom was lucky to escape the swinging cane of an ex-curate who was decidedly not finished with anything Tom could have an interest in. In the second, he found that he was a hair’s-breadth too tardy and his quarry had already fled. In the third, he met Jane Siple.

In the weavers’ workshops of Uqbara, no craftsman ever completes the final stitch of a rug without first deliberately introducing some flaw, on the basis that creating a thing of perfection is the domain of the Almighty and none else. Why, then, the Almighty practices the same ritual is unknown.

In Jane’s case, the defect lay in her heart, and in a strictly physical sense. If someone got it in their mind to examine it minutely (and many had), it probably wouldn’t have been a bad idea to take a moment while the instruments were out and have a quick look at her brain, either.

She was by far the youngest resident of the institution, and had already spent far more time in residence not only than the other patients, but also some of the staff. Her condition had perplexed the greatest minds ten dollars a week could get hold of, and the only general agreement that could be settled upon was that there was certainly no use buying calendars in bulk. However, Jane took this prognosis with enough salt to dangerously elevate the blood pressure, for the reason that it had been ominously proclaimed about half a dozen times in as many years. She was on the verge of buying up a calendar warehouse just from spite.

When Tom entered Jane’s vacuum-sealed boudoir, she was being attended by a pair of carrionesque physicians who reminded Tom of something out of commedia dell’arte. They began to leave as Tom entered, but their glares made him rethink and begin to retreat the way he’d come. Jane interrupted his attempted exit.

“Oh, don’t you mind those old buzzards. To them I’m a filing error, malingering past my expiration date. They’re just dying to bury me. Like a dog a bone!”

The doctors exchanged expressions of theatrically injured pride, but did not contradict Jane.

“Jane just likes to worry us.” The elder doctor wrote something down on a clipboard, which he showed to the younger doctor, who chuckled. As they passed the threshold, Tom heard the older one mutter, “Like a dog a bone!”

Word evidently traveled quickly in an institution where residents had little to do to pass the time except crossword puzzles and gossip.

“You. Are you the fellow buying up used souls?”

“That’s me,” Tom said.

“And you are? I would hardly feel safe giving my soul to someone to whom I’ve never even been introduced.”

“My name’s Tom.”

“Hello, Tom. I am Cleopatra.”

“Like the queen.”

“One and the same, as a matter of fact.”

“You’re Queen Cleopatra?”

“Not at present, perhaps, but at my best. And the proper nomenclature if it matters and I’m sure it does, is Pharaoh. Pharaoh of the Two Egypts and Lord of the Nile and All Its Peoples.”

“Gosh. I—”

“One’s past lives are always so much grander and more well-known than one’s present life, aren’t they? I wonder what I’ve done to deserve the down-slide. Or maybe the big names are just more easily recalled. I suppose I’ve probably been my fair share of laborers and peasants, too, only I just don’t remember all of them on account of what boring lives they must have been. If that’s the case, then I highly doubt I’ll remember this one any better. And to lose all memory of a life, why, that’s just the same as dying proper, isn’t it? Even if I am the Pope or Mrs. Astor or whoever.”

It was at this point that Tom capitalized on Jane being forced to take a breath to launch into his practiced spiel. He put on his best salesman’s smile, which was severely wanting. “In that case, I may be in a unique position to aid you. I can offer you—that is to say, your Eternal Soul—a unique and never-before-seen opportunity for Heavenly Gate VIP Access! A 100% zero-money-down Indulgence—guaranteed salvation. This is a bargain never-before-offered to humanity at large, and YOU-yes-YOU could take advantage of this once-in-an-afterlifetime opportunity today!”

Jane had been covering her mouth with her hand like a princess to hide her giggling. But it was more a mark of courtesy than genuinely trying to conceal her feelings, for she laughed in Tom’s face as soon as she took her hand away. “Ha! If only it were that simple! Alas, no, I am, as are we all, locked into the eternal cycle of metaphysical transmigration. But you keep believing your fairytale if you must.”

“If that’s the case, then it couldn’t hurt to try. So I’m a lunatic. Then what’s the harm in playing along?”

“Hmm. Well, still, I thank you for your offer but am regretfully unable to accept. Even if you were right and there were a heaven, what would I do there? The only thing worse than agony is boredom. And I should know.”

“I can only offer the standard two options—”

“Let me know when there’s a third. Besides,” her voice was resolute as the foundations of the pyramids, “I can’t stand harp music.”

 

Emptied of hope, Tom stood on the corner and waited for the sun to set on his mortal existence.

“Can I give you my soul, mister?”

Tom looked flatly at the short fellow in the rakishly tilted hat standing next to him. He raised his eyebrows for a moment in surprise, then lowered them in confusion, then did something else he had seen Pinch do once but had never quite pulled off until now. He thought about answering him, but wrote off the proposition as hopeless, and waited for the fellow to elaborate himself, which presently he did.

