Dark Matter (12 page)

Rasputin had only seen blackjack played in
the movies, but soon got the gist of it as hands fell in rapid, unromantic
succession. He began to take pleasure in the ebb and flow of fortune around the
table. One of the players—a heavy-set, balding man with nostrils big enough to
cache chips—had polar reactions to each hand. When dealt a poor hand, he
hunched down on the table and brooded, and when the hand held promise he pushed
his chest out and quipped with the dealer. Rasputin thought it was good the guy
wasn’t playing poker.

The conversation next door hit bottom and
kept going with “Who’s hot,” but Rasputin's attention was stuck on the blackjack
table. Without realising, he began nodding or frowning at bets, smiling when a
player made a haul, and tut-tutting big losses.

The third player at the table, a stick-thin
woman whose hair was so long it brushed the felt, bet $20 on Queen and Four.

“Bad move,” Rasputin said, so loud the
dealer and players looked at him. The dealer frowned. Rasputin attempted to
shrink.

When he felt safe to move again, he turned
to the bar and swigged lukewarm Guinness.

He continued to watch the cards fall and
reappear with growing boredom until a strange sensation crept over him.

He wasn’t sure when it began, but all of a
sudden he was conscious of a sense of the
weight
of the decks left in
the shoe. The feeling was the synaesthesic offspring of his eyes and grasp. He
weighed the remaining cards with his gaze, and found them heavy. He was certain
of it, without the remotest clue why: the shoe was hot.

It was on this knowledge, he realised, he
had been critiquing the players. The dealer had to hit on anything under
seventeen, with the object being twenty-one, blackjack, but no higher. But on a
top-heavy deck, chances were that he would bust. The dealer busts, the player
wins.

The player wins.

With rising excitement, he watched and kept
a loose count of card values as the shoe was played down to the last deck and a
half before being reshuffled. It was hard to follow. Each hand consisted of two
or three cards for the dealer, and the same again for the three players, which
made up to twelve cards, and more if there were double-downs or splits or
improbably low sequences. And all of these cards appeared quick-fire on the end
of the dealer’s arm-cum-machine, and were just as rapidly swept away.

All the same, by his rough tally, the
remainder of the card pool had indeed been high. His gaze had weighed right.

He leaned against the bar and let his arms
slide out either side, resting on their length, and exhaled. He still felt
tipsy. His smile remained, as if it was the only shape his lips made.

To the casual observer, he probably looked
borderline catatonic. But his mind was churning. He quested inward to
interrogate himself for the source of the intuition about the cards that had
proven correct.

Within, he found the memory of the
preceding twenty minutes. He focussed on the game table. As suspected, and to
his delight, he saw there every hand that had been played, indelibly printed.
Every cough, every call for drinks, every polite smile from the dealer, every
sniff from the man with the nicotine-stained fingers (
Fourteen in total. On
drugs?
), and most importantly, every dealt card.

Every
card.
Here was his lever.

Each of the eight decks that made the pool
of cards from which the game was played had a known make-up: four aces, four
kings, four queens, and so on. When the game began, the chance of dealing a
given card was fixed. But over time, as cards were dealt, the make-up of the
card pool changed, and so did the chance of dealing a given card. If early
rounds were thick with royalty, later rounds would be thin.

It was this knowledge that could be
exploited to gain an advantage over the House, whose every move was prescribed.
But only if you knew the cards remaining in the pool, and only if they were
favourable.

All of this was obvious to Rasputin, and it
came as no surprise that he could trawl back through the hands as easily as
paging through a spreadsheet and tally the totals. What anchored the grin to
his face was the realisation that his brain had birthed this information
quietly on its own. Somewhere in the shadow of his attention, a little program
had run, tallied the card values, calculated their distribution, and floated
this into his perception of the game as an intuition.

He sat watching the fall of cards with euphoria
reminiscent of Christmas mornings. The couple next to him left in an embrace.
He didn’t notice. He glanced at the shoe often. It wriggled in his vision, a
small, frightened creature until, all at once, it pushed upward against his
gaze, curiously buoyed. The shoe was light. He was sure of it.

That does it.

He stood, turned, and called to the
bartender for a drink, he didn’t care what. The bartended poured him a pear
martini. A woman’s drink, his brain informed him.
Fine. No fat tip for you,
sideburns.

He took the drink, winked, said, “Dutch
Courage,” and sculled it. The alcohol already coursing in his veins would soon
have reinforcements.

His eyes watered as he made his way to the
cashier, feeling like a stork wading through lily-pad game tables. He converted
most of his credit into chips, leaving enough for another dose of courage, and
headed back to the blackjack table. His path took him by a roulette wheel,
where he was struck by a sudden impulse to bet the chips heavy in his hand.

He paused. He would need a bankroll to stay
alive at the blackjack table.
And
, a voice whispered within,
if you
blow the lot now, you can slink back to the hotel and forget the whole idea.

He took a third of what he had, $120, and
threw it on Red.

The croupier called the drop and the ball
bolted round the rim, skipped a few times on the hot coals, and sat on Black
26. It was over so quickly he had no time to react.

He dropped his remaining chips onto Black.
The ball sped round the wheel’s rim again, tapped at the slots, and settled on
Black 2. The croupier slid a stack of chips at him, his winnings. He had
doubled the bet.

The pear martini was evidently not sexist.
It began to trickle into the byways of his brain. With a lurch of excitement he
pushed the entire stack back onto Black. The ball took forever to settle, and
when it did, sat snug in Black 10. His bet returned, multiplied, and after a
brief battle of wills, he retrieved it and returned, bankroll in hand, to the
table by the bar.

