What is this, the Masons? I asked. You need the secret handshake?
James Mason?
No, the Masons, I laughed. You know, the Masonic Lodge, all that?
He looked blank.
Charming, like I said.
Hey, he said. You hear about anybody needs a little carpentry work done?
Actually, I said, I’ve been thinking about putting a bookcase in my bedroom. That too small a job for you?
Nah. I’ll take anything I can get.
Great, I said. Why don’t you come by, look at the space. Give me an estimate.
Sure. Just let me know when.
Let’s make it Thursday night, I said. Say around eight?
This Thursday?
Right.
Uh, okay.
Some other day better for you?
No, no. Thursday’s fine. Thursday’s fine.
We got down to poker talk. We talked about semi-bluffs. Semi-bluff raises. How to play a maniac. What to do with two maniacs.
Find another table, he said.
Be happy, was my opinion. Stay right there.
Poker is a solitary occupation. You don’t reveal your thoughts to anyone you might be playing later. Which is to say, anyone at all. But there was something about Jake. His innocence, his enthusiasm. And,
I guess, the fact that there wasn’t a whole lot else we could talk about for more than two minutes.
When I finally left the bar, hours later, my feet didn’t quite find the ground. I stumbled. A little lean left, a list to the right. I had to focus to stay upright.
I didn’t usually let myself get drunk. Normally I was in control. I’d developed a prodigious capacity over the years. I knew when to stop. To slow down. I could feel it coming. The cotton-ball brain. The tongue less limber. The quips a little lame. Too quick to laugh. Too easy. Got to keep it hard. Keep the line. Don’t cross the line. Drink water for a while.
This time I’d let it go a bit. One too many single malts.
I staggered down the street in the snow. I tripped on my own front stairs. I laughed out loud. Laughed at myself. It took a clumsy try or two to get the key into the lock.
Shit. Sometimes it felt good to let it go.
23.
I sat on the edge of the bed. I looked at my feet.
Kelly had my feet. A younger, softer version. We liked to sit together and admire each other’s feet. It was one of our special things.
I tried to feel tired. But it wasn’t sleep I needed. It was consolation. I sat at the computer. I cruised some porno sites. Chatted with a cyber whore. Thank the Lord for cable modems. She wore a silver sequined G-string. She had the handcuffs ready. She was my friend. She could give me what I wanted, she said.
It didn’t take too long to find out that it wasn’t true.
Enough of that. I’d get my consolation from the poker site.
I’d been flipping channels one night. I’d come across a poker show. The World Series of Poker. Binion’s Horseshoe. Las Vegas. Guys in shades. Mountains of chips. When the field got down to two, women in bikinis dumping piles of cash on the table.
Right away, I was hooked.
I’d read a bit, when I was young. Don’t open with less than two Jacks. That’s all I remembered. That was draw poker, anyway. Nobody played draw poker anymore. Too much skill. The better players always won. The lousy player had to win sometimes, to keep him coming back. The ideal game combines the right amount of luck and skill.
Texas hold’em has that balance. I don’t know who thought it up, or how it got the name, but the game is perfect. The strategy is deep enough that very few can play it really well. Long-term, the better player wins. But on any given hand, any given night, the luck is such that anyone can win. Dead money can play the ugliest of hands, bank his whole roll on an inside straight on the river, the last card dealt. And it would happen. He’d fill that straight. Bad beat, the other guy would tell himself, and anyone else at the bar, later, who would listen. It would happen often enough. Dead money could most naturally succumb to the delusion. That feeling of omnipotence that every card shark feeds on.
I sat down, logged on.
I played for hours.
I loved the rhythm of it. The back and forth. The artificial swish of cards being dealt. The click and clack of chips being bet. The site designers did a great, hypnotic job. Most of all I loved the charge you got from winning. The best was when you won with garbage cards. Nothing in the world like a bluff that worked. Two Three off-suit. Pick your spot. Play it like Aces. Watch the suckers fold. Take the pot. Yes.
I started with two hundred dollars. It went up. It went down. At one point I was all in, every cent I had in the pot on a heart flush draw. Five of hearts on the river. Bingo. Back to one-fifty. That was the start of the rush.
I rode the rush, and nothing mattered for a while. I ended up with fifteen hundred dollars. Every night as good as that, and I could quit my day job.
Yes. Now I could sleep.
24.
A thick manila envelope sat on my desk. It had come from FitzGibbon. I knew what was in it. Old files. Trust deeds. Wills. Correspondence. Maybe a legal opinion or two. I was supposed to forward it to Kennedy. Normally, I’d call in Judy, tell her to seal it, send it to John. Hand delivery. Private. Confidential. To be opened only by addressee.
That was the right thing to do.
But, I said to myself, pulling the envelope toward me. Wait a minute. Jules is my client. Not his father. Daddy’s just paying the bills. I don’t have any fiduciary duty to him.
Actually, I didn’t know for sure if that was true. But I wasn’t about to look it up. And I wasn’t about to call up Tightass Bob Shumaker, the firm’s resident Ethics Guru, and ask him. Bob’s answer was always the same: if it feels right, it must be wrong.
A peek. A quick look. Who would that hurt? Jules, it might help. Jules was my client. I owed it to him to take a look. It wasn’t just curiosity, prurience. There might, there just might, be something in there that would help Jules. Information: it’s the stuff of litigation. Jesus, it’s the stuff of life itself. Without information, where would we be? Even the sloth, the slug, the amoeba, they operate on information. At a minimum, where the food is. Why was I any different?
The beauty of poker, I mused, the envelope heavy on my desk, is that it’s a game of incomplete information. Like quantum physics. No matter how powerful our computers, our detection methods get, the best we will ever do is predict the probability that a given electron is in any given place at any given time. And poker’s exactly like that. He who divines most consistently the missing pieces of knowledge – the other players’ cards – is the master of the game. The old lady next to you in Vegas. The old lady who lifts her cards to her face each time, like she’s seen in the cowboy movies, giving you a millisecond peek at her hand. Ignore the input? Be a good boy, turn your head
