What made him even more mystifying was his voice, which could only be heard indistinctly through his silk scarf. Was he American, or British? Perhaps he was a German, trying to elude the military police, who wanted him for grotesque war crimes. Perhaps he was Baron von Richthofen himself, the Red Baron, who was supposed to have been shot down in 1918.
But all anyone could determine for certain was that he was travelling alone and that he always dined alone. He ordered a nightly trolley a entrecote steak or poached halibut to be wheeled to his stateroom, which was one of the most expensive on board, and designed on a theme of "Joy"—which meant that he ate his steak amidst a great many frosted glass sculptures of naked girls with their arms flung up in the air. He emerged only after dark, to sit in the smoking room in his bizarre disguise, and play cards, usually for stakes of 600 to 700 pounds. Not too much, but not sneezing money, either.
Maurice shuffled the cards and beamed, "Another hand?"
The gentleman opposite shook his head slowly from side to side. "I think not," he said hoarsely. "She'll kill me if I lose any more."
"Ah, so there's a she?" said Maurice, quite affably, not obviously prying.
"It was a figure of speech. I was talking about fate."
"Ah, fate," said Maurice, in the manner of a man who knows all about fate, the same way that other men have become familiar with prostitutes or loan sharks. "Well, fate's a peculiar mistress, wouldn't you say so?"
"I suppose so. There are more peculiar things."
Maurice kept on shuffling. The cards flowed from one hand to the other in a ceaseless flickering flow, and he never looked at them once. "Well, then," he said, "that's an interesting point of view. What could be more peculiar than fate?"
"Mr. Wheatley's housing scheme," said the gentleman opposite.
Maurice snapped the cards into a single immaculate deck, and laid them face-down on the table. "I'm afraid you've lost me there, sir. What's Mr. Wheatley's housing scheme, when it answers?"
"It's a proposal, currently suggested by the British Government, that local authorities should build houses for the poor at a cost to the taxpayer and to the ratepayer of 240 pounds each. Well, it's scandalous nonsense, of course."
"I see," said Maurice. "Parliamentarian, are you? Is that it?"
The tall man sighed and lowered his head, so that Maurice had a generous view of his canvas-backed hairpiece. "It's all very difficult," he said, in a voice which was distinctly English. "This is not really my sort of style at all."
"Maybe another game will cheer you up," said Maurice, shuffling the cards yet again, so that they flowed out of one delicate, white-fingered hand into the other, like Chinese paper snakes. Maurice's hands could have been the hands of a watchmaker, or a Baldovinetti cherub. Gentle, soft, sure, with perfectly-manicured nails. Not effeminate, but immaculate. The hands of an expert gambler, a man who has spent most of his waking life in dim West Coast saloons and smoky New York speaks and chemin-de-fer pits all over the civilised world; a man who scarcely sees daylight from one Christmas to the next. Maurice could tell stories about poker games in Zurich that had gone on for nearly a week; about outrageous bets in France on the speed of Burgundian snails; and that last riotous night of legal gambling in Nevada, on October 1st, 1910, when he had won $17,630 on a single hand of faro, and had his left nostril bitten by a woman in a fruit-laden hat.
He had contrived all of his adult life to be on the scene of as many of the most historic, gilded, and richly profitable gambling events to which it was possible for one man to travel. He would bet on anything anywhere, from Epsom to Longchamps, from Hong Kong to Reno, provided the company was the classiest and the stakes were high. He was not a "Gentleman Jim"—one of those spuriously elegant gamblers with pomaded hair and ostentatious cufflinks. He was a plain workingman. But he was one of the best.
The tall man in the toupee watched Maurice shuffling for a while, and then pushed back his chair. "Yes, I think I'll pass, if you don't mind. You don't mind if I pass? Four hundred pounds is quite enough in one storm.'
"Suit yourself," said Maurice.
"I only wish that I could," replied the man in the toupee. He looked suddenly disconsolate, like a scarecrow with no crows to scare. "But it seems to me that my life these days has very little to do with suiting myself. I have served others for so long that most of the people around me have forgotten that I might have a few modest needs of my own. At least, she seems to have forgotten."
Maurice Peace grinned at him. It was rightly said of Maurice that he had the kind of face you thought you knew already, even when you were meeting him for the first time, but which you could never quite remember once he'd gone. Even his name seemed to fade from people's memories, like the print on a box of cereal that had been left too long in a grocery store window.
"I'll give you another game, old boy," put hi Sir Terence Harding-Crump, producing a crinkly sheaf of ten-pound notes from his grey Savile Row jacket. "Perhaps I can win back on calm seas everything that I lost when it was rough. And, besides, I believe I feel lucky again."
Completely ignoring Sir Terence, Maurice asked the man in the toupee, "Who's she? The she who seems to have forgotten?"
"She? Did I say she?" The man quite openly adjusted his toupee so that it covered more of his forehead, and tugged at his silk scarf. "Well, yes, she."
It didn't seem as if the man was going to explain himself any further and Maurice certainly wasn't going to press him. He was much more interested in the contents of the man's wallet than in the murky secrets of his private life, although his extraordinarily inept disguise was a most intriguing. The curious thing about it was that, as a disguise, it actually worked, because nobody could decide who he was. But then, it was possible that nobody knew who he was anyway, with or without his false hair, and his raffish silk scarf.
Sir Terence said, "Ready, Mr. Peace?"
"Oh, sure," said Maurice, a little abstractedly, and blocked the cards into a neat stack again.
"I think I'll have a drink," said the man in the toupee.
"A drink to forget, or a drink to cheer you up?" Sir Terence guffawed. At Harrow, his nickname had been Chortler.
"A drink to the successful outcome of this voyage,' the man in the toupee said dolefully. "And perhaps a drink to Their Majesties, for good measure."
"Try the king-size martini if you're not going to play any more cards," suggested Maurice, with that same sly grin. "It's a house special. Six ounces of freezing-cold gin over ice. A real belter. Mr. Ernie Byfield invented it at the Pump Room in Chicago, because he thought it would encourage his diners to spend more money on extravagant food."