on! With Mantle and Maris back in, and the first two games here in New York? No way, man. No fucking way.'
Jeff leaned forward, spoke softly but insistently. 'That’s how it’s gonna go. A shutout, the Dodgers four straight.'
Frank frowned at him strangely. 'You really are crazy.'
'No. It’ll happen. One-two-three-four. We could be set for life.'
'We could be back drinking at Moe’s and Joe’s, is what you mean.'
Jeff tossed down the last of his drink, sat back, and shook his head. Frank continued to stare at him, as if looking for the source of Jeff’s madness.
'Maybe a small bet,' Frank allowed. 'Say a couple of thousand, maybe five, if you’re really stuck on this hunch.'
'All of it,' Jeff stated.
Frank lit a Tareyton, never taking his eyes from Jeff’s face. 'What is it with you, anyway? Are you determined to fail, or what? There’s a limit to luck, you know.'
'I’m not wrong about this one, Frank. I’m betting everything I’ve got left, and I’ll offer you the same deal as before: my money, you place the bets, seventy-thirty split. You risk nothing if you don’t want to.'
'Do you know the kind of odds you’d be bucking?'
'Not exactly. Do you?'
'Not off the top of my head, but—they’d be sucker odds, because only a sucker would make a bet like that.'
'Why don’t you make a call, find out where we’d stand?'
'I might do that, out of curiosity.'
'Go ahead. I’ll wait here, order us another drink. Remember, not just a win; a Dodger sweep.'
Frank was away from the table less than ten minutes.
'My bookie laughed at me,' he said as he sat down and reached for the fresh Scotch. 'He actually laughed at me over the phone.'
'What are the odds?' Jeff asked quietly.
Frank gulped down half his drink. 'A hundred to one.'
'Will you handle the bets for me?'
'You’re really gonna do this, aren’t you? You’re not just joking around.'
'I’m dead serious,' Jeff said.
'What makes you so goddamned sure of yourself on these things? What do you know that nobody else in the world knows?'
Jeff blinked, kept his voice steady. 'I can’t tell you that. All I can say is, this is far more than a hunch. It’s a certainty.'
'That sounds suspiciously like—'
'There’s nothing illegal involved, I swear. You know they couldn’t fix a Series these days, and even if they could, how the hell would I know anything about it?'
'You talk like you know plenty.'
'I know this much: We can’t lose this bet. We absolutely cannot lose it.'
Frank looked at him intently, tossed off the rest of his Scotch, and signaled for another. 'Well, shit,' he muttered. 'Before I ' met you last April I figured I’d be living on a scholarship this year.'
'Meaning what?'
'Meaning I guess I’ll come in with you on this fool scheme. Don’t ask me why, and I’ll probably blow my brains out after the first game. But just one thing.'
'Name it.'
'No more of this seventy-thirty crap and you putting up all the money. We both take our chances, throw in whatever we’ve got left from Vegas—including what I raked in at the tables—and anything we win we split down the middle. Deal?'
'Deal. Partner.'
It was the October of Koufax and Drysdale.
Jeff took Sharla to Yankee Stadium for the first two games, but Frank couldn’t even bring himself to watch them on television.
The Dodgers took the opener 5-2, with Koufax pitching. Johnny Podres was on the mound the next day, and with an assist from ace reliever Ron Perranoski he held the Yankees to one run, while the Dodgers punched in four on ten hits.
The third game, in L.A., was a Drysdale classic: a 1-0 shutout, with 'Big Don' putting the Yankees down one right after the other. In six of the nine innings, Drysdale came up against only the minimum three batters.
Game number four was a tight one; even Jeff, watching it in color at the Pierre in New York, started to sweat. Whitey Ford, pitching for the Yankees, was up against Koufax again, and they were both out for blood. Mickey Mantle and L.A.
The Dodgers had shut out the Yankees in the World Series, the first time that had happened to the New York club since the Giants had pulled it off in 1922. It was one of the great upsets in baseball history, an event Jeff couldn’t have forgotten any more than he’d be likely not to remember his own name.
At Jeff s insistence, Frank had spread their $122,000 bet among twenty-three different bookies in six cities and eleven different casinos in Las Vegas, Reno, and San Juan.
Their total winnings came to more than twelve million dollars.
FIVE
The betting was over; they both knew that. The word was out on him and Frank, and there wasn’t a bookie or casino in the country that would accept any sizable wager from either of them.
There were, of course, other kinds of bets, under more genteel names.
'… put the accounting section in that office there, and legal staff here across the hall. Now, down this way…'
Frank was obviously taking great pleasure in showing Jeff around the still only half-furnished suite of offices on the fiftieth floor of the Seagram Building. He’d selected the site, with Jeff’s approval, and had taken charge of all the minutiae of organizing what needed to be done, from their original incorporation as 'Future, Inc.' to the hiring of secretaries and bookkeepers.
Frank had quit law school, and they’d tacitly agreed that he would oversee the day-to-day operations of the company while Jeff made the larger decisions about investments and overall corporate direction. Frank no longer questioned the validity of Jeffs recommendations, but there’d been a strange pall between the two partners since the World Series coup. They rarely socialized, but Jeff knew Frank had been drinking more than ever before. His former curiosity had been replaced with an apparent growing fear of just how much Jeff knew and how he knew it. The matter was never discussed again.
'… through this reception area here—just wait’ll you see the knockout who’ll be sitting at that desk a couple of weeks from now—and … here … we … are!'
The office was expansive yet somehow cozy, impressive without being intimidating. A black Barcelona chair awaited its owner behind the large oval oak desk, which faced a well-stocked bar and a handsomely cabineted TV-stereo console. Floor-to-ceiling windows on two walls offered views of the Hudson River on one side and the towers of midtown Manhattan on the other. The several flourishing
