"Two guesses," said Louis spitefully. "For sixty-four thousand dollars."
The Professor ignored him. "Thank you, my dear. You're very kind. If I may—a small Scotch and water?"
Kathy busied herself at the side-table, while silence and calm returned to the room, broken only by the hum of traffic far below on Fifth Avenue. Carl found that he did not mind these small evidences of discord. The five of them had to work together as a team, but they did not have to love each other; their voyage of piracy could well Profit from an injection of competitive ill-humour. There might come to be smaller cliques within their circle, but it would be as well if these did not flourish unduly. The only natural partners were himself and Kathy; the rest were mere allies—useful, indeed essential, but never to gain strength enough to challenge his leadership.
"Well, let's settle down," he said presently, when the Professor had his drink and a sandwich comfortably close at hand, and Kathy had returned to her chair. "We've got a lot of things to talk about, and this is the first time we've all met together in one room, though of course we've talked or telephoned individually. . . . First, the tickets. Are we all set there, Professor?"
The Professor nodded slowly and wisely, as if anything else were out of the question. Then he patted his breast pocket.
"I have everything here. The tickets, the passports, the passenger-list, the itinerary, and the cabin-plan."
"Did we get the accommodation we applied for?"
The Professor nodded again. "Yes, exactly. Five single cabins and a stateroom. Four of the cabins are on 'A' deck, and the fifth— presumably mine—is one deck below."
"What was the total bill?"
"Twenty-six thousand dollars and forty-two cents," answered the Professor precisely. "At par in the city of New York."
Diane Loring was the first to react, with a low whistle of surprise.
"Twenty-six—gee!" she exclaimed. "It's like the national debt!"
"We're in the wrong business," said Louis sarcastically.
Carl shook his head. "On the contrary, we're in exactly the right business," he answered, with firmness. "I told you this was going to be a big operation, and that initial bill for twenty-six thousand dollars is a good illustration of it. Of course it's a huge outlay, but think of the stakes! They call this a millionaire's cruise, as you know; whether that's true or not, the label has stuck and the label means plenty. It means that there will be about one hundred and fifty men on board whose annual income must total at least fifteen million dollars. It means there'll be women—rich widows with nothing to do but stare out of the window, divorcees who have so much money that even their psycho-analysts can't think up ways of spending it fast enough. There'll be jewellery by the sack-load! There'll be wives looking for off-beat romance, and husbands looking for anything—anything but their wives. And we're going to live with these people, mix with them, relax with them when they're in a spending mood, for three months at a stretch. Personally, I shall be very disappointed if I haven't made the cost of my round-trip ticket by the time we reach Martinique, and I hope the rest of you have the same kind of luck."
"What's your angle, chief?" asked Scapelli, in a subdued, almost impressed voice.
"Poker."
Hearing him utter the single, loaded word, Kathy nearly laughed aloud. But it would have been a loving laugh, a shared joke. Carl had spoken the word "poker" just as he felt about the game itself—as something special and significant, as a habit of life rather than a game of chance. For him, it contained everything because it demanded everything; skill, nerve, knowledge of human strengths and human weaknesses, mental endurance, and above all luck. . . . She had once watched him play for fourteen straight hours, for stakes which he could not afford to lose, with men as tough, cunning, and fundamentally ruthless as himself. The game had started at eight in the evening, in a San Francisco hotel room; by midnight he had lost eighteen thousand dollars, at dawn he had been level, at ten o'clock of a crisp September morning he had pushed his winnings above the thirty thousand mark. What had impressed her especially was the fact that, on the last hand, after all the nervous ordeal of the night, he had given as much attention to squeezing out two other players for a pot worth twenty-seven dollars, as he had done six hours earlier when a monumental bluff had earned him a hundred times that amount, on cards which, seen from any angle, were still utterly worthless.
For him it was the great game. She could even feel jealous of it; there had been very few times during their life together, and those only at the beginning, when it was beyond doubt that he would rather make love to her than cut the pack for a fresh round of seven-card stud. But now, at this moment, she did not feel jealous. She even felt relieved. If Carl were going to concentrate on poker during their cruise, at least he was not going to operate in another well-qualified area which, taking him from her bed, would land him squarely and permanently in someone else's.
She let him know this by saying, almost in a whisper:
"That's a very good choice, Carl."
He turned to smile at her, completely understanding, before he said:
"I hope it will prove so. . . . Mind you, I'm under no illusions as to the competition. To make it worth while, I shall have to be playing with men who treat the game as I treat it—seriously. Of course, it be suckers on board, but they won't all be suckers. And that's something I want all of you to remember, all the time. Basically, such men are not fools. They are rich only because they have outsmarted other men, at whatever game they've chosen. And they have a life-long preference for hanging on to what they have won. If we are going to separate anyone, man or woman, from their bankroll, we can't afford to underrate them, even though they may seem half-asleep or stupid. Stupid men have moments of perception; stupid women have intuition. They also have lawyers and policemen. Don't ever forget that."
There was another silence, reflective, rather foreboding, as if they were now moving nearer to some testing area, and then Diane Loring broke in again.
"How's it going to work, Carl?"
"Well, now. . . ." Carl, leaning back in his chair, looked round the room. He had the attention of all of them except the Professor who, after his precise enunciation of the figures, seemed to have succumbed to the effort and nodded off into a doze. It did not matter; the old man's tasks were simpler than anyone else's; he did not need a detailed picture, he only needed encouragement. . . . "You all know why we are making this trip: to take our fellow-passengers for every cent that the traffic will bear." Carl's voice had changed now, Kathy noticed; it was no longer free and easy, it had overtones of that ingrained contempt which made him the man he was. "But everything we do is going to be practically legal. We will give people what they want—give them good measure, too—but we'll make them pay a great deal extra for it. Kathy and Diane are really the spearhead of the operation—" he smiled, not amusedly, "—our front-line nylon pirates. They will supply romance—" Carl put a grotesque inflexion on the word, so that it sounded coarsely obscene, "—which can prove extremely expensive, particularly when there is, by coincidence, a very real chance of discovery. Few married men will argue with a girl who suddenly develops scruples, who might complain to someone in her family who is in the very next cabin, who might even call for help. . . . "He said he wanted to show me his exposure-meter,'" he mimicked, with ferocious sarcasm, "and now—look!' There are a number of variations on the same theme. I'll be glad to supply ideas, if you should ever run out of them."
Both girls were smiling as Carl paused; his mimicry of outraged virtue had been horribly accurate. But Scapelli, seemingly deprived of a leading role, was less amused.