Queen of Spades Read online

  The driver turned and walked away without closing remark, the heels of his boots resounding hollowly against the pavement. Chan watched as he slowly circled the Phantom, buffing small spots on the tire well and bumpers with a handkerchief. When it seemed like he wouldn’t be done soon—perhaps he was purposely delaying—Chan returned inside.

  The rest of the week, Chan made it a point to make himself available at the Royal at one a.m. At that hour, Eccleston would stride through the lobby and go outside to smoke and inspect the car, but there was no indication he was aware of Chan’s presence on the couch, much less that he had any information to pass along. Watching him come and go, Chan wondered whether he shouldn’t inquire as to the effect of his note, and was beginning to entertain the idea it had been for naught—maybe the Countess had read and dismissed it. Or she hadn’t read it at all.

  Sitting in his usual place, Chan was mulling over these possibilities one evening—a strangely quiet Friday, the last day of November—when, at five minutes to one, a shadow passed over the couch. He looked up, and the driver stood over him, hands on hips.

  Outside, the driver indicated with his head.

  Chan silently obeyed, following him through the doors, and when they were alone under the awning, the driver said to him, “Please listen carefully. My mistress has read your message. After several days of consideration, she has decided to offer you—against my urgings—a one-time audition.”

  Chan was unsure if he’d heard correctly. “An audition? What kind?”

  “A dealer audition. She would like to play a hand on your deal.”

  “When? Where?”

  “Sunday night,” the driver said. “In the pit. At two a.m., when we leave the casino. We will stop by your Blackjack table.”

  “But what is this about?” Chan asked. “What happens if I pass? And, for that matter, how do I pass?”

  “Your first two questions I cannot answer,” the driver said. “As for your last question, the answer should be fairly obvious. You will deal her one hand, and of course, she must win the hand.”

  During the rest of his shift that night, Chan could hardly keep his attention on the paltry five-dollar bets the players at his table were making. Finally—finally!—he’d created for himself an opportunity—a dealer audition, no less, something he had never failed to pass before. Yet, this audition had to result in a victory for the player, and this was a factor that, by all logic, was beyond his means to control.

  Or was it? Recently, Chan had perceived inklings that there was some aspect of influence that was within reach: at Snoqualmie Downs with Dumonde, he’d seemingly willed Charlie’s Kidney and Pinchbelly to triumph; then in the Thanksgiving poker game, on the last hand, he’d seen through Dumonde’s normally unflappable stare.

  Could this influence translate to the dealing of cards? It never had before, and Chan had stopped trying long ago to will winners and losers into the hands of his customers. Invariably, the smiling, the most generous would be the ones to whom he administered horrible, improbable beats, while the angry players, the ones who entered casinos with chips on their shoulders, would not lose for an entire shoe, building tall stacks they would cash out without tossing him a single dollar. And so it went that evening, despite Chan’s renewed attempts to visualize the next card in Blackjack for the benefit of the players he favored.

  Undeterred, Chan tried again when he got home. He showered thoroughly, then turned off the lights and lit a pine-scented candle. From the book shelf, he removed a deck of cards and fanned it face up on the coffee table. He closed his eyes and meditated on each card, visualizing its face, the arrangement of pips, the particular shades, the suits. When he was confident he knew the exact appearance of each card, he began dealing out hands of Blackjack. The player—he imagined the Countess with her driver standing close behind—received a 9 and an 8 for 17. Chan had a 10 showing. Chan closed his eyes and concentrated on his second card, visualizing it as a small card, a 5 or 6—no, Chan had to be more precise. He focused on a 6 of Diamonds. He turned it over and it was a Deuce of Clubs. Not bad. He hovered his hand over the next card in the deck, imagining it as a bust card. The Jack of Spades. He imagined it until he could see it clearly: side-profile, one-eyed, brandishing a scepter. He held the vision for as long as he could. Then he flipped the card over: it was the 7 of Clubs. “Player loses,” Chan muttered.

  He dealt the rest of the deck this way, focusing on specific cards he wanted to appear. Most times, a completely different card would turn up, making his hand instead of the player’s, or busting the player instead of him. He was close on several occasions: a pip or two off, or the right color but wrong suit. Chan decided he would continue until he achieved a perfect match.

