Jack of Diamonds

by Bryce Courtenay

  They looked at each other. ‘Jesus, no grog?’ Noel cried.

  ‘Just one drink when we start the game, so they don’t suspect anything. But it’s important to stay off the booze if we’re going to pull this off.’

  ‘The Congo guys do a lot of talking, but it’s in their lingo. What if that’s how they’re, you know, cheating?’ Noel said.

  ‘That would be great. I’m a Canadian. A lot of us speak reasonable French.’

  This brought a general laugh.

  ‘But . . . but, Jack, lad, the Jerries, they’ll close the game down if they realise we’ve found out they’re cheating,’ Russell Howell said. ‘They’re ex-SS, they’re not stupid. Well, Hans Meyerhof isn’t.’

  I shook my head. ‘That’s precisely why he won’t close it down. He knows if the story gets out that they’ve been cheating, he and his committee will be torn limb from limb.’

  ‘You’re focking right there, man,’ Piet Wenzel growled.

  ‘So, as they say in Las Vegas, Hans Meyerhof will be made an offer he can’t refuse. We’ll give him an out. How much have you guys lost in the past? Counting the guys you’re going to bring as backup – four, five thousand pounds?’

  ‘Make it six, Jack,’ Noel laughed. ‘Just to be on the safe side.’

  ‘Okay, you can have a private chat with Hans Meyerhof, Jannie. Tell him we’re onto him and we want him to keep the game going until his two Congo stooges have lost six grand, then they can get out and we’ll keep our mouths shut about the cheating.’

  Jannie Coetzee started to laugh, and the others joined in; the prospect of revenge was truly sweet.

  ‘Okay, gentlemen,’ Noel said, ‘I guess that’s it. Let’s have a drink or five. Let Jannie here know if the Krauts invite you to play next Saturday and, of course, if you’ve accepted.’ They all nodded. ‘Show a bit of reluctance – not too much, just something like “Shit, last time I lost my shirt. But okay, what the hell . . . ” That kind of thing. In other words, act normal.’

  I could see the union guys had changed their opinion of me. I wondered how any of these men would feel if they knew what was contained in Jacob’s gift. ‘See you all at the game next Saturday. Jannie, you and I will have to talk before then.’

  ‘My office, any afternoon, Jack; I’ll tell the dragon you’re coming,’ he laughed.

  I spent the next week getting to know Diamond Jim. He liked several types of grain and lots of fruit, and we quickly took to each other, getting on like a house on fire. Maybe I was just imagining it, but it struck me he was pretty intelligent. For instance, he only shat in his cage, which had a removable tray and was easy to clean.

  I wrote off to the Audubon Society in New York and, of course, Foyles Bookshop, asking each to send me any information they had on the African Grey Parrot and enclosing cheques I hoped would cover costs. I had a half-formed idea about Diamond Jim, so every afternoon I practised the harmonica for two hours with the little guy perched on my shoulder, swinging my body in time to the music and bobbing from one foot to the other. It was good exercise, even if it didn’t teach my parrot a thing. Then I decided to buy a mirror so that I could check if my new partner was reacting to any of the stuff I was playing. In the week leading up to the big poker game, Diamond Jim simply cocked his head at me and blinked his big, intelligent eyes. But I told myself to be patient; poor little guy must still be unsettled by the move.

  On the Thursday afternoon before the poker game, I dropped in to see Jannie Coetzee and got what passed for a smile from Mrs Dulledge. If ever anyone was well named, I thought. Jannie Coetzee suggested his secretary go to the staff canteen for a cup of tea. He had a big voice that carried through walls, so after she left, with a toss of her head, Jannie noted, ‘Ja, just in case, you never know. Noel White’s got this expression, “stickybeak”; that’s her, man. So, now we can talk, Jack,’ he continued, adding, ‘afterwards we’ll go and buy those cards.’

  ‘Jannie, there isn’t a lot to talk about. As you know, it’s usual to change cards a couple of times during a game, so if I find out they’re cheating, I’ll get up to take a piss, and shortly afterwards you do the same and I’ll brief you on what to do. It’s best the others don’t know what’s happening, so they’ll play their normal game. You’ll call the shots to my directions, okay?’