“I know where I am,” the youth said. “I’ve heard the stories about this streetcorner. And I know who you are, too.”

Here Tom managed a wordless “Mmm?”

“You’re the devil, aren’t you? I think I can tell the devil. Your suit. Your teeth. Your eyes. It’s like I’m looking at a tin of Underwood Ham.”

Tom took the compliment with grace and looked the young man up and down. He was wearing a two-dollar suit that was an imitation of something very stylish, and he carried at his side a small battered black case. He looked familiar. The words sounded familiar, too. Young, talented idiots. Tom broke into an involuntary grin reminiscing about a very similar conversation. Without privileged knowledge of the semantics of the situation, though, he couldn’t be absolutely sure he wasn’t buying another used shoe. Tom affected a look of innocent bewilderment. “Are you perhaps mistaken, my dear fellow? Surely you don’t mean to bargain away your own eternal soul!”

“Please. I know exactly what you are. You ain’t Father Mulligan. This weather must make you homesick. And I know exactly what I’m doing, too. I’m a musician. I have personal and professional standards to be met. Plus, I don’t think I’m using it much at the moment.”

“A musician, eh? What is it?” Tom pointed at the black box.

The youth beamed. “It’s nothing now, but it’s going to be everything in a few months’ time!” He flipped two metal clasps and cracked open the case to reveal a mangy squeezebox like Tom had seen slung around the necks of old German men serenading the Central Park ducks. “Jazz accordion!”

“Is that a joke? Who the hell’s ever heard of jazz accordion?”

“Yeah, well there’s this guy I heard about from right around here hocking jazz harp, so you tell me if that’s the future of music or you had something to do with it. Now I mean to push him off that pedestal, and you’re gonna help me do it.”

“Very well, then,” Tom said, mawking what he hoped looked like a mystical hand gesture. “Shake my hand, and I shall imbue you with a superhuman musical ability unrivaled among the denizens of the mortal plane.”

“To Harlem with that! I know what you need to get ahead in this business. You can take it for five hundred bucks.”

Not without a pang of loss similar to that one might feel handing over a beloved family pet to a wild-eyed veterinarian who come to think of it did not display any credentials in his home office and whose scalpel looks suspiciously like a carving knife, Tom removed the billfold from his pocket and counted out what ended up being the bulk of it into the accordionist’s hand.

They shook on the deal, and, when Tom withdrew his hand, in it was a small paper chip just like the one he had bet in Nick’s. It was likewise as heavy as a human soul ought to be, and its coarse wrapping bore the pencilled inscription “Franklin, Jr.” He put it in his pocket, where the weight of it was enough almost to sway him to the right.

Tom turned south and started walking, wingtips snapping against the sidewalk. He stepped into the shadow produced by the oppressive, batwing-like awning of a pawn shop, and in its window spied, arrayed alongside the knives, wedding rings, and other assorted paraphernalia of best-laid plans gang agley, a huddled, pitiful conglomeration of musical instruments: a French horn, a few well-used Hohner harmonicas, and even, bellows sagging like a weary smile, an accordion not so unlike the one the young fool had carried. It was a husk, devoid of breath and melody, incomplete without the animating principle of its absent owner, and as silent as a dead mouse. Tom stopped and wheeled about, horrified at what he had almost done. “Wait!”

 

There was an unfingerable sinister bend to the sparse furnishings of the front room of Nick’s when Tom walked back through the door. It may have been nothing more than the hyperawareness of a condemned man to every detail of his cell, knowing that these handfuls of stones and bars may be among the last sights to pass through his eyes. The bartender was purposelessly polishing a glass, the same glass, Tom would have sworn, he had been polishing the previous morning.

The same familiar duo was already seated around the card table in the back room. Zoras was reading from a large leatherbound volume, and Pinch was shuffling the deck of cards. Tom strolled in whistling tunelessly, his hands in his pockets. He addressed Zoras with a manufactured insouciance he hoped would irritate one or both of them.

“I don’t quite recall, did you say midnight, or dawn, or what? Can I just drop off the chip now so I can be home in time to catch The Shadow?”

Pinch snorted. “You know what he said. He said he’ll collect at dawn, not he’ll collect by dawn, and that’s exactly what he’ll do! It’s your fault you got here a whole night early. Now sit over there and if you want to be useful maybe play us something on that zither of yours. Something hot.”

Zoras looked up from his book, whose cover bore the inscription A Million and One Crackerjack Knock-Knock Jokes. “Do you know any lively hymns?” he asked hopefully.

“If ever there were a contradiction,” muttered Pinch.

