Dark Matter (13 page)

He was playing a guessing game, but with
guesses that acquired the robustness of statistical estimates as evidence accrued,
just as card-counting blackjack revealed the contours of the remaining cards.
But this estimate was further warped by the players’ varying skill, emotion,
fatigue, and blood alcohol level—and, unlike the dealer, the players couldn't
get fired if they failed to follow House rules.

Comps started flowing after he won his
eleventh round, halting his dangerous slide toward sobriety. But, even drunk,
he could see the limiting factor at the table was Goldilocks. She knew what she
was doing, more than Handlebars at any rate. She brooded over the largest stash
of chips. Everyone struck good hands, but she nurtured them best. So Rasputin
concentrated on her, and when she faltered, he struck.

And his winnings mounted.

“Youngblood’s a shark,” Handlebars said
sourly. The more he lost, the more he talked. Rasputin wondered if the man was
trying to break his concentration.
Good luck. I’m not.

When the penny finally dropped for
Goldilocks, she surveyed her reduced pile of chips and excused herself with a
tight smile. She was replaced by a young guy in a slick suit. Thereafter,
Rasputin and Handlebars shared his wealth, until he too left, leaving Rasputin
to clean Handlebars out.

When Rasputin took his last chips, the man muttered,
“Swings and roundabouts,” and stalked out of the room. He didn’t return to the
table.

That left only Old Joe at the table, but
Rasputin didn’t have the heart to take his money. Joe had spent most of the
night practicing his folding technique. Taking money from him would be like
pulling splinters: tedious and painful for embarrassingly small results.

Rasputin rose, stretched, and knew the time
to be just past three in the morning. A glance around the room confirmed there
were plenty more punters overly burdened with cash. He had cleared his debt.
Time to firm up on permanent studenthood. He secured his chips and went hunting
for the toilet.

He exited the games room into a small
foyer, where he spotted a toilet sign, and walked smack into Jordy.

Rasputin rocked back on his heels and
smiled.

“Monk!” said Jordy. “What in God’s name are
you doing here? It’s the middle of the night, and—” He wrinkled his nose. “You’re
drunk.”

“As a skunk, and rich as a finch,” Rasputin
slurred, then paused to consider. “I said ‘finch’ ‘cause it rhymes with rich,
but it doesn’t actually.”

“What happened at the audition?” said
Jordy. “That’s why we’re here, remember?” He jammed one hand in a pocket, and
glanced over Rasputin’s shoulder into the room as he spoke. He moderated his
tone and said, “We were supposed to meet in the foyer. I tried talking to the
staff but they didn’t want a bar of me. Only a girl, said you’d gone off
pissed.”

“Master plan had a flaw,” said Rasputin.

“I’m listening.”

“They accused me of cheating.”

“Cheating,” Jordy said flatly. Rasputin couldn’t
tell whether he didn’t believe him or them.

“Deceit. Turpitude. Improbity. Villainy.
Perfidy. They said I’m a naughty boy.”

Jordy took a moment to process this, then
visibly relaxed. He sighed.

“You’re drunk.”

“As a skunk.”

“Hang on.” A glint leapt into Jordy’s eye.
“You said rich.”

“Long story short: crime does in fact pay.”

“What?” Jordy looked troubled.

“True story. It pays. Tax free stipend.
Actually, that’s crap. The part about crime. At least, I don’t think it’s
illegal. Unless maybe you need a warrant to carry,” he fingered his temple.
“Warning: packing three pounds of hot grey matter.
Caveat Gamblor.
Like
having to say on your car license that you need glasses. Except the opposite.
Would Superman have to carry a warrant for laser vision? Like those warning
stickers on DVD players, ‘Class 1 Laser Superhero.’ Or X-ray vision. You could
get into a lot of trouble with X-ray vision.”

Jordy’s lids had lowered, and he said, “In
English, Monk. Please.” So Rasputin hefted the bag of chips in front of his
face.

