They were lost in there, as they were indeed lost in fact. Three small people, three very small people, about a little foursquare table. Their backs to the room, two in black cloth and one bare-shouldered, its contours rippling gracefully from time to time with muscular play.
She shuffled with neat economy of motion, and in the silence the cards made a little spitting sound.
Their battle against the silence was a losing one, for they could push it back each time only for so long as they spoke, and each time it came back again, and encompassed them once more, and they had it to do over again. And each time it crept back, the wall clock in the room with them got its chance, as it had inside in the supper room before, and the hissing of its pendulum was breathed malignantly into their ears, like some sort of lighted fuse over there by the wall, working ceaselessly toward its detonation point.
She placed the re-formed deck before Shawn. “Cut,” she said quietly.
He halved it, and she took it up again.
The sound of dealing was even less than the sound of shuffling had been. They fell like ghost cards about the table. Occasionally one snapped a little with the pressure of her thumb on leaving it.
They picked three of the four hands up; they shifted them into order. “I pass,” she said.
She spoke again. “You bid,” she said to Reid. It was too short a thing, too small a thing, to utter in such a large room, and after so long a time.
They waited.
It was excruciating. Shawn’s face was white with it. Her eyes were wide, and taut at their corners, with it.
Reid collapsed his hand, as though overcome by helplessness. And it was not helplessness of the game, for his eyes were not on the cards. They were over them, in sightless fixity.
She touched him on the arm, in tender reminder.
Then he spread the cards again, as if her touch had automatically told him what to do. But his eyes still failed to see them.
“Would you like to pass?”
He looked at her as though he didn’t understand. As though he’d heard her speak but didn’t know what it was she’d said He didn’t say anything.
“All right, I’ll make the first bid,” Shawn said. “One—” He stopped again, and referred to his hand, as though only belatedly remembering after he was well into mid-speech that his cards should have something to do with what he was about to say. “One diamond.”
“One heart,” she said.
It couldn’t pick up momentum. It had come back to Reid again, and it recoiled, dead. His hand was shielding his eyes now. He was still holding the disregarded fan-spread in his other. It was wilting toward the horizontal.
She tilted it up for him. “I can see your hand.”
Shawn lifted a seltzer-bottle from the floor beside his chair, shot a spurt into a glass, started to offer it to him.
Her foot reached under the table and tapped a period to his. Her head swung an unnoticeable quarter of an inch each way.
Shawn set the glass down.
“Do you pass again?” she tried to rouse him softly. He looked at her again. Once more as though he could hear her voice but couldn’t tell the meaning of the words.
“Two diamonds,” Shawn said, to put an end to the steady, haunting look Reid was giving her.
“Two hearts,” she said.
Shawn thumped the table with his knuckles. They shifted seats, each one moved one place to the left. She began to turn over the fourth hand, now opposite her on the table, arrange it in suits.
The clock had now veered around to Reid’s right. It had been directly back of him until now. His head started to turn, as if drawn by fine invisible lead strings. She caught the motion, and her hand went out, gently turned his chin to where it had been before.
The hissing seemed to become stronger, as if infuriated by her interference.
Nearly a full set of pictures in diamonds was exposed, only the king missing, from the auxiliary hand on the table.
She gave Shawn a look. Not the look of reproach a fanatic bridge player gives. A private look between the two of them meaning: You’re not making believe hard enough. Play the game.
He snapped his fingers contritely. “I knew they were somewhere,” he said. Something twinkled on his forehead, caught in a seam of the contracted skin. Something moist, but not big enough to be called a drop.
“Your lead,” she said to Reid.
They waited.
“Play to me,” Shawn coached him gently. “I’m your partner now.”
Reid put down a card.
“Don’t you want to take that back? You’re leading into an ace in the dummy.”
