A pause as he exhales slowly, facial muscles twitching. “Yes,” he says.
The room gasps—actually gasps out loud—when I turn over the jack of clubs. I jump as Emil’s hands shoot into the air, thinking he’s about to hit me, but he spins around as he throws out a long string of curses that are met with laughter from the rest of the room.
He’s pointing at me and screaming angrily to the Boss in Czech, appealing his case, I suppose, arguing I cheated or that it wasn’t fair. He’s right, of course, but it’s not like I didn’t tell them I would cheat. Only this time, the Boss had been my shill, showing the crowd how easy the game was until the real mark stepped forward.
The Boss stares him down. “Are we not cestny lidé? Men of honor and sport?” he shouts, not just to Emil but to everyone in the room.
Sheepish nods all around. The Boss pulls a cigarette from a pack on his desk and lights it. He exhales thoughtfully. “Take your money, Sofia. You have won and are free to leave.”
Emil paces back and forth, eyes drilling into me with hate. God knows what he would have done to me had he won. God knows what he still might to do to me.
I step forward and pick up the roll of money. It feels hefty and wonderful in my hands. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much cash together in one place. “What’s your usual cut?” I say to the Boss.
“My cut?”
“The money you get from each game that goes on in Praha 1?”
“Thirty percent.”
I peel off nine hundred euros and set it on the desk. “I want to work for you,” I say.
The Boss arches his eyebrows, and I hear a few snickers from the crew. “As you see, we are men only here,” he says.
“I just made you nine hundred euros in less than a minute.”
The Boss inhales deeply, and his nostrils flare. There’s a long pause as he considers and looks around the room, taking its temperature. Then he smiles the contrarian’s smile and shrugs. “Why the fuck not?”
*
At nine o’clock the next morning, the casino is closed to customers and is strictly employees-only. It’ll open again in the afternoon, but for now the tracksuited crew is gathered in the bar, sneakers propped up on stools upholstered in expensive green leather, crumbs from their breakfast of bread and cheese and salami dropping to the plush carpet. Their conversations shut down as I walk in, and heads turn to follow my progress across the room. A thin boy, cleaning a disassembled pistol with a wire brush, arches his eyebrows when he sees me and shakes his head. This place is going to shit.
Beran the Boss—in daytime dress of jeans and a white dress shirt open to the middle of his chest—stands behind the bar drinking mineral water from a bottle in between bites of sausage and sauerkraut. He smiles when he sees me, as if he’s surprised I showed up.
“Come with me,” Beran says, and I follow him down the corridor to his office. He shows me to a chair, and I sit primly, back straight, hands folded in my lap.
Beran opens a metal cabinet in the back of the room and takes out a long dry-cleaning bag on a hanger. “I will need your passport,” he says.
I produce it for him and set it on the desk.
“Take any drugs?” he says. “Heroin, methamphetamine?”
“None.”
“Truly? Not even a little marijuana now and then?”
“Marijuana when I was young. No longer.”
He drapes the dry-cleaning bag over the desk. “Undress.”
“Excuse me?”
“Undress. Take your clothing off.”
I knew in my heart it would come to this. I was willing to fuck Christian, so why not Beran the Boss? You don’t battle and weasel and scrape your way across Europe’s sewers and come out a virgin on the other end.
My jacket and shirt fall to the floor, and I try not to tremble. My pants join them a moment later. Beran looks up and eyes me with detachment.
Don’t be weak, I say to myself. The end justifies the means. I reach around my back to the bra clasp and am about to open it.
“Enough,” Beran says. “Hold out your arms.”
Like a doctor, he takes my hands and twists them, scanning me from wrist to shoulder. “You’re clean,” he says, a hint of surprise in his voice. “You will pardon my rudeness, but I needed to check you for needle marks or wires. I do not permit addicts to work for me. Or informants.”
He holds up the dry-cleaning bag by its hanger and strips away the plastic. It’s some sort of uniform: white shirt, embroidered maroon vest, short maroon skirt, a little maroon bow tie. “Please,” he says. “Put it on.”
My hands shake with relief as I climb into the clothes, but I have no idea what this uniform is all about. There’s no mirror, but I’m certain I look ridiculous. “Is this a waitress uniform, sir?” I say.
“You are to be a dealer, Sofia. Here in the casino. Blackjack. Poker. Baccarat.”
“But I don’t know any of these games,” I say.
“You can count, and I’ve seen you handle a deck of cards. That puts you above most of the others already.”
“I thought I could work—”
“With the boys? Emil and Libor?” He shakes his head. “Out of the question. I would have a rebellion on my hands. The only women here work in the casino.”
A word of gratitude seems required, so I thank him for the job, even though this isn’t at all what I had in mind.
“It is nothing,” he says warmly. “I hire only talented people from the streets. Smart people who are, what’s the English word, like children without parents?”
I search my memory. “Orphans?”
“Orphans. Just so,” the Boss says, opening the office door for me. “People who won’t be missed.”
*
My name tag says Sofia, and the uniform is too tight—made that way on purpose, the other girls tell me, to cup the buttocks and breasts just the right way and to prevent us from hiding casino chips inside baggy clothes.
My teacher, a fellow dealer named Rozsa, throws down three cards: queen of diamonds, eight of spades, seven of clubs.
“Twenty-five,” I say instantly, then repeat the number in Russian, German, and Czech, the rudiments of which Rozsa is teaching me as we go. The Czech language, it turns out, is similar enough to Russian that I have no trouble getting a handle on the basics like numbers.
Rozsa is tiny, with pale skin and black hair cut into a bell-shaped bob. She reminds me of a darker, rougher version of Tinker Bell. She throws down three more cards: jack of hearts, ace of spades, and two of diamonds.
“Twenty-three or thirteen,” I say. The ace can mean either a one or an eleven, whichever is more advantageous.
We run the counting drill again and again until Rozsa is satisfied. “You’re a natural, Sofia,” she says in crisp English, sweeping the cards together with an elegant flick of her wrist. “Now, what do we do about your face?”
“My face?” I say.
“Yes. With that hair and no makeup, you look like a boy with tits. Come.”
She leads me to the bathroom and spreads the contents of her purse on the counter. “This,” she says, holding up a tube of lipstick. “Do you know what it is?”
“Of course,” I say.