“How?”

“Not sure exactly. Not card-counting blackjack.”
Jordy waited for him to go on. Curiosity had beaten out all contenders.
“7-stud. Turns out the thing that’s better than card-counting is chap-counting.
Chaps and chappesses.”

Jordy levelled his gaze. “Monk, I can’t
tell whether you’re serious or it’s the booze talking. Can you give me a
straight answer?” Jordy leaned against the wall and Rasputin followed suit,
moving a little way down the corridor.

He held the chip bag up again and shook it
a couple of times.

“What’ve you got?”

“Over twelve grand.”

Jordy sprung off the wall.

“Then let’s get out of here before you blow
it.”

“Listen,” said Rasputin. He frowned and
squared-off to Jordy. “You dragged me over here, and I’m the one copping the
abuse. Now I should run home just when things are picking up?”

Jordy raised a conciliatory hand, but he
kept on, “No way. You were right. This is the money train, and I didn’t come
all this way to get off at the first stop.”

He strode the length of the hall as best he
could and beat open the toilet door. When he reappeared a minute later, Jordy
was gone.

He returned to the game room, but at least
one of Jordy’s shots had hit home. He got off the booze. A storm was well and
truly brewing in his bowels, and Jordy’s anger, which was so rare, had been a
slap in the face.

But he was still determined to milk every
last drop from the night. He began to prowl around the tables, stopping now and
then to observe, hunting for plump targets. (Being mobile also staunched the flow
of comps.) He avoided the weekend gamblers and tracked the fat cats, a modern
day Robin Hood. The ideal table had two or three players, and although these
tables had smaller stakes, the bleed-in on statistics, the time it took to
bootstrap his mental machinery, was shorter. His stocks went two steps up for
every one down like a good day on Wall Street. He just hoped to quit before the
crash.

When it came, it was not so much a crash as
a freeze on the exchange. Two black-clad bouncers, each with a worm-like
earpiece affixed, approached him and asked for a word. He thought they meant to
offer him a perk, maybe an invite to the high-stakes room or a plush suite.
Instead, one bouncer politely informed him to cash his chips and leave.

He couldn’t believe it. He almost laughed.

“Why?” he said.

“Card counting blackjack.”

He didn’t ask how they knew. They probably
had software to detect suspicious activity. He was so green the pit boss
probably spotted it. Fine. But it wasn’t cheating. He got angry, but when the bouncer
said he could leave without his winnings if he preferred, his temperature
dropped from equatorial to arctic. He suspected that wasn’t legal, but he wasn’t
going to risk it.

His two new friends escorted him out of the
room, without stopping at the cashier, but he didn’t protest. His thoughts were
forming too slowly. He was drunk enough to be tipsy until dawn. When they
walked past the lifts, fear spiked his belly. By the time they were handling
him across the threshold of the heavy fire door they had given up any pretense
of politeness.

They stood on a landing alone. Grey
concrete stairs folded out of view above and below. One bouncer remained at the
door. The other turned to Rasputin and said, “Just so you remember,” and
punched him deeply, deliberately, in the gut. They left before his cane slapped
onto the naked concrete and sent echoes bounding up and down the stairwell.

He had never been punched by a grown man
before. In place of his stomach, there was a stone of granite. It sat sucking
his breath away, like a cloth soaking up water, gathering pain latent in the
surrounding organs. He gasped, finally, and fell to his knees.

Senseless from pain lancing through the
drink-haze, he grasped his cane with one fumbling hand, and the railing with
the other, and began inching his way down. He didn’t dare walk back onto the
floor. Everyone would stare. No, he would gather his breath and cash his chips
on a floor below.

He reached the first floor with a carpark
exit, a black hole cut into the stark interior of the stairwell. He had just
pivoted to descend the next flight when he heard a footfall behind him.

A hand gripped his shoulder and slung him
around. A fist smashed into his face.

