by John Moralee
There was an awkward silence, broken by Lisa.
“How many games have been held here?” She knew the answer, but it would take Lavoisier off his mindprobing.
“One per year for one hundred and twenty years,” he said. “I know the place is showing signs of age, though the older players seem to like the ambience.”
She wanted to ask Lavoisier about the older players, but the elevator clanked to a halt.
“Here we are. We rent the whole floor for the game, so there will be no interruptions.”
No interruptions. She wondered if the walls were soundproof. She detected a musty odour in the passage, the smell of damp walls and stale air. They walked along it to a sturdy door. Lavoisier opened it for Lisa. She stepped inside a noisy, crowded room filled with men wearing dinner jackets and black ties.
She was the only woman present. The crowd stopped talking to look, assessing her both sexually and as an opposing player with equal ferocity. They reminded her of wolves. Fortunately, she was spared their thoughts by her thought blocking.
Two huge men crossed the room. Guns in shoulder-holsters bulged under their jackets.
“I’ll have to ask you to submit to a search,” Lavoisier said. “House rules,” he added.
“Of course,” she said, uneasy.
One security man brushed his hands over her dress, straying a little close to touching her breasts at one point. When finished, the two men disappeared and Lavoisier apologised.
“They weren’t telepaths,” Lisa said.
“They are paid well to keep their mouths shut, and the doors closed to Normals. “
“Can they be trusted?”
“They work for the New Orleans Mafia. One of our members is a godfather.” He must have seen her expression. “Don’t worry! He respects the rules.” He led her to a table where he exchanged her money for white chips - and the million dollar fee. “The White Chip Game begins in half an hour.”
“I was thinking about playing the Black Chip Game.”
Lavoisier swallowed concern. He was evidently no card player. “You do know the rules?”
“Normal five card draw. Any player can call a bet at any time with a black chip instead of money. If the bet is accepted then everyone turns over their cards - and the loser dies. If the bet is not accepted, you win.”
“That’s correct,” he said. “It’s very dangerous. Because of the high stakes involved only the best of the best play. You’ll have to win a table of White Chip first.”
“Okay,” she said coolly.
*
Beyond the anteroom, guarded by four armed men, was the card-room. Several green baize tables filled the room, all positioned far enough away from any others to avoid distraction. Slowly and carefully the players selected tables. Lisa had never seen so many telepaths in one room - in fact, her parents were the only ones she had known until today. She felt like a yokel coming to the big city for the first time. She only had nine white chips, fewer than any other player she could see. She sat down with five men. She noticed one table - in the centre - remained empty, waiting to be filled.
Lavoisier clapped and the room was silent. “The betting limit is five hundred thousand. The winner from each table has the option of joining the Black Chip Game. You will notice that there are screens between each game so that nobody can stand behind another player. This is so no messages can be passed. Anyone caught using their Talent or otherwise cheating will be asked to leave, losing all winnings to the house. Now, let the games begin.”
*
Lisa found the White Chip Game easy. Her opponents, without exception, had not learned to play poker the hard way. They had relied on their Talent to win against Normals, looking into a player’s head to see their cards, and it showed in their playing. Without such an advantage, they were no more than amateurs.
She had learnt the hard way. She had practised her game by deliberately not looking at her opponent’s thoughts to concentrate on their body language. There were so many ways to reveal the status of a player’s hand that it made the difference between amateur, pro and master. Lisa had lost games against the best Normals in the world - Johnny Moss, “Amarillo Slim” Preston and Phil Hellmuth - but she had learnt from her mistakes.
Before she played poker, she always wore black contact lenses and heavy make-up. She had learnt the dilations and contractions of her pupils told the masters all they needed to know, and blushing was an alarm going off.
The secret of playing good poker was to control bodily responses. Sweating, blinking, coughing were clues to bluffing. Even the pulse of a vein, the twitch of a nostril, and some details so subtle that maybe one player in a million would even notice, all mattered.
Lisa was last to take her place at the Black Chip table, with her winnings stacked and counted as totalling fifty-two million. She could have walked away with it with no questions asked, but money came easily to telepaths. Simple greed was not why she was there.
No - the reason why most telepaths gathered once a year in New Orleans was to have a challenge, to test themselves against others of their kind, to discover the best player.
That was not Lisa’s reason, either.
Lisa could tell instantly that the players of the Black Chip Game were not like the amateurs she had faced earlier, but were ‘blind’ players. The term card-shark was a truism, looking at their dead eyes.
Lavoisier approached the table. “Harry, Michael, Ivan, Hideo ... meet a beautiful lady who won’t say her name.”
Lisa nodded and smiled. “You can call me Mona.”
“You look familiar,” Harry said. His greying hair was slicked back in a pony-tail. “Have I seen you at Monte Carlo?”
“Possibly, I get around.”
“Don’t we all, love,” Michael said, puffing on a Turkish cigarette.
“You look like a guy I beat in ‘77,” Harry said. “Odd.”
Lisa tensed and forced herself to remain calm. Her father had died in 1977. Harry had killed him.