“Why should the Devil get all the good tunes?” sulked Zoras, and dealt the cards. Tom tuned his harp and took up “Get Thee Behind Me Satan,” just to spite Pinch.

The panel of flooring was right at Tom’s feet. If he leaned too far forward, he might fall onto it. If the panel opened, he might just—he peeked under the little square. In the distance, a comet about the size of Manhattan screamed by in a fury of silent colors. He shuddered and shut the door. From then on, Tom tried to concentrate on the game being played by Pinch and Zoras.

The pair did not play in the way that humans play cards, allowing fate to determine their lot and then dealing with it. That is all mortal life, but it was unknown to Zoras and Pinch. They seemed to put the bulk of their strategy and gameplay into what cards to draw, as if which to take into their hand was as much a conscious decision as which to shed. Still, the universal element of limited knowledge was in full play; neither Zoras nor Pinch had quite the epistemic powers of their master, and they guarded the knowledge of their hands in an almost humorously similar way to Tom’s bandmates, eying each other warily around the little card table behind the stage at Austin’s and mugging at each other to avoid tipping their cards. The tactics were eerily identical: Zoras kept his visage a perfect mask of serenity, which, to be sure, it always was, so that Tom doubted any effort at all went into maintaining it, rather into animating it when required. Pinch’s face was girning and mawking like a heretic in the throes of the pyre, or ecstasy.

But the illusion was not perfect. Tom noticed, before each round when the devil would wrap up another stack of cards and add a tally to his column, his corkscrew tail would wrap itself around the other way, so that it coiled about the leg of his chair. The motion was not even visible except in the reflection in the window behind him, and was almost lost in the manic writhings that all federated extremities of Pinch seemed to go through while playing a card game. But Tom had the rake’s eye for detail that comes of spending a couple of decades living by one’s wits. He hypothesized that the conscience is a powerful force even in the relatively virtuous species of man. The conscience of a devil must be all the more pent-up, for it is almost universally ignored. And a strong superego is always able to physically manifest itself in a thousand subtle ways.

Zoras seemed not to have noticed, but then angels are not accustomed to interpreting the grotesqueries of muscle and tooth that bodily beings use to broadcast (or conceal) thought. His own visage seemed only to exist out of benevolent consideration so that Tom had something to look at while he talked. It did not convulse itself in vulgar weeping or laughter, and moved only when the fact that Zoras was speaking would have made it odd for it not to. Tom got the silly, baseless feeling that the face was a curiosity Zoras had seen hanging on the front of some human and decided to try out. The same silly, baseless feeling said that the original had not been around for quite some time. If some angels were once mortal, Zoras was not one of them. He had never known any existence but his current one. But Pinch had the advantage of him, Tom realized, because Pinch had once been like him.

Angels, of course, nor have nor need consciences.

It was not very long before Zoras was almost out and thus the game almost over. Tom had wanted to wait as long as possible to act, for tactical as well as dramatic reasons, but saw his window closing. At the close of another hand won by Pinch’s impressive streak, Tom dropped the accordionist’s soul onto the baize. “I’ll join for the next hand.”

Zoras stared. Pinch’s eyes burned. “You owe that chip in a few hours. Gambling with it in the meantime would not be entirely—safe.”

“So what from safe?” Tom tossed his shoulders, grinning manically. “You don’t collect until dawn, and I have this chip now. You know guys like us, we don’t like to be left out. Deal me in again.” He tossed the little chip onto the table, where it struck the soft felt as one with a tiny, dull sound that somehow landed like a thunderbolt.

The angel’s face did not change, but his voice sounded as if Tom had just slapped him. “I thought better of you than that….”

“I didn’t.” Pinch riffled the cards with the point of his tail. “Pull up a chair.”

 

After three solid hours of play, Pinch growing ever more and more frustrated, neither had much changed the size of their pot. Pinch sat nearly obscured behind a stack of several hundred multicolored chips bearing crabbed inscriptions such as “Mathilda Braggsley, 10 Dover Road, Whisky Creek, Missouri” or “Antioch.” Tom had gone from one chip to still one chip over the course of several cutthroat ups-and-downs during which the game’s byzantine bylaws would not allow him to cash out. As Pinch drew his next hand, Tom noticed the low, coal-stove glow building strength in the east. It was coming up right behind Pinch, in the little dirty window in the back of the room. As dawn approached and the glow got brighter, the still-hazy sawtooth silhouette of the city across the river gradually began to assert itself over the crisp image of the interior of the room. The vault of the sky edged its way toward blotting out the reversed Tom, and Zoras, and Pinch like the light of truth blotting out the shadow of ignorance, or Tom’s despair blotting out his composure, or a blotter blotting out blotting ink on a blotting pad. Take your pick.

