Angels of Music (39 page)

She reached down and twisted the pistol out of his nerveless grip. The gun dropped to the bottom of the nest, clattering into a chamber-pot.

The Bad Little Man’s eyes glowed with hatred. His locked teeth ground.

Now came the most difficult stretch. She had to extract the Bad Little Man from his nest and take his place on the wheeled seat. There was scarcely room for one person in this space, let alone two.

Rima hauled the Bad Little Man up by his shoulders. They were closer in the shaft than seeds in a pod. She wriggled, a new-born cuckoo tipping a heavy egg out of a nest or an ant juggling a weight many times its own with its legs. She forced the Bad Little Man’s body up as hers inched down. When he was completely above her and out of his nest, he was still a weight. She lifted him into the shaft, crooking his withered legs over a rung. She took off her belt and used it to tie him there, a fly left in a spider’s web for a later snack.

The Bad Little Man was strong-willed. He fought the frog-venom, face crimson, spittle on his lips. Inside, he roared with fury. But he was helpless. If he built another nest, it would be less pregnable. With traps for unwary ghost-girls, cuckoos or daughters of Didi.

Rima left him be and settled in his seat. She rolled it this way and that, enjoying the smooth motion. It was a comfortable nest, just her size.

She flexed her fingers and touched the keys. Now, with this building as an organ, she would play her own music.

She looked through a set of eyepieces. A distant view suddenly leaped up at her, close and vivid. She had used binoculars, and knew how they worked. She was seeing down into the big room below.

The Bad Fat Man stood by a long green table. Every other gentleman in the room wore black, but he shone in white.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said, ‘place your bets…’

Piles of tokens were assembled on a baize grid. The Bad Fat Man elbowed aside a thin croupier. He would personally start off the evening’s play. He bent over a miniature carousel. Rima knew this was a roulette wheel. The Bad Fat Man set the wheel spinning. An ivory ball jumped on the whirring carousel like an insect on fire.

Pinned to the giant keyboard in the nest was a chart. It listed numbers, odds, hands of cards and precise times. Beside the chart was a large white-faced clock. As the wheel spun in the casino below, the second hand shuddered.

Rima checked the numbers and times against those she had learned. She imagined her own chart laid over this one. She would play a different tune.

The roulette wheel slowed. The insect tired, close to death.

Rima’s hand darted out over a particular key, hovered for a few ticks, then pressed down.

The ball stopped in a compartment within the wheel.

‘
Trente rouge
,’ said the croupier. ‘Thirteen red.
La maison gagne
. The house wins…’

‘T
HE HOUSE WINS
…’

Gilberte had never seen a man more unhappy with a streak of good luck than Charles Foster Kane. Only Elizabeth – and perhaps a few croupiers – shared her insight. The casino staff continued to obey orders from the Eye-Ball, though.

Everyone else in the know remembered his plan – ‘early losses to build up the pot’. The pot was swollen, and growing. A lake of money pooled in the counting cellars beneath the main salon.

Many of the Most High Order favoured the roulette wheel. Dr Quartz, Madame Sara and Baron Maupertuis had laid fortunes on the baize, and seen their chips swept away. Several initiates had gone to the foyer when their initial outlay was seemingly – indeed, actually – squandered, and returned with freshly purchased boards.

‘The house wins again,’ said the chief croupier. Chips clattered in a chute, disappearing below. Monies poured down a plughole.

Natasha, Sir Dunston and Senator Paine, preferring baccarat, sat together. An expressionless, wired-up dealer spun cards from the shoe. Gilberte understood that, in addition to the Terrorists’ funds, Natasha was gambling with the Face’s money. He could hardly be expected to show his, ahem,
mask
in such company, but would not want to miss out on the evening’s profit.

Carne, Gurn and General Sternwood played five-card stud with Potter – who was gloatingly raking in chips he was supposed to lose later.

In an antechamber, Perry Bennett was bent over a hazard table, rattling dice. His peculiar hand was adapted to
crapauds
-shooting, but the bones were not falling his way. His friend Owen was betting heavily on the losing run coming to an end, playing the Martingale System – which, under the circumstances, was a sure way to wind up broke.

All around, takers were being took.