Reid retrieved it. “It matters so,” he said hollowly. “It matters so.” He looked at the card curiously, spread his thumb along its glossy surface longingly. “It’ll still be here, for another game, another night,” he said wistfully, “but the player—”
The siphon droned angrily in Shawn’s hand and drowned out the rest of it. Charged water fumed recklessly to the top of the glass, bleaching the base of Scotch it had held to invisibility. Then he clacked a piece of ice noisily around in it, knocking its head off.
Her underlip went sharply in, making a crevice of woe, then returned to its normal position again.
“Cigarette and drink,” she pleaded hoarsely. “I’ll take that one you’ve just built.”
Shawn retinted it with a little additional Scotch, handed it over. Her lips touched it, she put it down. Her lips drew once on the cigarette he lighted for her; she stamped it out beside her.
The clock pendulum seemed to lash itself in unholy glee; they could hear its quickened, breathless sibilance.
She extracted a card from Reid’s sheaf and put it down for him. Three others fell quickly over it, blotting it out. She took in the trick, placed it at the table’s edge before her.
Reid was suddenly squeezing his cards, as if to extract life giving moisture from them that he could no longer find in himself. He exerted such pressure on them with both convulsively compressed hands that those not caught and hopelessly bent shot up into the air before his face, and came down all about him, on his shoulders, on his sleeves, on his shirt front, in his lap.
He was breathing open-mouthed, as though he couldn’t get enough air. “You’re torturing me,” he panted. “I can’t stand any more of it. Don’t, I tell you. Stop it. Playing with pasteboards, adding up points on a score pad, while my life is draining aw— I don’t want points in clubs and spades, I want grains of life, more minutes to breathe in!” His hands fell open on the table, turned upward in empty supplication. “Give them to me. Give them to me.”
They’d leaped back from the table, the two of them, Shawn and she, as though it were in imminent danger of upsetting, though it was firm enough. Shawn was holding a glass to Reid’s lips. His other hand was pressing down firmly on the top of his head, as if forcing calmness into him.
“That’s it, old man,” he said steadyingly. “Tha-at’s it.”
They left him for a moment, sodden in the chair. The paraphernalia of the game disappeared as if by magic; suddenly there wasn’t a trace left. Their paths crossed, just out of earshot of him, as they hurried about, each intent on his own appointed task in the impromptu rearrangement the outburst had necessitated.
“It was the wrong game. Too quiet,” she murmured.
“I was afraid of that.”
“Wait, there’s a roulette wheel; help me bring it out. In his younger days, he used to tell me, at Biarritz and Monte Carlo— He’d start in at nine, he’d look up, and it was suddenly light out, the whole night had gone—”
“It may work now.”
They set it up on the table. Reid looked at it dully; his eyes showed no interest at first.
“We’ll play for real stakes,” she said. “This is no friendly parlor game.”
“Everything is real tonight,” Reid agreed sepulchrally.
Shawn was already spinning the wheel, testing it. The two colors blurred as it sw
am around, then separated again as it slowed to a stop.
“I’ll be back in a second,” she said cryptically. She sidled out to the door, in a way that struck Shawn as having a touch of the surreptitious to it, though this could only have had to do with her errand and not with the fact of her going itself.
She was gone far longer than the second she had set, and longer than a minute too. Then the door reopened, and she had sidled inward again, and again with that same touch of secrecy with which she had gone. She was holding in her hand a large sized handkerchief knotted together by its four corners, like a vagrant’s pack in miniature.
She opened this on the roulette table, and a sunburst of fuming brilliance flashed upward into the light. Rings, bracelets, clips, pendants.
“These are all I have. And what are you two putting up?”
They stood looking at it, as though stunned. Shawn tried to catch her eye, as if seeking to fathom whether she was in earnest or not. She refused to meet his gaze. She thumped her knuckles arbitrarily, to one side of the massed profusion of jewels, as if summoning them to meet her challenge.