Lavoisier coughed politely. He was holding a .22 pistol with silencer. She watched him click a cartridge into the pistol and sit at the table, placing the pistol in front of him. He removed a pack of matt black cards, fanned them to show a complete pack, then shuffled them. “To avoid accusations of deck fixing, I’ll deal and supervise the game. Between hands, anyone can ask for a new deck.”
He dealt and the game began. Lisa studied her opponents, looking for the clues that would tell her if they were bluffing or genuine. It was difficult. Hideo hid behind a rictus grin. Michael looked like an octogenarian Quentin Crisp without the hair dye, but his blue eyes possessed an eerie intelligence. Ivan could have been Omar Sharif’s brother, cool and sophisticated. But it was Harry, Harry the murderer of her father, who she took the greatest interest in. He acted like a Sicilian hood, but she knew it was all show designed to unnerve.
“Do you gentleman always win the White Chip Game?” she asked, taking her cards.
“Always,” Harry said. “Of course, occasionally one of us has to step out ... one way or the other ... but I have been in the Black Chip Game more or less constantly for twenty years. I’m afraid the rest don’t last long.”
Like my father, she thought. She looked at Harry and was determined to beat him, to get revenge for ending her father’s life. She hated the sickness of the game, of the kind of people who would enjoy the thrill of destroying each other. Yet she felt angry that her father had given his life for a stupid bet. She had to know if he had died through his own lack of skill or if Harry had cheated. It was her one driving force, her obsession. Maybe if she knew the answer she could exorcise her pain, driving the demons out of her dreams.
*
By 4 a.m. she was down to half a million. Ivan was on a lucky streak and there was nothing she could do about it except ride it out. She picked up an Ace-high flush. It was a medium hand - a full-house, four of a kind, straight flush or a royal flush would beat it.
Ivan pushed twenty white
chips into the middle of the table.
Harry, Michael and Hideo folded.
Ivan’s intention was clear - to make her fold, too. She looked at him closely, looking for tell-tale signs. Had the rate of his blinking increased? A sign of nerves? No. He had a good hand.
Lisa put down her black chip.
There was silence.
Ivan stared at her.
Her heart pounded in her chest. She kept her eyes locked on his. She could tell he didn’t want to die, as she didn’t.
“Damn,” he said. He folded. She collected his chips. His nerves evaporated after that ... Ivan was knocked out of the game by six a.m.
The game continued ... piles of chips fluctuating like the tides of the sea, going back and forth, back and forth. Lisa felt the fan above, stirring humid air with a languid whap-whap beat. The noise was almost hypnotic, lulling her defences down. She wasn’t the only one affected.
She noticed that Michael smoked his pungent cigarettes with slightly longer intakes if he had a good hand. Gradually, he lost chips, one by one. In order to stay in he played his black chip.
Harry and Hideo folded.
Lisa could tell he was bluffing.
She folded despite a strong hand.
Harry flashed a look at her. “You feeling sympathy?”
“What?”
Harry shook his head. It was then she realised he had been in her head, seeing with her eyes. Unlike with Lavoisier, Lisa hadn’t even sensed the brush of his thoughts against hers.
She could have informed Lavoisier about Harry cheating, but she did not. She couldn’t prove it. Instead, she buried the information behind a mental barrier so Harry did not know she knew about him. It was like keeping the door to a cage of lions closed when there was no lock. Harry kept probing her from different angles, trying to reach through her defences. But she blocked him.
Hideo and Michael quit after twenty-two hours once Harry ground them down, no doubt due to cheating.
“You and me,” Harry said, grinning.
Lisa blocked out his mind-probing with all her effort. She had to beat Harry, but how? If she had a poor hand, he would know.
She picked up her cards, but did not look at them.
“I’ll take blind luck,” she said, feeling sick.
“You can’t do that,” he said.
“She can,” Lavoisier said. “It’s perfectly legitimate.”
As Harry picked up his own cards, Lisa concentrated on changing them in his mind. He was so busy defending his thoughts, he let her slip thoughts in. Ace. King. Queen. Jack. Ten. All hearts.
A royal flush.
Impossible to beat.
The odds of a royal flush were 1 in 650,000.
Harry’s eyes glistened.
Lisa could read him like a book. She put all her white chips forward ... and the black chip.
“A mistake,” Harry grinned. “I call that bet.”
Harry turned his cards face up.
He had a pair of fours.
He looked at them - he couldn’t believe it - opening his mouth, making an odd mewling sound. Lisa retracted from his mind.
Could she beat a pair of fours?
Lisa flipped over her own cards. She looked at them for a long time.
A pair of sevens.
“She cheated!” Harry screamed, rising and pointing. “Lavoisier, she cheated!”
Lavoisier shot Harry in the forehead. Harry fought with the air for seconds, then collapsed, ruining the green baize. Blood pumped out of the small wound in his forehead and out the larger one in his scalp.
“They never lose gracefully,” Lavoisier said. “It looks like you are one rich lady.”
Soon after, Lisa left the elevator, carrying a billion dollars in her briefcase. The pianist was still in the lobby, playing music to an unappreciative audience. Lisa walked up to him and handed him the briefcase, giving him the biggest tip in his life.
