Epilogue
The Odds
The envelope came on a Saturday, a year and a day later, between the electric bill and a flyer for a pizza place.
He nearly threw it out. It was a plain brown padded one, with no stamp and no return address, and his name had been typed on a label in a font that looked like it had come off a parcel machine. It sat in the pile next to his coffee and he picked it up last. He was at the kitchen table in the gray light, in his socks, at ten past six, with a pen and a pad, doing what he did every first weekend of the month. He was working out what he owed.
It was not much now. That was the strange part. He still did the sum in the little green notebook, by hand, in the same tidy columns, though there was no longer any reason to. Rent: nine-forty. Car: two-twelve. Child support: six twenty-five, paid, always paid, on the first. The loans had gone. Somebody had cleared them in November, in a single afternoon, through a firm of lawyers in an office with a brass plate, and had never said who. He knew who. She had written him a note, on blue paper, in a small upright hand. Do not argue. I am too old. H.R. And he had not argued. He'd gone to the post office and bought a stamp, and written back, three lines, and she had replied with a recipe for lentil soup.
He turned the envelope over.
The flap was held with a strip of red tape, the kind they used on parcels at the Mill. He slit it with his thumbnail. Inside, wrapped in tissue, lay a small black plastic case, about the size of a matchbox. A flash drive. Under it, tucked into a card, was a playing card. It was a joker. It had a cracked blue face and a little gray hat, and in the corner, in black pen, a number.
6.
On the back, in the same upright hand he had seen on an envelope a year ago, it said:
Your twenty-four hours. With the compliments of the House.
He sat very still.
Out in the street a garbage truck was making its way along the curb, grinding. A woman in the apartment above was running a bath. The kettle clicked off. He heard all of it with perfect clarity, the way you hear a house at night. He sat with the card in one hand and the drive in the other and tried to remember when he had last felt like this.
The second of November, he thought. In the road.
He got up and plugged in the old laptop.
It took him four minutes to make up his mind.
He did it properly. He turned off the wireless. He pulled out the network cable. He put a sheet of paper over the camera, and took a pencil, and wrote on the pad, in capitals, DO NOT OPEN. EVIDENCE, and underlined it twice, and then he opened it. He was ashamed of that, afterward. He knew exactly what he was doing. He had known on the second day. He had known in the night, in the long white hours when he lay awake and counted the cracks in the ceiling, that one day something would come, and that he would not be able to leave it in the envelope.
There was one file.
It was called RUNNER_01.mp4. It was twenty-six minutes long.
He pressed the arrow.
It began with a title.
It was white letters on a black screen, in a clean sans-serif font, and it said, THE GAMBLE. Then, smaller, A House production. Then it faded, and he was looking at himself.
He didn't know the man.
That was the first thing. He was sitting on a bench outside a apartment block, in the dusk, in a jacket he had not worn since, with his hands between his knees. He was thin. He looked tired and anxious and slightly stupid, like a man in a waiting room. A car pulled up at the curb. A bald little man in a suit got out and opened the door. And on the left of the screen, in a thin white column, a set of numbers had appeared, with a heading.
RUNNER 1. ETHAN COLE.
SURVIVAL TO 24H.
Odds: 7 to 1 against.
He watched it with a kind of numb, remote interest. They had edited it. It was very good. It went by quickly, with a soft, brisk, rather jaunty music under it, the sort of music they play on a program about food. He saw himself in the car. At the table with the boots. On the track in the dark, with a bag on his back, going toward the town. A man's voice, warm and amused, said over it, And he's off. He felt his stomach clench.
He saw Cutler Row. He saw the cameras. He saw himself lying on his stomach in a loft, with a hand over his mouth, and the bar at the side of the screen flickered, and the numbers changed. Odds: 9 to 1.
Someone had bet.
Someone was watching me in a loft and putting money on whether I'd breathe.
He watched the bridge. They had cut away from it quickly. He was grateful for that. He watched the pump house, and the can of peaches, and the laundry, and the washing machines, and the bucket. He watched himself come out of a drum on his shoulder, with a shout, and the music jumped, and a small laugh track came in, an actual laugh track, a recorded roar. The numbers went down. Odds: 4 to 1.
