Queen of Spades Read online

  Yet, she stopped herself. This club is mine, she thought defiantly—I’m not letting him scare me off.

  Instead, she walked up to the table, startling Dimsberg by dropping her workout bag next to his chair.

  “Barbara!” he exclaimed. He scrambled to shut off the Walkman pinned to his waist. “Please, sit down.”

  “Don’t bother. I’m only stopping by for a moment before my class.”

  “Which one is that? Maybe I’ll join you—”

  “I prefer that you don’t, Dimsberg.” She glared at him. “And to be honest, I don’t appreciate your joining this club. What happened to Gambling Help? I thought you were committed to that.”

  “I can’t do both?” he asked. A dark shade passed over his eyes. “The last time I checked, Barbara, this is a free country. I have as much right to be a member here as you, don’t I?”

  “Of course,” she said. “You’re free to do whatever you want, that’s true.”

  She turned to pick up her bag, but Dimsberg kept talking. “And please don’t think that your being a member had anything to do with my joining, Barbara, other than making me curious in the first place.” He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was edged with stone. “You’re flattering yourself if you believe anyone would pay $250 a month just to see you.”

  He switched on the Walkman and returned to his coffee. Barbara felt chastened standing there, staring at the back of Dimsberg’s bald head, before retreating down the stairs with her bag. She could not believe the encounter had gone so poorly—she hadn’t wanted to give him the upper hand—especially not on what she felt was her territory—and yet he had gained it so easily.

  As she walked downstairs, Barbara glanced at herself in the wall-length mirrors that lined the stairwell, and her pallid reflection seemed to reinforce Dimsberg’s harsh closing comment. She passed by the front counter, ignoring Quincy’s farewell, and exited the club, sitting in her car for several minutes before driving away, still steaming.

  During her next personal training session with Simon, who was encouraging her while she performed a set of squats, he remarked on her newfound fury and intensity. “What’s gotten into you?” he asked. “You’re not just doing your work today—you’re attacking it. I like it.”

  Barbara wiped the sweat from her face. “Can I be honest with you?” she said. She and Simon had grown close over her sessions, and she felt open discussing private matters with him. “Something personal?”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s the new member. The one who put me down as a referral.”

  “Tall, skinny guy?”

  “Yes. His name is Dimsberg. We share history. He was the leader of a support group I was in. For gamblers.”

  “I see.”

  “I quit the group a couple months ago. I didn’t think I needed it anymore. But he doesn’t agree.”

  “Did he follow you here?”

  “In a way, yes. He says I’m not the reason he signed up. But I can’t help thinking I am, at least partly. At first, I thought he was stalking me because he was interested in me—romantically. But now, I feel like he’s here to ruin my time, the same way he feels I ruined his.” Barbara hesitated. “I know this makes it sound like I think his whole world revolves around me. I just know I’m going to see him all the time. He’s going to make sure of it.”

  “If I recall correctly, he’s a monthly. Maybe he won’t renew?”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, because I want so much for this club to succeed. But I hope he doesn’t.”

  “Well, Quincy’s been working with him. He told Quincy he’s very much into aerobics, but he’s stiff as a board. Why don’t you let us see how serious he really is about exercise?”

  Barbara laughed. “Are you going to break him?”

  “Maybe we will. Quincy isn’t the biggest fan of his attitude either—he’s only a monthly, but he acts like we’re his servants.”

  Barbara did not encounter Dimsberg again for three days. The next time she saw him, they were crossing paths on the stairs—she heading down and he going up—and he looked twenty years older, stooped over and using a cane to support himself, although he was still garbed in athletic gear and wearing headphones. She attempted a wave. Seeing her, he stopped on the stairs, straightened as best he could, and glared at her unapologetically as she passed, offering no word or gesture of greeting in return.

  Barbara had a very bad feeling about the encounter. “You guys sure did a number on Dimsberg,” she said to Simon when she reached the front counter. “He can hardly walk.”

  “I was surprised to see him come in myself. Quincy told me he ought to be in traction after all the lunges and standing sit-ups he had him do.”

  She hesitated. Then she asked: “Does he suspect anything? I just passed him on the stairs, and if looks could kill—”

  “No, don’t worry about that. Quincy said he was completely gung-ho about accepting our Power Training Challenge. If anything, he’ll blame himself for biting off more than he could chew.”

  Despite Simon’s words, Barbara was not entirely consoled. After all, Simon hadn’t seen Dimsberg’s nasty stare, something she could not forget now that it was imprinted in her mind. She couldn’t recall ever being looked upon with more venom, and she was dismayed to discover that even though she detested Dimsberg, she cared that his negative energy—now more than ever before—was permeating the fabric of the club, a place she had come to feel was her personal sanctuary, coloring it in lurid, ugly streaks.

  What concerned Barbara even more, though, was that this negative energy would serve to disrupt her recent run of good fortune, like an enormous wedge driven into a stream.

