9
LOOKING BACK, ELLIOTT BELIEVED THAT THE air in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in January must be precisely equivalent to the air of Murmansk, Vorkhuta, or Nikel, Russia, in the same month; gulag bone-chilling. A wind sent from some cold hell whipped up the old cobblestones, sending trash flying into the dirty banks of snow. Icicles four feet long and six inches in diameter hung from the storm windows. The low white sky touched the rooftops. At night, ice formed along the sidewalk cracks and the yellow light of the lamps revealed high-water-content snow blown this way and that, born in the churning Atlantic.
The students came in September, when the grass was green and the boats slipped sedately along the Charles River. By the time they realized what they were in for, that the bucolic scenes of September wouldn’t return until May, it was too late.
By now Elliott had found ways to avoid the weather, seldom leaving his room at MIT with its damp towels hung over the radiator except to go to class or the library. This survival strategy limited him to the company of the all-male denizens of his floor, however. Tonight, on this sortie to the Harvard gulag, he wore rubber-soled boots and a parka with a fake-fur hood pulled around his face, and carried a brown paper bag containing a bottle of Chianti cradled in his arms.
He wasn’t exactly hopeful. But he was prepared.
The steps of the big house on Everett had been shoveled to allow an eighteen-inch-wide path to the door with its frozen mat. Christmas lights still hung unlit from the eaves, but behind the curtains of the windows flanking the porch he saw warm light and figures passing back and forth.
A party. His heart sank.
The door creaked open and the guy standing there looked at him without comment. He was an Asian Indian whom Elliott vaguely remembered from his class in set theory the previous semester.
“Hello, Wakefield.”
“Hello.”
“Raj.”
“Right. Raj. Is Silke here?”
“Of course. She’s waiting for you. Is that alcohol? Very good! Come in.”
It was a student house, one of the mansions near Harvard that was rented to the children of the well-heeled. The entry floor was piled with grubby boots and hung with jackets. A runner with a practical brown pattern mounted the staircase.
“This way.” They passed into the living room with its coffered ceilings and air of genteel decrepitude, where two girls were lounging on the couch, watching TV. Silke flicked it off with the remote in her hand and came over and stood under the shelter of Raj’s arm and said, “Welcome.” Reaching for the wine, she said, “Nice. You know Raj. And this is Carleen. She was in your class in set theory, too.” Carleen didn’t get up. With her legs curled under her, she looked like a punk kid of twelve or so.
“Hi” was all she said. Silke pointed to a chair and Elliott sat down and crossed his legs, which were now inches from Carleen’s on the couch.
“So what’s happening?” he said. Raj sat down across the coffee table from them and Silke came back into the room with a corkscrew, an extra bottle, and actual wineglasses. “
Silke smiled and Raj reached into his pocket and drew out a deck of cards.
“Ever played blackjack? Twenty-one?” he asked, casually flipping cards onto the table. It seemed that they were about to have a game.
“A few times. With my father.”
“Let’s try a hand.” Carleen sat up and took a look at the face-down card she’d been handed. They each had a card face-down and one face-up.
“We already ate up the eights,” she said. There were three eights showing on the table among the four of them. “Hit me.” Raj dealt her a ten and she turned over her hole card in disgust. It had been a four. With the eight showing she had hit on twelve.
“How’d she do?” Raj asked Elliott.
“She lost.”
“Silke?”
“Hit me.”
Silke took a seven. With the six she already had showing, she now had thirteen points showing on the table, her hole card still hidden. “Hit me,” she said again. Raj gave her a two this time. “I’ll stay.”
“ Wakefield?” Elliott had a ten hole card and an eight showing. “Stay.”
“Okay,” Raj said. “So you lose.”
“How do you know that? You haven’t even dealt to yourself. You could bust.”
“I’m going to get a ten, so I’ll have total nineteen and beat your eighteen. See?” He dealt himself a card face-up. It was a ten. He turned up his hole card. An ace. With the first face-up card he had dealt himself, an eight, he had hard nineteen.
Since an ace could be one point or eleven, Raj had already had soft nineteen. He hadn’t had to hit. In fact, it had been crazy to deal himself another card.
Therefore, he had known already what the card would be.
“Oh,” Elliott said. “The deck is rigged. Fixed.”