Elizabeth, calm again after the Freddy incident, steered Gilberte around the room. They were themselves this evening – Edda Van Heemstra and Irma Vep were mysteriously detained. At the moment, none of their co-conspirators minded the absences – more in the pot for everyone else. Later, when smoke cleared, their no-show act would be remembered. By then, the real Edda would be loose and likely in trouble. As for Irma, Gilberte assumed she’d dance away from blame as she had slipped out of every other trap set for her.

The influx of big money was, as Kane had said, ‘blood in the water’.

The salon stank with a hubbub of greed, fear, excitement and desperation. Usually, a casino came alive when a lucky or ingenious soul began to beat the house. Tonight was contrary. Gamblers rarely considered or cared about streaks if the house benefited. After all, odds were always with the house. But, tonight, a record might be set – the biggest single haul in a casino in an evening’s play.

Next year, revues and songs would commemorate ‘The Bank Who Broke the Men at Royale-les-Eaux’.

Elizabeth and Gilberte repaired to a side bar, to drink champagne and take the edge off all the excitement. This was where the professional gamblers, who knew by instinct that something was more amiss than usual, had retreated. Colonel Sebastian Moran, of London and India, and Bret Maverick, of Natchez and New Orleans, debated the presently standing record for a house win, and whether it was about to fall. The inveterate gaming fiends also remembered a macabre record for the number of casino-related suicides in a single night. The cynical Moran was willing to bet the death toll set at Mother Gin Sling’s in Shanghai on Chinese New Year’s in ’98 would be exceeded by dawn. The more optimistic Maverick considered taking the wager. Both were probably thinking of ways to put a ‘fix’ in.

Maverick caught Gilberte looking at them and raised a glass to her. She turned away from his alarmingly appealing smile, and thought of cool green beds of money.

Engineer Hattison, inventor of the cheating machine, was also at the bar, nursing ginger ale and radiating smugness. He also overheard Maverick and Moran, and offered stakes against the professional gamblers, claiming that at the end of the evening the house would be the
loser
, rattling off spurious mathematical piffle to justify his position. Gilberte saw Hattison was making a novice mistake by offering an apparent sucker bet. A more experienced confidence man set out bait and let the mark raise the notion of a wager. The Colonel withdrew from the conversation and returned to play. If there was a setup, he was determined to get in on the game and snare a portion of the free money he now believed was on offer. Maverick, however, had an acute sense of the way things were going and mildly took the engineer’s bet. Somehow, the Western gambler tumbled that a fix was
supposed
to be in but was actually off. Hattison threw a sheaf of his patents in to bulk up his meagre cash roll.

Elizabeth and Gilberte finished their drinks and returned to the salon.

Kane, on his podium with the small orchestra, was perspiring badly, and trying to catch Boltyn’s attention. His fellow millionaire wasn’t supposed to be in this phase of the game, but couldn’t resist trying to get one up. He sat by Natasha, matching the Queen of Terror’s bets and often laying a meaty hand over her delicate fingers in a manner which might well earn him a cut throat before the end of the night. Unless the girl was one of those queer ducks who rattle about revolution all day but secretly wish to spend the night being grossly pleasured by a bloated plutocrat on silk sheets.

Gilberte looked up at the Eye-Ball. She tapped Elizabeth’s shoulder.

Faint cracks appeared in the plaster, damaging a 14th-century cathedral ceiling Kane had stuck up to add class to his gaming hell. Fine dust sifted through the cracks. The Eye-Ball’s moorings were precisely calibrated. Adding even Riolama’s meagre weight was a stress not calculated for in Hattison’s plans.

Lights on the globe flashed on and off.

Gilberte whistled silently in admiration. Riolama had mastered the system and was playing it like a virtuoso.

All around the room were cries of exasperation, complaint, despair.

Some of the Most High Order grew irritable, feeling they had fed the pot a little too much. It was time for the great Kane’s munificence to be made manifest. Others simply ached for their money back, and their promised money on top of it.

Kane could not make a scene without it becoming generally known that this whole casino was a giant trick. But he knew, even before Bret Maverick, that his crooked path had twisted against him. Finally, he slipped from the podium and waddled with an unaccustomed hurry towards the foyer. The staircase which led to the secure gallery above the Eye-Ball was still guarded. Voltaire stood at his position, suitably resolute, invisibly well-armed. Ironically, Riolama could not have got upstairs without his strength.