He did not laugh.
He watched the market. He watched the old woman knit. He watched the cold room, the little white box, the cam lock, the hole in the roof. He watched the wasp. He watched himself on the Fairway roof, thumbing a heavy gray phone awake with a minute to spare, and the bar flashed green, and the whole screen was suddenly full of a single word. LIVE. A clatter of chips.
He watched Dave.
They had not cut that. He had thought they would. He had thought, in a flat, bleak, expectant way, they'll leave it out. But there it was, on a landing, a pink hand letting go of his sleeve, finger by finger, and the word, quite clear on the soundtrack. Whoopsie. They had put a title over it. Hunter 3. Status: withdrawn. And a long, soft, creamy chord of music.
He stopped the file.
He sat for a time with his hand over his mouth.
Then he pressed play.
It was twelve minutes before the end that it changed.
He knew it at once. The music dropped away. The little laugh track was gone. The picture, which up to then had been a quick bright patchwork of angles, from cameras on poles and in trees and on the roofs of cars, settled on a single shot. It was a long, wide, steady one, from high up, looking down. It showed a floor.
It was the loading floor of Mercer Mill.
He was in it. He was standing in the middle, at the end of the aisle, with his back to a fallen rack, and under the rack a boy was lying, and in the corner of the picture, small and clear, a clock was running. 21:57:12. There was no sound. Then there was. It came in slowly, from underneath, a thin low murmur. It was voices.
It was not the Mill. It was a room.
The picture split.
On the left, the floor. On the right, in a smaller frame, the inside of a very long room with a green table. He knew it. He knew it with the whole of his body, though he had never seen it. It was the Table. There were eleven people round it, no, forty, they had a lot of tables, four or five, in a great carpeted hall. They sat in good clothes. They had their chips in front of them. They had their faces turned to a screen in the middle, and the light from it lay across them in a flat blue glow, and every one of them was leaning forward.
He had never seen a crowd so quiet.
He saw a man in a blue suit, with his mouth a little open, and a paper bag of almonds on his knee. He saw a woman with silver rings, with her hand over her heart. He saw two men at the end, with their heads together, whispering. And at the third table, among the rest, a broad man with a flat nose and a good watch, who was not whispering, and was not smiling, and who sat with both hands pressed over his mouth.
Ethan knew him. He had known him since he was eleven.
He had not expected that. He sat looking at the small gray face on the screen, and a cold thin thought went through him that he did not want to follow. "I haven't seen it," Rick had said, in the glass box of an office, with the pink light on his hands. "They don't tell me." And at the far end of the room, away from the rest, in a plain wooden chair, with her coat on and her hands in her lap, a small gray woman who was not leaning forward, and whose eyes were fixed, not on the screen, but on her own two hands.
Helen.
She was not watching.
He realized it, with a kind of slow wonder. In all the length of the room, among all of them, she was the only one who did not look. She sat with her head bowed and her lips moving, and he thought: She's praying.
Under the picture, in a thin white band, a line of type had come up.
DECISION POINT. 3:00.
LEAVE: 91%.
GO BACK: 9%.
He looked at it for a long time.
Ninety-one.
They knew.
They had known, the whole room. Not what he would do, but what he was. They had sat in a warm room with their cheeks on their hands and looked at a man standing on a floor, and they had said, with a calm certainty that had a number on it, he'll go. Ninety-one in a hundred. And they had put their money down.
A voice said, in the room, close to the microphone, quite pleasantly: "Fifty on Leave."
"Seventy-five."
"Two hundred. It's a gift."
"God, look at his feet."
"He's already gone."
Ethan felt something cold close round the top of his spine.
He watched himself on the screen. He stood there in the middle of the Mill, with his back to the man on the floor. His hands hung at his sides. His head was turned toward the gate. He looked quite still. He did not look like a man making up his mind. He looked like a man who had made it up.
I took two steps.
He saw it, very clearly, and could not believe it. It was only a small movement. It was a short, slight, unconscious thing, like a man shifting his weight. His left foot went forward. His right came after it. Two steps, toward the light, toward the gate, on the gray concrete floor. He had not remembered that. He would have sworn on his daughter's head that he had not moved.
I was going.
I was already going.