“You think so?” Raj said. He gathered up all the cards and began shuffling expertly. “Eight times I’m going to shuffle,” he said. Silke drank her wine, her eyes bright.
Raj’s hands moved expertly, but there was no doubt that he was fully shuffling the deck over and over. “Here we go,” he said, and held the cards as if to deal them. “Ready?”
“For what?” Elliott said.
“For me to call the cards.”
“You want me to tell you the trick?”
“I don’t think you can tell me anything until I show you what I can do with these cards.”
“You’re gonna call them. You said so. You can probably remember a sequence of fifteen or twenty.”
Raj smiled and started laying down cards. “Ten of spades,” he said, and laid down a ten of spades. “Ace of hearts.” He laid down an ace of hearts. “Three of hearts. I can actually tell you the whole deck of fifty-two. So you know what I can do, but how did I do it?”
“Eight shuffles,” Elliott said. “I read about it someplace. If you already memorized the order of the deck, which you did, and you’re good enough, you can divide the cards equally from both sides as you shuffle. After eight shuffles, you’re back where you started from. Same old order.”
Raj and Silke looked at each other, and Silke smiled again. She wore a soft blue sweater tonight with her jeans. Elliott was jealous of the way her hip touched Raj’s hip so familiarly in their chair.
Raj said to Silke, “Not bad.”
“It was me who recommended him,” Carleen said. It was the first time she had spoken.
“Maybe you can tell me the next card,” Raj said.
“An eight.”
It was an eight. “There were three eights close to the top originally, and you hadn’t altered the order. It was the best guess,” Elliott said. He picked up his glass and let the liquid flow down his throat. He wasn’t much of a drinker-he had just turned nineteen and it had been hard to get alcohol, even with his fake ID, earlier. He took another look at Raj. Raj was definitely a few years older than the rest of them, not because he looked older, but because he dressed older and possessed the air of confidence that comes from age and money. He had a thick gold wristwatch that had some long French name scrolled across the dial. He wore a white dress shirt, sleeves rolled up, and actual slacks, and he smiled a lot. A happy type, like Silke. Elliott could see why Silke would find him attractive.
“I like games,” he said sourly, “but this feels like a test.”
“Part of one,” Raj said. “It remains to be seen whether you have the required nerve. I think you may pass that part of the test, too.”
“So?”
“Have some more wine. Pour it for him, Silke. I’m going to tell you a story, my friend. It’s about a team of people who play blackjack professionally.”
“You? You three?” Elliott said, looking around. “You all go to MIT.”
“We take a weekend off once a month,” Carleen said.
“We bring back ten to fifteen thousand apiece each time,” Silke said.
“Dollars? You mean dollars?”
“You have to practice for a couple of months. It takes a lot of concentration. We fly together and stay together. Sometimes Atlantic City, sometimes an Indian casino, sometimes Tahoe, sometimes Las Vegas.” Silke was leaning forward. “It’s fun, Wakefield.”
“You count cards? Isn’t that illegal?”
“If they catch you, they throw you out, but it isn’t illegal. We did get thrown out last month from Caesars in Atlantic City. That’s why you’re here.”
“I’m too conspicuous and they’re starting to recognize me,” Raj said. “We work as a team. Silke and Carleen are spotters. They go around the tables and play low bets until the cards get hot-lots of tens in the shoe. Then they signal me and I sit down and play big for a while. Then we move on.”
“And that’s why I’m here?” Elliott repeated slowly.
“We need another player. Another team member. We’ll train you.”
“I’m not sure I have time. I’m working on something, plus the classes are hard.”
“Tell me about it,” Raj said. His look was challenging. Elliott remembered him better now from class. He couldn’t understand set theory. He kept asking stupid questions all through that class.
He would be easy to surpass. Elliott thought, I can get an A in this game. Plus maybe some money. Plus travel with Silke.
“I find this hard to believe,” he said. “It’s not some joke? Because I don’t have much of a sense of humor.”
“It’s a business deal,” Raj said. “The tuition at MIT is staggering, in case your family hasn’t noticed.”
“And we all get to be friends,” Silke said.
It took three months before the team judged Elliott to be ready. He turned out to be a fast, accurate card counter. The calculations were nothing. He had no trouble concentrating, either.
