"And no funny business in the car."
Everybody's cautioning me against funny business, Crane thought. "You have my word of honor."
They were in the noise of the slot machines, and Newt mumbled something that sounded like Like applying none.
Crane frowned. Applying none of what? Honor? Could this strange little man possibly have some intuition about Crane's plan to dethrone his own father? And he leaned down as they zigzagged their way through the crowd. "What did you say?"
"I said, 'Like the Flying Nun.' Religious order where you gotta dress weird. She could fly, remember?"
Crane was oddly relieved; apparently they weren't talking about honor after all. They were outside now, on the baking, sunlit sidewalk, and he had to shout, "Yeah, I remember!" to be heard over the droning of the picketer with the megaphone.
"I guess that made up for it," yelled Newt, "for having to wear that stuff all the time. At least she could fly."
"I guess."
Crane followed the little man across Fremont and down First Street toward the pay parking lot at the end of the block. This was where he had been shot at eight days ago and saved by a couple of shots from the gun of the fat man—whom he himself had killed four days later. He scuffed the toe of his ridiculous left shoe across the chipped curb, and rasped the painted nails of his right hand over the pockmark in the brick wall.
Crane would have the deal next.
The sky was dark behind the open ports, and the still-warm wind, smelling of distant cooling stone and sage, had raised the lake surface into choppy waves; the levels of the drinks on the green felt table were all rolling and uneven. The cigarette smoke was a mushroom cloud over the pot's scattered bills.
Newt sat to Crane's right and was flipping out the last of the second face-up cards. "… and a Duck to the Seven," Newt was chanting, "no apparent help, Seven gets a Seven, Sevens are cheap, the Flying Nun gets an Ace and a possible Flush draw, another Ten to the Ten of Sticks, pair looks good, and the Nine gets … an Eight toward a Straight." He sat back. "Tens are the power."
Not wanting to consistently sit next to Leon, Crane had this time stacked the deck with the requirement that he sit two places to his father's right, and he had succeeded in getting that seat. The man between Crane and his father held the pair of Tens, and he rapped the table to check. Leon bet two hundred, and everybody called it, and then the man with the Tens raised it another two hundred. All the other players called the sandbag raise.
Crane's hand was up for bid now, and he managed to sell it for the seven hundred he had in the pot. The man with the Tens refused a $700-bid for his own hand and then bought Leon's hand in turn for $750.
"All right," the man said as he gathered Leon's cards face up into his own board, now showing a Tens Up Two Pair, "I wanted that, thank you, Mr. Hanari. I figured I could buy it; I notice you always sell your hand, never wait and buy one."
Crane saw the Art Hanari face frown slightly under the bandage, and he realized that his father wasn't pleased to have his Assumption strategy noticed. Leon made the Hanari lips smile. "I'll have to start mixing up my play," he said.
Not quite yet, thought Crane, please.
The betting went around again, and at the showdown the man who had bought Leon's hand had a Full Boat, Tens Over, which lost to an Aces Over Boat.
The deal was now Crane's.
He gathered in the cards, and then, as he tossed into the center of the table the hundred-dollar bill that was his ante, he hit the edge of his glass of soda water and sent it rolling across the table, spilling the water out in a series of pulses like a sine wave.
It was a fine distraction, and Crane had the cards dumped into his open purse, and the stacked deck flipped up onto the table, while everybody was still in the first syllable of a surprised curse.
"Sorry, sorry," Crane muttered, reaching out to dab ineffectively at the stain with a paper napkin.
"Stevie!" called the Hanari body to the Amino Acid bartender, "a towel here, quick!" Crane's father gave him a wrathful glance out of his unswollen eye. "The Flying Nun doesn't seem to appreciate the fact that these are hand-painted cards and must not get wet!"
"I said I was sorry," said Crane.
The green felt in front of him was dry, and he began smoothly riffling the cards and doing the pull-through shuffle. The deck that was in his purse now was the one with the Jack of Cups card that had split his eye forty-two years earlier, and he wished for luck's sake that were the deck he would deal from tonight.
After seven riffles and false shuffles he passed the deck to Newt for the cut, and easily negated it when he recombined the cards under his fast-outswept hand. Everyone's attention was still on the mopping-up of the spilled water.
When the green felt had been blotted with a towel and then been painstakingly blown dry with a hair-dryer that one of the Amino Acids had had to fetch from the bathroom, and the game was finally allowed to proceed, Crane spun out the first three cards to each player, two down and one up.
The first round of betting added fifty-two hundred dollars to the pot, and then Crane dealt out the second up cards.
This time his father held the Ten and Eight of Swords down and the Knight of Clubs and the Six of Cups showing. Crane's cards were the remainder of the hand Doctor Leaky had bought in the parking lot game the day before, the Nine and King of Swords down and the Seven of Swords and the Eight of Cups showing. Crane could plausibly buy the "Art Hanari" hand now, seeming to be trying for the Six-Seven-Eight three-Straight.
"And," said Crane after the last bet had been called, "Mr. Hanari's hand is up for the mating. What is he bid?"
One man bid $500, and a woman raised it to $550, but Hanari just kept shaking his head.
"I'll go six hundred," said Crane. And, he thought, if the rest of you bastards will just have the simple card sense to buy the hands I've laid out for you, I'll win this with the King-high Swords Flush.
"Uh," said Leon through the lips of the Hanari body, "no."
"Six-fifty," said Crane, concealing his impatience. He could feel sweat starting out under the makeup on his forehead; it would begin to look odd if he had to bid too much more for an apparent middle-size three-Straight.
"No," said Leon, "I think I'll buy one this time."
He's chosen this hand to vary his play, thought Crane, because of what that son of a bitch said in the last hand.
"Seven hundred," said Crane, trying to conceal his desperation.
"No," said Leon, swallowing the word so that it sounded almost like the French non. "The bidding is closed on these cards."
Crane's heart was pounding, and he kept his chin lowered so that the pulse in his throat wouldn't be visible. "Okay," he said. "Then the next hand is up for auction." He allowed himself a slow sigh. "What is the bid?"
Crane had again lost the chance to buy Doctor Leaky's hand and then let Leon buy it from him at the Assumption.
Leon eventually bought the hand of a young man who had been playing very loose. Crane had to admire the tactic; if the conceived hand should happen to win, this was the one player aside from Leon himself who might choose to match the pot for the Assumption option.
But Leon's Two Pair lost to a Flush, and the cards were gathered and stacked and passed to the man on Crane's left to shuffle and deal out another hand.
Again Crane was left with nothing to do but play for mere money until dawn.
To his intense annoyance, his Flying Nun nickname was picked up by everyone else at the table. At one point the announcement of "A pair of Queens to the Flying Nun!" drew such laughter that the betting was delayed for a full minute.