“Do you feel lucky?” he asked.
“What have you got in mind?”
“Let's go gamble,” he said.
Princeton was a two-hour drive made shorter by Valentine's heavy foot. The turnpike was clear, and the Mercedes' twelve-cylinder engine took a deep breath at ninety miles per hour. He was a law-abiding citizen except when it came to being on an empty highway. There he drove like a lunatic and suffered the consequences if a cop happened to be around. His late wife had scolded him for it endlessly, and he'd never listened.
He found jazz on the local public station, Dave Brubeck,
On the hour the news came on. The lead story was from Florida. The Micanopy Indian reservation was under siege.
“Earlier today,” the announcer said, “Florida's governor ordered fifty shotgun-toting agents from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement onto the Micanopy Indian Reservation in Broward County. ‘Video poker must go,' the governor told a group of reporters from his mansion in Tallahassee. But the Indians are fighting back. The tribe's leader, Chief Running Bear, released dozens of alligators into the casino. According to reports, the FDLE agents have fled.
“Reaction from Indian tribes across the nation has been negative. Legally, federal agents are forbidden from entering Indian reservations. Many tribal chieftains are calling upon Washington to intervene.”
The rest of the news was blather, and he tuned it out. So Archie had gotten his wish. He felt bad for the Micanopys. He'd met Running Bear at a cheating seminar he'd done in Las Vegas and had learned a little bit about the tribe's history. They'd been treated like doormats for centuries, and he sensed they were about to get the short end of the stick once again.
A road sign said PRINCETON, 60 MILES. His foot challenged the accelerator, and he watched the speedometer creep past a hundred miles per hour.
Princeton University is in the center of New Jersey, the hilly landscape thick with hundred-year-old oaks and a history of higher education. The university's campus is as big as a large town, and he had to stop twice to ask for directions.
He pulled into a spot in front of the Institute for Advanced Studies and killed the engine. The mathematics department, for which the university was world renowned, resided here, and he watched a group of students walk by. He'd never made it to college and had always regretted it. Not that being a cop hadn't been an education, but all of its lessons had come the hard way.
He went inside. A bulletin board in the foyer announced the day's seminars. In Lecture Hall 1, physics of oscillatory integrals. In Hall 2, vorticity in the Ginzburg-Landau model of superconductivity. Hall 3, geometric analysis of Chow-Mumford. You needed a degree just to understand the language. Walking into an office, he found a receptionist sitting behind a desk, filling out a form on an old-fashioned typewriter. Looking up, she said, “Can I help you?”
“I'm looking for a visiting professor named Juraj Havelka. He's here as a guest of the mathematics department.”
She thumbed through a log of visiting professors. Valentine leaned over the desk, reading the upside down page she stopped at. One line caught his eyes. Juraj's sponsor was a teacher named Peter Diamondis.
“Sorry,” the receptionist said. “But he left last fall.”
“Did he leave a forwarding address?”
“I'm afraid not.”
Back in the foyer, he consulted the teacher list tacked to the bulletin board. Dr. Peter Diamondis, head of the probability department, was in Fine Hall, Room 408. He asked a student for directions and was soon hiking across campus.
Fine Hall was what a college building was supposed to look like. Six-story, redbrick, with ivy-covered walls. Every student that passed through its doors was weighted down with books. Going inside, he took the stairs to the fourth floor.
The climb got his heart racing. Room 408 was at the end of a cavernous hallway. He tapped on the frosted glass door, then stuck his head in. “Dr. Diamondis?”
Diamondis sat hunched over a PC. He reminded Valentine of the absent-minded professors from the old Disney movies. A scholarly type in his late fifties with pince-nez glasses, his hair resembling cyclone fencing. Above his desk hung a photograph of Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out.
“Yes?”
“I was wondering if I could speak to you.”
Valentine entered with his business card in his hand. The professor put the card under his nose and scrunched up his face. “Tony Valentine. Your company is called Grift Sense. What's that?”
“I'm a private consultant for the gaming industry.”
“May I ask in what capacity?”
“I help catch crossroaders.”
“Is that any relation to cross-dressing?”
“They're miles apart. May I sit down?”
“I have a class in twenty minutes.”
“It shouldn't take that long.”
“Be my guest.”
Valentine took the chair across from the desk and unbuttoned his overcoat. “Crossroaders are thieves who specialize in ripping off casinos. It's a big business—about a hundred million a year in Las Vegas alone.”
“And you catch these people?”
“Yes. I can sense when things aren't right on a casino floor and I just take it from there.”
“Grift sense.”
“That's what hustlers call it.”
“You must be very good.”
Valentine nodded that he was.
“And you've come to see me because of my work on cheating at blackjack?”
Valentine hesitated. He'd read just about everything written on hustling blackjack, and Diamondis's name didn't ring any bells. But sometimes it was better to keep your mouth shut and play along, so he nodded his head. He was rewarded when Diamondis removed a deck of playing cards from his desk.
“Take out the cards and shuffle them,” the professor said.
Valentine broke the seal on a fresh pack of Bees, the cards used at hundreds of casinos around the world. He gave them a cursory exam; no marks, crimps, or shaved ends.
“Do it this way,” Diamondis instructed him. “Riffle-shuffle, then cut, then riffle-shuffle, cut again, then riffle- shuffle and cut again. As I'm sure you're aware, this is the same shuffling sequence used by most casinos in the country.”
Valentine shuffled as instructed. He kept the cards tight to the table the way a dealer would, with none of the faces being exposed. Finished, he handed the deck to his host. Diamondis declined with a shake of the head.
“I don't want to touch them,” he said. “You deal.”
Valentine hesitated. Had he missed something?
“What are we playing?” Valentine asked.
“Blackjack.”
“How many hands?”
“Four. The fourth will be yours, the others mine.”
Diamondis cleared a space on the cluttered desk. Valentine dealt three blackjack hands to Diamondis, one for himself. The professor played his hands, busting on two, winning one.
“Now,” Diamondis said, “would you say that everything is aboveboard, or to use the gambling lexicon, on the square?”
“I would.”
