The Floor of Heaven by Howard Blum Page B

that it was crucial to soften the concerns of anyone who was still feeling a bit ticklish. He needed to win the doubters over. “Gentlemen,” he’d say, “if there is any man here in absolute need, let him come up. And if I find him worthy, I will give him a stake.”
    Some days a prospector down on his luck would shuffle forward, and Soapy, without hesitation, would hand him a bill. This was, he knew, the price of doing business. But it wasn’t just that. Soapy, especially when he was flush, had a generous nature. After all, he had done his fair share of hard traveling and could sympathize with someone else’s misfortune.
    Regardless of whether a supplicant stepped forward, though, the crowd would never fail to appreciate this act of kindness. A thunder of respectful applause would break out. And that would be Soapy’s signal. The hook had been baited, and now it was high time to reel the suckers in.
    “Well, I see that there are no other beggars here, and that you are all worthy men,” he’d say. But that left him with a dilemma, Soapy would continue on, but with a newfound hesitancy meant to suggest that he’d spent many a sleepless night grappling with this problem. How was he to settle on a fair “method for distribution”? How should he choose the recipients of his cakes of money-laden soap?
    The only sensible solution, he’d explain, answering his own question with a measured, Solomonic wisdom, was to allow people to bid for the bars of soap. “If your eye is keen and your brain alert, you will buy the cake wrapped in the money. While if you are slow and stupid, you will at least secure a valuable soap that will let you ride on its lather over the Rockies and through the deepest mines.”
    “How much am I offered for this cake of soap?” he’d at last demand in a booming voice, all the time cradling the item in his two hands with an immense solemnity. He wanted the prospectors in the crowd to feel as if a shiny bar of gold had been put before them for their acquisition.
    And so the auction would begin. Competing bids would be shouted out in loud, insistent voices, a rapidly building frenzy of greed. It would sound as rough and tumble as a bar fight. But it was all a sham. It was only Soapy’s confederates in the crowd vying with one another, just his men going back and forth, raising the price another notch.
    When the bidding reached a lofty $40, that was the signal for the shills to sigh with regret and for Soapy to declare a winner. Jumpy with excitement, the lucky man would rush forward to claim his prize cake of soap. In a flurry, he’d unwrap the bar as the crowd watched with a shared anticipation. Lo and behold—a hundred-dollar bill! The winner’s whoop of delight would be loud enough to make many in the throng wonder if it was the whistle of an arriving train that had startled them. His joy was sheer ecstasy. And he could not give his benefactor—who, of course, was also his boss—enough thanks; encomiums that Soapy, gentleman that he was, politely dismissed with visible embarrassment.
    This hundred, as the grifters put it, was the “convincer.” The bidding for the next bar was “solid”—the real thing. Only this time the winner would find nothing in the wrapper but a flat cake of soap. Soapy would reassure the crowd that this unlucky man’s loss was their gain; the bars with the hidden greenbacks were still waiting to be claimed.
    And so it would go. More sales of soap at wildly inflated prices, more disappointed winners, more money going into Soapy’s pocket; and, before long, more disgruntled voices beginning to shout from the crowd that this was “a put-up job.” When the mood had sufficiently shifted, when the catcalls had turned truly threatening—and another of Soapy’s gifts was his ability to gauge the temperature of a crowd—he would promptly put an end to the festivities. “Since so few of you care for money,” Soapy, bristling with indignation, would reprimand