  ‘Ja, that’s fine by me, Jack.’

  ‘So, when it’s time to bring the new packs into the game, you’ll do it.’

  ‘Ja, okay, but you know, in the past when they present new packs, they’re always sealed, they break the seals in front of our eyes.’

  ‘Buddy, any cardsharp worth his salt knows how to reseal a pack of cards so not even an expert can tell they’ve been opened and marked. Just grin and say you bought them at the Club on a whim, you thought it might change your luck . . . something like that.’

  ‘And we don’t do the same, mark ours?’

  ‘No. If I’m right, we can do this straight, Jannie; no fancy tricks.’ I hoped to hell I was right, otherwise I was going to have a lot of explaining to do. My guys would be bringing big bucks to the table, hoping to win back some or all of the money they’d lost.

  We left to purchase the cards and Jannie Coetzee took charge of them. ‘So long, Jack, see you at the game, Saturday, six o’clock sharp.’

  ‘Jannie, for Chrissake, tell the others not to have a free drink or two at the bar before the game, it’s very important they’re sober.’

  ‘Ja, understood, I’ll tell them all. Thanks, Jack.’

  Saturday night came and I put Diamond Jim into his cage and stroked the tiny soft feathers on his head. He nuzzled his beak and face into my hand and made a sort of throaty rattling sound. ‘Wish me luck, buddy,’ I said, closing the door of his cage. Then, almost on cue, he gave out a loud chirp. ‘Thanks, buddy,’ I called back. Diamond Jim was the nicest thing to happen to me in a long time, and I couldn’t help but wonder in what condition I might be when next I opened his cage.

  Apart from my intense dislike of the Germans in the so-called committee, they frightened me. I was familiar with men who made their own rules. Las Vegas had taught me to keep quiet and knuckle under and when I hadn’t done so . . . well, you know the result. Now here I was again, facing up to men who had all the power they needed to do me a lot of harm. What is it with you, Jack Spayd? Don’t you ever learn? I told myself. But then I could almost hear Joe saying, ‘Jazzboy, sometime we got to shut our mouth even when we be right, but sometime we also got to do ourself a deal o’ yellin’ out.’ I could only hope tonight was the night to start yelling.

  After coming off night shift on the Saturday morning of the game, I lay awake going through all sorts of methods of cheating – shaved decks, cold decking, crooked shuffles and dealing off the bottom, selecting cards from below the top card, but all of those were hard to sustain throughout a game without being caught out or, at the very least, raising suspicion. I’d gone over and over every possibility a dozen times in my head and it was pointless; I needed some sleep, preferably extending well into the afternoon before the game.

  When I woke, I showered, dressed and had an early light meal at the mess before turning up for the game, where the others were already seated around the poker table, everyone with a drink beside them. Hans Meyerhof introduced me to the two guest players from the Congo, Jean Dubois and Pierre Laurent. ‘Jack Reed is tonight for his first time here, chentlemen. Ve velcome him; ja, ve vill all have fun togezzer.’ I almost expected him to add, ‘It is compulsory!’

  The recreation hut was packed: the entire Kraut committee was there and a heap of miners and other guys, most of them past players invited by the men around the table. It may have been my imagination but the atmosphere in the recreation hut seemed almost electric. Jesus, what if our plans have been leaked and reached Hans Meyerhof? I comforted myself with the thought that while the Krauts might be clever, subtlety wasn’t their strong suit. They were ex-SS after all and would have seen to it that I never got near the game if the
y thought I was a threat. What was the German equivalent of a hand sticking up out of the desert? Perhaps a pile of well-chewed bones left by the hyenas in the veldt, as the woods were usually termed.

  The game took place in a roped-off section of the recreation hut. Everyone was already seated, as I said, and I’d learn later that they hadn’t cut cards to decide our positions around the table. Hans had simply pointed to a chair and called out a player’s name – so far, so bad. The two Congo guys sat opposite each other. The dealer didn’t even look up or nod. He was, to say the least, a pretty poor example of the master race, fat and short with a bald crown sparsely covered by strands of dark hair he’d combed over from the side of his head. The scalp showing through the pasted strands of hair was an even baby pink. I could not imagine him storming Stalingrad or anything else. I decided to call him Colonel Comb Over.

