Читать «Infinite jest» онлайн - страница 879

Gene Fackelmann had, it turns out, for years been getting fraudulently over on Whitey Sorkin’s bookmaking operation in all sorts of little ways that Gately and Kite (according to Kite) hadn’t known about. Usually it was something like Fax taking long-shot action from marginal bettors not well known to Sorkin and not phoning the action in to Sorkin’s secretary, and then, when the long-shot lost, collecting the skeet plus vig^[372] from the bettor and rat-holing it all for himself. It had seemed to Gately after he found out about it a suicidal-type risk, since if any of these long-shots ever actually won Fackelmann would be responsible for giving the bettor his winnings from ‘Whitey’ — meaning it would be Sorkin that would hear the complaint if Fackelmann didn’t come up with the $ on his own and get it to the bettor — and the whole crew’s pharmacological expenses meant they always existed on the absolutest margins of liquidity, at least that’s what Gately and Kite (according to Kite) had always thought. It wasn’t until Fackelmann’s map had been presumably eliminated for keeps and Kite had returned from his long highatus and Gately and Kite were getting the late Fackelmann’s stuff together to divvy up valuables and dump the rest and Gately found, taped to the underside of Fackelmann’s porn-cartridge storage case, over $22,000 in mint-crisp O.N.A.N. currency, not until then that Gately realized that Fack-elmann had through iron will kept unspent an emergency reserve skeet-payment stake for just such a worst-case possibility. Gately split this found Fackelmann-$ with Trent Kite, then but went and turned his half of it in to Sorkin, claiming it was all they’d found. It wasn’t that he forked his half over to Sorkin out of any kind of fear — Sorkin would have regretfully had the C kid and his Nuck/fag crew demap him, Gately, too, along with Fack-elmann, if he’d thought Gately had been part of Fax’s scam — but out of guilt over having been clueless about his own fellow Twin Tower screwing Sorkin after Sorkin had been so neurasthenically over-generous to them both, and because Fackelmann’s betrayal had ended up so hurting Sorkin and causing him so much psychosomatic grief that he’d spent a whole week in bed in Saugus in the dark with Lone Ranger-type sleep shades on, drinking VO and Cafergot and clutching his traumatized cranium and face, feeling betrayed and abandoned, he’d said, his whole faith in the human creature shaken, he’d wept to Gately over the cellular phone, after it all came out. Ultimately, Gately gave Sorkin his half of Fackelmann’s secret $ mostly to try and cheer Sorkin up. Let him know somebody cared. He also did it for Fackelmann’s memory, which he was mourning Fax’s gruesome death even at the same time he cursed him for a liar and rat-punk. It was a time of moral confusion for Don G., and his half of the post-mortem $ seemed like the best he could do in terms of like a gesture. He didn’t rat out that Kite had a whole other half, which Kite spent his half of the $ on Grateful Dead bootlegs and a portable semiconductor-refrigeration unit for his D.E.C. 2100’s motherboard that upped his processing capacity to 32 mb² of RAM, roughly the same as an InterLace Disseminator-substation or an NNE Bell cellular SWITCHnet; though it wasn’t two months before he’d pawned the D.E.C. and put it in his arm, and had become such a steeply-downhill-type Dilaudid-addict that when he signed on as Gately’s new trusted associate for B&Es after Gately got out of Billerica the once-mighty Kite wasn’t even able to dicky an alarm or shunt a meter, and Gately found himself the brains of the team, which it was a mark of his own high-angle decline that this fact didn’t make him more nervous.