Queen of Spades Read online

  “Is there a seat open?” several asked, including the woman who had toasted Chan at the Baccarat table on his first night, but Mannheim told them to please wait until the completion of the shoe, which contained only two more turns. Chan could tell his boss was becoming discomposed—and perhaps excited—about the size of the bets and the strange pattern in which they were being wagered, with the entire table in unison.

  The five cards left in the deck, according to Mannheim’s case-keep, were as follows:

  Chan invited the players to make their bets for the twenty-fourth turn in the deck. Everyone’s eyes fell upon the Countess, but instead of refraining, as she had done on every even-numbered turn up to that point, she moved her entire stack, ten $25,000 plaques and an entire rack of purple chips—$350,000 in total—onto the 7. Pulled in her wake, the other players, Barbara, Maud, and the old man in the ball cap, all moved their respective chips onto the 7 as well.

  The crowd held their breath. Chan placed his fingers on the top card in the shoe and slid it out, cleanly and without fuss. He was now confident it would be the 7 of Clubs even before he turned it over, and indeed it was:

  The crowd roared. The next card off the deck was the meaningless 9, and then, unbelievably, Chan had to call for his tray to be refilled in order to pay out the extravagant sums just won. When the dust settled, the Countess had $700,000 in front of her, twenty oblong green plaques, milky like jade, rising to her neckline even as she sat erect in her high-backed chair. Her left eye glittered with the fever of gambling—or perhaps it was the effect of low gravity. No matter—there was no material difference between these concepts now.

  Only a single turn—three cards—remained in the deck: the Jack, Queen, and King. It was a minute until two, and Chan thought he could feel some change—some sort of shift in the atmosphere in the room. It’s gravity, he thought. Everything is gravity.

  “Would anyone like to call the last turn?” Mannheim asked. His voice sounded distant and nervous.

  Again, all eyes fell upon the Countess. “I would,” she said. “I call the Jack-Queen-King, in that order.”

  “How much is your wager, madam?”

  She waved her hands over her empire. “Everything,” she said. Although Chan was hardly surprised by her bet, there were numerous exclamations heard throughout the crowd. When Mannheim hesitated, she asked: “Is the house able to handle my action?”

  “Yes, madam.” Mannheim’s voice had grown very grave. “In this room, one can bet any amount at any time.”

  “I’m not stopping now,” Barbara enjoined. “I call Jack-Queen-King, too. All fifty grand here.”

  “And us as well,” said Maud and her partner. “Twenty grand total.”

  When the bets were arranged on the table, Mannheim told Chan to go ahead. His boss’s voice was so solemn and quiet now that Chan couldn’t be sure anything had actually been said. He shut his eyes and imagined the first card in the sequence, the Jack of Hearts, in all its emblematic glory: side-profile, blond locks, brandishing a halberd, getting larger and larger in his field of vision. Using just the tips of his fingers, Chan swept the top card through the slot, and it fell on the table:

  It was the Jack!

  The crowd erupted again. Then the old man pointed out that the hand was far from over, and a hush settled over the room. Chan steadied himself, gently placing his fingertips on the next card. He closed his eyes and imagined the Queen of Spades—her imperious eye, her hands clutching flowers. There was something unsettling in her expression, and Chan could not fixate upon her face without it changing, the eye winking at him, the chin turning away from him, ever so slightly. But it was too late to stop now—even the Queen could not resist the force of the cosmos, Chan thought, before he flicked the card out.

  He could tell by the weight something was wrong. When he opened his eyes, the card that lay on the felt was not the Queen of Spades, but rather the King:

  There was a sharp, collective intake of breath. Chan stared at the board, incredulous as the crowd began to murmur. He looked toward the Countess and she appeared as stunned, as stymied as he—the color had drained from her face and, for the first time, she looked all of her one hundred years.

  “Are you serious?” Barbara said. The reality of her last bet—$50,000—was seeping in, and she slammed her open palm on the table. “Please tell me I didn’t just do that!”

