A Gambler's Anatomy

by Jonathan Lethem

  II

  Wolf-Dirk Köhler, the rich man, opened the door to his study himself. The driver of the car had led Alexander Bruno inside, to the plush darkened foyer, and rapped lightly on the door that now opened, casting out light and warmth and wood smoke. Flames lapped in the fireplace.

  Köhler, advertised by Edgar Falk as “a potentially historic whale,” barely came up to Bruno’s chin. Nothing could have surprised Bruno. Marks, hemophiliac free spenders, gamblers of miscalibrated vanity: These appeared before him in an assortment of human containers. A whale might resemble a whale, or a minnow. Köhler’s big swank house was his true body. His money his true clothes. Bruno was here to bare him of what he could in an evening. Money ennobled nothing, except when you needed to have it. After what had happened in Singapore, and his flight to this city of dubious refuge, Bruno needed it very badly.

  “Edgar’s man of mystery,” said Köhler in perfect English. He held out his hand and grinned, a balding sprite in a blue velvet dinner jacket. “How I’ve been wishing to meet you. The veritable prince of the checkers, Edgar told me. Please come in.”

  “Luck is the prince,” said Bruno. “I am its servant.” It wasn’t the first time he’d used the line, or some variant: luck the master, luck the sorcerer, luck the caliph or samurai or Brahmin, Bruno merely footman, apprentice, pilgrim…

  “Hah! Very good! You have just won a first point, I think. Come in, come in.”

  The room was insulated with leather volumes, plush furniture, oak paneling, all burnished in age and redolent of cigar. A pewter tray atop a wheeled cart displayed crystal decanters of amber drink, glasses, a bowl of ice. Bruno’s glance went to the table, where a felt-and-leather backgammon set lay open between two comfortable chairs.

  “You brought your set,” said Köhler, arching his eyebrows. “How charming.”

  “I carry it. You never know. I’m happy to use yours.”

  “To insist on your own, that would be superstitious indeed!”

  “It would be useless,” said Bruno ambivalently. He did prefer his set, its smoothly inlaid points, its simple wood checkers, stained light and dark. No ivory or porcelain, no stitched felt or leather points to cushion the play in false glamour or comfort. The clacking of the checkers on the hardwood points was the music of honest thought, resounding in silence as it navigated the fortunes told by the pips on the dice. Bruno had for his entire life associated backgammon with candor, the dice not determining fate so much as revealing character.

  Bruno’s wooden set was the baseline, the pure enclosure. Any other, like the German businessman’s felt-muffled luxury item, was a euphemism for the true reality. Having his own in the room with him was touchstone enough.

  “I can no longer get into a game with any of my acquaintances,” said Köhler. His voice was lascivious. It was this greed that would kill him tonight. “Not for stakes—and yet we all quickly lose interest in their absence.”

  “Yes, I understand,” said Bruno, as if in sympathy. “This is typically when my services are needed.” He failed to add that he’d known several gentlemen of leisure who, on blundering into the gulf between the level of play they’d attained in topping their club companions and that required to persist through an evening with a player like Alexander Bruno, quit backgammon entirely. Relieving such men of their pretensions: Those were Bruno’s services.

  At Köhler’s predictability, Bruno’s confidence grew. Never mind the blot. “What stakes interest you?” Bruno spoke in a humdrum way. It was his own fervor he had to keep in check, the smell of blood.

  “Shall we begin at one hundred euros a point?”

  Bruno had no bankroll, less than sixty in his pocket. He’d need to win the first game in any event, and on from there. “Better a thousand, if you don’t mind.” Stakes to sting the rich man, if not bleed him, not yet.

  “You are in a hurry!” But Köhler was only delighted. “Would you care for a drink? I can pour you one of several excellent scotches, or you may prepare your own.”

  “What you’re having will be fine.”

  “Sit, then.” Köhler indicated the chair facing the fire. So, Köhler preferred the black checkers, moving clockwise. Every such preference was another vulnerability revealed. Apart from his wooden set, which he placed on the floor to one side of his chair, Bruno was careful to have no preferences at all.

