It was dark and smoky in the American bar in a forgotten part of Berlin as Michael North counted up the red, white and blue chips on the green baize. There were a lot less than when he’d started. And he had a dim memory that some of the best ones used to be black.
He couldn’t recall how much cash he’d come out with. Maybe 1,500 euros? Not to mention the five grand of credit and the Rolex GMT-Master II watch he’d lost. His head was wrecked. That last whisky was a mistake, he’d known it even as he tipped the shot glass and it poured like lava down his parched throat. He narrowed his eyes to peek at his two hole cards laid face down on the table – two eights, all blurred hearts and diamonds. A pair – that was good, he reminded himself. With some effort, he refocused his gaze to fix it on the face-up community cards in the centre of the table – the seven of clubs, two of spades, queen of hearts and eight of spades. He did the sums – he had three eights, which meant he had three of a kind, with one card still to come.
There was a rapping. He felt it rising through the baize, rather than hearing it.
‘The action’s on you, Engländer,’ Erich said. When he had a good hand, Pockmarked Erich grew impatient to play and twisted the end of his moustache so hard it had to hurt. He was twisting now, spiralling the coarse blond hairs round the tip of his finger at the corner of his fleshy wet mouth.
The bullet North took to the brain on active service in Afghanistan nearly six years ago was still in there, lodged close by the posterior parietal artery in the right temporo-parietal junction. The injury should have killed him; instead the bullet had rewired his neural pathways and heightened his intuition. Since losing the woman he’d loved though, nothing felt the same and the intuition which had once been so powerful was silent. Had the bullet moved? Had his rage and then his desperate grief tipped the balance in his fragile brain all over again? He didn’t know and he didn’t care. She was gone and he was less than he had been – it seemed only fitting.
But not even he could ignore the greedy expectation in Erich’s tone of voice. And there had to be a reason for it.
The adrenaline spike hit hard. One second he was drunk. The next, sober. The sound of a slot machine paying out coin by coin, the chink of glass against the tap of a beer pump, laughter and snatches of booze-oiled conversation. The complex geometric pattern on the backs of the cards, the open pores and wrinkles of his fellow players, and the green hair of the girl at the bar, all ratcheting into pin-sharp focus.
North sat up straighter, his chair scraping against the wooden boards, and that’s when he saw it. The sideways glance between Erich and the tattooed dealer next to him who had folded on the flop.
The body of the German eagle covered the dealer’s bulbous nose, its head and sharp beak centred over his sloping forehead, while feathered wings stretched out over each pustulant cheek. The eagle was bad enough. Worse yet were the grinning skulls sporting military helmets that decorated the back of the dealer’s bald head, the words Ausländer Raus and the zombified Nazi goose-stepping up his arm. North had called him Birdie from the off and the guy hadn’t complained. Doubtless he’d been called worse.
There it was again.
A nanosecond at most, but a glance nonetheless.
They didn’t look like friends. In an expensively cut dark grey flannel suit, Erich appeared every inch a successful businessman – perhaps something in finance – while Birdie reeked of three-day-old sweat. The two men hadn’t spoken as they sat next to each other at the table. In fact, they’d been careful to keep their eyes ahead, or on their cards, or on him. Till now.
They had rigged the game, North realized with a white-hot surge of anger. He nudged away the whisky that had appeared close by without him asking for it.
And what about the others? Klara with the seaweed hair and the diamond stud in her button nose. Way too luscious for a joint like this. The American bar had been her idea – she needed to leave a message with the bartender for her brother. Erich was ‘a good guy’ she knew ‘from way back’. A game of No-Limit Texas Hold’em? Klara didn’t mind. Sure, Liebchen. No-problem. Still happy to be there and it had to be four in the morning.
She gave him a thumbs up as she sucked at her petrol-blue drink through a corkscrew straw. Her long legs in the impossibly short skirt dangling, slightly apart. Everything on display. Under the harsh lights of the bar and from a distance, she looked older. Colder. Nothing like the postgrad art student she was supposed to be. She’d roped him into the game and she’d slip away on those perfect pony legs the moment he lost everything there was to lose.
What the crooks he was playing against didn’t know was that North had lost everything there was to lose three months ago. The rest? That was only money. He fished a fly out of his whisky. The fly was dead. But all God’s creatures deserved a chance of resurrection, didn’t they? Well, maybe not everyone. Not those responsible for the murder of the woman he’d loved. Members of the extra-governmental agency known as the Board. A conspiracy of the powerful that had once employed him as their agent, and an organization his lover had tried and failed to expose. Over the month that followed, without remorse or mercy, he had killed the men who’d ordered her assassination, and there was no coming back for them. Because Michael North never claimed to be the forgiving kind. Doubtless the Board would recover in time, but that day wasn’t today and it wouldn’t be tomorrow. He’d wreaked vengeance upon their heads and then caught a flight to Berlin to anaesthetize himself with whisky, white powder and cheap sex. Since then, he existed. He didn’t think and he didn’t feel. Which is how he’d washed up in a dive like this, easy pickings for the local lowlifes.
So yes, he had been stupid and he deserved to lose.
‘Check,’ he said – no bet. It made sense. He had a strong hand – perhaps he was playing it cool? No one else bet either. And then – all too soon – it was on him again.
