He Played for His Wife and Other Stories

by Anthony Holden

  ‘Look,’ Kenneally said, ‘why don’t we declare a draw and give you both the winner’s prize money? I think Robinson has found some wiggle room with the sponsors. We can make this happen. Guys?’

  Bridges and Gottschalk didn’t have to look at each other to agree upon their answer. They both shook their heads, at the same time.

  ‘You don’t really understand much, do you, Mr Kenneally?’ Bridges said.

  The hotels were downsized after Day 7.

  Day 8 was a rest day. Wendy lay on her bed for the first part of it, listening to the sounds her flatmates made preparing for work and then the noises that the street made, which she had never heard before. She took a shower. She picked up her white shirts and black trousers and waistcoat from the dry cleaners. Her shoulders and wrists burned. The vertebrae in her neck felt as if they were becoming unmoored from the spine. In the evening she went out for dinner with Bridges.

  She told him some things about herself, because she chose to interpret his silent attention upon her as curiosity. She listed some of the things she hated about poker players. She thanked him for his good manners at the table.

  ‘No one’s splashed the pot, there’s been no grandstanding or Hollywooding, your manners have been impeccable.’

  ‘If you hate poker players so much, you should get away from us.’

  ‘Probably. I should go back to university. Finish my degree . . .’

  ‘Or?’

  ‘Maybe become a poker player myself.’

  ‘Why would you want to do that?’

  ‘Because I think I might be good at it. Maybe one day I’ll be brave enough to try. What about you? What would you have done if you hadn’t found poker?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe something with real estate? Is that not a good answer?’

  ‘No, it’s not that. I just thought you’d say philosopher or monk or assassin or something like that.’

  And then he turned the conversation to some of the more notable hands of the previous day.

  At the end of the evening, as she was about to step into the cab he had ordered for her, he told her that she had very nice hair, which was said, she thought, in lieu of a goodnight kiss.

  Day 9 took place in a corner of the poker room at the Victoria Grosvenor casino on the Edgware Road. A red velvet rope cordoned off the area of play from spectators and slot machines. The cameraman was a friend of one of Kenneally’s children from film school. He was cultivating a moustache or maybe he had never shaved.

  Day 10 continued at the Vic. The event had gathered to it its own devotees of bloggers and enthusiasts. The TV interest had long ago abated, and most of Gottschalk’s original retinue, including his father, had returned home, to Weimar and Leipzig and Dresden, but others had replaced them. They also wore heavy metal T-shirts and denim jackets. Xi Tianxi had gone back to Geneva, and sometimes Mike Bridges would remain at the casino after the contest had finished for the day, and play a few rounds of baccarat, but he preferred to eat Japanese food with Gottschalk and to return to the small room that Kenneally was now renting for him.

  Before play began, the opponents always greeted each other with their traditional double-hand clasp and the warmest of smiles.

  On Day 12, their spot was occupied by a craps table. The cameraman was there, looking disconsolate.

  Wendy called Kenneally but neither he nor Tambini were answering their phones.

  ‘We’ll find somewhere else,’ Bridges said.

  Days 12, 13 and 14 took place in an upstairs room of a pub decorated with pictures of race horses and World War II fighter planes.

  Day 15 was a rest day.

  Day 16 was conducted in transit: a train from St Pancras to Paris; a second train to Frankfurt; a third to Leipzig. Bridges had never been to Germany, and Gottschalk was keen to show him some of the sights he had grown up with.

  Wendy saw them off from Paris. She contemplated dropping the watch she wore into the hat of a busker ineptly playing an accordion in the Metro, but decided she had earned it. Maybe she would use the money the players had tipped her with to stay over in Paris for a few days. There was a card room that had used to be the Aviators’ club on the Champs d’Elysées that she went to, thinking she might pick up a couple of casual shifts. As she waited for the manager to return she joined a no-limit cash game at the 1-2 table.

  If there had been one thing that she had learned from her time as a dealer, it was that Kenneally was right about luck, and yet, throughout her session at the 1-2 table, and then 2-5, it was as if her recent proximity to Bridges and Gottschalk had touched her with some wild charm.

  The session was close to miraculous. She heard, at least for a while, the rhythm that Gottschalk moved to.