  It took four times through the deck before it happened. Chan visualized a 5 of Diamonds, imagining it getting larger and larger, until red drowned his entire field of vision and his hands felt warm. He slipped the next card off the deck, gently turned it over, and there it lay:

  Two nights later, at the appointed time, Chan saw them approaching, the Countess and her entourage. There were only two players at his table, the mother and daughter—both regulars—and Chan watched over their shoulders as the retinue slowly wound its way through the casino and toward the pit. Dampness formed on his brow as she neared and eventually halted several yards from the table. A buzz arose over this detour from the Countess’s pattern—Chan could not hear them, but he saw her signal to her driver, and the two broke off from the party, shuffling toward him.

  “Welcome to the table,” he said, as heat colored his cheeks and neck. Chan could feel Mannheim hovering behind him, watching.

  In her gloved left hand, the Countess grasped a single black $100 chip. Everyone watched as she placed it in the betting circle, and then looked at him expectantly. “Please proceed,” she said. Her voice was powerful and undisturbed, and fuller than Chan had imagined.

  Nonplussed, he quickly dealt out the hands. He had an Ace showing. Playing ahead of the Countess, the mother and daughter received a 17 and a 19, and both stood pat. The Countess held a 10 and a 5 for 15, but she did not even pause when the action fell to her. She immediately waved off the offer of an additional card.

  Instead, she stared at Chan, as if saying, what now?

  Chan slowed his breathing. Inhaling, he turned over the card beside his Ace: it was a Deuce, giving him 3 or 13. Chan exhaled—now he had a chance.

  He closed his eyes and imagined a bust card, the King of Hearts. Face-on, long locks of hair, sword in hand, plunged into the skull. He pushed out the next card in the shoe and flipped it over. It was a 9 instead, making a hard 12.

  Again, Chan paused. He looked at the Countess regarding him across the table—standing behind her, exactly as he’d envisioned during his practice, was the driver, one hand on the back of her chair, the other hanging loosely at his hip. Chan closed his eyes and moved the next card out of the shoe by feel. Once more, he focused on the King of Hearts: the long, flowing locks, the sword, the suicide. He opened his eyes at the same moment he turned the card over, and saw paint first (!), then that he’d dealt himself not the King but the Jack of Hearts.

  “Dealer busts!” Chan announced proudly, relieved.

  The mother and daughter high-fived one another, while the Countess hardly reacted at all, though she continued to stare intently at the cards on board. Chan paid them, the mother and daughter winning ten and fifteen dollars, respectively, and the Countess a hundred. The old woman picked up her two black chips from the felt and slowly rose from the chair, whereupon the driver gave her his arm to lean against.

  In one deliberate, agile movement belying her age, the Countess flicked one of the black chips toward Chan, and he watched it turn end-over-end through the air, bounce once off the felt, and come to rest a mere inch from his toke box.

  “Thank you, madam,” Chan said. He bowed his head slightly as she and the driver rejoined their retinue. Meanwhile, at his table, the small crowd gathered arou
nd them began to disperse, and Chan could plainly hear their gossiping.

  “How old do you think she is?”

  “A hundred.”

  “At least!”

  “She must be worth five million.”

  “Easily—I heard ten.”

  “Strange,” uttered Mannheim behind him. “You think you’ve seen it all, and then something comes along and shatters all your pre-established notions.”

  “Sir?”

  “The Countess. As far as I know, she’s never placed a bet in the pit before—until now. I think she’s taken a liking to you,” Mannheim said, eyeing Chan peculiarly, before walking away to tend the other tables.

  Fugue

  It was winter now—wet, unceasing—and only inside the walls of the Royal did Stephen Mannheim continue to feel like himself, alive and whole, and certain he was both. His dealers, suspecting nothing, treated their boss as they always had, with a casual cordiality expressed through inside jokes and similar benign remarks. Chan remained deferential and polite, never bringing up the subject of his impending death again. Mannheim felt solid and substantial standing in the center of the pit, where time passed with no reference to the world outside, where no difference existed between living one or a thousand days more.