  Grunting, he dished out our chips, storing the cash in the drawer of a small table on wheels, on the top of which he kept several decks of cards and a box of chips. The Congo guys spoke reasonable English but always spoke to each other in French. We didn’t object, and I was interested to hear Jean Dubois say in a deadpan voice that they hadn’t been pulled up for speaking French. It was all he said, but the little smirk that went with it, and the slight nod from Pierre, spoke volumes. These guys were about as straight as a somersault.

  We began to play, and almost at once I could see how they’d worked the scam. The whole thing was so obvious I couldn’t believe it. Over the past few days I’d been mulling over everything I knew about card scams, and trying to remember what Johnny Diamond had told me about how a game of poker could be fixed. In every case, if you’re going to cheat well and win consistently, the best way to do it is to know with certainty what cards your opponents are holding: then you can fold whenever they hold the better cards, only risking your ante; or, when you hold the stronger hand, you can keep raising – the more your opponents bet, the more they lose. Often you don’t even need to show your hand if your opponents can’t afford, or don’t want, to match your raises. I know that sounds obvious but there are some very sophisticated ways of going about it. The one the guys from the Congo were using wasn’t brilliant or even clever.

  Colonel Comb Over dealt the first round of cards, face up to see who got the highest card, and thus became the first to place a bet. It was then that the visitors reached for their spectacle cases, opened them casually, almost absentmindedly, and put on their specs. One pair was round and gold-rimmed, and the other horn-rimmed; just your average spectacles, with the exception that both sets of lenses had a red tint.

  I very nearly fell off my chair. Jesus, it can’t be that simple, surely? There was no way a cheat in his right mind would try this one on in even the smallest roadside casino in Nevada. In fact, it was almost an insult, the sort of cheap trick any casino manager would pick within thirty seconds of the start of a game. The red-tinted lenses filtered out red light, highlighting faint green markings invisible to the naked eye hidden among the red pattern decorating the back of the Bicycle-brand cards. These markings showed the value of every card. The trick was for the dealer to lay each card down before each player picked up those allocated to him. In other words, they didn’t need to be great poker players, just have a reasonable memory, which is common among good card players. I was pretty sure they’d be competent players at the very least. The two Congo guys would know what every other player was holding almost before they did.

  It was an old trick and initially I doubted what I was seeing, thinking that they’d donned the tinted glasses merely to mislead, and that something truly subtle might be taking place. In all my time in Las Vegas I had never heard of anyone stupid enough to attempt to get away with such an old card-marking scam. It was one of those cheap tricks you might have gotten away with twenty or thirty years before, but not since. Still, this was the boondocks, after all; literally the middle of Africa, what Lenny would have referred to as the asshole of the world or, in the local parlance, arsehole of the world.

  I decided to let things go for a while, to see what transpired as I watched Jean and Pierre play. There was no need for an exchange in French now, it was simply too easy. The dealer, Colonel Comb Over, wasn’t pulling any fast ones either: his was a slow, steady shuffle and deal, no ‘mechanic’s grip’, no false shuffles. His side already had all the advantage they thought they were going to need.

  My fellow players were, certainly by Las Vegas standards, pretty average, a notch above a game on a Saturday night at a friend’s house. After an hour I’d won a small pot; Jannie Coetzee was down about twenty pounds; Piet Wenzel had been sighing for twenty minutes, slapping his cards down hard as he threw in his hand – he was down about fifty pounds. I noticed he was glancing at me as if to say, ‘When are we going to make our move?’ I could only hope Hans Meyerhof wasn’t watching him. The others were barely holding their own; at this rate, by the end of the night they’d be broke, skint. I was now confident I knew the extent of the scam. The Congo guys were biding their time, each winning a small pot once in a while. But then one of them scooped in a pot worth about ninety pounds. I guess we’d both decided it was time to move the game along. In fact, Pierre glanced briefly at Jean and, as if talking to himself, mumbled, ‘C’est le temps [It’s time].’

  Yeah, dead right, you bastard, I said to myself. Pushing back my chair, I stood up and announced that I needed a piss.