  The scotch was good. Bruno nursed it, not asking its name or year. He won the first three games leaning back from the board, letting the hearth’s flames caress the edges of his vision’s blot, watching them gleam off the shined curve of his opponent’s bent head. Bruno mostly blitzed, making points with no concern for building primes, and beat the rich man three times in a row not on the board itself but with the doubling cube. Bruno offered increased stakes when his own position looked least promising, and “beavered”—instantly redoubling, to seize control—each time Köhler dared touch the cube himself.

  Köhler was a “pure player.” He slotted checkers and tried to cover them, working to build primes with the monolithic purposefulness afflicting those who believe they’ve discovered a system or cracked a code. Bruno might have guessed this from the air of ritual and fetish in the rich man’s study, books pedantically flush to each shelf’s lip, dustless crystal decanters of ancient scotches, heavy curtains making the room a womb of comfort. He might even have guessed it from Köhler’s automobile, if he’d been paying attention instead of trying to catch one last glimpse of his ferry companion.

  The pure style had peaked sometime in the 1970s. Bruno relinquished it himself at seventeen. Maybe pure play was good enough for Köhler to routinely fleece his wealthy compatriots at club evenings fogged by cigars and scotch. Perhaps in this very room. Bruno would be surprised, but he’d been surprised before. The level of play in Berlin might not be equal to that in Singapore, or London, or Dubai, though Bruno couldn’t imagine a reason why that should be so. Possibly Köhler had stupid compatriots, or had seized up at the prospect of sitting across from a player like Bruno. Possibly Köhler was a masochist. To this point, anyway, he played like a fish. Bruno didn’t have enough of Köhler in his pocket yet to declare the German a whale.

  “The boys!” Köhler chortled, when he rolled double sixes, though in fact they’d come for him at an inopportune time. Then, “The girls!” when it was double fives. “I’m dancing,” he said sadly, when he failed to reenter his checker from the bar. The rich man was a fiend for jargon; he must have been, to know it all in English as well as German. He jabbered through the first two games. He knew the difference between a “back game,” with multiple points covered in the opponent’s inner board, and a “holding game,” which spread the held points into the outfield—not that this knowledge had gained him anything against Bruno. An unprotected checker, sitting singly on a point, Köhler called a “blot.” The term was universal in backgammon, and Bruno had heard it spoken by sheikhs and Panamanian capos de la droga, by men who didn’t know the English term for “thank you” or “motherfucker.” Of course, for Bruno, blot had taken on a new meaning. Bruno, for his part, never decorated his play with either tournament or club argot. The game’s language had, with the advent of online gambling sites, become common coin. It told you nothing about the real experience of the player before you.

  By the end of the third game, in any case, the German had fallen silent. In the fourth, he disconcerted Bruno by refusing logical surrender. Bruno doubled him up to eight on the cube, then played it out, the rich man apparently believing he was in a legitimate race to bear his checkers off. He wasn’t within reach. Either Köhler was praying for a run of doubles to validate his decision, or he simply wasn’t good at counting pips on the dice. Not that Bruno counted pips anymore. A glance was enough. Still, after Köhler’s acceptance of the redouble, Bruno had to turn his head from side to side slightly, to examine the whole board around the blot. He needed to be certain he hadn’t missed something, so poor was Köhler’s decision. He’d missed nothing.
/>   As Bruno threw the numbers that bore off the last of his men—of course he’d drawn the doubles, his opponent’s misplay earning its typical reward—Köhler grunted and abruptly stood. His small head almost seemed too narrow, as if in a vise at the temples. “How much do I owe to you now?”

  “Twenty-eight thousand euros.” Bruno knew better than to insult him by softening the blow. “Edgar mentioned, I hope, that I need to have cash tonight. I’m only in Berlin briefly.” Bruno had in fact no idea where he’d travel next, or how soon. “I’d prefer not to have to cash a large check.”

  “I cover my losses.”

  “I’m sorry to mention it.”

  “Oh, no!” said Köhler, in another of his bursts of exultation. “You have me in a pretty spot! Let’s find out what we can do about it!” He poured himself another scotch and topped Bruno’s glass. “Would you mind music?” The German stepped over to an ornate cabinet and lifted its top, revealing an antique phonograph.

