Stone Junction

attention. Please accept the picks as a graduation present. It’s been a privilege to work with you. I could go on, but, as Auden has chided, ‘Sentimentality is the failure of emotion.’

Volta asked that you call him asap through the Six Rivers exchange.

May the doors open on what you need,

Willie

As Daniel finished the note his first thought was now I can fuck Oriana. But the first thing he did was call Volta as requested. Volta, who seemed preoccupied, told Daniel a five-thousand-dollar cashier’s check was waiting for him at the Hibernia Bank, and that in two weeks he should meet Robert Sloane in Room 377 of the Bathsheba Hotel in Tucson.

Daniel cashed the check in the morning and took a cab back to Treat Street, instructing the cabbie to wait. He took only a few minutes to pack his gear. As he passed through the kitchen on his way out, he stopped to count out a thousand dollars in twenties, leaving them on the table. He directed the cab to the Clift Hotel, tipped the driver a hundred-dollar bill, tipped the doorman twenty for dealing with his luggage, and rented a suite for ten days, paying the full $1500 in advance. The suite was elegantly comfortable. He sat at the cherry-wood desk and dialed Oriana’s number. A computer-generated voice informed him the number had been disconnected.

He spent the next three torturous days wondering if she’d gone with Willie and why she hadn’t said good-bye. He tried her number over and over and the same hideous voice gave him the same bad news. He wondered if maybe she’d been hassled by the cops or a john. He thought about asking Volta to find out what was going on. He thought about Oriana’s long body, the curve of her flanks, the warmth of her inner thighs. He hurt.

When he stirred from a fitful sleep early the fourth day, he saw the red message light glowing on the phone. The desk informed him a letter had been left for him. In a few minutes, the concierge himself delivered it.

The note from Oriana was brief:

Now you’ll always have a future.

Daniel started laughing, and right in the middle of laughing he burst into tears. He couldn’t stop until he burned the note.

Six days later, on the night before his flight left for Tucson, Daniel relieved the Marina Safeway’s vault of ten thousand dollars and left it on the kitchen table at the Treat Street house before returning for his last night at the Clift. He believed it had been Willie the Click, quoting Schiller perhaps, who’d noted, ‘If luxury doesn’t inspire generosity, the luxury is undeserved.’

Bad Bobby Sloane – tall, lean, greying at the temples, always neatly and conservatively dressed – looked more like a savings-and-loan vice-president than a gambling fool. If you’d been around him in his early twenties when he’d succumbed to the only burst of flamboyance in his life, he might have handed you one of his business cards – and there it was, right under his engraved name:

ROBERT SLOANE

Poker Player & General Gambling Fool

I will play

Any man from any land

Any amount he can count

At any game he can name

Any place, face-to-face.

Bad Bobby had started playing poker for keepsies when he was nine years old, just after the Second World War. He’d played his first game around a migrant campfire in a Georgia peach orchard. He’d bought into the game with his father’s new boots, for which one of the men gave him fifty cents. His father had died a week earlier, beaten to death in a barroom brawl. Before sunrise, Bobby had turned five dimes into sixty-seven dollars.

Almost four decades later, Bad Bobby Sloane was generally regarded as probably the best all-around cardplayer in the United States, especially in Texas Hold-’Em and, since Johnny ‘He-Horse’ Coombs had recently cashed out, perhaps the best at Five-Card Stud.

Daniel’s knock at Room 377 was answered by a hotel steward. Behind him, through the drifting smoke, Daniel saw a card game in progress. He told the steward he was looking for Mr Sloane, and after a few minutes’ wait, Bad Bobby stepped into the hall. He had flat blue eyes and large, bony hands. He was wearing a well-cut houndstooth jacket, brown slacks, a lighter brown shirt, and a black tie with a gold stickpin fashioned in the face of the Joker.

‘Glad to meet ya, Daniel,’ Bobby said in his sleepy Georgia baritone. He took a room key from his jacket and tossed it to Daniel. ‘Go on down to the room and get the clouds outa your head. I’ll be along when I get there. Whatever you need, call room service and put it on the tab.’

Daniel nodded toward the door. ‘You playing in that game in there?’

‘Yup,’ Bobby sighed, ‘and I’m stuck and bleeding. That’s why it’s likely to be a spell.’

Bad Bobby wasn’t there when Daniel went to bed, but he was there in the morning, talking on the phone, when Daniel woke up.

‘Denver by four! What happened? The Raider cornerbacks get caught stealing cars? The defensive line busted at customs? Sweet Jesus, I may be an old coondog but I still know what a bone is. Shit, give me twenty grand on the Raiders. What’s the overs? Well mark me down another five on the unders.’

Daniel heard him hang up and then begin dialing again. ‘This is Robert Sloane in 377. Could you please send up some Eggs Benedict, two crisp-fried pork chops, and a quart of fresh-squeezed orange juice.’ He saw Daniel was awake and said into the phone, ‘Just a moment, please,’ and then to Daniel, ‘You eating breakfast?’

‘Your order sounded good to me.’

Bobby doubled the order and hung up.

Daniel said, ‘Is the card game over?’

‘Broke up about a half hour ago.’

‘Did you win?’

‘I lost twenty thousand.’