by Desmond Cory
He stopped, staring at the two cards that Fedora had just turned up. The seven of swords. And a knave.
“. . . Banker wins,” said Johnny unemotionally. “And doubles on siete y media, sixteen thousand.” He picked up the cards once more, began to shuffle them.
Galdos’ first reaction—surprising in itself—was to fling himself abruptly round in his chair and to stare accusingly at Pedro. But Pedro moved his head negatively to and fro, and Galdos swung himself back again. Nobody could cheat at cards without Pedro spotting it; therefore Fedora hadn’t cheated. He just had the luck of the devil, that was all. Muttering disgruntedly to himself, he counted out the money lost in thousand-bolivar notes. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. . . . Pedro came forward and placed another wad, not so large as the first, on the table to his left. He poured out another glass of whisky.
“You had your chance,” said Johnny, almost smugly. “The ante for this round is fifty. Fifty bolivares only, lathes and gentlemen; nada más.”
Galdos won that round. He won the bank and a hundred bolivares on a seven and a queen, and almost threw the cards into the corner. “Are you sure?” he said to Pedro, pleadingly.
“Of course I’m sure,” said Pedro. “They’re both playing straight, both of them.”
“Urn,” said Galdos. “Well—no offence.”
He dealt the cards mournfully on an ante of a hundred, and won from all three. This success sent a little blood back into his eye, and he promptly switched up the ante to two hundred. Fedora glanced at the pile of notes at his elbow, now perceptibly higher than Galdos’ own, then let his gaze wander imperceptibly on to meet Trout’s. “You had me sweating there,” said Trout.
“I’ve got a feeling,” said Fedora, “that this is going to be my night.”
Galdos was shaking the whisky bottle over his empty glass, urging out the last few drops. “Let’s have another botde on the table,” he said. “Maria knows where it’s kept. Mariiii-aaa!” He peered vaguely round him. “Isn’t that slut still here?”
“She went to make the coffee,” said Fedora. “About an hour back.”
“Go and find her,” said Galdos to Pedro. “No, go and get the whisky first. And then get lost. I’m sick of the sight of your face, anyway.”
Trout settled down to play as calmly as he could after that brief spell of excitement. Deep inside him, he was now feeling something of that delicious confidence that appeared to be animating Fedora; a dangerous quality but immensely valuable in that others feel it, also, and commence to play badly against you. The bank changed hands several times more and, as usually happens, a pattern began to impose itself on the game; Trout played against Gracia, VVest, a contest in which honours were on the whole even, and Fedora against Galdos . . . and here Fedora was winning all the time, comfortably, yet without seeming to press home fully his advantage. Pedro came back, bringing a full bottle of West’s American whisky and a carafe of water: then disappeared. There was a pause while glasses were replenished.
“This Galdos,” said Trout to Johnny, under his breath. “We’ll have to watch him.”
“I’m watching him,” said Johnny.
“He’s really batting out on this. Wasn’t it Baudelaire who said that gambling offers superior pleasures to those of sexual intercourse?”
“It might have been,” said Johnny. “It wasn’t me.”
“Yes, well, this Galdos. It’s almost indecent to look at him.”
“Don’t look at him,” said Johnny. “Look at his money.”
They went on playing. Almost at once, Gracia lost rather badly to Galdos, who beat her with a seven-and-a-half that took the bank: shaken by this unintentional treachery, she called comparatively badly for the next nine or ten rounds, and both Trout and Fedora made visible gains against her. Galdos himself was still losing to Fedora, almost with regularity; around the third glass from the new bottle, he seemed to become aware of the rapidity with which his billfold was diminishing, and promptly put the bidding up higher than ever before. He seemed now to be more than a little drunk; his breathing was deep and irregular, the veins were swollen in his forehead and that curious damp shininess had returned to his eyes. His first ante was for a thousand; Fedora had nothing to do with it and paid up cheerfully, Trout asked for a card and stayed on six, Gracia asked for a card and overshot. Galdos drew a three and a four: seven. Encouraged by this, he raised the ante to two thousand, and this time Fedora took him up. Fedora doubled him. And redoubled. Once again a tensed blanket of silence fell over the table. Fedora turned up his three cards; a two, a five, a king. Seven and a half.
Galdos turned up two fours, as bad a hand as any possible. He had lost eight thousand bolivares; he was cleaned out. They had been playing for rather less than two hours, in which time Johnny had won rather more than four thousand pounds.