  “Not at all.”

  “Shellac 78s,” said Köhler. “I collect them. Nothing sounds the same.”

  “Any type of music in particular? Or just shellac 78s?”

  “It is my belief that jazz died with Charlie Parker. He was a revolutionary whose innovations ought to have been firmly refused.”

  “Where would that leave us?”

  “Ah! A believer in progress!”

  Bruno had only been flippant. He had no knowledge of how Charlie Parker had changed jazz, nor any interest in learning. If Köhler had proposed the music as a stratagem, intending it, with the scotch, as a distraction to his opponent’s play, Bruno was indifferent. Since his discovery of backgammon at age sixteen, the game had acted as a funnel on Bruno’s attention, excluding the bafflement and seduction of a universe beyond the checkers and points. More likely, anyway, playing the record was for Köhler another expression, like the scotch, the whiskey, and the jargon, of his preference for a thickened atmosphere.

  Bruno sought to lose the next game. It served two purposes: to delay while he determined how far he wanted to push Köhler, and to soften the German up for the push when it came. Bruno played a reckless trapping game, his preferred form of intentional error. Tonight, however, he was luck’s prince. The dice simply disfavored Köhler, and he missed every one of Bruno’s naked checkers, his blots. Soon enough Bruno had three of Köhler’s checkers on the bar and had built a prime. The doubling cube had lain untouched during Bruno’s blitz, and now Bruno offered it, intending a merciful finish. But Köhler accepted and played on.

  Bruno’s next roll, double fours, closed the last point on his inner board. To decline doing so would have been conspicuous, a display of something much worse than pity. Contempt. Bruno brought in half his men before opening an escape for Köhler’s captured checker. The jazz had long since squealed to its conclusion, the 78 clicking and popping under the needle at its inner groove. Against that backdrop Köhler’s grunts were audible each time he rolled his dice, waiting for the miracle. None came. Bruno finished bearing off before Köhler’s last man limped into his home board.

  I am aware I have been playing like a complete asshole. Bruno beamed this thought at Köhler, though there was no less likely candidate for susceptibility to Bruno’s old telepathic gift, which was anyhow abandoned. Köhler was immaculate in his shrine of self. In fact, I tried to throw the game your way. The dice wouldn’t permit it. They don’t like you very much.

  The gammon brought Köhler’s debt to thirty-six thousand. Bruno didn’t imagine he’d inflicted hurt. He wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that prize items in Köhler’s shellac 78 collection had cost the German half that sum. Still, it made Bruno’s first good night in two months. If he walked out now he’d be in a position to repair his debt to Edgar Falk and pay his hotel bill. Enough would remain for Bruno to ponder his next move, and the prospects for true independence from Falk, at leisure.

  The result was too good—too much too soon. For the price he’d extract here tonight he owed Köhler an evening’s entertainment, some back and forth, a shred of hope, not this catastrophe. The situation exposed Bruno’s least favorite aspect of his profession. At such times he became a courtesan of sorts. A geisha boy massaging the customer’s vanity until he could make off with the loot. Backgammon’s beauty was its candidness. In contrast to poker, there were no hidden cards, no bluff. Yet because of the dice, it was also unlike chess: No genius could foresee twelve or thirty moves in advance. Each backgammon position was its own absolute and present circumstance, fated to be revised, impossible to falsify. Each roll of the dice created a new such circumstance. The game’s only true gambling device, the doubling cube, served an expression of pure will. Yet now, having to pull the German businessman back into the game to protract the evening, Bruno would be required to make a piece of theater.

  “You’ve lost a cuff link!” said Köhler.

  “I dropped it on the ferry…or the train…”

  Bruno felt overwhelming weariness. He’d arrived with what should have been sufficient handicaps: losing streak, near-empty pockets, an occlusion to his vision like a tunnel of dark he approached and might soon enter. What more must he offer in order to throw the rich man a game? Play with his eyes closed? If he could only throw the dice in his sleep, Bruno would have gladly let his head slump on the chair’s high cushioned back. Winning again, after passing through the vale of misfortune in Singapore, ought to revive him. Instead it seemed to have released Bruno into the clutches of a fatigue that resembled despair. He took a drink, fantasizing that the scotch could enter his head and dissolve the blot, like a solvent for stains on furniture.

