Hopscotch

Kendig’s fathomless eyes looked past the tables at a desolate emptiness of his own. The crowd was moderate, the decor discreet, the costumery tiresomely fashionable. Soft laughter here, hard silence there: wi

“You must speak with the maître.” The croupier glanced toward a largish man in black who loomed over the neighboring wheel.

Kendig had a word with the maître and had to show his bankroll to the cashier behind a cage. He bought five thousand francs in rectangular chips and the maître guided him officiously past the tables to an oak door with massive polished brass fittings. Beyond it Kendig found the game, six players around a table that accommodated eight chairs. A houseman stood in the shadows.

There was one woman in the game; he knew who she was but they’d never met. He knew the American, Paul Jaynes; the others were strangers.

Jaynes gave him a debonair greeting and the others glanced at him but Kendig hung back until they had finished the hand. They were playing seven stud—unusual for a room like this. And the house wasn’t dealing.

The woman won the hand and gathered the pot; the maître bowed his way out and Kendig pulled out one of the empty chairs and sat down with his chips. His place was between Jaynes and the woman, with the woman on his left; he knew Jaynes’s ma

“Been a while,” Jaynes said with his beefy smile and Kendig nodded acknowledgment. Jaynes had a deep suntan and a huckster’s compulsion to touch anyone to whom he spoke. He was a film producer of independently financed sex-and-sandal epics. The others had the same look: businessmen, promoters—two Frenchmen, a German, a Swede. The woman he knew by sight and reputation; he’d seen dossiers on her—she’d spent a few years as patroness of American exiles in Algeria before she’d tired of the game or been frightened out of it by the professionals. She had been married to a banker but there’d been a divorce and she’d reverted to her maiden name.

“Pot limit of course,” Jaynes told him, laying out the ground rules. “Check-raise. It’s not table stakes—you can go into your pocket if you want to. Or you can tap out. We try to make it easy on ourselves.” He smiled; it was a little nervous—it looked as if he might have started with a larger stake than he had now. “Ante twenty-five francs to the player. The house takes one ante for its cut.”

“Seven stud or dealer’s choice?”

“Seven only.”

The woman said, “We decided by majority when we began.”

“Suits me.” It didn’t matter.

The game proceeded. He tried to take an interest in it but most of it came to him like the adult voices you half-heard when you were a small child dozing in the next room. It was one of the things he found soothing about gambling: its detachment from everything. He folded out of three hands on the first round of each; on the fourth he caught a pair of wired jacks in which he had little faith but he strung them along to the sixth card before he dropped out, unimproved; that cost him three hundred francs.

“You’re getting cool cards for a newcomer,” the woman said apologetically. “You must be disappointed.”

He made a soundless reply, a courteous expression. She was wrong, actually; disappointment only follows expectation and he’d had none of that.

After the first half hour he was a thousand francs in the hole and had won only two hands. There had been one extravagant pot; he had not participated in it; the woman won it. That was what the game amounted to—like surfing; you endured the ordinary waves while you waited for the occasional big one. The players who approached it professionally would have none of that—they played every hand to win—but the big ones came their way too and whatever their denials it came to the same thing. The woman was pushing the big ones hard and he saw she was the player to beat.

The Frenchman Deroget tapped out and left the table in vile spirits. He left nine thousand francs in the game. When the Frenchman was gone Paul Jaynes said, “More than two thousand dollars. Not much for a game like this one—but too much for a shrimp like him. I’ve heard it around that he’s in pretty deep. They’ll be keeping a close eye on him.” He meant the casino: if a man committed suicide his pockets would be stuffed quietly with money to discourage any idea he might have killed himself over his losses.

A few hands came Kendig’s way and he raked them in without particular joy. He was only marking time.