Time compressed beneath the force of the
blow. The world broke into pieces. Sense came in juddering packets.

He lay on the concrete landing. Words hung
in the air, whispered in echo: “Swings and roundabouts.”

He heard footsteps. A figure emerged from
the car park’s gloom. It was the boy who had caused his accident, his first
assailant. He was crouched over him, shouting something.

—No, he was confused. It was Jordy.

The boy again.

He took the opportunity before it was lost.
He slugged the kid full in the face.

And then he was seated on the cool
concrete. Jordy sat opposite him, leaning on the guard rail. He was holding his
nose. Blood had streamed down and arched around his mouth. Someone offered
Jordy a cloth.

Rasputin patted his pocket that had bulged
with chips. Empty. The money train had left.

A day later, when Dee arrived at the
airport, she found them sitting forlornly in the arrival lounge, sporting
complementary shiners. It was the second time in as many months she was struck
speechless.

CAIN

Sixty years. Just look at me. Some
beauty sleep.

When, all those years ago, I lay down to
sleep, I did so secure in the knowledge of careful preparation. I had spent
many Deutschmarks of the Schürmann fortune stocking Europe against our future
needs—mine and my brother’s. Safe houses, ciphers, food and marks. All
connected in links guarded by redundancy, and obscured by cut-outs. I secured
silence with the carrot of vast wealth, and the whip of certain, slow and
sticky death.

Sleep took me, I confess, feeling rather
self-satisfied.

But when I woke and stumbled from Central
Park to be struck dumb by New York’s glitter and speed, I knew my plan had
developed a nasty kink. I had counted on the need to thaw my network after
sleep. I had not counted on that sleep being so long. Thawing the cold of death
doesn’t yield much but stinking corpses.

But the same years that had eaten away my
provision had given me another. A
different
kind of network.

To my rescue: the Internet. TV taught me
about that too.

With the Internet’s help, the world was
delegate, awaiting my typed instruction. I set about learning how to invoke
that power. How to find information, people, and—once found—how to command
them.

But first I needed money. Enough to cast
into the furnaces of mens’ desires.

The Internet passed this first and crucial
test. A password and account number sufficed to connect me with some of the
wealth of France and Belgium I hid following the invasion. Time and interest
had been kind to me, and while I was forever cut-off from the wealth of my
family, my nest egg proved sufficient.

To lay hands on that money, though, I
needed an American bank account. And for that, I needed another identity. My
bass-playing mask had become noisome, as had the hotel in Hell’s Kitchen.

So I went collecting. I got ‘upwardly
mobile’, I believe the phrase is. I searched for single men in well-to-do
apartment blocks, where neighbours didn’t seem to notice, much less care about,
each other. (One such apartment was near the Metropolitan Museum, where I had
lain all those years gathering dust. I spent many a philosophic spell gazing
along Fifth Avenue through the bulging canopies of its trees at the steps of
the museum.) I particularly hunted men with a near resemblance to me—the more
easily to
change
to and between.

Before long I had assembled a small deck of
identities with which to enter the game proper. Passports, driving licences,
payslips, everything I needed to become Bank of America’s newest customer. I
opened an account and wired in enough cash to requisition myself, put out
feelers, and, ultimately, travel.

All the while, my education continued. I
consider myself a life-long learner, but the abrupt, dark epoch I had just
exited contained sixty years of missed frivolity and foment. While I slept,
nations died and were born. Some were even resurrected from Europe’s well-trod
earth. These had lain, the unquiet dead of old wars, like vast golems of earth,
river and forest, and been beckoned into life again by a latent vitality.

Nationality had never much fussed
the
Imago,
but it was vital I be aware of any ethnic tensions that might have
grown in my absence.

The war of ideologies too had had its
winners and losers. National Socialism, clearly, had been a casualty. And so, I
guessed, had Fascism. But what of the Bolsheviks? Which ideas were vogue? Which
had been forever repudiated?