"I have reciprocity with my London club, old boy.
Sign you in, what?" They had played for an hour and a half. Jake was enjoying the game. He liked the style of the establishment, for he usually played in less salubrious surroundings the back room behind the bar, an upturned fruit-crate behind the main boiler in an engine room, or a scratch game in a dockside warehouse.
This was a hushed room with draped velvet curtains, expanses of dark wood panelling, dark-toned oil paintings and hunting trophies shaggy-maned lions, buffalo with huge bossed horns drooping mournfully, all of them staring down with glassy eyes from the walls.
From the three billiard tables came the discreet click of the ivory balls, as half a dozen players in dress shirts and braces, black ties and black trousers, evening jackets discarded for the game, leaned across the heavy green-topped tables to play their shots.
There were three tables of contract bridge from which came the murmur of bid and counter bid in the cultivated tones of the British upper class, all the players in the dress that Jake thought of as penguin suits black and white, with black bows.
Between the tables, the waiters moved on silent bare feet, in ankle-length white robes and pillbox fez, like priests of some ancient religion bearing trays of sparkling crystal glass.
There was only one table of draw poker, a huge teak structure with brass ashtrays set into the woodwork, and niches and trays to hold the whisky glasses and the coloured ivory chips. At the table sat five players, and only Jake was not in evening dress the other three were the type of poker players that Jake would dearly love to have kept locked up for his exclusive pleasure.
There was a minor British peer, out in Africa to decimate the wildlife.
He had recently returned from the interior, where a white hunter had stood respectfully at his elbow with a heavy-calibre rifle, while the peer mowed down vast numbers of buffalo, lion and rhinoceros.
This gentleman had a nervous tic under his right eye which jumped whenever he held three of a kind or better in his hand.
Despite this affliction, a phenomenal run of good cards had allowed him to be the only winner, other than Jake, at the table.
There was a coffee planter with a deeply tanned and wrinkled face who made an involuntary little hissing sound whenever he improvised on the draw or squeezed out a pleasing combination.
On Jake's right hand was an elderly civil servant with thinning hair and a fever-yellow complexion who broke out in a muck sweat whenever he judged himself on the point of winning a pot an expectation which was seldom realized.
In an hour's careful play, Jake had built up his winnings to a little over a hundred pounds and he felt very warm and contented down there where his dinner was digesting. The only element in his life that afforded him any disquiet was his new friend and sponsor.
Gareth Swales sat at his ease, conversing with the peer as an equal, condescending graciously to the planter and commiserating with the civil servant on his run of luck. He had neither won nor lost any significant amount, yet he handled the cards with a dexterity that was impressive. In those long tapering fingers with the carefully manicured nails, the pasteboards rustled and rippled, blurred and snapped, with a speed that defied the eye.
Jake watched carefully, without appearing to do so, whenever the deal passed to Major Gareth Swales. There is no way that a dealer, even with the most magical touch, can stack a deck of cards without facing them during the shuffle and Gareth never faced the deck as he manipulated it. His eyes never even dropped to the cards, but played lightly over the faces of the others as he chatted. Jake began to relax a little.
The planter dealt him four to an open-ended flush, and he filled it with the six of hearts. The civil servant, who had an insatiable curiosity, called his raise to twenty pounds and sighed and muttered mournfully as he paid the ivory chips into the pot and Jake swept them away and stacked them neatly in front of him.
"Let's have a new pack-" smiled Gareth, lifting a finger for a servant, and hope that it breaks your run of luck." Gareth offered the seal on the new pack for inspection, then split it with his thumbnail and unwrapped the pristine cards with their bicycle-wheel designs, fanned them, lifted the jokers and began to shuffle, at the same time starting a very funny and obscene story about a bishop who entered the women's rest room at Choring Cross Station in error.
The joke took a minute or two in the telling and in the roar of masculine laughter that followed, Gareth began to deal, skimming the cards across the green baize, so that they piled up neatly before each player. Only Jake had noticed that during the bishop's harrowing experiences in the ladies" room, Gareth had blocked the cards between shuffles, and that each time as he lifted the two blocks he had rolled his wrists so that for a fleeting instant they had fanned slightly and faced.
Guffawing loudly, the baron gathered up his hand and looked at it.
He choked in the middle of his next guffaw, and his eyelid started to jump and twitch, as though it was making love to his nose. From across the table came a loud hiss of indrawn breath as the planter closed his cards quickly and covered them with both hands. At Jake's right hand, the civil servant's face shone like polished yellow ivory and a little trickle of sweat broke from his thinning hairline, ran down his nose, and dripped unheeded on to the front of his dress shirt, as he stared at his cards.
Jake opened his own cards, and glanced at the three queens it contained. He sighed and began his own story.
"When I was first engineer on the old Harvest Maid tied up in Kowloon, the skipper brought a fancy little dude on board and we all got into a game. The stakes kept jumping up and up, and just after midnight this dude dealt one hell of a hand." Nobody appeared to be listening to Jake's story, they were all too absorbed with their own cards.
"The skipper ended up with four kings, I got four jacks and the ship's doctor pulled a mere four tens." Jake rearranged the queens in his hand and broke off his story while Gareth Swales fulfilled the civil servant's request for two cards.
"The dude himself took one card from the draw and the betting went mad.
We were throwing everything we owned into the pot. Thanks, friend, I'll take two cards also." Gareth flicked two cards across the table, and Jake discarded from his hand before picking them up.
"As I was saying, we were almost stripping off our underpants to throw it all in the middle. I was in for a little over a thousand bucks Jake squeezed open the new cards and could hardly suppress a grin. All the ladies were there. Four pretty little queens peered out at him.
"We signed IOUs, we pledged our wages, and the dude came right along on the ride, not pushing the betting but staying right there."
Gareth gave the baron one card and drew one himself.
They were listening now, eyes darting from Jake's lips to their own cards.
"Well, when it came to the showdown, we were looking at each other across a pile of cash that came to the ceiling and the dude hit us with a straight flush. I remember it so clearly, in clubs three to the eight. It took the skipper and me twelve hours to recover from the shock and then we worked out the odds on that deal just happening naturally it was something like sixteen million to one. The odds were against the dude and we went looking for him. Found him down at the old Peninsula Hotel, spending our hard-won gold. We were preparing for sea at the time. Our boilers were cold. We sat the dude on top of them, and fired them.
Had to tie him down, of course, and after a few hours his knockers, were roasting like chestnuts."
"By God," exclaimed the peer.
"How awful."
"Quite right," Jake agreed. "Hell of a stink in my engine room." A heavy charged silence settled over the table all of them aware that something explosive was about to happen, that an accusation had been made, but most of them not certain what the accusation was, and at whom it had been levelled. They held up their cards like protective shields, and their eyes darted suspiciously from face to face. The atmosphere was so tense that it pervaded the gracious room, and the players at the other tables paused and looked up.