“Never seen luck like yours, Fedora,” said Galdos, mopping his forehead with a large green handkerchief. “You’ve got card sense, you have, sonny Jim. I’ll have to see if I can’t get some of that back another evening, that’s all.”
He took it quite well, really. But neither Trout nor Fedora were altogether deceived. He sat relaxed at the still centre of a vast whirlpool of roaring, elemental rage, an orgasm of fury which he was still waiting to attain. His fingers moved restlessly, silently, plucking at the twisted cane arms of his chair. Gracia West looked towards him, patted the notes that remained at her elbow.
“You’ve still got these left. You can go on with these, if you want to.”
“No,” said Galdos. Just that. And then, “You seem to have picked on me, Fedora. Why don’t you have a crack at your auntie?”
“My what? Oh yes, of course.” Fedora looked unblinkingly across the table at his most recently-acquired relative, shuffling the cards as he did so. “Somehow I hadn’t thought of you that way before.”
“I hadn’t realised that you were thinking of me in any way at all,” said Gracia West. “I was admiring the way you concentrated on the job in hand.”
“A modest gift,” said Fedora.
She placed one hand delicately on the pile of notes,
edging it forward a trifle. The hand was very clean, very well manicured, and two or three huge diamonds gleamed against her slender fingers; Fedora dropped his eyes to watch its movements. “What would you say to this as a flat ante, the game between you and me with Tomas dealing?”
She took her hand away; Johnny went on looking at the notes on the table. This was easily the biggest bet yet, for she still had the greater part of what Galdos had given her at the start of the game; there would be something like two thousand five hundred pounds there. Or more. He gave the pack a final riffle, then nodded. “All right,” he said, “I don’t mind.”
Galdos, sitting well back in his chair, began to hiccup again; he hadn’t hiccuped for quite a long time, but now he made up for it. It sounded almost bestial. “Magnifico” he said. “Es magnifico, eso. If we go out, we go out with a bang . . . eh? Would you care to cut, Señor what’s-your-name?”
Trout leaned forward and cut the pack. Once again he was, as he would have said, uneasy in his mind; he had a sensation that there was more to this bet than met the eye. Not that the ante wasn’t big enough, in any case; two thousand five hundred pounds would be considered an outsize banco in any casino in the world. He leaned back again, looking slowly round the room. Pedro still wasn’t there. He looked back at the table as Galdos slipped a card from the top of the pack; looked at Gracia West as she picked it up from the table. It’s a good moment to study a woman’s face, thought Trout, when she’s playing baccarat; its deliberate repose is almost as revealing as its repose when she’s sleeping. This woman’s face was certainly beautiful and went with a beautiful body, supple, well-shaped,
graceful. Though there remained about her a touch of Argentine flamboyance that just stopped short of vulgarity, a kind of animality, a leopard-in-a-cage quality, a savage impatience held in check. . . .
There could be no raising the ante on a f
lat wager. Galdos dealt two more cards swiftly, their dark blue backs flickering over the table in the smoky light. The delicate, rapacious fingers poised over the card, scooped it up; a second’s pause. . .. “Give me another,” said Gracia. Galdos grinned, a tight death’s-head rictus, and gave her another; looked at Johnny.
Fedora sat rather still, not looking at his cards but at Gracia’s hands. “Si, 9 ‘ he said. “Pido. Another.”
He was making no attempt to conceal the cards from Trout; who, leaning back casually as though to light a cigarette—he didn’t want to distract Johnny’s attention in any way—saw that the two he already held were a jack and a queen. Good. Quite good. But the card that came was a four; and that was terrible. He looked back at Gracia West, and saw that her eyes were fixed on him; he lit the cigarette, blew out the match and didn’t look any more. It was too risky. This was Johnny’s game, and Johnny’s alone.
Her fingers on the table rattled a brief tattoo; she, too, seemed suddenly unsure of herself. Or chose to give that impression; if the latter, it was clever, in view of the cards that Fedora held. Galdos watched her, still grinning, with a kind of obscene intentness, as though she were undressing in front of him; there was a tiny bubble of saliva in the corner of his mouth. Ten seconds passed. . . . Then she drew the fan of her three cards together and placed them, face downwards, on the table. “No,” she said, “I pass.”
