Читать книгу Streaking - Brian Stableford - Страница 4

CHAPTER TWO

As soon as Canny stepped back into the larger room he felt the change in its atmosphere. The atmosphere really was subtly different, of course, because the air in the gaming arena was more carefully maintained—against much greater challenges—than the air in Meurdon’s office, but in Canny’s estimation the potential with which it was charged went beyond any mere mechanical conditioning. It was pregnant with possibility.

According to the family records—legends, as Canny had always defiantly thought of them—the Kilcannon luck always sank to a low ebb whenever the patriarch died, and remained at a low ebb until it was dutifully renewed, but Lord Credesdale wasn’t dead yet, and while he was still ailing Canny’s share of the family fortune might actually increase, as if it were flowing out of the old man’s decaying husk into his still-vibrant flesh. The time was ripe for a coup—if he wanted to bring off a coup.

In a way, he did. But in another way, he didn’t.

He did because he knew that this would be his farewell to the playboy lifestyle. He might recover some of the threads, but it would never be the same even if he did, because he wouldn’t be the same. Once Daddy was dead, he’d be the Earl of Credesdale—no longer a son fighting for scraps of his a fortune that really belonged to his father, but his own man, in control of his own destiny. He would never again be the person he was now, and he couldn’t deny a certain urge to celebrate that conclusion.

On the other hand, he had just been informed that other eyes were following his luck, not merely watching it but weighing it, not merely marveling at it but wondering what could possibly sustain it. In circumstances like that, scoring a spectacular win might qualify as an extremely undiplomatic thing to do, perhaps a stupid thing to do.

His father would have been horrified by the fact that he was even thinking about it—but Canny wasn’t sure whether that qualified as an argument against or an argument for.

What the hell, he thought, eventually. He was daring me, wasn’t he?

The potential seemed to hang most heavily of all above the roulette table, and it drew him with smooth efficiency while he put up no resistance. Stevie Larkin, the English football player Meurdon had referred to as Canny’s “friend” was one of three team-mates playing the roulette wheel. They were sitting to the croupier’s right, directly across from a trio of models, one of whom was said—if only by the tabloids—to be one of the ten most beautiful women in the world. Although the club the footballers played for was Italian, the other two were Croatian and Algerian; at the top level, the sport was a perfect model of twentieth-century globalization.

Canny had been casually acquainted with Stevie Larkin for a couple of years, because the footballer had sought his help as a translator at various Mediterranean social occasions. Stevie certainly seemed to think of him as a friend, even though the footballer was a Lancastrian and Canny was a Yorkshireman—which would have made them implicit rivals in their own land almost as surely as the fact that Canny was about to succeed to an earldom while Stevie hailed from an insalubrious area of a small industrial town. They had hardly exchanged five words tonight, but as soon as Stevie saw Canny gravitating towards the roulette table he nudged the Croatian and begged him to surrender his seat so that Canny could sit next to him.

The Croatian obliged, although he seemed a rifle resentful. So did the Algerian, who was currently serving as his companions’ French translator—having presumably been brought along in the faint hope that he might be able to act as a go-between assisting one or both of his team-mates to pick up something tasty. Any of the models they were currently ogling would doubtless have done very nicely—although the footballers had probably no chance there, especially with Lissa Lo. Canny couldn’t believe that Stevie could possibly think that one of the ten most beautiful women in the world would give him a second glance; unlike some of his ilk, the Lancastrian had his delusions of grandeur under control.

Canny sat down beside Stevie and said hello.

Stevie eyed the tray of chips as Canny set it down in front of him, but didn’t comment on their value. For once, he had something else in mind. “Called into the headmaster’s study, were you?” he said. “Caught cheating again?”

“Phone call from Mummy,” Canny reported, laconically. “Daddy’s taken a sudden turn for the worst. Got to go home and inherit the estate. No more carefree playboy lifestyle for me.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, mate,” Stevie said, repentantly. “Didn’t realize it was serious. If you have to get away, go.”

“Can’t get a flight out till morning,” Canny told him, tersely. “Won’t be able to sleep. No mad rush. Might as well finish up here.”

“Right,” Stevie said, uncertainly.

