The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [26]
Jimmy whisked cards in front of Nada and she continued to conduct the play with her hands. Kings and fives and aces appeared and disappeared. Bets were collected and paid. None of these decisions caused even a pause in her attention. “High-limit room?” She sighed. “Sounds nice.”
“It is nice. But I’d be fired if I let Canada Gold play a hand of blackjack against this casino for five thousand bucks. It’d be different if you wanted to play poker again and the house could have a piece while you took somebody else’s money. I understand you were once good at Hold ’Em.” He wanted the last bit to come off with some sort of sexy double meaning, but it didn’t.
“I was great at Texas Hold ’Em,” she said. “But I can’t even get in a cash game anymore, thanks to the rumors. You hear the one where I’m some kind of robot? Nobody wants me at their table. And tournament poker is dead. It’s all for amateurs now.”
“Isn’t amateur just another word for sucker?”
As Jimmy shuffled, Nada leaned backward, found the waitress, and ordered another drink with her eyes. “The thing that makes Hold ’Em a beautiful game, the thing that makes it a worthy test of skill, is that I know the cards inside out. And at a table of good players, I have faith that everyone else knows the cards almost as well. Every hand, I say to myself, I know that they know that I know that they know…. But at a table of amateurs, what do I know except that they don’t know shit? If I’m heads-up with a pro, by fourth street I can usually tell that he’s got one of two hands. And I figure he’s sized me up the same way. So we’re each trying to put on like we’ve got the hand we don’t, and that we think the other guy has a hand we know he doesn’t. Now that’s gambling. That’s a dance. That’s art. But an amateur might push his chips in for God knows what reason. He’ll fold the nuts because he has to take a piss. There’s no play against that. Amateurs turn poker into lotto. It’s like going hunting with blind men—somebody’s gonna shoot you eventually; you just don’t know which direction the bullet’s coming from.” She paused. “What’s going on in the high-limit room?”
Wayne said, “Rhodes is playing host to this Saudi building contractor.” Wayne had seen him in the casino before. “Hospitality calls him ‘the Concrete Sheik.’ Loves the baccarat. Saudis all think they’re Sean Connery.”
“Steve Rhodes is here tonight?”
“Yeah.”
Nada said, “What does he know about our little arrangement here?”
Wayne leaned close and whispered into the back of her ear. Her hair smelled like hotel conditioner. “He had to approve it.”
“Do you talk to him a lot?”
“I basically speak to Steve Rhodes when spoken to, which happens pretty much never.” He smiled. “Two years ago he asked me what I thought about the Rebels quarterback playing with the flu. Maybe he had a number on the game.”
Nada busted and muttered something foul. Wayne thought he must have misheard it.
“What?” He stood up.
The end of Nada’s lip turned. “A name I got called yesterday. I’ve been swearing like a ship’s whore lately. Dad would have killed me if he’d heard me talk like that.” She covered her mouth and laughed loudly, as if that joke, black as a rattlesnake hole, had really been unintentional.
“Dad would have killed me,” she had said, and now all the family details Nada had whispered into Wayne’s pillow—gory details in every sense—were suspended in the awkward silence between them. Wayne reached out and touched her on the arm, but she pulled away by polite millimeters.
During their three nights together, before and after, Nada told him many things. She told him about the operation