“A good question; that’s what I’d say,” Captain Manley-Norville replied enigmatically and continued to watch the match with a thoughtful expression on his handsome face.
“Down three doubled and vulnerable,” said Simpson, referring to the last hand played by the Carpenters, and marked down the score. His eyes came up. “My, my! This is somewhat of a rout, I’m afraid. Are you sure you want to continue at these stakes?”
“Shut up—I mean shuffle the cards and deal,” said Max Carpenter between clenched teeth, and he stared fixedly at the cards as they slid across the table toward him, rather than look up and meet his wife’s baleful glare.…
4
“So what’s the story, butterfingers?” Mrs. Carpenter demanded. “Give me an alibi, and it better be good, Mr. Houdini the second—or maybe the fifty-second—because I’m in no mood for sob stories!”
Her voice was scathing; she was stalking their stateroom to the limited extent that shipboard staterooms, even luxurious ones, permit stalking. Her manner was that of a caged lioness deprived of her loved ones; which, of course, was precisely what had happened to her, her loved ones being Franklin, Jackson, Hamilton, Lincoln and Washington—or at least their portraits.
In the light of the utter calamitous disaster of that bridge game, Mr. Max Carpenter had become quite calm. The totality of the fiasco was too great for mere anger; it would have been like childishly losing one’s temper at Armageddon.
“What happened, sweets,” he said quietly, “is that we lost six grand. Our whole, entire stake. Plus, of course, what we picked up from the suckers so far this trip.”
“Don’t tell me bad news I already know! I know what happened! What I want to hear from you is, what happened?”
Bitterness tinged the normally quiet voice of Max Carpenter.
“What happened is that we got taken to the cleaners by a couple of innocent-looking sharks who ought to be made to walk the yardarm, or be keel whipped, or something.” Mr. Carpenter’s ignorance regarding shipboard punishment was forgivable since he seldom saw much of a vessel beyond the card room. His tone indicated, however, that if discipline aboard vessels hadn’t gone down a long way since Captain Bligh, Simpson and Carruthers would certainly have suffered the penalties described.
Mrs. Mazie Carpenter didn’t even bother to sneer at this weak effort.
“Alibi Ike! Why don’t you admit the truth—that you suddenly developed ten thumbs?”
“Hold it! Hold it right there!” Max Carpenter didn’t mind being called stupid, idiotic, lame-brained, ugly, gruesome, dopey, and jerky by his wife—after all, marriage granted certain privileges that he recognized—but to have one’s talent insulted, and falsely at that, was too much! “Don’t tell me! I dealt those cards as good as I ever did! They jumped up and ate out of my hand!”
“Ate your hand, you mean—”
“Hold it!” He paused, thinking, and then struck himself on the forehead with his clenched fist. It was a bit harder than he intended, but as he rubbed the spot he didn’t mind. “Do you suppose—?”
Mrs. Carpenter was far from sure this wasn’t another ploy to escape her tongue. “Do I suppose what?”
He frowned into space and then brought one clenched fist down into the palm of the other hand. “Of course! Five will get you ten—”
“My husband, the gambler!”
“Hold it!” Max Carpenter reached for the telephone, dialed, and waited. At last it was answered at the other end; he dropped his voice silkily.
“Bell captain? I wonder if you could have a boy bring a deck of cards—playing cards, that is—to Stateroom B-67? What? That’s right. From the library steward. Thank you.…” He hung up the receiver gently, remaining in a brown study.
“You haven’t had enough cards for one day?” Mrs. Carpenter said sarcastically. She shook her head in disgust; it was not an unaccustomed gesture on her part where her spouse was concerned. “Or are you finally going to get around to a little practice? A bit late, of course, since we’re flat broke. It would have been helpful if you thought of practicing a little last night!”
“Hold it!”
Mr. Carpenter raised his hand for silence; unaccountably, Mazie closed her mouth. Max seemed to know what he was about, a rare thing when he didn’t have a deck of cards in his hands. They waited in silence; it was only minutes until a polite but persistent tapping came at the door. Max answered it, tipped the bellboy with a coin he knew he could ill afford at the moment and closed the door behind the uniformed figure, latching it securely. Mrs. Carpenter watched her small husband with narrowed but still suspicious eyes.
