He had wanted to play, of course, but he had exhausted his credit earlier in the evening and neither Wes Cagle nor I would accept his marker so we let him deal the head-to-head stud game that we were playing in Cagle’s fancy office. We were playing no limit, raise-when-you-want-to poker, and we had been playing for three hours and I was nearly a thousand pounds down.
Five-card stud, when played by two persons, is often dull, relentless gambling, even when played for very high stakes. You tend to get overly reckless or overly cautious, neither of which makes for good poker. I had been too reckless earlier in the night and now I caught myself overcompensating by playing too carefully.
Cagle played like a machine, a huge six-foot-seven, 275-pound machine, some of it fat, that loomed over the green baize of the round Victorian table, dwarfing both Robin Styles and me. Cagle rode his luck when he had any. He rode it hard, too hard perhaps, and I kept waiting for the hand that he would have to ride because his skill and his luck and everything that made him a gambler would tell him that this was the hand that both of us had been waiting for all night — the hand that would bust one of us.
It was a pleasure to watch Robin Styles deal. He seemed to go with the elegant room that was Wes Cagle’s office. It was Victorian, but gracefully so, with the best that age had had to offer. Whoever had decorated it had known that mauve can be a pleasing shade, if it’s done right, and Cagle’s office was done right. He had the only inlaid roll-top desk that I had ever seen and there were chairs and a couch that curved elegantly and looked comfortable. The bric-a-brac was just that, bric-a-brac, but it went with everything else and I thought that the decorator had succeeded in accomplishing what he had set out to do: create a room in which vice might flourish. All kinds of vice.
Cagle and I were down to our shirt sleeves, but Robin Styles sat there, and dealt, looking well pressed and unrumpled, his jacket still on, but his tie loosened an inch or two to signal that he was feeling at least part of the strain. If he had fixed his tie, he would have looked as if he were all set to drop by for a noon drink at his club. Probably Guards.
He dealt effortlessly and as prettily as anyone I have ever seen. The cards flowed from his fingers, landing exactly where he wanted them to. He probably did everything well with that same effortless grace, except the one thing that he wanted to do well more than anything else. Gamble. He still gambled like a twit.
He had just dealt me the two and four of hearts. The four was my hole card. Cagle had a king showing. He bet a hundred pounds on it so I assumed that he had paired it. I called. My next card was the ace of hearts. Cagle got a jack of diamonds. Robin Styles called my hand for what it was, a possible flush. I checked to Cagle who bet another hundred. I called.
My next card was the five of hearts. Cagle was dealt another king, which gave him two up, and probably one in the hole. He bet them that way anyhow. He bet five hundred pounds.
I had a four-card flush. I ran through the odds of my landing another heart. I decided that it was worth it so I saw Cagle’s five hundred pound bet.
Robin Styles knocked the table and said, “Set?”
“Cards,” Cagle said.
Styles dealt Cagle the one-eyed jack of spades. Cagle couldn’t keep the glint out of his eyes. I didn’t blame him. He had a pair of jacks and a pair of kings showing, and probably another king in the hole. He had a full house.
Styles dealt me the trey of hearts and it stopped my heart for a second. I had the ace, deuce, trey, and five of hearts showing. In the hole I had the four of hearts. I fought back the almost overwhelming temptation to peek at it, to make sure that it was really there. But I knew it was there and I knew that I had a low straight flush and that it would beat any full house ever dealt.
I could almost sense Cagle’s mind running through the odds to see what they were against my having the four of hearts in the hole. They were astronomical. He could beat a flush with his full house. But he also knew that I would call him: that I would virtually have to call him, if I had my flush.
“Well,” he said, “what have we got here?”
“You’ve got two pair showing,” I said. “You bet.”
“So I do,” he said. “I shall bet one thousand pounds.” He shoved his chips in. They lay there and glowed a little, the way one thousand pounds will do.
I had my hands in my lap. They wanted to shake, so that’s why I had them there. “Up a thousand,” I said and used one of my hands, the least shaky one, the right, to push two thousand pounds’ worth of chips into the center of the table.
“Well,” Cagle said. “That do make it interesting.”
“You know something, Wes?” I said.
“What?”
“You don’t much talk like a Princeton man.”
“Fuck off.”
“See what I mean?”
“I’ll see your raise and bump you a thousand, St. Ives,” he said and pushed the chips into the center. I looked at the pile of chips. There should have been £6,400 there — nearly $16,000, depending on what the dollar was doing that day. It was a big pot. It was, in fact, the biggest pot I had ever been in on. I wondered whose money Cagle was playing with — his or the house. I knew whose money I was playing with — the installment loan department’s at Chase Manhattan.
“Up two thousand,” I said, “and I’ll have to write you a check.”
I think it was about then that Cagle got the message. “You son of a bitch,” he said and watched while I took a blank check from my wallet. My hands were better because I no longer cared whether he saw them shake. I wrote the check out and tossed it onto the pile of chips. Cagle shoved in the stack that would cover my raise.
“You’re just calling,” I said.
“I’m just calling.”
I turned my four of hearts over. “Straight flush,” I said.
Robin Styles gasped and Cagle’s lips moved as he silently counted up to five to make sure that I wasn’t lying. Then he turned to Styles and said, “Deal,” as I raked in the chips.
“I’m cashing in,” I said.
Cagle made no protest. Maybe he had learned his good manners at Princeton, although maybe they weren’t good manners at all, but good business practices that he had learned in Vegas. I started counting out the chips and Cagle counted with me. Robin Styles watched fascinated and I remember thinking that I had probably ruined him for life. It had been the big hand that all gamblers dream of and now that he had seen it come true, he would pursue his own vision of it forever, no matter how far down it might lead him.
When I was through counting the chips, I took something else from my wallet and flipped it at Cagle. “How about this, Wes? How much is this worth to you?”
It was the torn half of a one-eyed jack of spades that I had removed earlier from the wallet of William Wordsworth Curnutt of the broken neck. I watched Cagle carefully as he picked up the torn card, looked at the face of the knave, and then turned it over as if to see what was written on the back. The only thing written there was the reversed letters that spelled out SHIELDS, A Gambling Emporium, but they were supposed to be there, and Cagle flipped the half card back to me along with a disgusted look.
“Are you trying to be funny or something?”
“I don’t guess it was a very good joke,” I said.
“No it wasn’t. At least I didn’t understand it. Did you understand it, Styles?”
Robin Styles moved the knot in his tie up until it was firmly mounted in his collar. “Well, no, I don’t think I really understood it either,” he said.
Wes Cagle rose and stretched. He looked huge doing it. But then he was huge. “How do you want it, St. Ives, pennies, nickels, or dimes?”
“Any way at all,” I said.
Cagle nodded and moved over to the wall, swung back a painting, and started dialing the numbers of a combination safe. He looked bored, so I decided that it wasn’t his money he had been playing with. He counted out eight thick stacks of ten pound notes. “Eight thousand,” he said. He counted another smaller stack out. “Plus four hundred. Right?”