We did. With his head on the table, the Pharaoh didn’t have any trouble seeing the cards. But his smokes kept going out. He had to light them over and over again.
While I found out I had my own problems.
Gimble went all in early on. I called with ace-jack suited, and he turned over a pair of fours. A coin toss. I caught a second jack on the flop, but he made trips on the river, and then he was right back in it.
And after that, the cards kept running against me in one of the worst possible ways. I got my share of decent starting hands, but rarely improved on the streets afterward.
At a weaker table, it might not have mattered. I still had more chips than anybody else, and I could have used them to push other players off their hands. But not here. Not tonight. The others had all decided they needed to play back at me, and they did, whenever they had anything or just decided I didn’t. They kept forcing me to fold, and nibbled away at my stack.
I switched into rock mode while I tried to figure out what was the matter. Had I developed a tell? I didn’t think so. Although you can never really know unless somebody takes pity on you and warns you.
Were the cards marked, then, and everyone knew it but me? I looked for crimps and scratches. I didn’t find them.
But maybe somebody had used some kind of magic to mark them in a way I couldn’t see.
I limped in late position with king-ten. The flop missed me as usual, and when Leticia smiled and raised, I folded. Then, hoping it would do some good, I flashed the Thunderbird. It was just a flicker, the symbol hanging in the air one instant and gone the next. I hoped that would keep anybody else from noticing I’d used any mojo.
The backs of the cards I was mucking didn’t change. But one of the cards face up in the center of the table did. For a second, it changed from the nine of spades to the ten.
Except that really, it didn’t. I could feel it had been a ten all along, but magic made it look like something different.
Nobody else seemed to notice it blink back and forth. That was good. I wanted to figure out the whole scam before I tried to deal with it.
At the moment, I had it half worked out. Somebody was using illusion to turn what would have been good cards for me into bad ones. But he couldn’t know which cards helped me unless he also knew what I had in the pocket.
When I figured it out, I almost grinned. Because, like the gadget built into Gimble’s forearm and his suggestion that we signal one another, this part wasn’t really magical. It was the kind of cheating I’d learned to spot long before I ever heard of the Old People. Although I had to admit, I’d never caught anybody doing it exactly this way.
A careful, honest professional dealer sends the cards skimming just above the felt. Because if they fly any higher, somebody might catch a glimpse of the faces. Or some shiny object on the table could reflect them.
The Pharaoh had two shiny objects, a case for his cheroots and his lighter, both silver tonight despite his usual fondness for gold. He also had eyes that were a lot lower to the tabletop than anybody else’s. I was pretty sure he saw every card he dealt, and at least a few that other people dealt.
And all the others must know about it, or they wouldn’t be attacking me so aggressively. He’d even let Wotan, the guy who’d torn him apart, in on it. Their nasty little back-and-forth when Davis brought him in had been a show for my benefit.
I guessed I should be flattered. It meant the Pharaoh thought I was his toughest opposition. And it showed what a cool, conniving bastard he really was.
The flop missed me, or at least it looked like it. Unless I called up the Thunderbird, I couldn’t really know. I bet anyway, and Leticia raised.
As usual, I folded. The difference was that this time I threw in my cards with a scowl and a snap of my wrist.
A couple minutes later, the same thing happened again, except that it was Wotan putting me to the test. “Damn!” I said.
He smirked. “You know, human, you don’t do as well when you aren’t catching every card in the deck.”
“I’m not catching any of them!” I said.
Later, I missed filling a spade flush on Fourth Street, and folded when Leticia made a pot-sized raise. “Shit!” I snarled.
“Poor darling,” she said. “I guess it just isn’t your night.”
“It never is,” I said. “Not when it really counts. I do all right for a while, but by the end of a game or a tournament, I get one bad beat after another!”
I waved one of the Tuxedo Team over and asked for a Scotch. It was the first time I’d had anything alcoholic at the table. I drank it fast and got another.
Then the clock struck three, and it was break time.
As I expected, Timon was impatient to see me. With one grimy hand planted on Gaspar’s shoulder and the other clutching my arm, he hauled me out into the lobby. I was worried he meant to go all the way up to his little hideout on the mezzanine, but we didn’t. Either he thought we had enough privacy, or he just couldn’t hold back any longer.
“You’re on tilt!” he said.
“Bullshit!” I said. Or half shouted, really.
“You are,” he said. “You’re frustrated. It’s making you play too many hands, and push too hard.”
“Will you relax?”
“Settle back,” he said. “Conserve your chips and wait for premium hands.”
“How the hell can you give me advice?” I said, raising my voice another notch. “You can’t even see what’s going on.”
“Sylvester describes every hand.” Sylvester was a servant whose inhumanly tall but stooped body and long straight shaggy hair reminded me of a weeping willow. I guessed he’d been handling the play-by-play because Gaspar had trouble seeing the top of the table.
“That doesn’t mean you understand what he tells you,” I fired back. “You and I already talked poker, remember? And it got to be obvious early on that you don’t know as much as I do.”
He took a breath. He didn’t
“And losing, until now you’re down to your last piece of real estate.”
“You’re playing as my proxy, and you’ll do as I say!”
“Go to hell!” I snarled. I jerked my arm out of his grip, then shoved him. He almost fell and pulled Gaspar down with him, but not quite. They both looked amazed at what I’d done.
So amazed that for a moment, nobody spoke. Then Timon said, in a soft voice that was scarier than shouting, “That was over the line.”
“So what are you going to do about it?” I answered. “Fire me? Kill me? No? I didn’t think so!” I turned and strode back into the ballroom.
And everybody watched me as I did. Maybe they didn’t know everything that had just happened, but they’d overheard enough. And in their world, a stooge just didn’t dis his own lord, not even one on the injured list like Timon. Not unless he had a death wish. So, even if they hadn’t been convinced I was tilting before, I hoped they were buying it now.
When we players got back to the table, I got a third Scotch, but since I didn’t want to get drunk for real, I nursed it. And tried to figure out when to make my move.
It was tricky, because a lot of times, the flop just misses you because it does. And when that happened to me, the Pharaoh wouldn’t need to change any of the cards. So how was I supposed to know when he was really doing it? I didn’t want to fire up the Thunderbird on every hand. I didn’t want to burn through that much power, and I was afraid one of my opponents would notice.
So I lost chips-and eventually the chip lead-sulked, and bitched, while Wotan threw taunts in my direction. Until finally it was the Pharaoh’s deal, I called a bet with the eight-seven of clubs and flopped an open-ended straight flush draw.
That meant I was a six-to-four favorite to end up with the winning hand. So when I didn’t, it would also be six to four that it was because the Pharaoh had screwed with the cards. In other words, now was the time to take a
