by Mark Teppo
It’s not that cheating didn’t happen in the butcher’s basement room; it was just that sometimes a wild eye and an angry finger were enough to drive a player out of the game—illicit card handling or not—and Ralph didn’t need the forced forfeiture of his stake. Not tonight. Not when his weekly payment was due tomorrow.
It had been a shitty month, shoved on the end of a bad year. Too many of his slips were defaulting, and while he could get his own collectors, they took their cut, and that didn’t help his situation. His finances looked good on paper, but the Minotaurs weren’t the sort to do sit down for tea and do some light reading of the books. They liked hard currency assurances, the ten-percent-waiting-for-them-in-a-paper-bag kind.
Ralph dealt three hole cards to each player—two and the pineapple—and tried to keep his focus on the table, on the game in front of him. The faster the cards fell, the more quickly the money moved around the table. Snap. Snap. Keep the cards moving. Keep the energy up.
Ralph kept an eye on the thin man with the wind-whipped hair at the other end of the table. He can’t help it, Ralph thought, watching the other man look at each card as it was dealt to him. But he’s going to derail the game.
Forcing the Poet out of the game was going to be a priority.
Snap. Snap. Keep the cards moving.
III
Vilmo Verone, the game’s host, thumbed the edge of his cards. He took a long look, bending the cards so far they would be permanently creased. During the course of the evening, the players went through multiple packs of cards, as Vilmo’s incessant folding splintered the deck.
The weekly game took place in the basement room of the Verone family deli and butcher shop. On the corner of Blaine and Madison, halfway down the western slope of Crown Hill, the deli clung to the kinetic upheaval of the financial district. Vilmo’s father had opened the shop when Heritage Haven sat on the hilltop, but the VA hospital, like its patients, had died a slow death in the decades following the War. After a few years mourning the death of the old, real estate speculators and slick contractors had moved in, rebuilding the hilltop into a chaotic mess of half-raised business towers and sprawling condominium complexes. Everyone was too busy trying to close a deal to bother with minor details like locking doors, fire-resistant insulation, or stairs that reached all the way to the top floor.
Unlike his father, Vilmo cleaned money as well as ham and beef. The change sweeping Crown Hill would have taken the deli—had threatened to, in fact, in the wake of his father's death—but Vilmo, having seen the way his father and the other veterans were devoured by the Sprawl, opted to be part of the organic flow of the city instead of a rock around which everything must detour.
Once a week, just after sundown, Vilmo would leave five matches in a cup by the front door. Those who came to move money would take a match and descend into the basement. When the last match was taken, the door would be locked and the game would begin.
It was always poker, the age-old ritual of money laundering via the cards, and whatever loans or debts the players might have were laid aside for the duration of the game. Names were optional and stations were ignored. All seats were equal and the only allowance made was for coin: you played what you brought—no more, no less—and what you brought was what you felt comfortable carrying.
Once, as the stories go, a man who owed a Parkway banker $30,000 came to play with his last six hundred dollars, and he sat directly across from his street banker. The following day he paid off his marker with cash taken from the Parkway man through the swing of the cards. The loan shark laughed and didn't break the man's legs because the transactions of Vilmo's game were sacrosanct.
Like the thin bookie sitting on his right, Vilmo didn’t mind the pineapple variant. More cards led to more money on the table. Though, getting hands like the one staring at him now were tiresome. Deuce, five, eight. All mismatched. Nothing makes nothing, he thought as he tossed his cards to the muck. “I’m out,” he said.
Elliot Whitcombe, on the butcher’s left, scratched at his rubbery jowls. He wore many rings, and the pale basement light reflected from the hot red stone in the center of the large one on his index finger, a moist eye winking seductively through lashes of silver filigree. “Fifteen,” he said, tossing three blue chips into the pot.