  She didn’t see Kenneally again, but she heard that the Federation had folded. One night in the card room in Paris, she caught sight of a photograph of Robinson on a news programme, projected behind the head of the presenter, but the sound was down and she never learned what he was said to have done or to have had done to him.

  And nor did she see Gottschalk or Bridges again. There were supposed sightings of them, in Munich, Leipzig, Warsaw, Vienna. Someone who called himself Mike Bridges entered two Omaha events at that year’s WSOP but didn’t arrive to claim his place. Gottschalk’s online avatar went broke, but it turned out that it was his father who had been playing.

  She heard rumours that the contest had finally ended in a bar in Kathmandu called The String of Pearls. In this version, Gottschalk had won, and returned home to Germany, where he was studying chess and karate, while Bridges had entered a Buddhist monastery.

  Or the bar was in fact in Moscow, or Milan, or in one of the Florida Keys – and it was only in the last of these that Bridges was said to have won.

  Once, Tambini materialised behind her during a tournament she had come over for at the Vic. She was making a bet, moving her chips towards the dealer, when she had to shrug a hand away from her shoulder. She looked up, away from her opponent, and closed her mouth, which she sometimes left open as a sort of private joke, or act of homage.

  ‘I’m working for a new Federation now,’ Tambini told her.

  She was more interested in the news he had of the latest sighting: in a café in Kinshasa an obese German had been seen with a slim older American gambling at cards that people thought might be Gottschalk and Bridges, perpetually at play.

  Primero Face

  by Anthony Holden

  It was a bold bet, quite out of character – deliberately so, of course. Normally I play as tight as a nun’s whatsit, as dear old Alvarez used to say in the long-lost days of the Tuesday Night Game. Now, first to act, I’ve bet the max. It’s a rash move, I know; OK, I’ve been dealt pocket queens, but the board is showing a king and an ace. I am all too aware of the whole table staring at me, sizing me up, looking for a nervous tell. It’s not like me to play loose-aggressive – if that is what I’ve just done. I’m not sure. I never am. I have no idea if this was a super-cool move, or a super-dumb one.

  But I’m surely about to find out. Don’t speak, I remind myself. Don’t look anxious. At the same time, though, don’t look too confident. Don’t look anything.

  I had raised before the flop, naturally, and the first two players folded. Now I raise merely my eyebrows as the next two seats also fold, then look down the other end of the table to find myself caught like a terrified rabbit in the stare of the most elegant pair of all-seeing, all-knowing Elizabethan eyes.

  ‘Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool . . .’ he intones, with a mischievous grin all over his scarily intelligent face. Oh shit, methinks he’s got a king. Or an ace. Or both. Or even a pair of either. He’s going to raise the bejesus out of me.

  I try to maintain eye-contact of an unflinching order as he openly re-checks his cards while idly riffling his chips. Then he scratches his beard and opens his mouth, as if to speak, and I grow ever more determined to make no response, to give nothing away. Eventually, with a rueful smile, he says simpl
y ‘. . . farewell!’ – and slides his cards into the muck.

  Will Shakespeare has just been toying with me. Now the fidgety adolescent to his left says ‘Pooh!’ He scratches under his wig and adds: ‘Pooh and double-pooh!’ Then he too, with a ferocious fart, folds. Respect from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart!

  Last to act, or the pot is mine, is (appropriately enough) the supreme actor of the twentieth century. If anyone could simulate to maximum effect, you would think, it is he. He muses a while, still scanning my desperately twitchy visage, and finally says in a mildly aggressive, self-satisfied monotone, as if it were blindingly obvious: ‘Raise!’

  He doubles my bet.

  That’s all? Not much of a raise. It’s thirty years since I wrote his biography, but I don’t remember Laurence Olivier – Lord Olivier, to you and me – ever having played poker. He may well have risked the odd backstage hand with chums like Ralphy Richardson and Johnny Gielgud; but he knows nothing at all, I’m sure, about this level of game. He was even asking me dumb questions about bluff amid the small talk as we settled into our seats a few hours back. Olivier is most himself, what’s more, when pretending to be someone else. When playing himself, as now, he is really not very convincing.

  After appearing to think for an Oscar-winning pause, staring him down the while, I reply without (I am proud to report) the slightest quaver in my voice: ‘All in!’