‘So, Engländer?’ Birdie’s eyes were greedy as they peered out from the inked-on feathers. Impatient for North to notice that the river card was the two of hearts. Impatient for him to work out that all of a sudden he had a full house – three eights and a pair of twos. They expected him to bet it all now.
As if the booze had slowed his thinking, North took a breath, looking over at two of the other players. An elderly black pastor in a shabby jacket and a dog collar, and an anxious postman with jug ears.
The pastor had taken a hit tonight, but then again, maybe he’d cut out his dog collar from a washing-up-liquid bottle and he was in on it? Because now North considered the matter, why would a respectable black pastor sit down to play cards with a neo-Nazi, and why would a neo-Nazi let him? The pastor’s eyes met those of Birdie. The pastor kept his face still, but the right side of Birdie’s mouth tugged up a fraction. Not the scorn of a racist. But the complicity of a confederate.
North struggled to believe he had been so stupid. And the postman?
Beads of sweat dripped from the postman’s forehead as his skinny hand clutched at a balled-up serviette, trying to wipe away the worst of it. The postman was as much a sucker as North was – too anxious to be a cheat, too nervy and altogether too miserable, because no one was that good an actor.
But how had the others rigged the game? He’d noticed nothing untoward earlier, though the whisky and the half a Quaalude he’d taken an hour ago wouldn’t put a razor finish on his observational powers.
North knew how to cheat. From his time in detention as a kid, he knew that a marked deck normally focused a cheat’s attention on the back of the cards being dealt or fanned out in the hands of his opponents. North thought he would have picked up on that. Would have noticed any bottom dealing or palming of aces, would have noticed too the lifted thumb indicating ‘raise now’, the carefully placed index finger indicating what card the player wanted. Thought he would have caught the holding of cards around the person, tucked under the knee or slid into a pocket or under a thigh.
Which meant they’d stacked the deck.
Swapping it in when micro-skirted Klara wandered over with a tray of drinks, which she had put down by Erich, who had slapped her denim rump and she’d squealed loud enough to break a window. Squealed loud enough to distract North from the switch.
He looked across at her again, and she blew him a kiss, her pout coral and sticky. It made him feel sick.
He should toss the cards and walk away, write off the money and pay his debts – he had more money than he knew what to do with and he could always buy a new watch. He realized his foot was bouncing up and down and stilled it. He regarded the two cards in his hand and the five on the table. The only way to beat a full house was with a higher full house, four of a kind, a straight flush or a royal flush.
Walking away was the smart thing to do.
But he was curious to see it play out.
‘All in, mate,’ he said, pushing across the rest of his chips.
Under the tattoos, Birdie was sharper than Erich, busy chewing at his moustache with his lower teeth. Some lizard part of his brain sensed the shift in North, the sudden alertness. But he wasn’t one for changing plans. And even if he was, how could he alert his colleagues?
The postman had lost almost as heavily as North, his sparse brows drawing together as the pots came and went. So they’d have given him enough to bring him out to play. North imagined two pairs – nothing too extravagant, but enough to keep him interested. He was trying to unscrew the wedding ring on his finger and ease it past the bulging joints. And good enough, when hope and the wedding ring were all he had left. Panic and regret passed over the postman’s face even as he tossed the gold ring towards the pot. It gleamed for a second in the artificial light, spinning in the smoke-wreathed air, before landing askew on top of the plastic chips.
‘Guys, not the man’s wedding ring,’ North said to the table, his arms open. ‘He has to go home to his wife.’
‘Das ist nett von dir. Wie sagt man… That’s good of you, friend,’ the postman said, allowing himself a rictus smile. ‘But my wife is dead of cancer these three years.’ The bloodshot eyes were wild with the loss of the ring or his wife or both. ‘She was a terrible cook. But it’s true what they say. You never know what you have until it’s gone, eh?’
North reached into the pot for the ring, before rolling it back towards the postman. ‘Then it sounds like you need this more than these schmucks.’
‘Hey.’ The neo-Nazi reached over, his beefy hand slamming against the table, trapping the ring underneath it and scattering the chips around him. ‘She’s dead, didn’t you hear the man? The ring stays in the pot. House rules.’ Birdie’s breath was rancid.
‘I have rules too, my Nazi pal,’ North said as the bar grew quiet. ‘No rings in the pot and no scum at the table. We all know who’s about to win here. And it isn’t Postman Pat and it isn’t me.’ He flipped over Erich’s cards to reveal a pair of twos. With a two on the flop and another on the river, that made four of a kind.
Chairs scraped as Birdie and Erich leapt to their feet, the ring bouncing across the table. North took a step to one side, making sure he kept the pastor in his peripheral vision. He was old, sure enough, probably there to make up the numbers, encourage the stakes to go higher, but he might have a knife.
‘Take the ring, mate.’
The postman’s hand was trembling as he reached for it. For a second he hesitated – tempted by the dollars and the thought of the money he’d lost, by the game he could get into the next night if he reclaimed his stake. ‘Take it to remember her.’
Decision made, the postman grabbed the ring, reaching for the puffer jacket hanging on the back of his chair in the same move, before half running for the exit. North wondered if he’d call the police. Punch in the number on his mobile. Maybe he’d do that much for North, but not until he’d stopped running. And by then it would be too late.