Max took the deck of cards to the small dressing table, switched on the light there and opened the deck with practiced fingers. The cards were first fanned out expertly and then regrouped. One card was taken and placed before the light; its opacity prevented even the slightest shadow developing. It was returned to its companions and the deck spread out on the Formica top of the table. Mr. Carpenter’s thin index finger poked among them a bit, his small head bent over them, his sharp eyes studying every detail. For several moments silence prevailed; even Mrs. Carpenter was impressed by the thoroughness of the investigation. She stood behind her husband and held her tongue, no small sacrifice. Mr. Carpenter picked up one card after another, checking each carefully, holding them in his thin but muscled fingers. Finally he nodded slowly.
“Beautiful!” he said softly. Despite himself, admiration tinged his voice. “Lovely! Those dirty no-good bastards!”
“What?”
“Look here!”
He held up one of the playing cards for his helpmate’s inspection. The back was decorated with a colored picture of the S.S. Sunderland sailing bravely into some exotic harbor. Mountains formed the background, birds wheeled in the sunlight over the smoking stack, coral sand beaches edged the blue water. Max raised his eyes to his wife’s frowning face.
“What do you see?”
“A ship sailing into some sand, if it doesn’t watch out. What am I supposed to see? Our six grand?”
Max nodded. “Believe it or not, Mazie, sweets—that’s exactly what you are seeing. Our six grand. It’s right there on the back of these cards, every cent of it.”
It finally made it through Mazie Carpenter’s irritation into her brain. The information shocked her.
“They’re marked? Those old miserable so-and-sos slipped a marked deck into the game?”
“Not just one. A ton of them.” Max Carpenter put that point aside for the nonce, sticking with more important essentials. He waited a moment from force of habit, allowing time for his wife to say something demeaning to him, but when silence prevailed he continued with his catechism. “See the smokestack? See the top deck? See the sides of the ship?”
“All right!” said Mrs. Carpenter irritably. Her previous silence had established a new record and she wasn’t about to break it too quickly. “See Jane? See Dicky? See Spot?” She snorted. “I made it past the first grade. What’s the pitch?”
Max Carpenter was not one to rush his triumphs. With his wife, Mazie, they were few and far enough between. He closed the deck and then fanned the cards widely, smiling at them.
“See the portholes? Those lovely four rows of portholes on the side of the ship starting under the Promenade Deck?” A thin, well-manicured finger came to rest, its nail pointing. “See? There’s just the barest touch of shading in the different portholes. This card, for example: the first porthole from the front of the ship is a trifle darker than the others—the first porthole in the top row. My guess is either the ace or the deuce of spades.” His fingernail flipped the card over expertly. “Ace of spades. So the card with the second porthole darker, would be a king. And in the second row, the king of hearts, and here we have—” He spread the cards with one finger and found his target. He flipped it over. “The king of hearts, as advertised.” He grinned up at her. “Cute, isn’t it?”
“Cute!” Mazie Carpenter was fuming. “Cute? Bullsauce
! I’ll have their scalps for napkins! Those crooks!” She reached for the telephone, sparks flying from her steely eyes.
Max Carpenter’s hand closed on the telephone, depressing the button.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m calling somebody, by God!”
“Who?”
“Who the hell do I know? Just somebody!”
“You’re doing nothing of the sort,” Mr. Carpenter said with a quiet authority that was so rare that Mrs. Carpenter didn’t argue, at least for the moment. “Stop and use that beautiful head. In order to work their little swindle, they needed to mark every deck of cards on board. I switched decks four times, and it was all about as useful as pockets on a shroud. I’d give a grand to know how they managed to get their hands on all the decks.”
“A grand you don’t have,” Mazie Carpenter pointed out.
“A grand, like you say, neither one of us has. Anyway, the fact is the old bastards managed to do it. Did you ever stop and think of that?”