“You can buy Carnegie Hall,” she said, and walked out. His bewildered thoughts turned to overwhelming joy as she crossed the street.
Only Snowing
Ryan slowed his car to a crawl when the snow started. Quickly, colour bleached from the countryside. After a mile everything outside was white. Ahead, snow draped the cars locked into a single, crawling chain and settled on the tarmac, growing an inch deep in minutes. He had never seen it snow so badly, so suddenly. Ryan could hardly see where the road met the embankment. A flurry of white cut his vision to just three cars, and Ryan shivered at the thought that unless the weather improved soon he could be stuck here, between cities, until the snowploughs cleared the way.
Bored, he smoked a cigarette and looked at his Timex. It was 8.30 a.m. He was supposed to be at work by now. The Datsun in front moved slightly, kicking up snow. He closed the gap, then sat waiting for it to move some more.
“Come on, come on.”
Ryan kept the engine idling, in case he stopped it and could not get it restarted. He switched on the radio. There was a worrying crackle and the red FM stereo light blinked on and off, the snow interfering with the signal.
“... unexpected snow ... the ... expect delays in ... freezing temperatures and high winds ...”
“Great,” he said, turning it off. His breath was steaming up the windows. Jennifer Ross would probably take today out of his wages. His boss would expect him to arrive in any weather, arguing that if he did not like commuting then he could always live in Edinburgh like she did, rather than commute from the countryside.
The windscreen wipers struggled to shift the snow as fast as it landed. They slipped and slid over a thin veneer of newly-formed ice. He could hear the wind battering the glass, a hollow scream.
The rear lights of Datsun were red eyes staring out of the white blur, growing smaller with each passing second. It was moving, he realised. He put his foot on the accelerator and felt the car jolt forward. The red eyes grew larger until the Datsun’s vague outline returned.
He waited for the Datsun to move again.
And waited.
9.00 a.m.
Now he was officially late. Ryan unlocked his briefcase on the passenger seat and removed his cellular phone. He would call Ross to tell her he could not make it for the ten o’clock meeting. This was probably the safest distance to tell her. He dialled her mobile number.
The phone hummed tunelessly.
He tried his home number, hoping Diane could pass a message on. He could not get through. He closed the phone. He’d have to wait for an improvement in the weather conditions. Meanwhile, he was trapped in the traffic queue.
The snow continued. The wipers stuttered.
10.00 a.m.
He could no longer see anything outside the car. The wipers scraped uselessly over a windscreen that looked like frosted icing. He tried to open his door, but it would not move. It was the same with the passenger door, and the rear ones. When Ryan pressed the button to wind down the electric windows, chilled air and snow spewed inside with a vengeance. Quickly, he leant his head outside, looking back and forth. He could just see the Datsun, and a lorry or something behind him.
Snow had piled up against the door in a drift. He reached down and brushed it away, then forced open the door. It was bitterly cold outside. Icy flakes stung his cheeks like bees. He considered leaving his car in search of help, but he was not dressed for the weather and it was clear none of the vehicles were going anywhere. After clearing the immediate area of the worst of the snow, he climbed back inside. He was so numb the heat brought tears to his eyes. He was going nowhere. He would just have to wait for the emergency services to find him. They would not take that long. He hoped.
11.00 a.m.
The wipers stopped. Snow began piling up on the glass. Every few minutes he wound down the side windows to clear them and wound them back up before too much heat was lost. On the fields and hills, the snow was a foot deep. Without the wipers rhythmically beating, the silence was eerie. He could hear his heartbeat drumming away and the patter o
f snow against the glass. Just relax. Someone will come along soon. To help pass the time, Ryan opened the glove compartment. He examined his CDs, choosing a compilation album of good driving tunes to take his mind off the situation. There was no need to panic. The car was warm, the engine was running, and he could listen to music to kill the boredom.
12.00 p.m.
Ryan tried his phone again. He stabbed 999 and waited. Nothing.
Why could he not get through?
Maybe the batteries were low.
His neck was aching, he noticed. He arched his back, trying to loosen his stiff muscles and trapped nerves. Sitting in one position for three hours was painful, even making his legs go numb. Therefore, he adjusted the driver’s seat so it was at a better angle and lay back. The music played on. It was so comfortable. He wished he had thought of it earlier.
He was asleep in moments.
*
Ryan opened his eyes to complete darkness. For an instant, he thought he was at home in a warm bed, but then he remembered where he was and sat up straight, bumping his head on the cushioned ceiling. His Timex glowed an evil green.
6.00 p.m.
He could not believe the time. God, had he been that tired? Why had nobody woken him? Why had nobody rescued him? He groped for the door light, flicked it on and felt his whole body jolt with cold electricity. A snow wall blocked every window, a solid sheet of compressed snow. Not a crack of light crept in.
He was completely trapped.
Trapped in the car.
It was then he felt the cold. The engine had stopped, possibly hours ago. The rescue teams had probably been and gone while he slept, thinking his car was abandoned. Maybe the snowploughs had covered his car with snow in order to clear a path. Whatever the reason, he was abandoned. No one knew he was here - and by the time Diane realised he was missing he could already be dead. There had to be some way to get out. Had to.