  Whenever he exited the casino, however, Mannheim felt himself splintering—physically and psychically. He had begun relying on extensive notes, directions, and lists he wrote reminding himself how to get home, his schedule for the day, when and what he’d eaten so as to not forget a meal. It was in these lost moments when he would emerge into consciousness in some strange location that it was becoming more and more clear to Mannheim he was nearing the end.

  These moments—what Mannheim called his own private fugues—had begun more than a year ago. Through his work with Dr. Eccleston and Theo, Mannheim could now remember two of these episodes vividly—he “came to” once sitting in an empty, darkened movie theater, the end of the credits scrolling on the screen, an usher with a broom gently nudging his shoulder, saying, “Sir? The show’s over, sir.” Another time, he awoke in a nightclub, music blaring and drink in hand, his wallet gone. Everyone seemed to know his name—and called him Steve!—slapping him on the shoulder even as he was trying to exit and regain his bearings.

  Mannheim would find all kinds of detritus in his pockets—torn halves of tickets, matchbooks, receipts, business cards. He would deposit these in a drawer in his kitchen to forget about, despite his intention of eventually piecing them together to form an idea of his whereabouts during these lost moments. From the places he’d visited, like the theater and the nightclub, Mannheim discovered his “fugue self” was far more social than his real one, as if a complete lack of memory allowed him to be a person he wasn’t, but perhaps could’ve been.

  The morning after the Countess played a hand of Blackjack in the pit—an event so remarkable it left the Royal buzzing in its wake—Mannheim arrived at Dr. Eccleston’s in the afternoon carrying his entire junk drawer in both arms. Dr. Eccleston had promised (for an additional fee) she would work alongside Mannheim to aid in deciphering his mysterious movements. In a previous life, she said, she’d been an accountant, and the beginning of their task that afternoon proved little more than the sorting and categorizing of each item into date and kind.

  Little Theo quickly grew bored watching this. Seeing the child’s dissatisfaction, Mannheim explained that he was only weeks from the end, according to both the doctor’s timetable and theirs, and it was time to get his affairs in order. In the past several days, he told Theo, he’d visited his bank and several lawyers, as well as Snoqualmie’s two leading funeral parlors.

  “What did you find out, sir?”

  “Yes,” Dr. Eccleston enjoined, peering up from a stack of receipts. “What did you find?”

  “Well,” Mannheim said, “even though I have hardly any assets to speak of, the lawyers still encouraged me to write a will for the disbursement of my personal effects.”

  “May we have some of your stuff, sir?” Theo asked.

  Mannheim laughed. “Of course. What would you like?”

  “Surprise me,” Theo said after a pause.

  “I’ll have to think about it,” Mannheim said. “In the meantime, Theo, the funeral parlors—you can’t imagine all the options! Oak, mahogany, pine, metal—whatever I want, the man said. The interior lining in any color and any pattern, satin or silk. The shape of the handles, whether they’re silver or bronze. Did you know you can even get an outer casket to contain the coffin, in order to slow decomposition of the body?”

  The child seemed entranced by this array of funereal possibilities, and Mannheim did not disclose to them the disagreement he’d had with the first undertaker about the cost of the burial, nor the fact he’d gone with a much cheaper, nondescript aluminum model at the second place he visited. During the past few months, Mannheim had carefully winnowed his bank account down to the bare minimum, most of it going toward his extravagant dining practices and to Dr. Eccleston, but he’d squandered most of his remaining funds in the Thanksgiving poker game, and he did not want this information coloring their opinion of him.

  Instead, he redirected their attention to the task of sorting. “Have you discovered anything?” he asked Dr. Eccleston.

  She raised her glasses to her forehead and leaned back. “As far as I can tell, these papers suggest you’ve had at least four of these episodes.” She indicated the piles in front of her, neatly ordered on the table. “In addition to the cinema and the discotheque,” she said, “we also have evidence you went to the museum one afternoon, and to a comedy night at Rudy’s on another occasion. You may have just wandered in—there’s a receipt from a gas station next door, where you purchased some gum, and here is a matchbook from a bar located right next door. Does any of that ring a bell?”