  “We got exactly what we deserved,” Maud said, disgusted.

  “It’s this dealer,” the old man in the ball cap groaned.

  Chan remained rooted in his seat. The King lay there on the table, plain as day. All the bets wagered and lost—he could clearly see the plaques and chips piled on the table before him. Yet as he continued to stare at the awful King, Chan began to disbelieve the reality of the moment—these are mere trappings, he thought.

  “Come on, Chan,” Mannheim said behind him. “Let’s get this over with.”

  Mannheim’s words sent a sliver of insight shivering through Chan—he distinctly felt the idea come from outside of himself. The hand was not over, not officially, until the last card, the hock, was dealt. If the card underneath his fingers was not the Queen of Spades—as it most assuredly was—this Faro hand would qualify as a misdeal.

  All of the active bets would be returned.

  Chan heard the Countess’s words: Focus your concentration. Once more he closed his ears and his eyes, and the murmuring around him slowed, calmed, vanished. An utter silence fell. Then from this void, there began emerging other noises, distant and faint, getting louder. The chittering of voices not quite human. Some were laughing and cheering. Others were crying, sobbing plaintively. There was a momentary burst of applause—loud clapping and hooting—over an unsettling, grinding noise underneath, like an old machine winding down. Like the gnashing of teeth.

  Chan saw himself sitting in the dealer chair. He was inspecting himself in very fine detail, down to the most minuscule point on his iris. Each molecule was alive, moving, and from their mixture would emerge snatches of moments. Barbara playing poker at Thanksgiving, brandishing a card with zest, cheerful and happy. Dumonde jumping up and down on the grandstand next to him, making it tremble underfoot. Mannheim smiling with fondness, taking his hand and shaking it, telling him he was hired. There were thousands—tens of thousands—of such accumulated moments, and Chan relived them in all the intensity of their experience, the entire span of his consciousness.

  Years passed—or the briefest part of a second. He was walking down a dark hallway, toward the clack of tiles behind a study door. The door was ajar, and streaks of orange-and-blue light seeped from the edges, bathing the walls. From inside, the man with the painted eyes was shouting “Trey!” in a high-pitched voice, over and over. Chan placed both his hands on the door and pushed it open. The orange-and-blue light dazzled him, and he shaded his eyes. At the gaming table sat the Countess, and she was young, a child no more than ten. She was laughing, playing a hand of Stud Poker versus the painted man—her thin fingers moved freely and easily over the cards, snappish and quick-paced. She hovered her index finger on the back of her hidden card for a brief moment. Then she seized the card and flung it on the table—

  Mannheim placed a hand on Chan’s shoulder. “It’s time, Chan. Let’s see the hock.”

  Chan opened his eyes. The Countess seemed the only person still attending to the formality of revealing the final card. She looked at Chan curiously, the same way she had first regarded him so many months ago:

  Can you?

  Chan lowered his hand slowly and extended his index finger, hovering, over the final card. Then, with the faintest, deftest movement, he issued the card through the slot. It spun out, revolving lengthwise in the air, describing an ancient, flawless arc as it fell toward the table.

  What the people crowded around that table witnessed (although many more would attest to having seen it after) was the card, while descending on its journey to the felt, clearly loaded with paint—for it was the Queen of
Spades still. But as it neared the table, the image blurred, becoming arcane and incomprehensible. The color was draining from it, leaving trails Chan swore he could see. By the time it settled gently on the green felt, light as a feather, there was hardly any color on the card at all.

  The card was now the Trey of Spades!

  There was an audible gasp as the card appeared: it was the Countess sucking in her breath between her teeth. Chan stared in amazement at the card.

  “It can’t be,” Mannheim was saying behind him. “I saw the setup—we all saw it!”

  “What just happened?” a voice asked from the crowd.

  “It’s a misdeal!”

  “What?”

  “A misdeal! A misdeal!”

  “We all get our bets back, don’t we?” Barbara said amid the cacophony. “Please tell me we do.”