“Next time you see me I’ll be the Earl of Credesdale,” Canny said, reflectively. “But friends like you can call me my lord.” As he spoke, he counted off a thousand Euros in chips, then reached out and put the entire stack on zero.

It was the sort of gesture that could precipitate a moment’s silence almost anywhere else in the world, but this was Monte Carlo. Everyone on the table saw what he did, but there wasn’t a single sharp intake of breath. The croupier didn’t even blink.

“I know you’ve had a shock, Can,” Stevie murmured, “but don’t you think you’re overdoing the symbolism just a trifle?”

“Symbolism?” Canny queried. “I thought you left school at fifteen without a single GCSE.”

“We all have our own personal sports psychologists these days,” the footballer told him, as the wheel spun. “Used to be we only got counseling when we got transferred—nowadays it’s every time we lose. I know what symbolism is, mate—and you just lost a grand. Only Euros, but even so....”

The croupier called the number, and raked in Canny’s chips with practiced ease.

Entirely casual, Canny thought. As if it were as natural as breathing.

He counted out another thousand, and placed it in exactly the same spot.

“I get it,” Stevie said. “You called a cab, didn’t you? You only have time for three shots, so you cut your stash in three. It’s a penalty shoot-out—all or nothing.”

Canny was slightly surprised by Stevie’s ready interpretation, but he met the younger man’s blue eyes with his own darker ones with carefully-feigned frankness. “That’s absolutely right,” he said. “The sports psychology is really paying off.”

He looked away from Stevie as he caught something in the corner of his eyes and directed his gaze at the far side of the table. The three models were all looking at him, trying not to be obvious but not quite contriving to hide their fascination—even Lissa Lo.

Canny had never attempted to be the womanizing kind of playboy that Stevie Larkin thought he ought to aspire to be, but he knew that he was going to miss the presence of beautiful women—not as much as the click of chips and the rustle of cards, but enough to leave a gap.

If he decided to follow the dictates of family tradition, he was going to have to get married now. According to the advice of the records, he’d already put it off too long for his own good. If the records were mere legends—a tissue of hopeful fancies and silly mistakes—it didn’t really matter what advice they offered, but whatever else Daddy found the strength to say to him, he was bound to get an earful on that subject, and then some.

Canny knew that Daddy wouldn’t approve of the way he was betting now. Daddy had always advised him to go slow, to be modest in his aims and modest in his gains. It’s a gift, Daddy had told him, time and time again, and it has to be treated with due respect. Don’t try to test the limits. You had your ration of playing the fool when you were a boy. You have to be a man now. Don’t risk bringing the lightning down. Collect the house percentage, little by little. Don’t ask for too much too quickly. When freaky things start happening, you never know when they’ll stop.

“Don’t bring the lightning down,” Canny murmured, while everybody placed their bets on rouge and noir, pair and impair, or bet on batches of four or eight numbers. There were a dozen other bets on individual numbers, but all of them were ten-Euro bets—there wasn’t a single hundred, let alone another thousand. Lissa Lo hadn’t bet at all; she was still watching him.

“What’s that, mate?” Stevie asked. “Storm coming?”

“Just symbolism,” Canny assured him. He wondered whether Henri Meurdon was watching him on the screen in his inner sanctum—and whether, if so, he was mildly disappointed that Canny had broken his pattern and his image by accepting his playful dare.

The wheel spun. The ball dropped. Canny lost.

He watched Lissa Lo collect forty Euros, and add it carefully to a stack that must have been worth more than a thousand. Had she started with half as much or twice as much? Her expression gave nothing away.

Canny immediately pushed his remaining chips on to zero. There were twelve hundred and seventy, which was two hundred and seventy over the official table limit, but the croupier didn’t bother to seek permission from above to let the bet stand; he had the discretion to accept it, and he had his own notion of style.

“What the hell,” said Stevie, putting down five hundred Euros. “I’ll keep you company, mate—even though I don’t have a country estate.”

“You must get paid at least thirty thousand a week, plus perks,” Canny pointed out. “And the estate’s in a valley so shallow and narrow that it hardly qualifies as a dale.”