“Are you kidding? Since you told me, I haven’t been thinking of anything else! I couldn’t care if they crawled over the side of this tub and marked the actual portholes themselves!” Her hand went out for the telephone once again. “Those miserable crooks cheated us out of six thousand big bucks, and I’m going to—”
“Mazie!” Mr. Carpenter’s unaccustomedly sharp voice gave his wife pause. She slowly set the phone back in its cradle. Max Carpenter shook his head in disgust. “Use your head! We’ve figured out the markings. The cards are still in play; there aren’t any others on this bucket! Take that fact, add to it you’re crazy if you think I’ve lost my touch with a deck, and what d’you have? Christmas in July! We ought to send the old bastards flowers on their birthdays! They’ve put every other card player on this ship right into our hands!”
Mrs. Carpenter closed her mouth. It had been opened preparatory to scotching any argument whatsoever her husband might try to present, but the obvious truth of his statement took the wind from her sails. She considered it for several moments and then nodded slowly and, for the first time, with a smile. True, it was the kind of smile Genghis Khan most likely smiled when he first saw the banks of the Indus, but it was a smile.
“Yeah!” she said softly.
“And after the way we got slaughtered today, every card player on this tub has got to be convinced we shouldn’t be allowed to play casino for more than a nickel a corner, right?”
“Yeah!”
“So getting suckers shouldn’t be any great sweat, right?”
“Yeah!”
“And another thing: after the shellacking we took today, nobody in their right mind will ever accuse us of being cardsharps, which you have to admit hasn’t always been the case. Right?”
“Yeah!”
“So,” Mr. Max Carpenter said in obvious conclusion, “we should really be happy over what happened this morning. Right?”
“Yeah!” There was a pause. “Only I’m not,” Mrs. Carpenter added, her voice harsh once again. “To be taken by a couple of old cockers, and foreigners at that! I’m telling you, Max, it doesn’t pay to leave the good old U.S.A.” She shook her head at the unfairness of it all. “Our whole stake out the window! Even if we know those cards like the back of our hand, so what? We can’t play. Anyway, not until we round up some scratch.”
It was the sad truth. The worst possible thing would be to jeopardize a beautiful scheme by being unable to pay for any temporary setback; and while they could not honestly foresee any setbacks, temporary or otherwise, neither one of them even faintly considered starting to take advantage of their knowledge without some folding money in their pockets. They had not foreseen losing to Simpson and Carruthers, either, and neither required a memory course by Harry Lorayne to recall that morning’s session.
There was a pause while they both thought. Then, “Cable your grandfather? Collect, of course?” It was a silly suggestion and Max Carpenter knew it even as he made it. Mazie Carpenter didn’t even bother to answer. Max wrinkled his small brow in further thought. “Do we have any friends with money?”
“We don’t even have any friends without money,” Mrs. Carpenter said. She didn’t seem to mind the loss. She was thinking furiously, her pretty face screwed up in a frown. “The only people we know in this whole wide world with any loot are those three old you-know-whats.” She paused, struck by a thought engendered by her idle statement, and then nodded slowly. Max Carpenter, no stranger to the weird moods of his wife, instantly became apprehensive.
“Sweets, what’s on your mind?”
“The answer, that’s what’s on my mind!” She smiled, a humorless grimace. “Those bright boys are going to contribute a good chunk of our dough back where it came from!”
“And just how do you make them stand still for that?” Max could not keep the sarcasm from appearing. “Just by asking them for it politely?”
“I don’t know about the polite part, but you got the general idea. Yeah. We just ask for it,” said Mrs. Carpenter decisively, and she proceeded to outline her plan to her husband.
Max’s face blanched as he listened.
“Oh, no!” he whispered.
“Yes!”
“Not again! You promised me—”
“Keep quiet!” she commanded. “You just go get ready. And leave the rest to me.…”
Mr. Carruthers sat with his friends Mr. Simpson and Mr. Briggs at their usual corner table in the bar. They sipped their usual drinks in preparation for lunch as he studied the figure of the young bellboy wending his way through the laden tables in their direction and glanced at his massive pocket watch.