  As I push my pile of chips into the centre of the table – the first ‘shove’ of the evening – Olivier suddenly looks revealingly downcast. Or is he now acting for real? Uneasily I remember that he won his own Oscars, for Henry V and Hamlet, when he had barely turned forty. Could I have misread him? Does he indeed have a king or an ace, and wanted to stop this hand right here?

  No, it turns out. ‘Fold,’ he eventually shrugs, showing us all pocket nines.

  The whole table exchange pained glances as I haul in the pot, with my wilfully infuriating mantra: ‘Come to Grandpa!’ (It used to be ‘Come to Daddy!’, but time’s wingèd chariot has been moving on rather swiftly of late). So now I’m chip leader, maybe even table boss.

  Rashly, no doubt, I feel like I’ve got the measure of these players. After all, I have written books about all of them; I probably know more about them, I reflect cockily, than they do themselves. And they know little or nothing of me. Most of them, after all, have actually been dead quite a while, which must surely give me something of an edge?

  All but one, who is next to act. He’s been acting pretty haughty all evening, as if put out to be here. Inspecting his hole cards rather clumsily, like a man used to others doing this sort of thing for him, he agonises in his oddly whiny voice, with its strangled vowel sounds, before wondering aloud: ‘To bet or not to bet?’

  His obsequious glance over to Shakespeare is met with a dark, disapproving glare. Charles, Prince of Wales turns away in embarrassment, and muses: ‘Oh, this is simply appalling – even more agonising than that haunting passage in Berlioz’s Symphony Fantastique.’ Mozart looks puzzled. ‘Or Erbarme dich from Bach’s St Matthew Passion.’ Now Mozart nods approvingly; that he appears to know.

  ‘Put the clock on him,’ I hear myself saying rather brusquely – which the floor manager, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the Grim Reaper, is summoned to explain to HRH. Evidently unused to being barked at by anyone, let alone told to get on with it, Charles sulkily just flat-calls.

  Unhappily for them, if not for the rest of us, the draw for seats has placed the prince next to his ex-wife. With a withering sideways glance at him, Diana promptly triples his bet. She doesn’t even check her hand before doing so. She knows what she’s doing, this girl, I think as I promptly, discreetly, re-inspect my own while no one’s looking. Yes, 7-2, as I had feared. Shakespeare calls; Mozart folds; Olivier calls; I shoot Diana an approving smile, and throw away my cards.

  The turn brings a low spade, so no one can be pulling to a flush. With 5h-6c-10d-3s showing, a gutshot straight draw is possible, if a long shot. But this is scarcely the World Series, where veteran pros can improvise moves which make such things look hauntingly plausible. These rank amateurs (among whom I count myself) can pull such things off only by dint of freakish luck. ‘You know,’ I hear Leigh Hunt saying beside me, ‘the more I practise, the luckier I seem to get!’

  He promptly re-raises. Poet, critic, editor, patron and friend of Keats and Shelley, Hunt was jailed in 1813 for insulting the then Prince of Wales, the Prince Regent who went on to become King George IV. An irate Charles seems aware of this. Can he have read my biography, The Wit in the Dungeon (the title conferred on Hunt by his sometime friend Byron), or is that kind of knowledge a standard slice of the royal DNA?

  ‘You always were an irritating little man, Hunt,’ he tells him testily, before nodding towards his cards, for his attendant footman to pass them back to the dealer.

  And so to Diana, who pouts winsomely. ‘Ay me,’ she laments, ‘what to do?’ With a sigh, and another winning ‘Ay, ay me’, she flat-calls.

  ‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks,’ intones the Bard, and re-raises. The entire table folds, and he pulls in a hefty pot.

  ‘What did you have?’ Mozart saucily asks him.

  ‘The rest,’ replies Shakespeare, ‘is silence.’

  On my side of Charles, with Hunt safely between us, sits the mass poisoner Graham Young, whose trial in St Albans I covered as a rookie journalist on the local paper – gathering enough material for a true-crime book, later filmed as The Young Poisoner’s Handbook. I’m mighty relieved not to be sitting next to him; this man could extract poison from a stone. That’s why I declined all his many invitations to visit him in prison for a cup of tea. All evening I’ve been keeping a very close eye on the glass of vintage claret beside me.

