Sam's Legacy Read Free Page A

lot.
    If religion meant so much to his father, then how come he never even went to synagogue anymore? Answer that, he heard himself saying to Ben—but he knew that Ben would only smile back at him, in the way which drove Sam crazy, and say something clever. Here the man was, though, sixty-seven years old, admitting he didn’t believe in God and winding black straps around himself every morning of his life…and people thought that gamblers were superstitious!
    Sam played the cards, just what was there. If you bluff, it’ll get rough. Sure. It was no skin off his back if somebody wanted to believe something—when it came down to it, he bet his old man would have been shocked to find out what he himself believed. Ben didn’t know everything.
    He passed the post office, the firehouse, and Luigi’s, where he and Dutch still went sometimes to split a pizza pie. The parking lot across the street, next to the Biltmore Caterers, had been Harry Gross’s place of business, and even though he’d been put in the can almost twenty years before, at the time of the basketball fixes, guys in the neighborhood still talked about him. Gross had been the biggest bookie in Brooklyn, a friend of Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen; and he’d always worked completely in the open. Sabatini’s take was probably one-tenth of what they said Gross had controlled; the man had to be careful, sure, but Sam didn’t like it, never seeing his face, only hearing his voice on the phone.
    He couldn’t complain, though. If the guy wanted to act as if he was king of Las Vegas, that was his right. He’d always dealt straight with Sam, for the six years Sam had been using him. Maybe he felt he had to impress the muscle men on his payroll, acting like some kind of Howard Hughes, the guy who owned the state of Nevada and walked around his penthouse with his feet in Kleenex boxes to keep germs off. Sabatini could keep himself locked in an iron mask, for all Sam cared; so long as Sam got his money at the end of the week, when it was coming to him.
    At the corner of Church and Flatbush, Sam could see that the morning papers had not yet come in—the stacks were all too low—so he went into Garfield’s Cafeteria, pushed through the turnstile, took his blank check from the machine, picked up a tray, some paper napkins, silverware. He got his cup of coffee and a cheese Danish, then sat down by the Flatbush Avenue window. The kids from Erasmus had probably been rioting again, he figured: there was tape going across the window in a jagged line. A lot of old people were sitting around, talking. With triple locks on their doors and round-the-clock doormen, the old people hung on, but their kids were all moving out, the way all his old buddies had done: to Westchester and Long Island and New Jersey, to California and Florida.
    Sam sipped his coffee, watched the kids across the street (they sat, in rows, on the steps of the Dutch Reformed Church), and he could see Stallworth moving across half-court, then cutting left through a pack of players, his body toward the basket, and, at the last second, his left hand stretching back and swishing a beautiful hook shot straight through. The guy was right-handed too—an ace. But Sam would lay off the Knicks for the next game—they would be playing on the road, and he wouldn’t press his luck. The two-fifty would last until the end of the month.
    The man at the table in front of his, next to the window, was licking a pencil point with his tongue, marking things down in the margins of The New York Times . The guy wore an old brown jacket over a sweater with holes in it, yet there he was, figuring out the stock page. The man scribbled furiously along the edge of the newsprint, stopped, looked at Sam suspiciously, then, with his left hand, stuck a finger through one of the holes in his sweater and scratched his chest. Sam thought of the other guy, reaching into his jacket