  “Fletcher Henderson,” said Köhler, his back to Bruno as he changed the record.

  “Uh-huh.” Bruno pushed the checkers back onto their starting points.

  “Should we raise the stakes?”

  Bruno shrugged, covering surprise. He shouldn’t be so naïve. If the German truly wasn’t feeling any pain yet, it was only a reminder that real money, the kind Bruno would never know, was bottomless. Since Bruno couldn’t excuse himself from this room, he could perhaps at least wake himself up by seeking out Köhler’s threshold, to wipe away the rich man’s tiny lizard smile.

  “Two? Three?”

  “Five.”

  Bruno nodded. At that, the air in the room was slightly electrified.

  “Mr. Köhler, may I ask your business? Edgar didn’t mention it when he sent me to you.” Bruno guessed that old money, at least some element of family fortune, lay behind the combination of splendor, complacency, and passivity on display. Entirely self-made fortunes were typically compiled by aggressive men, even feral ones. Not that Bruno expected a confession. Old fortunes were usually given some industrious-sounding veneer.

  “Call me Dirk, please. And may I call you…”

  “Alexander.”

  “Alexander. Were you watching on television in 1989, when the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall was breached?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The Berliner Mauer,” said Köhler, showing his teeth to his bottom gums. “The Wall.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Well, you should not feel embarrassed, those Germans who were not in the streets with a pickax or a blowtorch were also sitting watching on television, apart from me. I was on the telephone.” Köhler reseated himself and rolled his single die, to win the opening with a six-four. He began as usual, dropping builders into his outer board. “I was part of a consortium of interests that had been for some time acquiring what many believed entirely without value—the land deeds beneath various parts of the Wall.”

  “Real estate. You’re a developer.” Bruno rolled his dice, missing Köhler’s exposed checkers. He split his own back men, figuring to run for a change. Perhaps this was the game to lose, though conceding the first contest at the raised stakes would be irritating.

  “A developer of sorts.”

  “So you built a lot of, what, really thin apartment buildings?”
r />   “Funny! But between the eastern perimeter and the famous Wall of the Western imagination, covered with graffiti and celebrants, lay thousands of square meters.”

  Bruno had intended a mild flattery, inviting Köhler to talk about himself and about his money, of which he’d concede some share tonight. Köhler seemed reanimated, however. He soliloquized as if from some interior script. “These blasted lands consisted of demolished buildings and filled-in canals, laid with traps, watched over by guard towers—the so-called no-man’s-land. All on the eastern side, of course, and claimed by that government for the People. But in the background lurked various private owners, families not even any longer in Berlin, quite willing to sell…we required the services of a great many lawyers! I built nothing myself, I haven’t the appetite for it, but anyone who tried was forced eventually to negotiate with me and my partners.”

  “A onetime killing, then.”

  “The Wall? Yes. How dare I hope for a second such windfall? But I find ways to carry on. This city puts a great emphasis on the rights of tenants and squatters, and on the privilege of sites to remain in a state of commemorative ruin. Few have the patience for the art of speculation, it is a very slow game. But you know, even the graves themselves must eventually give way…”

  “Urban renewal.”

  “Yes, you Americans have this admirable name for it. Urban renewal. Everything in its right place!” Köhler rolled a six-four a second time, and closed a three-prime in front of Bruno’s split runners. After Bruno’s next roll didn’t clear this hurdle, the German reached for the doubling cube.

  Bruno accepted, putting them in a ten-thousand-euro game, one in which Bruno controlled the cube. He’d break Köhler badly now, or let him come back, then settle in for the longer and likely bigger kill. Let the dice decide. Bruno would run his back checkers unless the pips commanded otherwise.

  But first, Köhler rolled to hit Bruno’s two unprotected checkers, and Bruno found himself unable to reenter from the bar.