Once Upon a Time in Byzantium

By Jim Elledge

Byzantium: the word itself denotes a period of chicanery, treachery and willful duplicity. Thus this novel begins with a conundrum that foretells the intricacies the reader will encounter as the plot unfolds.

“Richard Unger is dead,” the story begins. “gone for twenty-eight years. Murdered in 1974.” (An excerpt from Richard Unger’s diary, entered February 10, 2001.) Herein, these words tell you everything and yet nothing. And so the story unfolds in an aura of mystery.

From the beginning Richard Unger makes it clear he is writing of these events under extreme pressure. He prays those who read this material, after examining the facts, might grant some sort of absolution. But that is for the reader to decide.

Richard and Mary Nell have, the last twenty-eight years, been leading a privileged life in Dallas, Texas enjoying the fruits of lucrative careers. Their tranquility is shattered when they receive an anonymous note taunting them with information which proves the correspondent knows they are living under false pretences. The missive concludes he possesses knowledge they are responsible for the death of the writer’s soul-mate in 1974. Now it is their time to be destroyed.

The author’s memoir is based on events from the distant past which now are destined to spin out of control. He sums it up when he writes: “Whenever I think of the past I try to rearrange the facts in some sort of logical manner. However events can only be changed at the point of origin. If then. If ever.” Thus, Richard and Mary Nell find themselves caught in a net of mystery and subterfuge where they are about to enter a bizarre world of their own making.

As Richard recalls how his past was marked by involvement in a life of trickery and deception he also express hope that the contents of this journal might pave the way for a better understanding of the forces that precipitated the actions herein and in the end might give a capacity for some degree of exoneration. In any event the big question for readers becomes: How would I have handled this under similar circumstances?

This scenario goes back to the early’70s introducing Richard, then known by the name of Michael Hanlon, a card counter making his living at the tables in Vegas, and Mary Nell a.k.a. Rebel Smith, who dealt blackjack at the Sands. They were drawn to each other through their dexterity at the game and soon formed a partnership as card sharps traveling up and down the west coast.

Every game was not rigged. As Mary Nell once said, “The difference between smart play and duplicity is sometimes a hundred miles of gravel road.” They were always careful. They knew the odds on each draw. When to stay and when to fold. And above all, how to read the faces around the table.

Although their goal had always been in the pursuit of money, their dream was to hit the big score, find something legit, and settle down. They had the intelligence and the grit to make it work. But, for the present, the money was easy, and there was the thrill. Always the thrill.

However, fate was predestined to dictate their future and they found themselves about to be caught in an undertow of intrigue that would sweep them away into a chaotic sea. To the perfect pigeon. Toward the consummate scam. Into a tangled web of deceit.

Their good times come to an abrupt end when a high stakes poker game at the Fairmont in San Francisco goes sour. Upon discovering he has been cheated, a disgruntled player who brought a gun to the hotel room forces them to drive to a secluded spot across the bay with murder on his mind. Once there the tragic basis for this story unfolds when, in a struggle for the gun, he is killed.

The most poignant of the author’s forays into the truth is centered around the twenty-four hours after this event and give crede

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 9, 2008
• ISBN: 9781465315328

Book preview

Prologue

Richard Unger is dead. Gone now for twenty-eight years. Murdered in 1974. But that doesn’t stop me from the haunting reality that fate is only one step away. Always there. Creeping behind me on silent footsteps. Forever stalking, like a never-ending dream.

If by day I march to a different tune, it is in the deep of night that the harpy’s voice whispers those dreaded words that foretell the fact that good fortune does not last forever.

Excerpt from Richard Unger’s diary, entered,

February 10, 2002

I have used a prologue to set the framework for this narrative. Indeed, the prologue tells you the reader everything, and nothing. My theme, although entirely factual, is being put in a framework that must seem to border on the fictional. I pray that those who read this will find it has been presented truthfully and with great care. For all the dark side, which I portray, I truly believe that, in the end, you might find an essence that borders on the heroic. But it is up to you to make that decision.

To say I am writing this under extreme pressure is an understatement. It is a story about how my wife and I were faced with decisions and how we struggled to make those decisions. Maybe this is only an attempt to get closer to what makes people do things; if the actions shown herein reflect imperfect choices, my hope is that after examining the facts, you might grant some sort of absolution.