  “I don’t understand this,” Chan heard Mannheim say. “It doesn’t make any sense!”

  Chan turned his head. “Sir,” he said. “What should we do?”

  “Hush!”

  “Quiet, everyone!”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, please!”

  The room was silent, awaiting Mannheim’s words. He composed himself, straightened his tie, and told Chan, “Go ahead—spread the deck and count it down.” Then he moved to the phone and called upstairs to surveillance.

  Chan carefully collected the deck, squared it, and gently fanned it face up on the table, with no expectation as to what would emerge. The first thing he noticed was that the Queen of Spades, which he was certain had not appeared during the deal, was situated early in the deck, where the Trey of Spades had originally been. The murmuring in the crowd grew as they saw, like Chan, that somehow the positions of the two cards—the Trey and the Queen—had switched mid-deal.

  Otherwise, the deck was entirely complete, with all fifty-two cards.

  “They can’t even begin to say how,” Mannheim said after he got off the phone. “But surveillance confirms the deck was legitimate both before and after the deal. They also said there was no mistake made on the case-keep.”

  “We could have told you that,” said Barbara.

  Mannheim cleared his throat. “Ladies and gentlemen, your attention!” Chan thought his boss sounded different now. “I officially declare this hand a misdeal. All players are allowed to rescind their bets.”

  Above the peal of applause, Chan heard a very distinctive noise, like the cawing of a crow. The Countess’s mouth was wide open—she was laughing so hard she had to hold her chest with both arms. Thomas Eccleston, standing behind her, had raised his dark glasses to his forehead, and was still staring at the board in astonishment.

  Chan could breathe again. He felt light-headed, as light as the last card falling toward the table, transforming as it fell.

  Chan was immediately tapped out after the hand. He turned to Mannheim and told him that his standing so close had been what enabled the card to change. “For a moment, there was a pathway—I believe it was yours, sir.” Then he hugged Mannheim, which he had never done before. “Good-bye, sir. And good luck.”

  Afterward, Chan drove home and collapsed into bed. For the first time in Snoqualmie, he was able to sleep in his apartment, soundlessly and dreamlessly, and when he awoke the next afternoon, he felt refreshed, relieved, and very, very hungry.

  A New Setup

  After the commotion died down—and it did not for almost a quarter hour—play resumed at the other tables. The Faro table, however, remained closed. Mannheim ordered its shutdown, overriding the pleas of the crowd that had gathered, many of whom wanted to place their own bets. Not until the surveillance tapes could be reviewed, he told them.

  Then, after asking Dayna to relieve him, Mannheim exited the High-Limit Salon. His steps took him through the passage in the casino known only to its longest-serving employees, a winding corridor that led out the back entrance to where the staff lot stretched all the way to the first line of trees. Mannheim felt the night breeze keenly, the swaying pines and heavens above the Royal Casino seeming more vast in his dazed state, and he half expected to find his car, which he had not driven in several days, gone. But of course, there it was. He opened its door and left his key and wallet on the driver’s seat, in full view of any passersby. Then he closed the door halfway, leaving it ajar.

  Afterward, Mannheim re-entered the casino through the front entrance, a mirrored revolving door that required only a gentle nudge from his shoulder. His gaze passed over the walls and floor of the bright lobby, which were paneled in a warm, vivid cedar. As he used to in the old days, Mannheim took a moment to inspect each of the five suits of armor lining the wall, feeling their weight and contours with his fingers, admiring the progression in material from leather to links of chain to heavy, forged plate. Beside the armor, the maw of the massive, raised portcullis gaped before Mannheim, inviting him to step through. Boldly, he did, and emerged into the pit.

  Immediately, Mannheim could sense the liveliness in the air. The casino floor was buzzing in the aftermath of the hand, and as he walked across it, many of his old regulars—the small-timers—wanted to find out “what really happened” in the high-limit room. One young woman unknown to Mannheim shook his hand vigorously, asking him to touch her pocketbook in order to “pass the luck.” Others kept their distance, but whispered and pointed as he passed: “There he goes—he oversaw it!”