Casually, Gilberte and Elizabeth followed the magnate.

In the foyer, just as Kane was about to call out to Voltaire, they caught up with him and, with practised ease, took an arm apiece.

‘Oh, Mr Kane…’ said Elizabeth, musically.

‘Ladies,’ he said, not recognising them but not too far gone in panic to miss their appeal, ‘ordinarily, I’d be happy to escort you, but…’

‘We shan’t take refusal kindly,’ purred Gilberte. ‘This is a special occasion, and we claim you as our prize.’

‘We could dance all night,’ said Elizabeth, tugging on one arm.

‘Or drink champagne as if it had just been invented,’ said Gilberte, tugging on the other.

Kane tried to break free, but – for all his meat and money – was not a strong man.

In the salon, general fury erupted at another huge loss. The chutes to the counting cellar were choked with boards like clogged-up drains. As usual in such situations, a stink was rising. Kane turned to look, but Gilberte and Elizabeth insisted on his attention, patting his damp cheeks, smoothing his sticky moustache. If pricked with one of Riolama’s darts, he would not be more deftly immobilised.

Bennett and Owen, black-faced and broke, stalked out of the salon, towards the main doors.

‘Gentlemen… friends,’ cried out Kane as they passed by.

Bennett gave Kane the evil eye and made a vulgar gesture with his malformed hand. Owen drew his thumb across his throat in an equally eloquent sign.

‘Don’t mind them,’ purred Elizabeth. ‘They’re bankrupt. They haven’t got two pennies to hire a cosh-boy, let alone funds enough to have you killed.’

Kane really saw Gilberte and Elizabeth for the first time.

‘Do I know you?’ he asked.

A commotion exploded in the salon, and spread through the building.

William Boltyn was on the floor, clothes torn, expertly pinned by the dainty boot-heel of Natasha Natasaevna. She cursed him as every variety of capitalist exploiter and blood-sucking oppressor of the people. She took a croupier’s gathering-stick and knouted the millionaire as if he were a Russian peasant and she a Cossack. His face was striped with red weals. So, he wouldn’t be conquering the Princess of the Revolution in his suite this evening. Others of the Most High Order were with her, getting in kicks and blows. Their pockets were empty, Gilberte supposed. Dr Quartz had actually pulled out his trouser pockets in a caricature of pennilessness. He had gambled away his custom-made surgical instruments.

‘The house wins,’ announced another croupier, blandly.

A shot rang out and the man was down, wounded in the shoulder. Two hefty guards threw themselves on General Sternwood, who had brought his revolver. Voltaire left his post to see what the trouble was.

Kane was pliable now. It was important he see what was happening, so they steered him back into the salon.

It was pandemonium!

Boards flew like shrapnel on a battlefield. Patrons smashed the furniture. Voltaire and the apes went into action, endeavouring to suppress rowdy behaviour. Madame Sara tried to splash a bottle of vitriol into a croupier’s face, and was instantly trussed and thrown onto a table. Acid burned the baize. The Inner Circle of the Most High Order of Xanadu, assuming treachery on the part of their Grand Master, took to quarrelling with each other, flinging accusations and daggers. They had no common cause before Kane gathered them. Old rivalries and enmities bubbled up like marsh gas. Simon Carne and Sir Dunston Greene fenced with swords, leaping from tier to tier. They fetched up on the podium, cutting through the orchestra. Musicians fled diplomatically, grasping their more valuable instruments. Maupertuis brutally kicked Henry F. Potter, as if determined to put the pleading banker into a wheelchair.

Then, all the croupiers started screaming.

This had the effect of stopping fights and destructive rampages. All the staff were rooted to the carpets, juddering and fizzing, hair standing on end and smoking. Cards spewed from sleeves. Trouser-cuffs caught fire. Crackles of lightning ringed the croupiers’ bodies. Riolama had cranked up the electrical devices to their highest setting and thrown all the switches at once. There was a peculiar, tart, burned smell. This extraordinary phenomenon lasted only a few seconds, then shut off – along with all the electric lights.

Maverick strolled out of the side bar, with a fistful of Hattison’s paper. He tipped his black hat at the ladies, and his appalled host, and calmly walked out of the building. Back in the bar, Hattison had abjured ginger ale and was thirstily swigging whisky from a bottle.