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By Root 310 0

with an eight ball the previous week. Fast lives were ending all around them. The concern among their own group was which one of them would be the first to crash. The Dauphin or Mancini. They saw less evidence of disaster with The Dauphin. Though he took Quaaludes regularly, the odds were with him. And he seemed preoccupied with teaching his friends about the recordings and skills of the great concert pianists, as well as how to dress, railing against slip-on loafers, tattoos, men’s cologne, the Windsor knot. He talked for hours on the proper length of the sleeve and the correct height of a collar. The greatest work of literature for The Dauphin, as far as clothes were concerned, was The Tale of Genji, and on those long drives he read the other passengers to sleep with paragraphs from Lady Murasaki. He had already lectured them on Japanese noir and the early femmes fatales. ‘You’ve not met them yet,’ he told Cooper, ‘but you will. They’ll come at you with a weakness. There is nothing more seductive to a man than a woman in distress. They’re like priests, you never give them a handicap.

Cocaine fooled The Dauphin, however, and under its influence two Baptists lured him into a game of Deuce to Seven and he lost everything. A few days later a heart attack felled him. He placed his last bet on a football game that was showing in preop, and was dead a week later. When Dorn went to identify him, the orderly pulled back the sheet and they saw the Jack of Hearts tattooed on his calf, a mistake of taste from his youth.

That left Mancini the winner. (He continued his cicada-length relationships with women and surprised everyone by eventually becoming a drug counselor in Iowa.) They gathered in his apartment at eleven the morning after The Dauphin’s death. The colour TV was on mute. There was some coverage about the buildup of the war in the Gulf, and Mancini switched channels and stopped when he found a programme with a female snake-handler wearing shorts. They watched her in silence, remembered anecdotes about The Dauphin, then got in the car and took a drive around the lake. They were more than six thousand feet above sea level and it was easy to get drunk.

They played shorthanded poker among themselves and learned new games and broke down percentages. Dorn’s first principle had always been (as in the song) that you go with ‘the one with hair down to here and plenty of money.’ In the lull after The Dauphin’s death, Cooper decided to show them how good a card mechanic he could be. He tore open a new pack, discarded the guarantee cards and jokers, cut at twenty-six and gave a series of faro shuffles, eight times in under a minute, so the deck ended in exactly the same order he started with. He confessed all this to them, even if it was something he would never use in a game, so they would trust him. ‘Watch carefully,’ he said at the start. ‘You have the fingers of a good Catholic with his rosary,’ Mancini noted. ‘Why do you do this?’

There is a great history of people being given the wrong book, at some key moment in their lives. When Coop had been scammed a few years earlier in three-card monte on the pier in San Francisco, he went to a game shop to discover how he had been cheated, and instead found a reprint of The Expert at the Card Table, published as far back as 1902. Apart from explaining the three-card-monte hustle, the book became a Pandora’s box for him. He found a subterranean world.

I thought I should discover everything that might come against me, Coop said. I found a treatise on the ‘Science and Art of Manipulating Cards.’

Well, someday you must meet The Gentile, Dorn said, and learn a few more things from him. He’s an old-time faro player. Maybe I will write you a brief letter of introduction.

A few days after The Dauphin’s funeral, they scattered. Dorn returned home to Nevada City, where Ruth, his perennial girlfriend, worked as a speech therapist. He invited Coop to join him, and they drove a winding road bordered by pines and were caught in a swirling snow until they left the mountains. Dorn changed the radio