  As she went through the motions in her Dance Aerobics class that afternoon, her mind drifted from Quincy’s unflagging exhortations back to her life before she’d left Gambling Help. Barbara recalled the long, hapless nights, tossing in bed wondering if she would ever experience excitement and joy again, and she shuddered. Her new life, which a week ago had seemed like it would last indefinitely, now struck her as so much pretty window dressing, with a pane as thick as Dimsberg’s enmity separating her from everything that was good and worthwhile inside.

  Driving home from the club that night, Barbara pulled in to the gas station she usually bought her scratch tickets from, a sudden idea in mind. Ever since her encounter with Dimsberg, she was fearful her rush was over, and that she would start losing again. She would purchase a single five-dollar ticket and see if this were the case. But as she exited the car, money in hand, she noticed that on the curb outside the entrance, a group of young carolers had congregated, headed by a stout white-haired woman ringing a bell, wearing reindeer antlers, and a red-and-blue sweater trimmed in green. Beside them stood a cast-iron pot on a tripod with a sign over it that read “Goodwill to All,” and as Barbara neared, she heard the woman’s voice, loud and overpowering, over the children’s:

  Oh, tidings of comfort and joy

  Comfort and joy

  Oh, tidings of comfort and joy.

  Barbara listened for a moment—she had not heard this song for a very long time, and she was surprised to find herself moved by it. She had never been, after all, very religious: her father, a non-practicing Jew, had left when she was too young to remember, and she had been raised by a mother who’d been staunchly atheist. But now, listening to the soft melody, a calm slowly descended upon her. When they finished, she reached out and dropped inside the pot the five-dollar bill she had been clutching in her hand.

  “Peace be with you,” the stout woman said, smiling.

  As the carolers began singing again—another song she remembered, “Silver Bells”—Barbara returned to her car, where it was still warm inside. Her errand no longer seemed as urgent, and she decided she would wait until tomorrow to see if her luck had changed. At least she could spend one more evening believing it hadn’t.

  Thirteen Thousand Years

  The gray, dreary afternoon following hi
s audition with the Countess, Chan awoke with a start from a dream where he was sleeping in his childhood home. In the dream, the house was located in the hills, far from the murmur of crowds and casino lights, and in the silence and stillness, Chan had been frightened—there had been someone standing in the dark corner of the bedroom, shadowed by enormous, dead trees. The presence made him want to shriek, but he hadn’t been able to turn his head, nor could he so much as lift a finger. The figure moved next to the bed, looming over his shoulder, just out of his vision. Somehow, Chan believed if he could just turn and see, he would find a person with his grandmother’s face.

  “It’s a dream,” Chan had told himself. “It will be over soon and you’ll see, there’s no one there.”

  Now, facing the window, he perceived a light through the blinds, the sound of a motor growing in intensity—the headlights of an approaching car. They bathed the wall in an eerie glow, punctuated by horizontal slits. Chan strained to listen as the groaning engine outside the window throbbed with the pulse in his ears. He thought he heard someone approach the front door, but he couldn’t be sure, and no knock came. Then, after a moment, over the roar of the idling motor, he discerned quick steps retreating—a familiar clacking of heels—and a slam of a car door. The headlights receded, then vanished, and stillness returned. Chan wiggled his fingers and toes, then turned in bed, and saw in the corner the shadow of a swaying tree, its long, distended branches like icy fingers scraping the walls.

  Chan slid his feet into slippers and padded down the hall to the kitchen, where he filled the teakettle and placed it on the stove. Then he walked to the front door and opened it. The parking lot was cold, a slight rain falling. There was only the mist—no person, no message.

  Chan was off that day, and having heard no word from the Countess or her driver since his audition, he went to the Royal at 12:30 a.m. under the pretense of collecting his paycheck, after which he sat in the lobby to await Eccleston’s break. The driver did not seem surprised to see Chan, and inclined his head as he passed. Chan waited ten seconds before exiting, and standing at a short distance, watched as the driver went around the vehicle with his handkerchief. The only difference in his routine was when he reached the trunk: taking out a key, Eccleston turned the lock, then looked at Chan knowingly before re-entering the casino.

  After his departure, Chan’s gaze returned to the Phantom. The long, silver limousine sat before him, glowing invitingly under the casino lights. He looked around to see if anyone was watching—the valets were all inside, warming their hands. Very quietly, Chan lifted the lid of the trunk, revealing inside a vast, empty space that could very comfortably and safely fit a human body.

  Chan awoke several times during the journey—each time, the car was moving smoothly around him, and each time, for some unknown reason, he could not stay awake. There was such a luxurious, spacious quality inside the padded leather walls of the trunk—it was far more comfortable than the bed he spent afternoons tossing in—that the effects of the insomnia of the past six months, since he’d started working at the Royal, seemed to overwhelm him. He took a kind of delicious comfort in knowing that he was within a few feet of the Countess; he could feel the warmth of her body as he passed his hand over the barrier that separated them. And there was something else, too, some sort of spell woven around the car. Every time Chan felt that he could almost reach out and place his finger on it, his mind became dull and his eyes heavy.

  Once, forcing himself to stay conscious, Chan carefully undid the latch that held the trunk in place. Holding the lid fast so as not to inadvertently fling himself out onto the road beneath like so much excess baggage, he raised it and glimpsed in the glare of the Phantom’s rear beams the white lines of the highway disappearing behind them. He lowered the lid back into its housing and upon its closing almost immediately fell back into a dreamless stupor.