On the other side of the table, sitting opposite Vilmo, was the Poet. His cherubic transparency tended to confuse the other players. They expected hard masks—immobile, expressionless, stony—and the Poet's mutable face was a source of discord. The Poet’s eyes were in constant motion, darting back and forth on the table, dwelling too long on exposed cards better than his and flicking over the rest. He bet carelessly as if he didn’t really understand the importance of money—as if he had nothing to gain nor anything to lose. It was a gambit, they figured, a clever mirage meant to hide the true player. Vilmo knew better, and he kept these little secrets to himself.
It made up for Mistral’s inscrutability.
Next to the Poet sat Clio, the woman who ran the Alibi Room downtown, and beside her was the quiet man, Mistral. Mistral was a regular. He had missed one or two games in the last six months. He always took home more than he showed up with, but he never dominated the table. It was both his circumspection in his grinding and the unsettling manner of his play that made Vilmo not mind his regular appearance. He was good, but not that good, and yet it didn’t matter who else was at the table or what technique they used, he never broke.
He was Vilmo’s ringer because the butcher had realized that there was money to be made in ignoring Mistral. While the other players were distracted by him, Vilmo could quietly chip away at their stacks.
The last player was a new face at the table. Named Deke, he was an out-of-towner, a shark who had swum into their harbor. He had known the game was going to happen, hours before Vilmo set the matches out. It was as if he had the scent of the cards, as if he could smell the history of play that had gone on in the basement.
Vilmo didn’t normally allow strangers to sit at his table, but there was an intermingling of desperation and hope in Deke's eyes that had loosened his tongue. “Come back in three hours,” he had said earlier that afternoon. “With at least two hundred dollars, if you hope to play for a while.”
The man had looked destitute, and regardless of his ability to spot a game or the energy he would bring to the table, he was an unknown agent. Vilmo's superstitious reflex had kicked in. The table sat six, and seven introduced a chaotic element. The sort of influence that would give birth to strange fluctuations and odd twists of fortune that might not work in his favor.
Deke had come back, with more than the necessary amount of money, and Vilmo decided to read that as a portent of opportunity.
IV
Clio had two threes—spades and clubs—and a red eight as the bookie finished dealing. Discarding the eight before the flop was the obvious move, leaving her with the black pair. There were five cards to be turned, though the odds were against her getting anything from them that would improve her chances with the tiny numbers. Still, the night was young, and she hadn’t lost much money yet. The game was still settling as the other players sorted through the bluster and the bluff for the real clues in their opponents' play.
And there was the issue of the seventh player.
Even though this was only the third time she had come to Vilmo's game, she knew most of the men at the table, and she could read their interest in the slender stranger in the thread-worn clothing. There was something about the way he moved that seemed familiar to her, and while it was like the intermittent shiver that struck her regulars at closing time, the twitch wasn't alcohol related. The stranger was bound to some other compulsion. The cards, if she had to guess.
There was a story here, a tale she could tell at the Alibi tomorrow. The game of seven: the night when Vilmo invited a stranger to his table. A real gambler.
“Match and raise,” she said, tossing enough chips into the pot to meet Whitcombe’s opening bet and ad
d ten dollars to it. Red daisies and blue daisies dancing on the green felt field.
Mistral always sat like a cat in his chair: watching, with inscrutable patience. He examined her face for a few seconds after she placed her bet, searching the skin around her eyes for some clue of what cards she had.
She was used to the examination. It came with the job. There was a perpetual stream of young men flowing into the Alibi, a flood of eager bodies vibrating with energy, all that pent-up desire. They stared at the wait staff, and most of them were sharp enough to use that relentless fascination to their advantage, but it was a different sort of hunger the men reserved for her. They knew she was unobtainable, completely and totally out of their reach, and the swift denial—even before they could try their charms on her-—enflamed them all the more.
Mistral’s gaze had a different sort of intensity, as if he already knew what secrets lay in her heart and wanted to dig deeper. “Twenty-five then,” he said, adding chips of his own to the pot. He never even looked at his hole cards.
