“What’s the game?” he asked.
“You wouldn’t know it if we was to tell you,” Tim replied sarcastically.
Harvard watched the next hand closely. Five cards were dealt and the men placed bets in French francs. Each player then threw in certain of his cards and was dealt replacements. Each then bet again, laid down his cards, and called out the value of his hand.
“Minus two,” said Tim. He had the ten of diamonds, queen of spades, seven of hearts, three of clubs, and six of spades.
“Plus four,” said Beamon. He laid down the king of hearts, six of clubs, nine of hearts, four of clubs, and five of spades.
“You’re playing Red-and-Black,” Harvard said.
The two Irishmen looked at him incredulously. “You know the game?” Beamon asked.
“Yes. Are you playing it high or low?”
“Low,” Tim said.
“I’d like to take a hand,” Harvard told them, “but I assume you’ve stolen my money.”
Tim glared at him. “Well, you assume wrong, Yank,” he said coldly. “We’re not common thieves. We happen to be members of the Irish National Front; in other words, we’re revolutionaries. Your bloody money is still in your pocket.”
“Get it out for me, will you?” Harvard asked, standing and stepping over to Beamon. The Irishman dug out Harvard’s wallet, removed the currency, and replaced the wallet. “Well-heeled, aren’t you?” he commented, examining Harvard’s last few thousand dollars.
“Cuff my hands in front of me so that I can play, and I’ll give you a chance to win some of it,” Harvard offered.
Tim and Beamon exchanged cautious but clearly interested glances. After a moment, Beamon asked with a shrug, “What’s the harm?”
“All right, cover him,” Tim said.
With Beamon holding a gun to Harvard’s head, Tim uncuffed the prisoner’s wrists from behind and recuffed them in front of him. Harvard immediately took his money and drew up a keg to sit down. “Whose deal is it?” he asked.
“Mine,” Tim said churlishly. He snatched up the cards, muttering, “He assumes we’ve stolen his money. The bloody nerve.” Shuffling the cards, he began to deal, but Harvard stopped him.
“Excuse me, but I believe I’m entitled to cut the cards before you deal.”
“Are you saying we’re cheats, as well?” Tim asked irritably. But he gathered the cards back into a deck, shuffled again, and slammed the deck down on the barrel.
“Thank you,” Harvard said, cutting.
They played for nearly an hour, each of them winning a little and gradually losing it back, all three staying about even. As they played, Harvard unobtrusively got his bearings on the boat. From where he sat, he could see into the cabin, see that the key was in the ignition switch. The cabin hatch opened in, and was held that way by a shim. The boat was turned outbound, barely bobbing in a tide of no more than six inches, which meant that the anchor was probably at half-depth or less. The cabin hatch, Harvard judged, was about fifteen feet away.
He waited until a particularly competitive hand was being played, with all three of them betting more heavily than usual. Then, as Tim and Beamon concentrated on their replacement cards, Harvard suddenly brought up both feet and kicked out from under them the kegs on which they were sitting, sending them sprawling back onto the deck. Leaping up, he sprang past them and dove through the open hatch into the cabin. Kicking away the shim, he slammed the hatch and bolted it from the inside. Behind him, Beamon got to his knees and drew his gun, but Tim quickly seized Beamon’s arm.
“No gun play — harbor police—”
Together they charged the hatch, putting their shoulders against it, but it held firm. Inside, Harvard started the inboard engine and jerked back on the throttle, not hard enough to stall, but with enough force to send the boat into a tight circle as he raised its anchor. The two Irishmen were tossed back to the deck in the maneuver, groped to regain their balance, then were slammed back again as the anchor broke the surface and the craft accelerated to high speed on a straight course.
As soon as he had the boat under control, Harvard began veering all over the outer harbor, making sharp turns that doused his captors with heavy spray and several times almost careened one or the other of them overboard. Still, the two men doggedly resumed trying to break through the cabin hatch. After several minutes of wild maneuvering, Harvard saw the blue flashing lights of a harbor patrol boat leaving the shore in his direction. At the same time, he heard the sound of wood splintering as the cabin hatch began to give way to the solid shoulders of the two Irishmen.
Looking desperately around the harbor, Harvard saw an empty inbound garbage scow creeping slowly toward shore. A reckless idea quickly forming in his mind, he made a wide circle around the scow and reduced speed as he came alongside it, heading in the opposite direction, on the side away from the approaching patrol boat. Shifting to neutral, he let the engine idle as he clumsily used his cuffed hands to slide open a cabin window and squeeze through it onto the forward deck. Balancing himself precariously on the bow, he stuck one foot back through the window and kicked the throttle to full speed again. Tim and Beamon were rushing around the starboard side to get to him, and the cruiser was churning up forward motion, when Harvard made a short, running jump and leaped onto the slow-moving scow. He managed to land without falling and at once grabbed onto a pipe railing to balance himself. Tim and Beamon looked back at him in flabbergasted surprise, and Harvard smiled and gave them the finger as the cruiser sped off toward the open sea with the harbor patrol boat in hot pursuit.
On the scow, the French garbage workers, who had been on the bridge lying in the sun as they cruised back to port, sat up and looked curiously at Harvard. Noting his handcuffed wrists, they spoke a few quiet words among themselves, shrugged, and resumed lying in the sun.
Harvard peacefully rode the scow back to the industrial dock and went ashore without incident.
Carrying an empty jute sack from the scow to conceal his cuffed hands, Harvard made his way to the nearest marketplace and found a locksmith.
“I have a problem,” he told the man in French, and exposed his hands. “I am not a fugitive; it is a personal matter. No police are after me. Can you help me?”
The locksmith examined the cuffs. “Perhaps,” he said, with typical French reserve and indifference.
“I also have another problem. No money. But I have a very expensive Movado watch,” he said, turning his left wrist to show the watch. “I will trade the watch for release from these cuffs and two hundred francs.”
The locksmith took the watch several doors away to a jeweler friend for appraisal, and when he returned accepted the offer. He only had to make three attempts from a ring of keys before unlocking the cuffs. Minutes later, Harvard was crossing the marketplace, free of the handcuffs and with two hundred francs in his pocket.
At a small café, he ravenously ate two plates of fried fish and half a loaf of bread and mustard. As he ate, the snatches of conversation that he had heard just before he passed out from the ether came back to him. Particularly conspicuous in the recollection was the mention of a ballet theater.
“Excuse me,” he said to the proprietor, “where is the ballet theater?”
“The Salle Garnier, monsieur? It is directly behind the casino building, across from the train station. But it is closed until the fall season.”