  Hours later, Chan awoke and realized the car had come to a rest. There was light—bright sunlight—shining on his face. The interior of the trunk was lit through an opening into the car itself; a section of the back seat was down, and Chan could see through the glare that the passenger compartment was enormous, larger than he could ever have suspected. He could see the legs of a table and a chair, and the lower part of the gown the Countess had been wearing that very night. She was waiting for him.

  Carefully, Chan poked his head through the opening, and saw, across the table from him, the Countess sitting and regarding him with interest.

  “Sit down,” she said. Her voice was clear yet distant, like the toll of a large bell from miles away.

  Chan struggled through the opening, for although he was thin, he was not a short man, and his limbs got in the way. The Countess watched his attempts with some amusement. Eventually, Chan managed to get through, and he rose and dusted himself off, pulled the chair opposite hers, and sat down. The sunlight through the car windows had the effect of expanding the space in the compartment, giving it the feel of sitting on a veranda, and if Chan closed his eyes, he could almost feel hard cobblestone beneath his feet.

  The Countess was regarding him curiously. This close, Chan was struck by the intelligence in her withered face: her veined hands that sat one upon the other on the table, a magnificent lower jaw bespeaking centuries of royal breeding.

  “You were waiting for me to wake up?” Chan asked.

  “We were,” she replied. “It is not every day we harbor a passenger. I’ve seen you—even before you gave your message to Thomas. You appear to have developed an unusual level of interest in our activities.”

  “I have,” Chan said.

  “Do you understand why?”

  “No—not fully. But I am interested in your way of gambling.”

  “You are a dealer. So you must perceive more than most the vagaries of chance.”

  “I thought I did,” Chan said. “But I’ve never heard of the way you play.”

  On the table, the Countess separated her hands, turning them palm up. “Show me your hands,” she commanded. “I must examine them.”

  Chan complied, placing them on the table next to hers. Her bony touch was unaccountably warm as she took up his hands—Chan felt faint, as if he were crossing some ancient threshold. Images of gambling ritual—the drawing of cards, the rolling of bones, the turn of a wheel—swam before his eyes, and he felt slightly nauseous.

  “There, there,” she said. She stroked his hands with the nails of her fingers until the feeling passed. Then she turned his hands over in hers, probing, feeling along the soft webbing between each of his fingers. “You have excellent hands,” she said.

  “Thank you,” Chan managed to say. “You must know already—but I would like to deal to you.”

  “You will. Soon.” She relinquished his hands. “The moment will come when a particular deck will be dealt,” the Countess said. “The game will be Faro. The location will be in the High Limit Salon at the Royal Casino. I will be one of the players. And you will be the dealer.”

  “How can you know all this for sure?”

  “We can never know anything for sure,” the Countess replied. “For what we speak of is gambling.”

  Chan accepted this. He understood any explanation that was more certain would be in some sense unsatisfactory—the bond of chance was what was now uniting him with this profoundly singular gambler.

  “We will set into motion the necessary conveyances to bring you to the high-limit room at the appointed time,” the Countess was saying. “All you have to do is submit yourself to a series of directives that many may find arcane—but I do not think you will find them so. I hope I am not mistaken in saying an understanding exists now between us.”

  She placed her hand on top of Chan’s, and again he felt the odd sensation of being pulled by her through some murky psychic space. He arose from the chair and crossed to her side of the table, to sit next to her, and there was no going back now. Chan, with all the passion accrued from a lifetime of dallying, of waiting upon something that had
now so unquestionably arrived, was ready. “Please,” he said. “Tell me everything.”

  Over the following hours, he listened as the Countess related her tale.

  “In 1912, I graduated from Göttingen University,” she began. “I was the first woman permitted to receive a doctorate in Mathematics from that famous institution. All the great thinkers of Europe were there in those years before the war, and I learned at the feet of the greatest: Josef Kunst. Under his guidance, I began studying repetitive patterns and series, particularly of numbers, everything that is typically thought of as random and assigned to what we call ‘chance.’ This includes behavior as seemingly simple as Heads or Tails when tossing a coin, to the more complex fluctuations in stock markets and world currencies.

  “What we think of as chance, or probability, has been grossly misrepresented by the standard statistical textbook in use today. We have taught ourselves that all we know in regard to a coin flip, for example, is that fifty percent of the time it will come up Heads, and fifty percent of the time it will come up Tails—this profound reduction does not even account for the 1 in 10,000 chance the coin lands directly on its side. This dismissal, that we have exhausted our knowledge of outcomes, is not ‘true’ in any sense of that difficult word—mathematically or otherwise. The standard explanation depends on a hypothetical point in the future called ‘the long term’ that is, in my experience, always ever unreachable, even for someone who has lived as long as I. What I have discovered is that specific and reliable patterns do emerge in situations when the potential outcomes are highly and artificially constrained, as with a deck of cards and its fifty-two possibilities, two dice and their thirty-six possibilities, or a coin, with its two—or even three!—possibilities.