“Yeah,” he answered. “I’ll see you.”
The deaf man turned over his hole card. Sure enough, it was the ace.
“Straight to the ace,” he said. “I think that beats your three aces.”
“How’d you know I had three aces?” Chuck asked, watching the deaf man pull in his winnings.
“Only from the force of your betting. I don’t think you’d have bet so heavily with two pair. So I assumed you already had your third ace.”
“And you raised three aces? On the strength of apossible straight?”
“On the strength of percentages, Chuck,” the deaf man said, stacking his chips into a neat pile. “On the strength of percentages.”
“Some percentages,” Chuck said. “Luck, that’s all. Dumb luck.”
“No, not quite. I was sitting with four cards to a one-ended straight: the jack, queen, king and ace. In order to make my straight, I needed a ten—any ten. And this was the only possible way of improving my hand to beat your three aces. I had to catch that ten. Ifnot, if for example I simply paired one of my cards, I couldn’t possibly beat you. Am I right? So what were my chances of completing the straight? My chances against making it were nine to one, Chuck.”
“Well, those seem like pretty damn steep odds to me.”
“Do they? Consider the fact that no tens had appeared at any time during the game. Of course, either you—or our friends before they dropped out—could have been holding tens in the hole. But I knew you had an ace in the hole, and I took a chance on our friends.”
“The odds were still too steep. You should have dropped out.”
“But then I’d have lost, wouldn’t I? And your own odds against improving your hand were even steeper.”
“How could they be? I had you beat to begin with! I had three aces!”
“Yes, but how could you improve them? In one of two ways. Either by catching a fourth ace or by catching another six to give you a full house. I knew youcouldn’t catch the fourth ace because I was sitting with it in the hole. In any case, the odds on catching it, even if Ihadn’t been holding it, would have been thirty-nine to one. Considerably higher than nine to one, don’t you think?”
“What about the possibility of a full house? I could have caught that other six.”
“True, you could have. The odds against it, though, were fourteen and two thirds to one. Which, again, is higher than the nine to one odds I was bucking. And, weighted against this was the fact that our two friends were both showing sixes when they dropped out. This means there was only one six left in the deck, and it further means that the odds on catching that last six were essentially the same as they’d be for catching the fourth ace—thirty-nine to one. Get it, Chuck? My odds were nine to one. Yours were thirty-nine to one.”
“You’re forgetting something, aren’t you?”
“I never forget anything,” the deaf man said.
“You’re forgetting thatneither of us could have improved our hands. And if neither of us improved, I’d have won. Three aces beats an incompleted straight.”
“That’s true. But it’s not something I forgot. It was simply a calculated risk. Remember, Chuck, that your pair of aces didn’t turn up until the fourth card had been dealt. If your first two exposed cards had been aces, I’d have dropped out immediately. Up to that point, we were both on equal footing more or less. You had an ace and a six showing on the board. I had an ace in the hole, and a king and queen showing on the board. My hand seemed just about as strong as yours. I suspected you had a pair of aces but, considering my own ace in the hole, I thought you might be bluffing a strong bet on a pair of sixes. Andany pair I caught would have beat those. I think I played the hand correctly.”
“I think it was luck,” Chuck maintained.
“Perhaps.” The deaf man smiled. “ButI won, didn’t I?”
“Sure. And since you won, you can come on real strong about how you figured it all out beforehand.”
“But I did, Chuck.”
“You onlysay you did. If you’d have lost, it’d be a different story. You’d have been making excuses all over the lot to explain away your mistakes.”
“Hardly,” the deaf man said. “I am not a person who admits to mistakes. The wordmistake isn’t even in my vocabulary.
“No? Then what do you call it?”
“Deviation. Truth is a constant, Chuck. It is only the observation of truth which is a variable. The magnitude of error depends on the difference between the unchanging truth and the faithfulness of the observation. And so error can only be defined as deviation, not mistake.”
“Bullshit,” Chuck said, and the other men around the table laughed.
“Precisely,” the deaf man said, laughing along with them. “Bullshit. Error is simply the amount of bullshit attached to any true observation. Do you want to deal, Rafe?”
The tall thin man on Chuck’s left raised his gold-rimmed spectacles and wiped the tears from his eyes. He took the cards and began shuffling them.
“One thing I’ve got to say is that this is gonna be the goddammedest caper there ever was.” He shoved the deck at Chuck. “You want to cut?”
“What’s the use?” Chuck said petulantly. “Run them.”
The man sitting opposite Rafe said, “What’s the game?” He put the question tentatively because he was a newcomer to the group, and not yet too sure of his standing. Nor was he yet too certain as to exactly who his predecessor had been or why he’d been dropped from the quartet. He possessed only one quality which could be considered useful to the group, and he had stopped considering that a quality some ten years ago. This quality was the making of bombs. Bombs, that is. You know, bombs. The old man sitting at the table with the other three had been quite adept at fashioning lethal exploding devices. He had lent his talents at one time to a certain foreign power and had spent a good many years in prison regretting this peccadillo, but his early political affiliations had not been questioned by the deaf man when he’d been hired. The deaf man was content to know he could still put together a bomb if called upon to do so. He was particularly interested in learning that the old man could put together incendiary bombs as well as the exploding garden variety. His versatility seemed to please the deaf man immensely. Pop couldn’t have cared less either way. All he knew was that he was being hired to do a job—and as far as he could tell, the only qualification he possessed for that job was his ability to make bombs.
He could not have known, not at this stage of the game, that his second qualification was his age. Pop was sixty-three years old, and that was just young enough, just old enough; that was perfect.
“This is seven-card stud,” Rafe told him. “Deuces wild.”
“I don’t like these bastardized versions of poker,” the deaf man said. “They throw off the percentages.”
“Good,” Chuck said. “Maybe we’ll stand a chance of winning. You play poker as if you’re out to slit your mother’s throat.”
“I play poker as if I’m out to win,” the deaf man said. “Isn’t that the right way to play?”
Rafe began laughing again, his blue eyes misting behind their gold-rimmed eyeglasses. He dealt the cards, said, “King bets,” and put the deck down on the table.
“Twenty-five,” the old man said hesitantly.
“Call,” Chuck said.
“I’ll see you,” Rafe said.
The deaf man studied his cards. He was holding a six in the hole, together with a jack. His exposed card was a five. He glanced around the table quickly, and just as quickly pulled his cards together.
“I fold,” he said.
He sat just a moment longer and then rose suddenly, a tall good-looking man in his late thirties who moved with the economy and grace of a natural athlete. His hair was blond and cut close to his skull. His eyes were a dark blue. They flicked now to the street outside, through the plate-glass window of the store front and the inverted legend: