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your horses.”
    I looked at her. It fell into place for me and I saw what a stooge I still was. The man in the boater was a plant, testing me. Christ.
    But I’d passed, right? I’d passed. The next test wouldn’t be planned by her. It’d be out there, out there in that hot glitter, and I’d have to sink or swim by it.
    ∞◊∞
    There were a lot of regular parts of the job, placing bets at the small tracks, moving goods, passing information, making deliveries to and from the casinos. That was my favorite. I loved the swank carpet joints in the big city. I didn’t have to go much to the grimy betting parlors in town, or the grind joints filled with suckers, the kinds of places made for low rollers who gave it all up the minute they had it in their pockets. They had regular boys with swollen arms to take care of those rougher places. But the bosses wanted me at the casinos because I stood for Something, like Gloria did. I stood for a class operation. Me, the dingy issue of a vending machine man. The girl in the Orion dress who’d been taking the bus to a chump job just a few months back.
    I’d show up at the joints late. I’d head to the manager’s office, collect wads of cash all earmarked for the pad. At first, she just had me bring it all to her. I didn’t know where it ended up. Eventually, I began helping her make the rounds with it, mostly to the PD, the district attorney’s office. There was a complicated formula based on rank and pull and you never let the low-level boys know what the higher-ups were getting, or who else was on the pad.
    No one ever gave me a hard time, but every night I’d get invitations, either from the casino fixtures, the bulls, or the hard boys at the door. At first, I was too scared even to one-step with them, to give them back a little of their patter. But the better I got, the more I was willing to toss it around. At least with the prettier, slicker ones. I had a weak spot, right off, for the worst of them. The ones that still had faces worth looking at. The ones without the dented noses or cauliflower ears. Mostly, I had it for the cruising gamblers who didn’t rate with the big boys, just threw them their money every night like some nonstop tickertape parade. They were the smooth ones and I didn’t mind a little dance with them.
    “So I’m guessing you’re the soft spot at the end of the day for some very sugared daddy.”
    “I’m not so soft.”
    “I could rub you some round edges, you give me half a sec.”
    “I bet you could. From the way you’ve been chasing losses all night, I can see you’re a born grind.”
    “I can take being called a grind player long as I got some odds on seeing you grind a hurdy-gurdy for me one of these eves.”
    Yeah, okay, it wasn’t Lunt and Fontanne. If these fellas could really give you a line, they wouldn’t be at a casino every night, losing their shirts.
    Besides I never let it get far. At the toniest joints, I’d once in a while let a butter-and-egg man buy me a steak. For his troubles, he’d get a dry kiss on the cheek. And when it paid, I went on dates with the high-stakes gees. But I never laid for one. I really felt like I could keep coasting like this, above everything. She taught me how you could move through it all and not let your feet sink in it. Not let your fine snakeskin stick in their muck.
    You have to decide who you are, little girl, she told me once. Once you know that, everyone else will too.
    We were sitting in her plush pink and gray living room. I remember looking at her under the milky cast of the brass wall sconces, looking at her while she passed on pearls of wisdom (You always want to know the strategy behind it, honey. You do things for them without knowing why, there’s nothing in it for you.) and I’d think maybe I was getting to see what she was like back in 1945, bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked, slinging those gorgeous stems one across the other and making hay while times were good.
    I’d look at her