There it was. That left Fedora with a really nasty decision; one of the hardest to make in the game. He sat motionless, as before, watching Gratia closely all the time; another ten seconds passed; the door burst open with a noise like a gunshot and a high, harsh voice called out in what was almost a scream. . . . “Fedora! Fedora!“. . . Johnny didn’t move a muscle, and Trout never admired him more than at that moment. He knew that he himself had jumped a clear three inches.
He looked round. Maria stood just inside the door, breathing deeply and audibly; the collar of her dress had been torn wide open and there was the red mark of a coming bruise on her upper arm. “Fedora,” she said urgently. “You said to call you.”
There was a moment’s silence. Then Galdos jumped to his feet with a speed surprising in so heavy a man, raised his cane high in the air and slashed it down on the table. His face had gone almost scarlet in the light of the lamp, and the big vein in his forehead looked ready to burst. “Get out of here,” he said, very softly but so vehemently that spittle flew across the room from his lips. “Get out of here,” he said. That was all.
Maria didn’t move. She stood as though petrified. Nobody else moved, either. “Pedro,” said Galdos, his voice switching fantastically to a high, treble pipe, “get her out of here. That little whore. And if she comes back, I’ll cut her to pieces.”
He stopped, his whole body rigid, expectant. The dark shape of Pedro came looming through the doorway. “Come on,” he said, grabbing Maria by the arm. “You heard what he said, didn’t you? You don’t have to act that way . . . for God’s sake. . . .” His voice, in marked contrast to Galdos’s, was a deep, hardly audible, amorous rumble.
“Fedora,” said the girl, struggling against him, “Fedora, oh God, you said you would.”
“That’s right,” said Fedora. “I did.” He got up, arching his body up and away from the chair like a stretching cat. “Leave the girl alone. Let her stay here, if she wants to.”
Galdos looked at him. “Sit down,” he said.
Fedora sat down.
“That’s better,” said Galdos, and grinned. “We’ll get on with the game.”
“It’s all the same to me,” said Fedora mildly. “But if that girl leaves the room, then it’s jam who gets it.”
“Gets it? Gets what?”
“Hurt.”
“. . . Welt, I’m damned,” said Galdos slowly. The grin came back, gradually, and a bead of sweat ran swiftly down the crinkle it formed in his chin. “I’m damned if you don’t remind me of Roberto. Now here’s schoolboy Fedora, the great man’s nephew, who . . . who thinks he. . . . Come here a minute, Pedro, will you?”
Pedro advanced; he, too, was grinning. He stopped! some three feet from Fedora’s chair and put his hands] on his hips. “You going to hurt somebody, sonny boy?” he said. “Fancy that. Care to show me how you’re] going to go about it?”
“My friend will illustrate,” said Johnny.
Trout was ready, nicely placed and only too willing to oblige. There are very many disadvantages implicit in being hit in the belly by Trout, most of them stemming from the obvious fact that he hits very hard indeed. The unfortunate Pedro doubled up like jack-knife, whereupon Fedora, who was waiting for this, kicked him forcibly in the face. Pedro began to squirm about on the floor, making sad damaged noises; Trout and Fedora, neither of whom had risen from their seats during this brief and drastic operation, nodded pleasedly to each other and then restored their attention to Galdos. “You can sit down, Señor Galdos,” said Johnny politely. “Maria will excuse you.”
Galdos made no move to accept this invitation. He looked at them for perhaps twenty seconds with eyes that now bore no resemblance to a spaniel’s at all; then he walked quickly round the table, stooped over Pedro, grabbed him by the collar and yanked him to his feet. “They made a fool of you,” he said tightly. “Anyone makes a fool of you, makes a fool of me. I don’t like that. I just don’t like it.” He made a sudden, violent hiss like a soda-water syphon and slashed Pedro across the face with the cane, using all his force. The pain of the blow straightened Pedro up; he put both hands to his face and gave a little dog-like yelp. Then he turned and, still with his hands to his face, made for the door. Galdos stepped aside, and did so just a little too quickly; though Fedora would have been ready in any case. He waited, his hands resting on the surface of the table, for Pedro to turn. . . .
Pedro turned, very fast, the gun in his hand. He turned fast enough to catch the last blurred flicker of movement of the pistol barrel that now stared him in the face, and without a tremor. He extended his fingers, let the gun slip through them to the floor. Fedora smiled. “That’s it,” he said. “Now just keep on walking, Felix.”
