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More slowly now, he walked through the lobby to the port corridor that lay beyond. It was very quiet, and he could both hear and feel the deep thrum of the ship’s diesels far below his feet. The smell was stronger here—much stronger. The strange, musky perfume was combined with other, deeper, far less pleasant scents—moldy fungus, maybe, along with something he couldn’t identify. He paused, frowning. Then, taking one look back at the lobby, he turned into the port corridor.
And stopped abruptly, inebriation vanishing in an instant.
Up ahead lay the source of the odor: a dark cloud of smoke that blocked his path down the corridor. Yet it was like no smoke he had ever seen, strangely opaque, with a dense, dark grayish color and a rib-like outer surface that reminded him—in some bizarre and unpleasant way—oflinen .
Paul Bitterman drew in his breath with an audible rasp. Something was wrong here—very wrong.
Smoke was supposed to drift through the air, curling, and shifting, attenuating to faint wisps at the edges. But this cloud just sat there, man-sized, strangely malignant, motionless, as if confronting him. It was so regular and even that it looked solid, an organic entity. The reek was so strong he could barely breathe. It was impossible, alien.
He felt his heart suddenly accelerate with fear. Was it his imagination, or did the thick cloud have the form of a man, too? There were tendrils that looked like arms; a barrel-like head with a face, strange legs that were moving, as if dancing . . . Oh, God, it looked not like a man, but ademon . . .
And it was then the thing slowly stretched out its ragged arms and—with a horrible, undulant purpose—began to move slowly toward him.
“No!” he shouted. “NO! Keep away!
Keep away!”
The desperate shouts that followed quickly opened stateroom doors up and down the port-side corridor of Deck 9. There was a brief, electric moment of silence. And then, the sound of gasps; shrieks; the thud of a fainting body collapsing on the carpet; the frantic slamming of doors. Bitterman heard none of it. All his attention, every fiber of his being, was riveted to the monstrous thing that glided closer, ever closer . . .
And then it was past.
37
LESEUR STARED FROM HENTOFF TO KEMPER AND BACK AGAIN. He was already feeling aggrieved that the commodore had shoved this problem onto his plate—he was a ship’s officer, after all, not some casino employee. Not only that, but this problem wouldn’t go away—it just kept getting worse. With at least one murder, and perhaps as many as three, he had more dangerous and alarming things to deal with than this. He shifted his stare from Hentoff to Kemper and back again.
“Let me make sure I’ve gotten this right,” he said. “You’re telling me this Pendergast fellow contrived for the card counters to lose a million pounds at the blackjack tables, in the process raking in almost three hundred thousand for himself.”
Hentoff nodded. “That’s about it, sir.”
“It seems to me that you just got fleeced, Mr. Hentoff.”
“No, sir,” said Hentoff, a frosty note in his voice. “Pendergast had to win in order to make them lose.”
“Explain.”
“Pendergast started off by tracking the shuffle—a technique in which you observe a full shoe of play, memorizing the positions of certain critical cards or groupings, called slugs, and then follow them through the shuffle, visually. He also managed to get a glimpse of the bottom card, and since he was offered the cut, he was able to place that card inside the deck exactly where he wanted it.”
“Doesn’t sound possible.”
“These are well-known, if exceedingly difficult, techniques. This Pendergast seems to have mastered them better than most.”
“That still doesn’t explain why Pendergast needed to win to make them lose.”
“By knowing where certain cards were, and combining that with a counting system, he was able to control the cards going ‘downstream’ to the rest of the players by either jumping into a game or sitting it out—as well as by taking u
LeSeur nodded slowly, taking this in.
“He
had
to shortstop the good cards in order to let bad ones go downstream. To make the others lose, he had to win.”
“I get it,” said LeSeur sourly. “And so you want to know what to do about this man’s wi
“That’s right.”
LeSeur thought for a moment. It all came down to how Commodore Cutter would react when he heard about this—which, of course, he would eventually have to. The answer was not good. And when Corporate heard about it, they would be even less sympathetic. One way or another, they had to get the money back.
He sighed. “For the sake of all of our futures with the company, you need to get that money back.”
“How?”
LeSeur turned his weary face away. “Just do it.”
Thirty minutes later, Kemper walked down the plush corridor of Deck 12, Hentoff in tow, feeling a clammy sweat building inside his dark suit. He stopped before the door of the Tudor Suite.
“You sure this is the right time for this?” Hentoff asked. “It’s eleven P.M.”
“I didn’t get the sense LeSeur wanted us to wait,” Kemper replied. “Did you?” Then he turned to the door and knocked.
“Come in,” came a distant voice.
They entered to see Pendergast and the young woman voyaging with him—Constance Greene, his niece or something—in the salon, lights low, sitting around the private dining table with the remains of an elegant repast before them.
“Ah, Mr. Kemper,” said Pendergast, rising and pushing aside his watercress salad. “And Mr. Hentoff. I’ve been expecting you.”
“You have?”
“Naturally. Our business is not complete. Please sit down.”
Kemper arranged himself with some awkwardness on the nearby sofa. Hentoff took a chair, looking from Agent Pendergast to Constance Greene and back again, as if trying to sort out their real relationship. “May I offer you a glass of port?” Pendergast asked.
“No, thank you,” said Kemper. An awkward silence developed before he continued: “I wanted to thank you again for taking care of those card counters.”
“You’re most welcome. Are you following my advice about how to keep them from re-wi
“We are, thank you.”
“Is it working?”
“Absolutely,” said Hentoff. “Whenever a spotter enters the casino, we send over a cocktail waitress to engage him in trivial conversation—always involving numbers. It’s driving them crazy, but there’s nothing they can do about it.”
“Excellent.” Pendergast turned a quizzical eye on Mr. Kemper. “Was there anything else?”
Kemper rubbed his temple. “Well, there’s the question of . . . the money.”
“Are you referring to
that
money?” And Pendergast nodded to the bureau, where Kemper noticed, for the first time, a stack of fat envelopes wrapped in thick rubber bands.
“If those are your casino wi