“It’s in bloody Yorkshire as well,” Stevie said, feigning contempt, “but you’ll have it till you die, and I might break a leg on Sunday. We have personal financial advisors too, you know. I lost my last club shirt in the dotcom crash. I’m a sensible investor now.”

“If you were sensible,” Canny muttered, “you’d bet the whole thousand. When it’s all or nothing, the Kilcannons always come through.”

“Is that the family motto?” Stevie asked, not moving a muscle to add to his stake—but Canny watched Lissa Lo reach out a delicately manicured hand, and place five hundred Euros of her own on zero. On another night, with a slightly different crowd, she might have started a rush, but it was four o’clock in the morning and tired sanity held sway. Nobody else joined in. Canny didn’t know whether to be glad or not.

Well, Daddy, he said to himself, silently, this is the end. From now on, I’ll be just like you, at least for a while. No more grandstanding. But he was very keenly aware that there was one more spin of the wheel to go. He really wasn’t certain that he would win, when the croupier spun the wheel and dropped the ball—but as soon as he saw the streak he knew that he’d been a fool to doubt himself.

Visually speaking, it was a beauty. It wasn’t the brightest he had ever seen, but it was certainly the most complex. Given that he was about to win more than forty thousand Euros at long odds he might have expected it to be brilliantly white, but it had all the colors of the rainbow in it, not ordered into a spectrum but fragmented and mingled in a kaleidoscopic effect that was literally dizzying. The physical sensations accompanying the visual were equally complex; as expected, there was an element of euphoria and a rush of supreme self-confidence, but they were part of a compound whole whose other elements were unnamable. Some of them, at least, he had never felt before. He felt as if he had been moved sideways and wrenched out of shape, but he hadn’t really moved at all. He was sitting perfectly still.

The experience was all the more thrilling because he knew that no one else would have the slightest memory of the experience; if they felt it at all, or saw anything at all, it would leave no trace.

Afterwards, the heady cocktail of immediate sensation gave way to the customary wrench of nausea and the surge of objectless fear—the “aftertaste of triumph” his father had always called it—but he was well used to steeling himself against the possibility of collapse.

While the inner wheel of the machine spun, its glossy black casing surrounded it with a halo of reflected light, making the whole ensemble seem a mirror of wayward fate.

Then the silver ball dropped meekly into the zero slot.

This time, there was an audible effect—not a communal intake of breath, but an abrupt collective exhalation.

“Bugger me,” Stevie murmured. “You did it. Thanks, boss.”

Even Lissa Lo permitted herself a slight smile—but she wasn’t looking at Canny any more, and she studiously ignored the stacks of chips that the croupier was counting out, one by one, before raking them out. She was whispering to her companions, whose expressions suggested that she was bidding them an apologetic farewell.

Canny calculated that thirty-six times one thousand two hundred and seventy was forty-five thousand seven hundred and twenty—ten Euros shy of forty-seven thousand, including the stake. The croupier had already signaled to one of his peers, who came to collect the chips on Canny’s behalf. A brief nod sufficed to confirm that it was his intention to cash up. Canny took back a hundred Euro tip and tossed it to the man at the wheel; it seemed the least he could do.

As natural as breathing, he reminded himself, as he stood there watching the boy, savoring the prospect of the walk to the cashier’s office. Set a good example, now—leave them wanting more. He half-expected Henri Meurdon to emerge from the office to shower him with felicitations, but Meurdon had an image to maintain too. Forty seven thousand? he imagined the manager saying, in his slightly perfumed English. People walk out of here with that sort of money every day of the week. You could too, if you were lucky—and we’d be glad of the ad.

Before he moved off, Canny permitted himself one last glance at the three models. Two of them were staring; one wasn’t. It was the one who wasn’t to whom he addressed himself, although he didn’t look directly at her and spoke distinctly enough to be heard by everyone at the table. “I need an early night,” he said, carefully making his apologetic tone ring false. “I have to go home—Daddy’s so ill that he might not last the week, alas. Henri will have to do without me for quite a while, I fear—I hope he won’t miss me too much.”