Pedro went out through the door, his shoulders drooping dejectedly. Fedora got up and went across to collect the pistol, then came back to the table. He did not look at Maria at all. He looked at Gracia West,
whose lips seemed to be fuller and damper than ever before and who was taking a cigarette from a little silver case. Galdos was sitting down again now, his chin cupped in his hands, watching him.
“You’re a smooth operator, you are/’ he said; his voice was restored to normal, his anger was as though it had never been. “You both are. I like to see smooth work like that.” He turned towards Gracia, as though seeking confirmation; but his eyes never left Fedora. “He’s pretty goddamned fast, this new nephew of yours. You see him move then? Smooth. Economical.”
Fedora put the pistol down on the table, sat down once again. Trout was whistling quietly under his breath; at that very moment, a new idea had come to him for his rock-and-roll ballad. Gracia West blew out smoke and said nothing, nothing at all.
Galdos’ eyes continued to consider Fedora, hard as two brown pebbles on the beach. “You’ve been a gunboy, Fedora. Can’t think why I didn’t see it before; you’ve got a gunboy’s eyes. Where did you operate? In Europe?”
“That’s right,” said Fedora. “Some fine mixed game you get over there.”
Galdos nodded, taking this remark in all seriousness. “You looking for a job over here? I could use you all right. The pair of you.” He reached out to take the pistol and put it in his pocket. “I’m a good guy to work for, though I say it myself That car we were talking about . . . you’d get it. A good one. America model. Both my other gunmen have got cars.” Th hardness was slowly fading from his eyes as ice melts i a pool, to be replaced by something that could only have been mistaken for maudlin sentimentality “Maria? Where’s that girl.. .? Come here, Maria.”
Maria pushed herself sulkily away from the
Wall and advanced, her hands thrust down behind her back. “And what’s got into you, you slut?” said Galdos, exuding a genial bonhomie. “What d’you have to make all this fuss for, if Pedro wants a little bit of what you’ve got on offer? You gone all timid these days, or something?”
“You promised me,” said Maria, still much offended. “You said that if I came here, no one’d paw me around. You know you did.”
“That was while Roberto was here,” said Galdos, perhaps a trifle more shortly than he had intended. Sensing this, he offered her a smack on the behind in compensation. “Anyway—you’re staying with the family, the way I see it. I’ll tell the boys you’re private property . . . though Fedora here can look after his own material, if anyone can.”
“What d’you mean, staying with the family?” asked Maria suspiciously. But Galdos, maybe fortunately, had already dismissed her from his attention. “You think it over,” he said to Johnny. “I mean it. It’s a fair offer. You think it over.”
There was a short silence; Johnny was contemplating his own fingertips, pressing them softly against the table. . . . “Sorry,” he said at length. “I’m not really interested.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t think I’d be happy working for you,” said Johnny. “You give me a pain in the neck.”
Galdos said nothing, but his breath hissed audibly through his nose. “All right,” he said. “Please yourself. There’s those that just won’t learn. All right. . . . Let’s get on with the game.”
Johnny looked across the table at Gracia West. “You want to scrap this hand and start a new one?” he said. “Or shall we go ahead on the cards we have?”
“I’m ready to go on,” she said, “if you are.” There was a touch of aggression in her voice that had not been present before, and Johnny looked up, but not quickly, at her. Then down again, at the three cards that lay, face downwards, on the table where he had left them. He didn’t pick them up again. “Okay,” he said to Galdos. “Give me a card.”
Galdos, his face sagging from the after-effects of suppressed fury, dealt him a card. Trout wrestled with temptation for a moment, then leaned across to see it. A jack, the jack of cups; which went with the other jack and the queen and the four to give Johnny a count of five and a half. Which was hardly any better than before. . . . Trout sat back again, his face carefully composed, and glanced towards Gracia; this time, though, she was not looking at him but down at the cards in her hand. There was something subtly different in her expression; Trout looked hard at her, and at the cigarette in her hand, and as he did so was aware of a sharp, hard scent hanging in the air, a scent he knew well and yet was momentarily unable to place. Then the three things—the scent, the expression, the cigarette —seemed to click together in his mind to form a coherent whole. She was smoking marijuana. He turned his head slowly to look at Fedora, and found Fedora already watching him. It was all right. Johnny had seen it already.