Slowly a faint gleam kindled in Reid’s eyes, as if reflected there by what lay on the table. His lips even curved in a macabre smile. He turned abruptly to Shawn, clenched him by the arm. “Come with me a moment. I want you to go inside with me. I’m afraid to go in there alone.”
Shawn accompanied him uncertainly to the door, glancing back toward her a couple of times.
“Warm up the wheel a while,” Reid said to her.
They went out into the hall, and down it as far as Reid’s private study. They opened and went in there.
“Close it,” Reid said softly. Then when Shawn had, “Turn on that strong light over there. No, that one by the mantel. That’s it.”
He opened two adjoining sections of wood paneling. “You know what this is, don’t you?”
“I do now,” Shawn said soberly. “I didn’t until I saw that safe dial behind it.” He watched Reid a moment, started to turn on his heel. “I shouldn’t be in here with you.”
Reid’s hand darted out, caught him by the arm, held him there. “I want you to see it. What difference can it make now? One, and then nine, and then three, and then two. It’s an easy combination to remember. 1932. The year of the depression. Think of being broke, and then automatically you know how to open this safe and stop being broke.”
“You shouldn’t do this,” Shawn repeated stubbornly, looking down at the floor like a man trying to keep his eyes off something indecent.
Reid suddenly thrust something at him, something in each hand. “Here, put this in your pockets for me. Carry it in for me. There’s twenty thousand in cash here, that’s all I usually keep in it at one time.”
“Did you close it again?” Shawn asked, when he tried to turn him away from it.
“No, somebody else’ll have to do that for me—tomorrow. They’ll probably want it open again, first; it’ll save time.”
Shawn reached for the dial, twirled it so that the opening point was lost, closed the two wood panels over it.
They went back to where she was waiting for them by the table. She didn’t look up. She was watching the wheel. She must have known what they’d gone for, where they’d been. The flickering blur of the wheel was reflected in her eyes.
Shawn emptied his side coat pockets, which was where he’d carried the bank notes, onto the table. She didn’t look at the money, nor up at them, even then.
Shawn brought up his own wallet, from over his hip. It contained, he knew even without consulting it, one lonely ten and a few singles.
“You can’t play, with what you’ve got,” Reid said brittlely. “Those small denominations’ll slow us up. Here, I’ll stake you.” He pushed a taped packet almost contemptuously over toward him. “A thousand.”
“I can’t do that either,” Shawn said a little sharply.
“Give me your I O U for it,” Reid suggested impatiently. “It’s not a present.”
“This is on the level,” she warned, braking the wheel and looking up tautly.
Shawn stared at her hard for a moment. “All right, I’m game; I’ll take a chance,” he said abruptly.
He unclipped a mechanical pencil from the lining of his pocket, walked aside to another table, jotted something on paper, came back with it. “This do?”
Reid didn’t even look at it; took it and thrust it sight unseen underneath the bottommost of the packets of bank notes stacked one atop the other.
Shawn mopped his brow furtively, but she must have seen him. “You’ve never played for such high stakes before,” she murmured.
“I’ve never played at all before,” he answered.
“I’ve never had so little to lose,” Reid said. “Or so little to win.”
“Are we ready?” She thrust still farther aside a chair that remained too close behind her, threatening to hamper her. “Who’ll be croupier?”
They both turned to her simultaneously. “You.”
“Then I’ll have to spin and bet against the wheel as well. It’ll be a little irregular, but the wheel is honest. We trust one another here.”
“But who gets the forfeited bets?” her father wanted to know.
“Winner takes all. The winner takes the losers’ bets, instead of the house taking them. In other words, we’re betting directly against one another, instead of against the house. And since there are only the three of us playing, we’ll have to eliminate the numbers entirely. Just bet on the colors, black or red, and even or odd. No exact numbers. See what I mean, Tom?”
Shawn nodded.
“I’ll make the calls in English, for Tom’s sake.”
She stood facing the wheel. The two men ranged themselves on opposing sides of the table, their stakes offside.
