at the door. In response to Meurdon’s invitation, the waiter came in again, carrying Canny’s neatly-sorted chips in a plastic tray. Although Canny hadn’t asked for them to be removed from the table, he accepted them graciously and returned a ten Euro chip by way of a gratuity. The seat would still be his if he wanted it, but now that he had the chips he wasn’t sure that he did. Poker demanded too much concentration and he had been playing badly even before the news came through. It was time to change to a mindless game of chance.
“Trois milles deux cents quatre-vingts, Monsieur,” the waiter reported as he backed away. The information was presumably intended for Meurdon rather than Canny, although it was difficult to be sure.
As the door closed again, Canny said to the manager: “Don’t worry, Henri. I was playing poker—it’s not your money I’ve won.”
“I know that, Monsieur,” Meurdon said. “It is of no consequence—if you placed it all on your favorite number at the roulette wheel, and won, I would be happy to lose the money.”
Canny laughed. “Is that a dare?” he said. “I won’t be back for a while, you know. I have responsibilities now. This was always going to be my last fling—although I’d hoped to spin it out for a few more weeks, if not months.”
Meurdon shook his head. “No, Monsieur Kilcannon,” he said, smoothly. “It is not a dare. I spoke the simple truth; you do me a better turn when you win than you would if you were to lose—which is perhaps as well, considering the amount you have won over the years.”
Canny frowned. He knew about the screen-filled room on the upper floor where Meurdon and his security staff could keep watch on every bet laid in every game, and he didn’t suppose for a moment that the manager had been using his computer to surf the web when he came in to take the call, but it still worried him a little to think that the casino might have a record of all his visits, and all his victories. When he played poker the house took its cut in seating fees and the flow of cash was utterly irrelevant, but when he played chemin de fer or roulette he played against the house—and Meurdon’s house percentage was, in the long term, less powerful than his own.
“I’ve never had a spectacular win,” Canny said, half-apologetically. “I’ve been very lucky—but I always bet modestly, compared with your more flamboyant clients, and any profits I’ve made must have been similarly modest.”
“I know about your modesty,” Meurdon told him, with a slight smile. “Which makes the consistency of your good fortune even more remarkable. I had you under observation for a while, when you played chemin de fer, in case you were a card counter. When I discovered that you were not, I was pleased.”
Canny raised an eyebrow, but only slightly, He’d never realized that he was under surveillance, but it didn’t surprise him. That, after all, was what the cameras in the hall and the screens in the upper room were for. “How did you convince yourself that I wasn’t?” he asked.
“Your betting pattern,” Meurdon told him. “Counters patiently place minimum stakes for hours on end, until they are convinced that the cards in the shoe are biased in their favor—then they begin betting far more heavily. You play your cards as you see fit, whether the shoe has been recently replenished or not, varying your stake in an entirely casual manner. If that were not proof enough, I’ve observed that the ratio of your stakes to returns is exactly the same at chemin de fer, poker and—most remarkably of all—roulette. I don’t suppose, given that you might not be favoring us with your custom again, that you’d care to explain how you do it?”
Canny’s surprise was magnified, but he felt no alarm. The atmosphere in the room hadn’t darkened, and there was no nausea gathering in his stomach. He was not under threat from Henri Meurdon.
On the other hand, he thought, it was one thing for Meurdon to interrogate the record of chips he’d bought and cashed in order to check that he wasn’t counting cards; it was quite another to take the trouble to have all his betting patterns analyzed and compared. Meurdon’s question was, however, the kind of challenge that he was always prepared to meet.
He laughed. “Well, you seem to know more about that than I do,” he said. “Entirely casual, you said—and that about sums it up. I’ve always been lucky. Yorkshire folk have called us the lucky Kilcannons since time immemorial, so I guess it runs in the family—except that poor Daddy’s contest with the crab doesn’t seem to have worked out so well. These things always even out in the long run, isn’t that what they say?”
“They do say that,” Meurdon admitted, “but all experience of life suggests otherwise. Even the so-called laws of probability, if properly interpreted, suggest that there are always winners and losers in the long run, and that breaking even is no less a statistical freak than any other result. The trick is to make sure that one ends up with the winners rather than the losers. I have the house percentage to make sure that the casino achieves that objective—but you have something more precious, I think. That is why I say that you do better for me when you win than if you were to lose.”
For a moment or two Canny was frightened by the reference to something more precious, but then he realized that it was only a turn of phrase, connected with the latter part of the sentence.
“Pour encourager les autres,” he murmured, with a wry smile. “I’m sorry that I haven’t been a better ad, then. I fear that I’ve been a little too unobtrusive to persuade your richer clients to plunge more heavily.”
“You have been a far better advertisement than you know, Monsieur,” Meurdon said—and Canny knew, now, that he was not merely being polite. “One might almost say that you are the ideal advertisement. You are not as good-looking as your friend the football player, let alone the movie stars who honor us with their occasional presence. You are not even as well-dressed, although I would not dream of criticizing your sense of style—but you have something more valuable to me than looks or clothes: your savoir faire. You do not bet ostentatiously, but you do bet casually. You bet lightly, as if betting were as natural as breathing, and you always expect to win...which is not unnatural, given that you usually do. Whenever you lose, you smile, as if you know perfectly well that the reverse is temporary. Whenever you win, you do so gracefully, as if it were your entitlement. Can you understand what a role model like that is worth to me, Monsieur Kilcannon?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it,” Canny admitted. “It never occurred to me that people might watch me when there are so many colorful people around.”
“People watch one another in different ways, Monsieur. Yes, everyone watches the sheikhs, the businessmen, the musicians and the sportsmen—but they watch them from afar, regarding them as specimens in the world of celebrity. No one ever thinks: I shall bet like that in order to be like that. They compete among themselves, of course, but what you would probably call the casino’s bread and butter comes from the tourists who each have much less money to spend but are multitudinous in their numbers. They do look at you, Monsieur Kilcannon, and they think: That is the way it is done; that is the way a man should bet, the attitude a true gambler should strike. Yours is an attainable model, a copiable performance—in every respect but one. Unlike you, they lose. Not all of them, but more than enough, and always if they come back often enough. In order to sustain the kind of hope I need them to bring to my tables, I need authentic, consistent winners—and they are much harder to come by than you might suppose. In the bad old days, of course, we pretended, but the regulations are much tighter now and the employment of shills is strictly forbidden. We have reason to be grateful that there are genuinely lucky men around, and I shall be truly sorry not to see you again.”
“I’ll be sorry too,” Canny said, softly—although any intention he might have had to return, once the estate was sorted out and the businesses were