  The employee lounge, where he’d spent innumerable hours, was Mannheim’s sanctuary on the casino floor, and he headed there now. It had recently been renovated, much to his taste, the walls freshly painted a robin’s-egg blue and lit in each corner by a tall floor lamp with a red shade. There was a sink, a tray of drying mugs and dishes beside it, and a new, more powerful microwave oven installed over the stove. Leanne and Bao sat at their usual table drinking coffee and chatting, and very soon, they spotted him by the door. Standing up, they pulled out a chair for him, entreating him to sit and provide his own account of the hand. So Mannheim told them what he knew, as sensibly as he could:

  “Somehow, Chan switched the Queen and the Trey.”

  He could have said more, that he felt his standing so closely behind Chan had affected the course of action. Chan had essentially confirmed this fact afterward. But to offer this seemed needless.

  Mannheim spoke with Leanne and Bao until their break was over, and then the next group came in, this one including Derek and Rumi, and Mannheim related the incident anew. He added more details: Barbara slamming a fist on the table, the Countess cawing with laughter. They had never heard her laugh before. Four more times, for four more sets of dealers, Mannheim spoke of the hand until, at six a.m., the first of the day shift began to appear through the lounge’s doors. By that time, Mannheim felt utterly worn out, and he greatly desired rest. Excusing himself, he left the morning crew, who were mostly strangers hired by Lederhaus, to be apprised of the events of the evening through secondhand information.

  Mannheim was certain a headache was coming—every time he blinked now, he saw bright flashes of light, as if he were wading through a field of sparklers. Unsteadily, he made his way down the stairs, clutching at the banister with both hands. Around him, a stillness lay heavy in the air, underneath the surface noise and exclamations, the clatter of chips exchanging hands. The casino itself was still and silent, like some great beast keeping its own counsel, waiting, it seemed, for Mannheim in the changing room.

  There, in the darkness, he lay down and closed his eyes.

  The next time they opened—how much time seemed to have passed!—his old, shrunken body lay on the pallet, his breath hardly moving. Most curiously, the flashes of light that had previously dazzled his vision were escaping now, radiating from his eyes and mouth, illuminating the entire bedchamber in an eerie, colorless glow. Was this what Dr. Eccleston and Theo had called his aura? Mannheim could sense, like the advance of a momentous tide, the light filling the room, then slowly washing through the hallway, up the stairs, into the offices, into the pit, immersing
the gaming tables and ornate carpets, the ceiling painted to look like the night sky, the suits of armor standing neatly in a row. The light sank into every crevice, chip, and inhabitant inside the Royal Casino, and a great and joyful sadness welled up inside his old body, still on its back on the pallet, and Mannheim could taste with his lips the salt of his tears.

  Nearby, a phone rang.

  The body on the floor stirred, rising in the darkness with great effort. The bell rang, and instinctively, the body must respond. On leaden feet, it shuffled forward down the long tunnel, toward the far end of the hall, toward the small, half-sized door. The top of the door was arched, lit on each side by a smoky lamp, their hot oil mixing with the thick dust of desiccated bones and paper, filling the old lungs with a fine, gray ash.

  The body coughed and coughed, but walked on. The bell seemed to ring continuously now, one long deafening trill. From the other side, the doorknob of the half-sized door began shaking violently.

  The parched mouth ventured to open, to articulate the question “Who’s over there?” but the jaws were full of ash and sand, grains spilling out and onto the floor, packed inside all the way down the throat to the pit. The body wobbled, staggered, and fell against the wall. Then, no longer able to bear its own weight, it collapsed, knees shattering into pieces on the cold stone floor.

  The doorknob rattled—then click! And for a brief moment of clarity, Mannheim saw his twisted legs on the floor in front of him, felt himself surrounded by beings, murmuring among themselves over the gray shell before them.