He took his old stool, and sat observing
the game, now conscious of trying to look uninterested. The shoe in play
finished and was reshuffled, and the dealer chewed through another without it
moving far from balance. But on the third it dove fast and soon sat on the
table like an immovable little Buddha, offering its cards with the promise of
plenty.

Rasputin opted in.

He wore a nervous smile, but the croupier
had apparently forgotten his earlier gaffe and returned the smile.

His first hand was Jack/8. The dealer dealt
himself 6/9, hit again, and was busted by the Queen of Spades. In under a
minute, Rasputin had won his first hand, a whole $5.

The only other player still at the table
was the man with capacious nasal passages. He slouched so low he might have
been eyeing a putting green. Rasputin needed no mental magic to weigh his
fortunes.

The win became a run and Rasputin was
beginning to feel untouchable when reality bit into his winnings, and then
began gnawing on his bankroll. Three hours later, having jumped in and out of
the game as much as he thought he could without drawing suspicion, he was back
on par.

He excused himself in disgust and emptied
his remaining credit into another shot glass.

I’d make more flipping burgers.

His gaze roamed the floor while he sipped
the liquor. When the glass was drained he squinted through its bottom at a
kaleidoscope of colour like a sailor with a protuberant monocle. The liquor
held the room at bay, but his stomach had begun to churn with rumour. Had he
been sober, he would have recognised the signs of impending mutiny.

He wandered unsteadily past the roulette
wheel, conscious of having passed it earlier with about the same amount of
chips. He kept walking.

On reaching a row of one-armed bandits, he
paused to watch their electronic tumblers spin, but had to look away when a
wave of nausea swept over him. He waded on into the calmer atmosphere of the
poker room, slumped onto a stool and rested.

Nearby a game of Texas Hold’em was in high
dudgeon. Another table hosted a game of 7-stud. A handful of spectators cradled
drinks and commented on the play. He knew he couldn’t count either game. Both
were played from a single deck. He relaxed and waited to feel at home again in
his own flesh, steeping in the room’s hum.

Consequently he didn’t recognise the
synaethesic sensation when it returned. It tugged at him like he needed to pee,
and he had risen to search for a toilet before it occurred to him what it was.

He sat again, brow furrowed, and
concentrated on the 7-stud game. The first of three cards, 3
rd
 
street, was dispensed in a fresh round, making
two down and two up for each player. As the bets began to fall, he felt the
familiar flutter of heft. He hunted for the source.

He found it, not in the cards, but the
players
.

Another card was dealt face up to each
player, 4
th
 
street, and again for 5
th
 
and 6
th
. Bets fell on each, getting heavier
as the dealing progressed. It was as the last card, the eponymous 7
th
, was dealt,
and the final bets were placed, that he had a disconcerting sense of inversion:
the amply-proportioned blonde festooned with gold jewellery felt light as a
feather; the wiry man sporting handlebar moustaches and a zirconium-inset ring
felt heavy as a whale.

This tangible sense of two strangers
disturbed Rasputin. Beyond that, he wondered if he had finally split the bag
and spilled his marbles.

The hands were sprung. Goldilocks won big,
Handlebars picked his teeth, and the feeling of weight all but evaporated from
every player.

Rasputin ran his hands through his hair and
rallied his spirits. By nature, he wanted to investigate, to uncover the why of
it. But it was late. He was tired, tipsy, and queasy. He had also just
witnessed the lady rake in over $300 in three minutes.

He bought into the game.

The first round came and went without any
unusual sensation. He kept his head down, and folded in the 4
th
 
on fish food. Another hand passed, and he was
beginning to wonder whether he had wasted more money when, on the fall of 3
rd
 
street, Handlebars’ stocks plummeted. The
sensation was much stronger now, charged by his investment in the game. He
turned over his card, the Ace of Diamonds, and Handlebars and Goldilocks both
gained fifty pounds. The fourth player, a quiet, elderly gentleman in a grey,
Sunday-best suit conservatively folded.

Rasputin tossed chips onto the table,
upping the ante. The others followed. 6
th
 
and 7
th
 
cards fell, bets were placed, and Rasputin
felt as if he were a sideshow strongman lifting a barbell of human flesh,
Goldilocks and Handlebars each to a side. He bet everything. Goldilocks folded,
and Handlebars saw him.

With the slightest tremor in his hand,
Rasputin flipped over his hidden cards, which included the Kings of Spades and
Hearts. They made, together with those already exposed, three of a kind, Ace
high. Handlebars grimaced, scratched at his gingery two-day growth, then
flipped his cards. He had called what he thought was Rasputin’s bluff on two
pair.

“You’re in the game, young blood.”

And so he was, to the tune of $500.

On cue, Radio Rasputin aired Kenny Rogers’
Gambler. But the chips he clawed to his chest sure felt real, and eminently
countable.

As the game continued he gave his gut the
reins. He lost on occasion, but more often got it right. At the back of his
mind he chewed over how this new mode of intuition worked, and bit by bit the
answers came.

He was still mining probability, but this
was a much more lucrative lode. Unlike blackjack, 7-stud rounds draw from a
single pack, which renders card profiling pointless. But there is one complex
of information that accumulates with time: the profile of a
player
.
Perhaps he registered nuances of posture and expression, but that wasn’t
necessary. Each new card evoked a response from every player, fold or bet, and
if betting, the amount. Each card supplied another piece of data, dependent on
the preceding cards and those of the other players. Each of the five sequences
of a 7-stud hand added a quantum of information, a piece of profile, a datum of
behaviour, with which to judge a player’s position. All this accumulated like
blocks in a tower. The trick was to predict who was building on shaky
foundations.