Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves(12)
Not breaking his stride, he eyed her askance. “No, I am not going to panhandle,” he said, as if attempting to divine her thoughts. His expression was indignant. “The gentlemen at the Hotel Adlon Kempinski would peer down their monocles at me and have the concierge toss me out.”
“They play cards, do they not – those gents?”
He halted beneath the corner street lamp and stared her down. “So, that is your point? A confidence card game? First, I would have to have a stake – you know, money. Second, I would have to win. And third – ”
“And third, ye have to look presentable. Ye are looking a little rough for the Kempinski.” She reached up and grabbed his tie and began straightening it. “And second, ye will win, because I will be helping ye cheat. And first, we pawn that expensive watch of yuirs for the stake.”
She could feel his heavy regard. “What?” she asked.
“Only that your criminal mind is amazing.”
She had the feeling – Fate whispering at her skull’s base – that was not what he had been about to say. “Not a criminal mind. Just survival skills, Gunter. I want half of yuir spoils.”
“Pardon me.” He swept a deep bow, but his tone was spiked with sarcasm. “I underestimate your resourcefulness.”
§ § §
That resourcefulness plus Gideon’s legal fame and his fluency of lip homage got a good bargain on his pawned Meisterstück, got him past Kempinski’s concierge, and got him to the gaming table in the private and lavish suite of Peter von Braun.
A great pastime for the idle rich, the white-knuckled card game of Loo was beginning to fade in popularity but was still a favorite among highborn gamblers throughout Europe. Von Braun’s uncle, a landed aristocrat, had been a Prussian baron.
Like any other game, the object was to take the most tricks. But this was unlimited Loo. A looed player who took no tricks had to toss double the amount into the current pot, meaning that player lost more than his initial wager. Fortunes were won and lost in the flick of a single card.
Before the all-night game of Loo, beginning at ten o’clock that evening, he and the exasperating girl had spent three too-short hours at the beer garden going over her tricks of the trade with a ratty deck of Bicycle playing cards that had been left, along with a cheap chess board provided by the beer hall, on one of the outdoor tables.
She had instructed him, when his turn to deal came, to call for Irish Loo, which dealt out only three cards apiece, making it easier for his unskilled fingers to palm a card. More importantly, the dealer kept control of the deck – and she taught him how to palm the crimped trump, the Jack of Clubs. Known as the Pam, it was higher even than the Ace of Spades.
Not that he could do it all that well. “Ye’re like a grasshopper on hot dirt,” she had told him back at the pebble-strewn biergarten. “Yuir fingers should palm the card smoothly. Like tracing a lover’s lip.”
That remark had got him to wondering about her. She was young. She was sharp. Winsome, if he stretched his imagination. And virginal. Gypsy and virginal certainly didn’t pair up. Yet he’d stake his last marks, which was about all he had left to his name now, that she was, indeed, as pure as Alpine snow.
“It’s all in card control,” she explained to him with an earnestness that equaled Prime Minister Chamberlain’s effort to appease Hitler with the Munich Agreement. “The pinkie and base of the thumb cradle the Pam beneath the palm – with the fingertips together so there are no spaces showing the card. Under the guise of riffling through the bridge, ye joggle the packet, so that ye crimp the Knave.”
She made it look easy enough, as time after time she dexterously but slow-motioned shuffled the deck and palmed the Jack of Clubs. But it was a matter of muscle memory and flexibility that lacked sufficient practice in such a short time for him to convert into an unchallengeable win at von Braun’s private table in his penthouse suite.
Gideon had pause to mull over exactly what it was he wanted. He was faced with an imminent choice: eventual return to his old life and impending systematic eradication of all European Jewry at the hands of the Nazis – or immigrate to the U.S. through Mexico via an undercover, uncertain, and illegal project known as Operation Texas.
Clearly, his choice was a cake walk. But what did he want?
The girl was to wait for him in the lobby below, idly perusing a newspaper to foil the house detectives. As if she could even read. At the sight of her, his eyes had lifted upward to the hotel’s high ornate ceiling. Deftly, he had removed the reversed newspaper from her clasp. “Your ignorance is abominable.”
“Yuir arrogance is no less so.” Then, her gaming smile. “May ye be lucky.”
With that reassurance, he had taken the lift to von Braun’s suite, where Gideon would either ultimately rejoice in his brilliant success or confront an SS firing squad.
Cigar smoke wreathed the room. Three other players were present – Gasquet, a Frenchman; Reinholdt, the German Assistant Minister of Finance; and the balding Heinz Auerswald, a prominent, attorney.
When Gideon’s time came to control the deck, sweat beaded his temples and upper lip and, worse, dampened his palms. As he went through the false shuffle, he could feel his damaged muscle twitch along the scar that scythed his left cheek. Everything he had left, including his own life, was in the pool.