“Fine.”
He broke open a deck of cards, passed them to me. I flipped through them to see if they were readers. They weren’t.
“Cut,” he said.
I cut a seven, he cut a jack. He dealt.
Murray Rogers took the first set clear, with a blitz in the third game. I couldn’t keep my mind on the cards the way you have to. My head wasn’t working right.
I drank coffee until my teeth were floating, and I buckled down and riveted my mind to the game. I forgot the money I’d have if I won and I forgot the bullet I’d win if I lost. I concentrated on the cards.
And I played him, too. You can get hurt in gin if you just play the cards on the table. You have to play the person as well. You have to tip your opponent off balance, to smart under his skin so that he begins to make mistakes. It’s a war of attrition and nerves, and you have to handle yourself just right.
On the second set, I softened Murray up with a series of fast knocks. The brand of gin we were playing was stacked against the quick knock. All the bonus boxes came for going gin, and a knocker was going to a lot of trouble to make a damned few points.
But I was softening him up. I went down quick five hands in a row and I was setting up a pattern. The sixth hand, I drew very good cards right from the gun. It was a spade hand, too. I sat there like a stone, and Murray made his bid for the only good defense against a fast knock. He got down fast himself, and he knocked before I did, with eight points in his hand.
I was sitting with one loose card, a six of hearts that played off against a run of his. That made it a gin-off, good for six boxes and sixty points. It put me out in two games and close to out in the third.
We continued that way. He was better at playing gin rummy, but I was damned good at playing Murray Rogers, playing him like a fish on a line. He became lucky and took the third set, and I came back in the fourth and very strong in the fifth. He blitzed me two games out of three in the sixth set. When we finished it I asked for a summary of the score. He tore off a clean score sheet and added up all the figures. With six of ten sets completed, we stood fairly close.
But he was a few hundred points to the good. I gulped more coffee. We were even enough, I thought. Even on the score and even as far as ability was concerned. Over the long haul, I figured I could probably beat him. If we played gin every day for a year I would win more than I lost.
Fine.
But we had only four more sets to go, and we were evenly matched enough so that anything could happen in four short sets. It could be a simple matter of him winning the spade hands and me winning the regular ones. If he had a little break in the luck department, he would come out on top. And I would wind up in that lime pit on the lake shore.
I was gambling for my life.
And I remembered that moral that had occurred to me on my way to New York. Don’t gamble. Stick to your trade and don’t take chances. My trade was the card mechanic’s trade, and here I was staking my life in a straight card game.
It was purely crazy.
There was no question of honor involved, not as far as I could see. He had brought me here by force and he had arranged the game on threat of death. The game was being played on his terms, not mine. And honor had never been my long suit to begin with. I was playing to stay alive, and he was playing to see me dead.
So I started doing what I had always done well.
Gin is a beautiful game for a good mechanic. If you know what you’re doing you can cheat on center-stage with every eye on you and still get away with it. Knowing the position of one card in the deck can make the difference on a hand. Setting up just one or two things can make you a winner every time out.
It was nerve-wracking. The Mutt and Jeff team was sitting in close, never taking their eyes from my hands. But we had been playing for a long time and the boys had watched for a long time without seeing anything remarkable. They were tired, and they weren’t as sharp as they might have been. And Murray was under enough pressure so that he couldn’t watch me all that close and still pay full attention to his cards. He had to study the cards to beat me, and that gave me just enough room to swing.
I won the seventh set big. I knew the bottom three cards in the deck every time I dealt, and that’s a big edge—when you know what you don’t have to look for, when you know what cards are out of the hand, you’ve got a healthy advantage. And this was a kind of cheating no one could pin down. All I did was manage to see those bottom cards in the course of the deal. I didn’t move anything or stack anything, just managed a peek.
There were other tricks. On one hand, I went for an early knock. I had a lay of four kings in my hand. When I scooped up the cards for the deal, I made sure those four cowboys wound up all together on the bottom of the deck. They stayed there during the shuffles, until the last shuffle when they wound up all in a row about a third of the way up from the bottom. When Murray cut, the kings were grouped among the first twenty cards. He got a pair and I got a pair. Fair enough. Only I knew what Murray was holding and he didn’t know what I held. All I had to do was wait. He couldn’t do anything as long as he held on to the kings because I wasn’t about to break up mine. And when he did break his, finally, I picked up his discard and ginned with it. That happened to come on a spade hand, too, and it put me out in two games.
I won two games of the eighth set and he came back and won the other. With two sets to go, the tables had turned a little. I was three hundred points out in front. "You’re luck’s getting better,” Murray said.
“It’s not luck. I’m outplaying you.”
“You bastard,” he said.
I kept the needle in. “You don’t play a bad game,” I said, “but you’re not flexible enough.”
“Shut up and deal.”
“I want more coffee.”
One of the heavies went for coffee. I shuffled the cards and kept up a running stream of chatter until I had a cup of mud at my elbow. I drank it down and dealt out the hands. By this time he was so tensed up that I beat hell out of him without cheating at all.
Then, toward the end of the ninth set, he hit a streak of luck. He was doing everything right and I couldn’t get to him. We had just broken open the eighth new deck of cards, and he couldn’t seem to lose with them.
I won a hand, finally. And I shuffled the cards and stopped suddenly and boxed them and looked through them.
He had brought in a deck of readers.
I glanced up at him. He had a sick look on his face. I called the cards off one at a time, then turned them face up. I called ten cards right in a row. They were Bee brand, the diamond back design, and the markings were in the little diamonds near the corners.
Marked cards are strictly for amateurs. A pro never uses anything phony—he gets by on his own abilities at sleight-of-hand and misdirection. Whenever you see daub or marked cards or luminous readers or hold-out machines, you know you are dealing with a wiseass amateur looking for the best of it.
“These are your cards,” I said.
“I—”
“They came in at the beginning of this set,” I said. “I think we ought to forget this set and go back to the end of the eighth. I think we ought to play two more sets with straight cards.”
He just nodded.
From there on in I didn’t have to cheat. He was beaten all the way. Even when the cards ran his way he couldn’t do things right. He had tried to do some cheating on his own hook, and he had been caught at it, and he was through. On the tenth and final set I blitzed him three games straight. The bastard never won a hand.
Murray sent the boys away. He gazed at me and his shoulders sagged. “You win,” he said. “It’s all yours. Fifty thousand dollars. And Joyce, if you want her.”
I turned to her. As desirable as ever, unless you saw the death in her eyes.