“He lost big time,” Buff says. I nod, wishing it wasn’t true. Although perhaps if other patrons of the Chance Hole are losing, that means there’s plenny of room for us to win.
I hang onto that thought as we descend the steps. There’s no smoke or voices now, as the thick door at the bottom is closed again. A man as big as a boulder with legs like tree trunks stands in front of the door, thick arms crossed over his chest.
“I ain’t seen you two before,” he says in a voice that suggests his father is a bear. Given the thickness of his beard, his mother might be a bear too.
Buff lets me do the talking after his unfortunate tongue tie up when he spoke to Lola. “You haven’t. Usually we play small time, but we’re looking to up the ante tonight.” Yah, with the all of thirty sickles we have to play with.
He looks me up and down with a crooked smile, as if he doesn’t believe for a second that we’ve got the stones to play with the high rollers. My nerve falters under his gaze, but I don’t let it show on my face. When his heavy brown eyes return to mine, he says, “Buy-in’s twenny sickles, five-sickle ante per hand, betting starts immediately.”
When he opens the door the smoke and noise hit us like a morning fog.
Chapter Four
Inside is full of snakes. Not the slivery brown rattlers you’ll find in the woods sometimes in the heart of summer, but the greasy, venom-eyed, hustling kind who work the Red District underground. There are a dozen tables and all appear to be full. The slap of cards, jingle of coins, and groans of loss or shouts of victory muddle into one stream of sound that represents one thing and one thing alone: greed.
Here is where fortunes are made and bigger fortunes are lost. Just by stepping through this door we’ve proved that we belong, certainly more than the bald-headed man with the unsteady hands who left earlier.
Through the pipe smog, I scan the crowd, laughing when a chubby guy with a lopsided smile scrapes a pile of coins from the center of a table while a hooded man slams his cards down. For every winner there’s a loser.
“Advance?” a nasally voice says from beside us.
A pointy-nosed woman sits at a desk, stacks of coins in front of her.
“Excuse me?” I say, being as polite as possible.
She lifts a hand to her curly red hair, shakes her head, rolls her eyes. Maybe we don’t belong here after all. Even she knows we’re new to this scene. Slowing her pace, she says, “Would. You. Like. An. Advance?” She motions to the coins.
Forget trying to act the part. This woman appears to be offering us money—which we desperately need—so I need to understand. Keeping my voice low, I say, “Look, you know as well as us that we’re new to…all of this.” I wave my hand across the room. “We’ve played cards plenny of times, but never in a joint like this—for high stakes. So can you please explain how it works. The advance, I mean.”
She sighs, seems to resign herself to the fact that I’m not going away without some information. “Most of our…customers…are high rollers. They play for big stakes and they don’t back down. You think they carry hundreds of sickles in their pockets? Forget about it. They come here empty handed, and we keep a tally of their balance. We can also advance you silver so long as you’re good for it. We can do up to a thousand sickles the first time, until you’ve proven you’ll pay it back. Then we can go as high as ten thousand.”
A thousand sickles? Ten thousand? I haven’t ever seen that kind of wealth in my life. “You’ll give me silver?” I say slowly.
She laughs, which comes out as nasally as her voice. “Not give—loan. Each day you don’t pay it back, the balance goes up by ten-hundredths of the amount you owe.”
Buff and I look at each other. The green of his eyes almost looks silver, as if he’s been staring so hard at the piles of coins that they’ve gotten stuck there. “What do we do?” he asks.
I shrug, trying to think. If we keep doubling our thirty sickles each time we play, we won’t really need anything else. But we could also lose it all in the first round.
I lean in, so only she’ll be able to hear me. “How far will thirty sickles get us?”
“Thirty sickles each?” she says, tapping her chin with a long, white finger.
“Uh. Thirty sickles total,” I admit.
Her nostril-heightened laugh is back. “You’re joking, right? Didn’t Ham tell you the buy-in’s twenny? You won’t both be able to play if you’ve only got thirty sicks.”
Decision time. Take the money now, or one of us has to walk out the door. Or we could both leave. But then where will we be? No money, no jobs, no pub. I steel myself and go for it. “We’ll take thirty sickles,” I say.