Dallas, Texas

February 2002

1

What goes around comes around. Herein you will find a story of duplicity and greed. A difficult point I admit, especially under the circumstances. But there has to be a beginning for my chronicle.

Sara Jane Olson is a start. You may call this a back-story, if you wish. It makes no difference. Front to back. Back to front. It’s all part of the whole.

Take today’s headline in the Dallas Morning News:

Saturday, February 10, 2002

SARA JANE FACES UP TO TWENTY YEARS

In the beginning, we knew her by her real name, Kathleen Soliah. Today she was sentenced for the attempted bombing of a police car in Los Angles then, moments later, pleaded innocent to charges of murder stemming from a Symbionese Liberation Army bank heist in 1975 that went astray.

But it is to February 4, 1974, the date the SLA kidnapped Patty Hearst, where I now return. It was the same month we were caught like a shadow crossing in front of the silver screen of history.

Myself and Mary Nell.

It might seem that it in this case is the one word that holds us hostage to the past. The scenario is now hard to reconstruct. Can twenty-eight years really have elapsed?

The drapes that were drawn across the corridors of time have begun to unravel. In the bright light shining through the cracks, the line of truth sparkles in its wake.

February 4, 1974. The day that marked our footnote to history. The day we should have cut and run. And so we have to go back. Way back. To the beginning of our odyssey.

Sometimes memory is selective, something that fades away like the pulsating sound of music from an open window of a passing car, carrying down the street and finally vanishing in the distance.

For the record, that February, I was an innocent bystander. A nonentity whose brain had become a projector. I was simply biding time, waiting for Mary Nell at the bar of the Claremont in Oakland and caught up in the cloudy beauty spreading across San Francisco Bay.

What started as a rather mundane occasion of another poker game with a group of visiting delegates attending some obscure convention instead began to turn into a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach. I started to have a sense that something momentous was about to change my day. The corollary is that this was no sense at all, merely a bad moment resulting from a lingering hangover.

The evening was unremarkable. But as events unfolded, destiny was about to announce an almost apocalyptic change of course.

February was the month that would be the big breakthrough for Mary Nell and me.

It was not.

2

A biographer might say this is our epiphany, although it would be hard to find anything divine about it.

Who are we?

Today, in the year of our Lord, 2002, I am known by the name of Richard Unger, otherwise addressed as Rick. I hold the title of CEO in a successful Dallas brokerage firm dealing in commodities. Mary Nell is my wife, who for the past twenty years has carved out a name for herself as an actuary for a major insurance firm. I am fifty-three, and she is two years behind.

Unlike me, she could pass for being thirty-something. Nature has been kind. Together we have achieved what many would consider the pinnacle of success. To coin a phrase from our San Francisco days, we have arrived at the Top of the Mark.

Our profile:

A condo in Dallas overlooking Turtle Creek.

Reserved table at the Mansion.

Monogrammed golf shirts for a round at the Preston.

Gold-enhanced twin DeVilles.

My clients call me, not the other way around.

This is now.

Nineteen-seventy-four was then.

One of life’s basic truths is the postulate that wherever you are, whatever you become, you are always held hostage to the past. We are, and remain, the sum total of the events that have shaped our lives. Now is the time to download the data.

Let me tell you who we used to be.

*     *     *

For a prelude, I will use the saga of Sara Jane Olson as a template. Like Kathleen Soliah, before she became Sara Jane, we were someone else. I went by my birth name, Michael Hanlon. So you can see, as Sara Jane had done, through the ensuing years I, too, have carefully hidden my past.

Mary Nell, and after all this time I still have to catch myself in public, always introduced herself by her working name, Rebel Smith, although her driver’s license reflected a more formal and indeed legal Mary Nell Cooper.

Our credentials?

At twenty-five, I had graduated two years before from San Diego State with a masters in economics, and an undergraduate degree in English literature.

Since then, without any measurable success, I became involved in trying to interest Hollywood in a screenplay that I considered an imminent masterpiece.

My rejections represented an inadvertent broadcast that my goal ended with the ultimate exercise in futility.

In view of the bleak outlook surrounding this project, I began to give much thought to falling back on biker movies.

"The Wild Demons of Cycle City" comes to mind.