“A bit longer than I had anticipated,” he remarked thoughtfully.
“I beg your pardon?” Simpson paused in the act of lighting a Corona and considered the man in the ecru suit curiously.
“The royal summons,” Carruthers explained genially and turned to face the waiting bellboy. “Yes, son?”
“A message for you, sir.” The bellboy produced a salver holding a letter. It seemed to come from nowhere—or perhaps from behind his back. Carruthers exchanged a coin for the missive and waited until the boy had left before tearing it open. He read it slowly and nodded, not at all surprised by the contents, although the stationery itself seemed to impress him. It was far more tasteful than he would have suspected and confirmed his belief that the skill of the Carpenters was seldom as unproductive as it had been that morning. He held it up.
“Rather nice, what? Monogrammed and embossed.”
“What’s it say?” Briggs demanded, always pragmatic.
“Oh, ah! Yes, of course. Well, as anticipated, it wonders if I might stop in and see her in her stateroom. Mrs. Carpenter, that is. It’s cabin B-67.” He smiled brightly at his friends.
“What’s she want to see you for?” Briggs asked suspiciously.
“I doubt if it is merely because of my animal magnetism,” Carruthers said. “My personal guess is that Mr. Carpenter—Max to his exceedingly few friends—has managed to discover the means of our success at the bridge table.”
Simpson frowned through a cloud of smoke.
“I say!” he said. “They can’t make us return any of it, can they?”
“I’m sure it would be difficult in their position. Besides, I imagine publicity is the last thing they desire. It would be against their best interests.” Billy-boy shook his head. “No; I judge they have some other scheme in mind. Knowing the cards to be marked, and having solved the mystery of the markings …” He paused, thinking, and then looked up. “You know, that would make a rather good title, were we still writing. The Mystery of the Markings.…” He thought a moment more. “We might have this family named John and Mary Markings, and one day they disappear in a place from which nobody in their family has ever disappeared before, like the top box of a ferris wheel—”
“I believe that’s been done,” Simpson said thoughtfully. “Still, it’s a lovely title. My suggestion would be
a ringer in a pet show, winning because his trainer falsified his true markings—”
Briggs had had enough. “Dammit! Cliff! Billy-boy!”
“Oh, ah! Sorry. Got carried away,” Carruthers said contritely and got back on the track. “Where was I? Oh, yes. The Carpenters, knowing the backs of the cards now as well as the fronts, and Max—being very fine in the handling of a deck—they are now in a beautiful position to take every card player aboard this ship. And we, of course—” He shrugged. “Well, we’d scarcely be in a position to unmask them.”
“So what do they want from us?” Briggs demanded.
“Money,” Mr. Carruthers said simply. “I’m afraid we depleted their operating funds.” He finished his brandy, washed it down with a sip of champagne and came to his feet.
“But surely you aren’t going to finance them with our money?” Simpson asked, peering up anxiously at the round face and innocent blue eyes of his friend.
“Not without a struggle,” Mr. Carruthers assured him, and marched from the room.
In his youth, admittedly many years before, Billy-boy Carruthers had earned a reputation of something of a ladies’ man, the reputation being relatively well deserved. The feminine form, therefore, was not a complete mystery to him. And, of course, on occasion one of the younger—or even older but livelier—members of the Mystery Authors Club would leave a dogeared copy of Playboy in the club reading room, and in this manner Billy-boy had been able to verify the basic lack of design changes over the years. Still, there were figures and shapes, and shapes and figures, and it did not take a Praxiteles to know that the one standing and beckoning from the half-open door of Stateroom B-67 was one of the better models.
From her dress—or rather, lack of it—it was instantly apparent that Mrs. Carpenter might well contract pneumonia if left standing in the slight breeze from the drafty corridor, and for this reason Mr. Carruthers did not hesitate to enter and close the door behind him. Mazie Carpenter was wrapped in a diaphanous bit of transparent gauze that seemed to magnify her charms rather than disguise or hide them; her air of nervousness was not entirely put on, because it was some years since she and Max had been forced to use this particular approach, and she wasn’t quite sure how well she was up on her lines.
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