On the screen the clock said 21:58:40. On the right, in the room, a man laughed, easily, and said, "That's it, that's him. Pay the man on Leave."
LEAVE: 97%.
GO BACK: 3%.
He did not know how long he sat.
The screen went on. He watched the whole of it, from the beginning to the end, without blinking. He watched his own back, small and dark, a long way down, standing in the middle of a floor. He heard his own breath. He saw the clock go from 21:58:40 to 21:59:12, and 21:59:40, and 22:00:01. The small white numbers at the bottom crept slowly, steadily, like a fever. And at the very end, at exactly three minutes and forty-one seconds from the moment the bar first came up, a thing happened that he had never seen.
He turned his head.
It was only that. It was a very small thing. He turned it to the left, a quarter of an inch, and looked down over his shoulder. The camera was too far off to see his face. But he saw the line of his neck, and the bend of his jaw, and the way his shoulders came up, as if from a blow. He saw the whole of his body change. It did not turn all at once. It turned in stages, like a ship coming about: the head, then the shoulders, then the hips, then a long, slow, grinding swing of the feet.
In the room, somebody said, "Oh."
It was not a loud sound. It was soft and puzzled and small. A single syllable. And it was followed, quite quickly, by a silence so total that he could hear the little hum of the screen.
"He's going back," said a woman's voice.
"He can't be."
"He's going back."
"Oh, for God's sake."
"Eight to one. I had a hundred on it. I had a hundred." A man's voice, cracked and delighted. "Roy! Roy, you son of a, I'd have put the house on it. Oh, this is good. Oh, I love this. Roy, did you see?"
The screen showed LEAVE: 4%. GO BACK: 96%. The bars had swapped. They jumped, and flickered, and swapped again. There was a rushing, scrambling clatter of chips, a laugh, a groan, a woman's shriek, and then, rising over it all, a great confused rolling roar like a crowd at a race. The picture was a mess of arms. People were on their feet. People were hugging. A man in a blue suit threw a handful of almonds into the air. And in the middle of it, at the head of the table, in a gray cardigan, with a deck of cards in one hand and a glass in the other, quite still, quite calm, with a round pleasant tired face, sat the man who had been a voice.
Roy Vance was smiling.
It was not a villain's smile. It was not a smile at all, really. It was a look of quiet, comfortable, private satisfaction, such as a man might wear who has been to a good restaurant and has been told that his table is ready. He was not looking at the screen. He was looking, quite directly, into the camera. He lifted the glass an inch. He tipped it, toward the lens, in a small friendly salute.
Well played, he mouthed.
The picture went to black.
He did not move.
There were three lines of white type on the screen, in the middle, in the same clean font as before.
GO BACK: 3 winning stakes. Total payout: $4,200,000.
The House thanks all participants.
SEAT 12 IS YOURS.
He read it twice.
Then, quite slowly, he put out a hand, and picked up the card. He turned it over. He had looked at the back when he took it out. He had read the line about the twenty-four hours, and put it down. But there was a second line, in smaller writing, at the very bottom, that he had missed. It was written in the same ink, in the same neat hand.
Next game: March 14. A seat is reserved in your name. The House always honors a winner.
He sat there.
It came to him slowly, as such things do. It came the way the answer to a sum comes, when you have been staring at the figures for an hour and your mind has gone blank, and then one of them shifts a little, and the whole column falls into line. Ninety-one. Leave. Pay the man on Leave. Roy, did you see? He thought of a man in a gray cardigan, saying, in a warm voice, on a telephone, in a roof, I think we have rather a lot in common. He thought of the odds.
Three winning stakes.
Four million dollars.
Who bet on Go Back?
Who took a nine-to-one on a man who'd turn round?
He thought of a man with both hands over his mouth.
He went back, and ran it again, and watched the third table when the bars swapped. A broad man with a flat nose, who had sat for twenty minutes without a word while forty people put their money on Leave, got slowly to his feet, with his face breaking open like a window. He was laughing, or crying; at that distance there was no telling. A woman beside him was shaking his arm. A clerk in a black waistcoat was counting something out onto the felt.
Rick Hall had put two hundred thousand dollars on Go Back.