  ‘Ja, not a bad idea,’ Jannie said, getting heavily to his feet. It surprised me that Hans or the German guy behind the bar hadn’t noticed that no one around the table had replenished their drinks. Jannie Coetzee and I were alone at the urinal. ‘So, tell me, man, what’s going on?’ he asked.

  ‘They’re using marked cards, buddy,’ I replied, with a snort. ‘It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book. I almost feel insulted.’

  ‘Bending the cards? Scoring them? I’ve looked for that, there’s nothing like that going on, man,’ Jannie replied.

  ‘No, the glasses, the red-tinted lenses; they filter out the red pattern and let them see faint green markings on the backs of the cards as they’re dealt. They might as well be dealt face up.’

  ‘Jesus, are you sure?’ he exclaimed.

  ‘Jannie, concentrate on one thing at a time, you’ve pissed all over your nice brown boots.’

  ‘Heere, Jack,’ he tucked himself away and buttoned his fly, ‘you sure? Certain?’ He pulled a square of newspaper off a hook near a washbasin and cleaned the toes of his boots. ‘We’ll kill those fockers. The men are going to be pretty focking angry!’

  I placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘Take it easy, will you, buddy? The real action is about to begin.’

  ‘I can’t wait, man.’

  ‘When we get back, we insist on a change of deck. Give them one of the packs we bought at the Club. Now Hans Meyerhof is certain to object, so stay cool, smile, ask him for a quiet word in his office.’

  ‘Will you come with us?’

  ‘No, Jannie, you go alone. You’re the guy who holds the key to their dominance of the single quarters. He won’t refuse. If I go with you, he’s going to smell a rat.’

  Jannie smiled. ‘That’s two rats then. Ja, okay, I understand. What do I say?’

  ‘Tell him you’re obliged to demonstrate to everyone in the room how the glasses our visitors are wearing help their eyesight. Oh, then smile and remind him that there’s enough muscle in the room to do him and his committee a great deal of harm.’

  ‘Wragtig, Jack, if the room knows what’s going on, I’m telling you, they’ll kick the bastards to death, right there on the spot. I’m not joking, man.’

  ‘He’ll know that. Next, you inform him how much his two friends across the Congo border are going to lose.’

  ‘So, six grand . . . six thousand pounds?’

  ‘That’s what we decided at the braaivleis, wasn’t it? Oh, and every deal has to have a sweetener; tell him if he complies, not a word will be said about the glasses, but after the game
is over, they’ll be confiscated and kept as evidence, “just in case”, along with the marked deck.’

  Jannie nodded. ‘Good, Jack. I’ll go first, then you follow me a bit later, hey?’

  I had a sudden thought and called after Jannie. He came back to me. ‘When you hand over the new deck, just collect any of the marked deck on the table and put them in your pocket.’

  ‘Jack, you’d make a blerrie good diamond driller. You got detail in your head all the time.’ He laughed.

  I left the toilet block and waited outside. The stars in that part of Africa are spectacular, so myriad that you’d sometimes wonder if there were any black sky between them. I wondered whether if ‘everything went apeshit’, as Noel White would put it, I’d live to see another night sky like this one. What would happen to Diamond Jim? Perhaps I’d been away from women for too long.

  I returned to the recreation hut and resumed my seat. Jannie emerged from Hans Meyerhof’s office shortly after, followed by Hans. Without even glancing at me, he handed Colonel Comb Over a deck of cards. The fat little man glanced towards Hans, and I looked up in time to see the German nod. Hans Meyerhof then walked over to Jean Dubois, and asked if he could see him and Pierre Laurent in his office for a moment. ‘Some telephone call is coming from Katanga,’ he said, by way of explanation to the table. ‘Maybe you play on?’

  ‘They’re not coming back?’ Noel White asked.

  ‘Certainly, they are coming,’ Hans replied. He removed a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his brow. Whatever Jannie Coetzee had said to him, I could see he was afraid.

  In the meantime, Colonel Comb Over had opened the sealed pack Jannie had passed over to him and, grunting to himself, was going through his deliberate, almost ponderous, shuffle. ‘What say we wait for our friends from across the border before we resume?’ I suggested.