Then he opened up a drawer below the bar. Icy mist wafted out. From the drawer, he withdrew a tiny pillbox full of small blue beads shaped like teardrops. Each was about the size of a sesame seed. “These are gelatinized cobalt,” he said. “I make them with calcium alginate and three different water baths.” With an antique silver salt spoon, he drifted the spheres into the glass one by one. Tapping the last few out, he gave the glass a final, gentle nudge to swirl its contents, then handed the glass to Javier.
“Thank you,” Javier said, and raised the glass. The teardrops drifted slowly down through the sparkling suspension. “Do you carry this whole set-up with you on every cruise?”
“It comes with the suite,” Alice said. “Doesn’t yours have one?”
“I never thought to look.”
Manuel used a standard shaker to produce a dry martini for Alice. He shaved a curl of yuzu peel into it, and she and Javier raised their glasses to each other. The drink had no discernible flavour but it was delightfully cold, and quite pretty, and he liked the weight of the glass in his hand. It felt reassuringly solid and real.
“Do you play baccarat, Mr Montalban?”
He blinked. “Punto banco, or chemin de fer?”
She sniffed. “The latter, naturally. Punto banco is a game of chance. Chemin de fer is a game of choice.” She arched a pencilled eyebrow. “I thought you would appreciate a game in which there is at least a small measure of free will.”
“I do.” Javier rested a hand on the nearest chair. Opposite the piano stood floor-to-ceiling windows. Beyond the balcony there was nothing, only black. Somewhere, beneath those waves, there might be some trace of Amy and the island. Somewhere dark and cold and awful, where he’d put her because his own personal deck was stacked against him from the beginning. “But there are games, and then there games.”
Alice took a seat. Javier followed. “I made my career on poker and blackjack,” she said. “But it’s all different, now. The security measures are beyond anything I imagined, when I started out. Do you know that it was a computer vision algorithm that picked up my first stroke? It was a transient ischemic attack, one of the little ones. You scarcely even know it’s happening. One minute I was splitting on an eight, and the next there was the casino doctor.”
So he’d been right about the warfarin. She was probably still on a blood thinner of some type. “Casinos have doctors?”
She cast him a pitying glance. “The good ones do.” Her lips thinned. “Or they did. Once. Now it’s all vN.”
Javier sipped. “I thought we weren’t allowed on casino floors.”
“Not here. But these places…” she waved her hand to encompass the ship, “are no good. They’re for punters. The rake is terrible, the commission is too high, the bankroll top-up is automatic. It’s disgusting, the way they take advantage of people. Old people, especially. Do you know how many of the elderly are living on points, on these old boats? There’s free meals and free medical care. It’s cheaper than a home, these days.”
“But that’s not why you’re here.”
“Of course not. I’m here to host a tournament. They have me working in player development. Me. At my age.” She sniffed again. “This is my one night off. Two nights a week, I’m paid to hold private games here, in the suite. I take a commission. The rest of my evenings I’m supposed to be working the floor. With no advantage whatsoever. No loss rebate, no soft seventeens, nothing. It’s disgraceful.”
Javier liked this woman very much, he decided. His last woman, before Amy, was a divorcee from La Jolla named Brigid who took his twelfth iteration to a supermarket parking lot and gave him away, like he was an unwanted kitten. The boy hadn’t even chosen his own name, yet. Both Amy and Alice were significant improvements on that record.
Javier slid his hand across the table. “Given the value of your time, then, perhaps you should tell me what I can do for you.”
She smiled. “You’re right off the bat, aren’t you? All right, then.” She sipped, and then pushed her drink away, half-finished. “After this I’m going to Atlantic City. There’s a baccarat tournament, there. Three nights, three styles of game: punto banco, chemin de fer, and banque. Tie-bet only; nine-to-one odds. And the banker is a vN from Mecha. His name is Taft. He has corporate sponsorship. The bankroll is likely infinite.”
Javier watched her eyes. She wore bright green contacts, possibly to obscure the dilation of her pupils. It would be a good affectation to cultivate, in her profession. Even now, he could not read her feelings. She looked completely calm, a consummate professional brokering a deal.
He reached for her hand anyway. “Please don’t do that.”
She withdrew her hand. “I have to. And you’re going to help me. I need to log as many hours as I can playing against a vN.”
“You’ll still lose, no matter how much I help you.”
“Perhaps.”
He decided to take another strategy. “If I win the majority of hands, will you at least consider leaving the tournament?”
She gave him a tiny smile and patted his hand, as though humouring a child. “Of course. But you have to prove to me that a vN can play perfect cards with every hand.”