“Place your bets.”
She picked up a ring from the embedded mass in the handkerchief, scanned it appraisingly, discarded it. She picked up a flexible bracelet of diamonds, in five closely fastened strands, turned it about in her hand. “I remember this. Cartier’s, one hundred thousand francs. Or was it two hundred and fifty? It looks like something you would use in your profession, Tom. On the red, even.” She put it down on ten.
Reid sheared off the topmost of his packet of bills. “On the black, odd.” He put it down on five.
They both looked at Shawn questioningly. He picked up his single packet of bills, hesitated, started to work his thumb in under the paper tape to burst it.
“Oh, no change,” Reid protested pettishly, “or the game won’t have speed. And I haven’t much time, Shawn, always think of that; we’ll have to play fast.”
“Sh-h,” she cautioned him softly.
“I’ll take a chance,” Shawn consented abruptly. “But I’m liable to leave the table quick and early.” He stabbed the packet of bills down intact. “On the black, even.”
“Nothing more goes.”
The wheel flowed blurredly, sending up ghostly high lights into their downpeering faces. It disintegrated into its two colors again, stopped with that little click of finality.
No one said anything.
Reid put his packet atop Shawn’s, edged their double layer slightly toward him.
Shawn drew it the rest of the way back, into sterile margin, with reluctant slowness.
But his hand made a sudden damlike barrier on the tabletop when she tried to shift the coruscating bracelet his way.
“Oh, no,” she insisted, and stepping quickly around the table, pulled out the mouth of his coat pocket and dropped the object in. “We’re not play-acting.”
“There’s a fourth variant we haven’t made allowance for,” Reid said, as if talking to cover up the detective’s embarrassment. “What happens if that comes up, uncovered by anyone’s bet?”
“The spin is canceled out. Bets are carried over where they are until the next spin. Make your bets.”
“Black, odd,” Reid said. “I’ve started on it. I’ll stay on it.”
; “Red, odd. This diamond dog collar. I’ll see if I can change my luck.”
“Black, even,” Shawn said. He pushed his whole stake forward.
“You don’t have to do that this time,” Reid said. “You have a backlog now.”
“I’m not going to hide behind that,” Shawn said stubbornly. “It stays.”
“Nothing more goes.”
Again that click, and then a silence.
Shawn lit a cigarette, so that his hands would have the excuse of being occupied.
“Oh, don’t be coy; let out your shirttails,” she said a little brusquely. “Isn’t it enough that I lose? Do I have to hand my stakes to you too?” She wedged the neckpiece in on top of the bracelet.
“I’ll feel like a walking hock shop in a couple more minutes.”
“Here, if this’ll make you feel any better,” Reid said. He took out the penciled I O U, tore it to pieces, flung them floor-ward, and retracted the topmost of Shawn’s now triple packets. “Now you’re what is known as financially independent.”
“That doesn’t wipe out the original—”
“Make your plays,” she interrupted.
They posted their bets in silence, they didn’t call them out any more as they laid them; they let their choices of squares on the chart speak for themselves. A change was coming over them, scarcely noticeable at first, yet growing more all-pervasive with each progressive turn of the wheel. From Shawn’s point of view, he could only observe it as it affected the other two. Her color was higher now, especially up over the cheekbones, and her eyes were brighter. Reid’s face had come back toward a semblance of normality; it was taut and grim, but it was the face of the emaciated living.
Shawn’s necktie bothered him, and he hooked fingers under it trying to give more slack to its constricting noose.
“Is it getting you yet, Tom?” she said, the pupils of her eyes flickering in time with the restless rippling of the wheel.
He widened his eyes at her in surprised confession, meaning it was in spite of himself. He could feel heat at the back of his neck, as if a burning glass were being mischievously focused on it. He pulled at his tie and it came loose. He snapped up one wing of his collar, let it stand out like a sort of epaulet upended over one shoulder.
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