significant amount, yet he handled the cards with a dexterity that was
impressive. In those long tapering fingers with the carefully
manicured nails, the pasteboards rustled and rippled, blurred and
snapped, with a speed that defied the eye.
Jake watched carefully, without appearing to do so, whenever the deal
passed to Major Gareth Swales. There is no way that a dealer,
even with the most magical touch, can stack a deck of cards without
facing them during the shuffle and Gareth never faced the deck as he
manipulated it. His eyes never even dropped to the cards, but played
lightly over the faces of the others as he chatted. Jake began to
relax a little.
The planter dealt him four to an open-ended flush, and he filled it
with the six of hearts. The civil servant, who had an insatiable
curiosity, called his raise to twenty pounds and sighed and muttered
mournfully as he paid the ivory chips into the pot and Jake swept them
away and stacked them neatly in front of him.
'Let's have a new pack-' smiled Gareth, lifting a finger for a servant,
and hope that it breaks your run of luck.' Gareth offered the seal on
the new pack for inspection, then split it with his thumbnail and
unwrapped the pristine cards with their bicycle-wheel designs,
fanned them, lifted the jokers and began to shuffle, at the same time
starting a very funny and obscene story about a bishop who entered the
women's rest room at Choring Cross Station in error.
The joke took a minute or two in the telling and in the roar of
masculine laughter that followed, Gareth began to deal, skimming the
cards across the green baize, so that they piled up neatly before each
player. Only Jake had noticed that during the bishop's harrowing
experiences in the ladies' room, Gareth had blocked the cards between
shuffles, and that each time as he lifted the two blocks he had rolled
his wrists so that for a fleeting instant they had fanned slightly and
faced.
Guffawing loudly, the baron gathered up his hand and looked at it.
He choked in the middle of his next guffaw, and his eyelid started to
jump and twitch, as though it was making love to his nose. From across
the table came a loud hiss of indrawn breath as the planter closed his
cards quickly and covered them with both hands. At Jake's right
hand,
the civil servant's face shone like polished yellow ivory and a little
trickle of sweat broke from his thinning hairline, ran down his nose,
and dripped unheeded on to the front of his dress shirt, as he stared
at his cards.
Jake opened his own cards, and glanced at the three queens it
contained. He sighed and began his own story.
'When I was first engineer on the old Harvest Maid tied up in
Kowloon, the skipper brought a fancy little dude on board and we all
got into a game. The stakes kept jumping up and up, and just after
midnight this dude dealt one hell of a hand.' Nobody appeared to be
listening to Jake's story, they were all too absorbed with their own
cards.