The frowns that greeted this speech were all male. Canny heard a whispered Arabic phrase, and had seen enough of the Makhtoums at Ascot and Epsom to know that it meant “the luck of the devil”. He smiled. There was no need to take it personally. Long experience had rammed home the lesson that no one ever credited his own good fortune to the devil, or anyone else’s to the angels.

Having observed her whispered conversation, Canny wasn’t entirely surprised when Lissa Lo got up too. He didn’t read anything into the coincidence; it wasn’t unusual for women to get up and follow him when he left a table—many of the women he encountered on a day-to-day basis loved winners, and not a few were masochistically intrigued by evident disinterest that wasn’t overtly queer—but Lissa Lo was in an altogether different class. It was said that she never got out of bed for less than Stevie Larkin got for playing a game of football, but that you couldn’t get her into one for what he got paid for a whole league season, whoever or whatever you might be.

As Canny walked away from the table, though, the model moved on to a convergent path. He didn’t look around to see what kind of expression Stevie Larkin was wearing, but he could imagine it easily enough.

“I’d better call it a night too,” the model said, as they made their way over to the cashier, walking in step but not quite together. “The boat’s waiting to take me to Nice—the jet has to be in the air by six. I have to put down at some ridiculous RAF base west of York, so that a fast car can whisk me off to Harewood House for a shoot.”

Canny frowned, partly because of a momentary confusion as to the significance of the word “shoot” and partly because her reference to the RAF base west of York rang such an eerie bell. “Do you mean Church Fenton?” he said, as he stood politely aside to let her cash up first.

“Yes—do you know it?”

He only hesitated for a moment before answering. “The family pile’s only twenty miles away,” he admitted. “Approximately north by north-east—a little place called Cockayne. Church Fenton’s practically local—two hundred miles more local than Heathrow, at any rate”

“Cockayne! How charming.” The model’s delicately-etched eyebrows increased their curvature slightly, delicately but firmly implying that she was fully capable of savoring the resonance of the name. “In that case, I suppose I ought to offer you a lift.”

The rainbow quality of the streak took on new meaning as Canny calculated the possibilities implicit in the invitation. The rules forbade him to waste his erotic energies on frivolity, of course, but the majority of his ancestors had taken a very dim view of the supposed pleasures of the bedchamber, so that wasn’t surprising. They were Yorkshiremen, after all. The fact that his father had always sided with the rules probably had as much to do with the Earl of Credesdale’s disapproval of his son’s attitude to life as with any real fear of diminishing the brightness of the family’s lucky streak.

Well, why not? Canny thought. If Daddy’s share of the pot is all but exhausted, why shouldn’t I be able to turn a thirty-six-to-one hit into a thousand-to-one shot? And why shouldn’t I treat myself, if the opportunity does arise?

He was careful, though, not to take too much for granted. It was entirely possible that all he was being offered, by Lissa Lo and Lady Luck alike, was a lift to Church Fenton.

“I have to go back to my hotel,” he said, in a deeply apologetic manner that—for once—wasn’t feigned. “There mightn’t be time to get up the hill, pack my cases and get back down again before your boat casts off.”

“Why don’t you try?” she said. “The boat’s practically on the doorstep. I’ll hold it for you for...oh, an hour should still leave plenty of time. Not a moment longer, though.”

“If you really wouldn’t mind,” Canny said, in frank astonishment, as the cashier rammed wads of bills into a leather-clad bag.

“I really wouldn’t,” she assured him. “I’ll probably try to take a nap on the boat, but I can never sleep on planes—I’d be glad of the company. It’s a pity that the news about your father has spoiled your lucky day.” She glanced at the cash that was stacking up in the bag, but she obviously meant the outrageous good fortune that had thrown him at the feet of a woman whose private jet was landing two hundred miles closer to his home than the scheduled flight he’d intended to catch.

“Yes it is,” he agreed, prepared for the moment to regard the coincidence in exactly that light. “They say that these things always balance out in the long run, but there’s no compensation for losing a father.”

“Mine died some time ago,” she said, “but I know what you mean. People who think that things always balance out don’t understand the real nature of chance, do they?”

She turned away as she said it, denying him not only the opportunity to answer the rhetorical question but also the opportunity to look into her lovely eyes in the hope of figuring out exactly what she meant to imply.