  During his trial the psychopathic Young – born the same year as me, so then twenty-four years old – sent me a note across the courtroom expressing the hope that my work would see him go down in criminal history as one of its most notorious serial killers, thus winning his rightful place in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds.

  Both wishes have long since been granted. So now, with a satanic smile, he seems ready to return the favour. Jerking his thumb in Charles’s direction, while HRH is looking the other way, delivering more orders to his footman, Young taps his nose with his forefinger and whispers across Hunt: ‘You’re a republican, aren’t you? I’ve read all your books . . .’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’

  ‘Is the monarchy really still going?’ Hunt interrupts. ‘The immortal Bard himself was a republican, weren’t you, Will?’ Hunt quotes Julius Caesar:

  I had as lief not be

  As live to be in awe

  Of such a thing as I myself.

  Shakespeare smiles indulgently, and Diana applauds with a grin while beside her Charles looks distinctly unamused. Young has meanwhile interposed his body between Hunt and the prince, so I can’t see what he’s up to. Still he has his back to me when suddenly it’s my turn to act. Shakespeare has raised. ‘A modest raise,’ quoth he, ‘perhaps even an ill-favoured raise, but mine own.’

  Out of the corner of my eye I notice Charles sipping his martini. But I cannot let that distract me now. ‘Call,’ I eventually blurt, somewhat to my own surprise. The flop has brought 7c-9h-10h, and I have 4h-Jh. I badly need a heart, or an eight or a queen, but the turn brings the ace of clubs. Shakespeare bets the pot. He must have another ace, I decide, and/or a club or two.

  In mid-conversation both Mozart and Olivier fold, the latter absurdly asking the former if he ever knew Peter Shaffer. All eyes are now on me.

  While I sit motionless, deep in the tank, Shakespeare intones: ‘γνῶθι σεαυτόν.’

  The table is a sea of blank faces.

  ‘Gnothi seauton,’ I transliterate helpfully for them. ‘ “Know thyself.” The Delphic oracle. So much for Ben Jonson’s taunt about “small Latin and less Greek”!’

  ‘It’s all Greek to me!’ quips Olivier.

 
; ‘Now you’re quoting our friend here again,’ I tell His Lordship. ‘Also Julius Caesar. Casca to Cassius. Surely you remember that?’

  ‘Never played Casca. I think, when playing Caesar, I was offstage at the time.’

  ‘But Brutus . . .’

  ‘Oh, do get on with it,’ Mozart intervenes. ‘I have no idea what you two are on about. And we haven’t got all . . .’ – he gestures to the expectant conductor behind him – ‘all night!’ The casino Big Band strikes up Eine kleine Nachtmusik.

  ‘No music during play!’ barks the floor manager.

  ‘Oh, I was enjoying that,’ laments the Bard. ‘One of yours, Wolfgang?’

  ‘Yes, indeed, one of his mighty output!’ cries a late arrival who has finally turned up, it seems, just at the right moment. ‘An honour to meet you, maestro. I’m a great admirer. My name is Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.’ He pulls up a chair between Mozart and Olivier.

  The band strikes up the 1812 Overture, before being silenced again by the Grim Reaper. ‘A pleasure to meet you all, whoever most of you may be!’ smiles Tchaikovsky. ‘This looks a bit like vint. I was a dab hand at that! Bit of an obsessive, actually.’

  Again all the other players look flummoxed. ‘A Russian variant of whist,’ I fill them in. ‘Pyotr here was obsessed with it. Cost him a lot of money, actually . . .’

  Everyone suddenly perks up. ‘Are you ever going to play, Holden?’ snaps Mozart. His Italian librettist Lorenze da Ponte, through whom I first met Amadeus, told me he could be like this. ‘You’re about as much use as da Ponte when that Jewish-born Catholic priest was down on his luck, playing his violin in his monk’s habit in a Venetian brothel!’

  ‘But he lived to be ninety, Wolfgang,’ I can’t resist replying. ‘Emigrated to the new-born United States. Died in a place called New York.’

  Mozart again points testily at the pot. Amid all this chatter, I’d quite forgotten the action is on me.

  I flick away my cards. Shakespeare scoops in another handsome pot.

  *