V
Elliot Montreaux Whitcombe’s father had always told him to think big, to use the brains with which God had blessed four generations of Whitcombe men. His father, Pieter Cornelis Whitcombe III, had been a stowaway on a luxury liner, an escapee from De Schie Prison in Rotterdam who had spent a year hiding in coffins, cargo bins, shipping containers, and steamer trunks before finding footing again on West Forty-Eighth Street in New York City. Within five years, he had built a trade empire of rail cars, steamer ships, and cargo transport. He married into polite society, donated generously to the arts, and funded schools so they could be named after him. Of his six children, four grew into positions that made Daddy proud, one died in the tragic manner that pursues all families of means and import, and then there was Elliot, who only dreamed of not working.
He was, however, not a fool, and he realized the best way to facilitate the comfortable lifestyle that filled his dreams was to traffic with the ephemeral. Daddy’s empire of crates and boxes and containers was built around a clever scheme of slippery margins, and its success relied upon a vastness of scale. The juggernaut kept moving forward because it was powered by a big brain that could juggle all the thousands of minute details that made up its incomprehensibly complex network.
Elliot wanted a transactional network that had only two points: a buyer and an object to buy. The magic lay in inflating the value of the object to the buyer. The magic lay in art. Elliot, in a way that his father would never truly understand, had dreamt the biggest dream of all: the valuation of the truly unobtainable.
Whitcombe watched the Poet play with his small stack of chips. The writer’s writing fingers were stained, old ink smudges like slippery tattoos. Pity there wasn’t more value to be squeezed out of the printed word, he thought. The Poet understood the importance of selling oneself—the stories of his behavior at dinner parties were numerous, and unlike some of the other fables he spun, probably true. It was the sort of reputation that sold art, and if the Poet had trafficked in something other than the word, Whitcombe wouldn’t be here, grubbing after seed money for his next acquisition.
It’d be a lot easier if he painted himself. A lot less work than pawing through studio after studio of shitty Neo-Impressionist portraits and Pop Art that was just bad surrealism hiding beneath a pointillist veneer.
But producing the work himself was, unfortunately, not the way value was created. An artist selling their own work was desperate, not visionary. No, the voice of the gallery critic was necessary, that detached intermediary lending gravitas to the work by interpreting its meaning for the public.
He sighed as the hand ended, Ralph’s two pair taking the pot. Not that there was much at stake on the table. It was a slow week at the butcher's game; the sort of money he needed hadn't showed up.
He watched Clio as she gathered the cards and started to shuffle them. At least, he thought, there was something nice to look at. She was tall and lithe, and her hands were big for her frame. Free of rings, and slightly rough—like she relied on them a great deal.
There were rumors about her, rumors of a relationship with the daughter of the world famous explorer, Alexander Urban Champlain. The sort of secret that, like art, had value in certain quarters.
VI
The stranger, Deke, had a tendency to breathe through his mouth: his lips half-closed, his tongue touching the edge of his teeth. It made his breath whisper, and when he exhaled, Mistral heard the ocean’s voice. “Where have you been?” he asked Deke as Clio flipped the cards through her fingers. “Recently.”
“The desert,” Deke answered. “On the Strip.”
Ralph knocked over the stack of chips he was rebuilding, and Mistral heard Vilmo's throat constrict suddenly around the beer flowing down it, though no one saw the twitch of muscles in the butcher's neck.
“Professionally?” Mistral asked.
“Persistently,” was the reply.
“Pretty dry out there in the desert,” Mistral said. “I hear they have to pump their water in from across the mountains. All the way from the ocean.”
Deke nodded. His right hand was in the pocket of his pants, and Mistral knew he was clutching a handful of change, trying to keep it from rattling. “That’s right. It can get quite dry.”
“A man might be inclined to go somewhere moister when he left,” Mistral said. “A change of scene is what he needs, he tells himself. Maybe somewhere rainy.”
“It’s pretty wet here,” Clio said, her hands finishing their ministrations to the deck. “Give it another month.”