However, one must eat and pay the rent. Even though I remained committed to a higher calling, I found myself broke and reduced to pitting my wits against the tables in Las Vegas.

I became a card counter.

Do not judge this as either right or wrong. There is a whole category of elitism, if not careerism, to be found in the Neon Jungle.

Over a short span of time, my vocational search became less frenzied, and I settled down to a kind of rigid discipline that gave an unambiguous answer to my immediate financial problems.

Then I met Rebel Smith.

3

It would be hard to imagine a pairing more indescribably suitable. I tell you this, not from some romantic viewpoint, but because I want you to understand that from this chance meeting, and it was wholly by coincidence, the wheels that drive this story were put into motion. Like a runaway streetcar, there was no place to stop.

Mary Nell, or Rebel (the name she used professionally), dealt blackjack at the Sands. During the off hours, she frequently ran her own card game away from the premises. She came about this occupation quite honestly. You might even say it was anointed by fate.

She was born in Philadelphia, Mississippi, to a mother who by any definition was a hard woman, possessing a style that included a rejection of any sentimental approach to life’s many choices.

Where you are born and whatever you might think is your birthright is so much crap, she would tell her daughter. You have the good looks and the where-with-all to reach for the stars. Whatever you achieve you have to fight for. Nothing is free.

Her father was cut from a different cloth. A gambler by trade, he traveled to wherever the action might be. Hot Springs, Arkansas, during the racing season; the Galveston piers in the summer; and all the places in between. Wherever you could find a card game, he called it home.

Always a jovial man, he imparted upon Mary Nell a sense of humor. One month would find him broke, the next bankable.

He was also an excellent teacher and took great pride in his craft. Mary Nell learned all the nuances of the trade at his knee. Being a bright child, she matured and became proficient in reading the faces around the table, always knowing when to joke, and more importantly when to maintain a stoic silence.

At the poker table, she was in her element. She developed the dexterity and the proficiency to deal cards in whatever pairing might be called for.

This is not to say the game was always rigged. But when the moment was right, she could pair up an ace or fill an inside straight with fingers so fast and bold that among those who counted on her and had hedged their bets on her agility; she became a local legend.

So, when Vegas called, it became obvious that Mary Nell was ready. What was less apparent was the future waiting for both her and me.

4

Dallas 2002

The article in this morning’s paper made me recall the litany of the past. Those days are gone. I only wanted to give you a generic account. There is no need for an original certified copy. You either remember it, or you don’t. It was simply a montage of the time.

On the other hand, the events that I now outline will speak for themselves.

I was standing by the window, looking down at Turtle Creek when Mary Nell came home. The music from the CD filtered from the bedroom, softening the afternoon with, The Way We Were. Little did I know how apropos.

Kathy Soliah got twenty years, I called into the kitchen.

"I heard it on the radio. Everything about those times seems so surreal. That stinking case should have been closed years ago. Anyway, it’s just so much shit. That whole damn scenario has haunted our lives long enough. It’s almost like we’ve been continually snared in a sort of predestined plot that’s somehow connected to her crazy karma.

Enough is enough. I refuse to give it another thought. Just let it go. Thinking back on those times gives me a headache. As far as I’m concerned the whole goofy bunch got what they deserved and now she’s dead meat.

Hey, she was your girl, I said.

Bullshit. I hardly knew her. Just drop the subject.

Well, what’s bugging me is she’s hogging the headlines again. That’s never been a good sign for either of us. It always seems like our fate is hot-wired to events surrounding her and that whole gang of psychos.

Don’t go superstitious on me. I told her back then and I would tell her the same thing now. You run with the wrong crowd and you’ll reap what you sow.

That sounds almost biblical, I said.

Biblical or not, she asked for it. Her time just ran out. Don’t get horsy with me, I’m in no mood.

Then how ’bout a martini? That might change your perspective.

Perspective’s ass, she said, reverting to the vernacular she commonly used when we were alone. But fix me one anyway and let me change into something warm. While you’re at it, make it a double. My God, this is Dallas. February isn’t supposed to be like this. The mail is on the bar.

This Saturday, I was expecting a January financial statement. It was certain to be unpleasant news, but you have to take the bad with the good. Little did I know the financial portfolios were