 

It was difficult even to tell precisely how much Pinch had, and when Tom tried to focus in on the mountains of chips in their little paper wrappers, they seemed to multiply like rice on a chessboard and become mountains in a decidedly less metaphorical sense—and every one with a tiny name, written in handsome copperplate or faded minims or something even older and forgotten that Tom couldn’t make out at all. But a squirrel never has trouble finding its acorns even after winter has changed the shape of the land. There exists a peculiar bond, similar to that which allows the mother cow to pick out the low of its calf from a thousand identical drones, and it was likewise not long before, on a minuscule ledge in an obscure crag of Pinch’s stack of winnings, Tom had located the particular chip he was looking for. The writing still looked fresh.

“What do you say, Old Devil?” Tom said, reaching over and plucking the chip from its bed. He held up Pinch’s chip and placed the devil’s bet for him, Pinch’s jack-o-lantern eyes fixed on Tom. “One more hand, penny ante?”

Pinch looked at the blank table before Tom. “Sorry, ’bub, you’re dry.”

“Oh yeah? How about … this?”

“That’s a nickel.”

“Sorry, I meant … this.”

Zoras gasped.

Pinch snickered gleefully. “You sneaky bastard! I love it!”

There on the table, from his now empty pocket, Tom had placed Jane’s soul. Its paper cover was crisp and cream-colored, like the neatly folded linens Tom had tripped headlong over barging back into her sickroom after his revelation at the pawn shop, and its label was written in a clean, flowing Palmer script that would not have looked the least bit out of place on a wedding invitation or a Dear John letter.

Pinch only took a second to recover. “All right,” he said, “and credit due for the delivery. One more hand. It’s your funeral.” He dealt.

In the window, the young light had increased to such a degree of gold that the reflection of the room within was only a dim outline in front of the little landscape painting behind. Tom could hardly make out Pinch at all, let alone his tail, and hastened to play the next hand before his clever jump on the forces of darkness expired and he was forced to rely on his own skill and the favor of fortune, which he had long known was a chump’s game.

 

Tom looked at the modest pile before him. It contained Jane’s chip, the accordionist’s chip, and, on the very top in a wrapper that looked somewhat the worse for wear since he’d seen it last, Tom’s own chip. In addition to which were almost a dozen new souls Tom had not factored into his plans but which he now found himself in the sudden and theologically problematic possession of.

The sun peeked out over the river and hit Tom in the face, interrupting his reverie. He blinked. Dawn had dawned. At the same time, Zoras rose from his chair and extended one berobed hand.

“I commend you, my child. Wresting just one soul from the clutches of sin to settle a wager is an honorable deed, if committed for somewhat less than honorable reasons. Winning a dozen more out of the mouth of Hell for entry into the Pearly Gates—that is charity. It is virtue. It is piety. Now hand them over.”

“No dice.” Tom dropped the chips into his breast pocket, where they jangled with a set of keys and a Mercury dime and tried to determine what they were the souls of. “The way I see it, your racket seems to have a monopoly on this business, and don’t you know that this country has laws against that sort of thing? I respect the neat little game you’ve got going, but I think there’s market share to be had. Two options just don’t provide the sort of variety the modern consumer is looking for. I’m going into business for myself, me and a business partner I met today, with these as capital. What do you think of that?”

Tom did not wait for a reply from either being. With his soul in his pocket (where it presently dissolved to once again occupy whatever remote nook of the body it had previously inhabited, be that, as Mahavatar Babaji writes, in a crystal atop the cardiac muscle, or, as Descartes posits, the epiphyseal gland of the brain), and thus unbeholden to the fading appeals behind him, Tom walked out of the little bar in Harlem and out into the cold pink dawn of the first day of spring.

 

Tom lost his contract with Victor as soon as they heard the first bar of his new set, which opened with Johnson’s “Crossroad Blues.” He kept that smallish portion of the advance money that he hadn’t forked to the (increasingly popular) accordionist, and, of course, he still had the actual harp. Most importantly, it might be said, Tom learned a lesson, and one which he even on occasion calls to mind, during moments of serenity when it may not be feasibly applied. From his own pocket, he has just cut his second record, and by all accounts it is quite hideous.

 

© 2018 Daniel Galef

 

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Daniel Galef graduated this month from McGill University, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of the Plumber’s Faucet humor magazine, was a finalist for a Student Journalism Award for his science column in the McGill Tribune, and won First Prize at the 2016 McGill Drama Festival for the musical play The Stars. Off-campus, his fiction has been published in Sein und Werden, The American Bystander, and Flash Fiction Magazine, among others, and new fiction is forthcoming in Defenestration Magazine, the Lowestoft Chronicle, and the J. J. Outré Review. Hey, here’s a crazy idea: hire him for something! Literally anything (not literally anything).

Photo: Kiana Brett Photography