  “Somewhat,” Mannheim said. The recollections were faint. As with his first two episodes, Mannheim knew of the locations, although he hardly frequented them. They were all within a twenty-minute walk of his house. “What I’m most afraid of,” he said, “is that I’ll die while I’m in the middle of one of these things.”

  Dr. Eccleston reassured him. “We will be extra watchful, Mr. Mannheim—Theo and I—from now on.”

  Then the child spoke: “Why don’t you live at work, sir? Don’t you say it’s the only place where you feel whole? Why don’t you live there instead of your house?”

  Mannheim laughed. “I can’t do that, Theo. Where would I sleep? It’s a casino, not a hotel.”

  “A casino is better than a hotel,” Theo explained.

  Theo’s idea, thrown out so peremptorily, began to gain traction in Mannheim’s thoughts. After all, it did make perfect sense: there was no building more familiar, more comforting to him than the Royal. When he clocked in that evening, just in case, he carried a duffel bag filled with toiletries, several changes of clothes, plus a blanket he put in his locker at the beginning of his shift. Then he went to see Gabriela to inform her—although she must’ve heard from day shift already—of the incident of the Countess playing a hand of Blackjack in the pit. Mannheim told her he couldn’t make heads or tails of it, other than perhaps the Countess had taken a liking to Chan. “And I believe the feeling is mutual,” he said. “I think she’s fascinated him.”

  “She has that effect,” Gabriela said. “On a related note,” she told him, “changes in the High-Limit Salon are imminent. I spoke with Lederhaus on Monday. I offered him general manager of day shift, getting him out of the High-Limit Salon. The hours will suit him better. He said he would think about it, but I’m going to press him. You’ll move right into his spot.”

  “Thank you,” Mannheim said.

  “Consider it an early Christmas present. This way, you can keep a closer eye on Chimsky. I trust you,” she added with a conspiratorial wink, and Mannheim smiled, blushing.

  Several hours later, his shift over, Mannheim returned to the changing room. No one else was around in the predawn ho
ur. He began inspecting the doors inside the changing room, the ones reserved for the use of the custodial staff. The first opened onto a closet, where brooms and mops hung on a rack over a sink. The second opened onto another closet, this one containing shelves of folded staff uniforms, vests of various shades, and a stack of pointy celebration hats reaching all the way above the doorframe.

  The third door, located in the far corner behind a row of long-unused lockers, was locked. Mannheim tried each of his master keys, and after several attempts, one succeeded in releasing the bolt. Carefully, he pushed the door open and was enveloped in an ancient pungency—he had to cover his mouth. It was the smell of old pulpy paper, returned and intensified fourfold. There was nothing else he could distinguish in the darkness, except for several cardboard boxes stacked just inside the door on either side, forming an entranceway. Mannheim reached out with both hands and felt along the walls for a light switch. Then he remembered seeing a row of flashlights in the first closet. After retrieving one, he returned to the room and crossed its threshold, brushing aside several lush layers of spider-webbing in order to do so.

  Eventually, Mannheim discovered that the boxes contained hundreds of flyers printed on cardstock, advertising a Grand Re-Opening and Winter Solstice Ball at the Royal Casino, dated December 21, 1971. The scene depicted knights and ladies of the Arthurian court, dancing and celebrating under a banner that read “Drink, Revelry, and the Pursuit of Chance.” Inspecting the drawing, Mannheim realized he’d worked that night, so long ago. He remembered his first boss, Kowalski, remarking at the time that Mannheim was the spitting image of the harpist in the picture.

  The Trouble with Dimsberg

  Barbara knew it was only a matter of time before she ran into Dimsberg at Hair & Now, yet it still surprised her to enter the cafe one morning and see his long body folded over a chair, a mug of coffee in hand. She almost didn’t recognize him. Gone were his outdated hat and frumpy brown clothes. He had pulled back his stringy, gray hair into a bun, underneath a red sweatband that foregrounded the top of his head, which was completely bald except for a pair of headphones. A club towel was draped over his shoulders, and he was clad in matching tank top and shorts shaded in light pastels, white athletic socks pulled up to the knees, and a pair of shiny white sneakers. His bare thighs, which were extremely thin and hairy, repulsed Barbara, and her instinct was to turn and go back down the stairs before he saw her.