“Yeah, I like the rain,” Deke said. “It’s a nice change from sucking dust.”
“Ah, the rain,” the Poet said. “I love that first rain of spring, how it washes away the winter stains. That smell as the cherry blossoms start to bud, as the young ladies start to shed their layers.” He tapped the table excitedly as Clio started to deal. “When the rains come, we turn to mud, and give birth to slumbering dreams.”
Mistral kept watching the stranger from the Strip as Clio finished dealing. The Poet’s last word echoed in his head, and he thought Deke could hear it too. Not for the same reason, but from a similar affinity, like being in love with a woman who had a twin sister. They could tell them apart—the differences were many to those who could catalogue the minutia—but to the rest of the world, the two were interchangeable.
That's how the Poet would describe it, he thought as he anted up. Two sides, practically identical. He rolled a blue chip across his knuckles. On one side, there was a small indentation, a mark left by the manufacturing process. But with subtle differences.
Deke, when he peeked at his cards, closed his mouth. Mistral didn’t hear the sea anymore, but that didn’t mean the echo of its roar wasn't there, reverberating throughout the man's lungs.
VII
The Poet was enjoying himself. He had been planning on crashing a debutante’s party on the Hill, some mid-week bacchanalia where his ribald poetry would have been warmly welcome, but a chance encounter with the dark-eyed stranger shortly before dinner had changed his mind.
He had spotted the gambler pulling the grifter’s finger trick and had marveled that someone still practiced that old gambit. Following at a somewhat discrete distance, he had watched Deke perform the sleight of hand at the cash register twice more before he had intervened.
“You are pushing your luck,” he had nonchalantly said to the dark-eyed man as they had both casually stood at an intersection, waiting to cross the street.
Deke had looked at him, a quick flick of those eyes, and the Poet knew he had been tagged as a like-minded fellow and not as an enforcer. “There’s no luck here,” the other man had said. “Just old habits that never quite vanish.”
“Useful,” the Poet had offered.
“In a pinch,” had been the reply. The eyes went back to scanning the street, assessing each and every person.
Looking for easy marks, the Poet realized. Someone who had a tenuous gri
p on their finances. Someone who could be dazzled or distracted or misdirected with a momentary illusion.
“Can I buy you a drink?” the Poet had asked.
“Why?” the man had asked.
“Because I want to hear your story.”
A moment of that rapid assessment again. “Okay, but it’ll cost you.”
“How much?”
“Two hundred bucks.”
The Poet smiled and nodded absently as the bookie repeated his question: The bet is two hundred. Are you in? The loan to the gambler had taken a bite out of his ready cash, and he hadn’t quite recovered it yet from the game, but the gesture still felt like the right choice. Contributing, in his own way, to the machinations of fate and fortune. Contributing to the permutations of the city.
He looked at his hole cards. But not with this hand. “I’m out,” he said. If he was going to keep playing for much longer, he’d have to get a better run of cards. His luck would have to change.
Would it, or do I need to give it a contribution too?
VIII
Deke glanced at his cards again, as if he needed to consider his wager. He didn’t need to look, but it was the seemingly unconscious tell he was cultivating. The others were too intent on watching him, trying to spot his idiosyncrasies, and he had to give them something so they'd stop looking. Some of them thought he was an easy mark, a cheap purse that needed to be emptied, and for the time being, he was happy to play that role.
The quiet man and the woman were familiar with each other. Deke didn’t think it extended to intimacy, but they shared a rapport that went beyond casual acquaintance. The fat gallery owner wasn’t as shrewd as he thought he was, and the bookie was crippled by his debts.
Deke knew that hollow-eyed look. It haunted everyone on the Strip. Players came to the desert to change their luck, to find some way out of the situation they had found themselves in, and they all thought money would be the answer. They all thought it would be easy if they could get one good hand, one good pull of the bandit’s arm, one good roll of the dice. One little bit of luck.