Ethan sat and looked at it. It would not fit. He turned it over, one way and the other, like a part he'd been given in the wrong box. A man who had sold him for ten thousand dollars, in a glass office, with a boy whistling in the next bay, and had told him so, to his face, and had wept. And who had then sat in a warm room, at a green table, and bet twenty times that on his friend.
Both.
People can be both.
Who was the only person in that room who knew?
He thought of a speaker, in a ceiling, saying, There's an old trick with a chain. Did you ever find it? He thought of a man who had said, to two men in a van, Mind the rack. It's a bit loose. A man who had put a boy under a rack, on a floor where another boy had died. A man who had waited, with a glass in his hand and a smile on his face, for the one thing that no one in the room believed. And who had gone round, perhaps, in the quiet of the afternoon, with an air of mild regret, placing his own small, careful, private bets.
The House always wins.
Of course it does.
It never needed me to run. It never needed me to live. It only needed to know which way I'd turn.
He put the card down.
He found that he was not angry. That surprised him. He would have thought he'd be furious. He sat in the gray kitchen with his hands on the table, and felt a long, slow, cold, quiet understanding go through him like water through sand. He knew. He read the file. He saw the key. He sat in a warm room and looked at a man's whole life, and he thought: he'll go back. And then he'd arranged it, one piece at a time. The cold room. The roof. The phone. The rack. Every door he'd walked through had been held open, from the other side, by somebody who knew exactly how far he would go.
I thought I was choosing.
I was.
That's the worst of it. I was.
"Dad?"
He jumped.
She was standing in the kitchen doorway in her pajamas, with her hair in her eyes and the cat in her arms. Maya had been nine in March. She was taller. She had lost her front teeth, both of them, and grown two new ones, big and crooked and white. She looked at him with her gray eyes, and then at the screen, and then, with the grave, clear, searching look of a child who is old for her age, at his face.
"It's six in the morning," she said.
"I know."
"Pepper woke me up."
"Sorry."
"She sat on my head." She put the cat down. It stalked off along the floor with its tail in the air. "What's that?"
"It's nothing."
"It's a video."
"It's a, it's a work thing."
"It's not." She came over. She stood at his elbow. She looked at the screen, where the last frame was still lit, a stark white line of type on black. "Is that a game?"
"Sort of."
"What's seat twelve?"
"It's a chair."
"Whose?"
"Nobody's. It's, it's just somebody's idea of a joke."
"It's not funny," said Maya.
"No."
"Why've you got a joker?"
He looked at the card. He had not noticed that she had picked it up. She was holding it in her fingers, quite carefully, by the edges, and turning it to the light.
"Because it's the, it's a card they send," he said. "When you've been in the game."
"Did you win?"
"I don't know."
"You do."
"I don't know, Em. It depends what you mean."
"What did you do?"
He looked at her.
He thought of all the things he could say. He had a great many. He had a whole drawer of them, ready, in a clean, kind, grown-up voice. It was a long time ago. It was a thing I did for work. It's all over. He had said them to Claire. He had said them to a judge. He had said them to himself, in the mirror, at the bench, at three in the morning. They were good words. They had worn smooth.
"I went back," he said.
"Where?"
"For a boy. He was stuck. He was one of the men who were hunting me, and he was stuck, and I could have gone away. There was a car." He swallowed. "And I nearly did."
"But you didn't."
"No."
"Why?"
"I don't know," said Ethan. "I really don't. I've thought about it for a year. I think it was the horse."
"The horse?"
"Captain. With the hat. You said the main rule."
She stared at him.
"You don't leave anyone," said Maya.
"That's the one."
"I made that up."
"I know."
"I made it up on a Thursday. I was in a bad mood. I wanted a rule so Priya wouldn't copy my picture." She frowned. "You really, you actually did it?"
"Yes."
"Because of a horse."
"I think so."
"That's the stupidest thing I ever heard," said Maya.
She said it with great pleasure.
He laughed. It came out of him all at once, a short wet bark. He put his hand over his eyes. She stood there quite stiffly for a second, as a child does who has been laughed at and is not sure whether it's a good laugh. Then she climbed, with enormous dignity, onto his knee, and put both her arms round his neck, and put her cold nose against his ear.
"It was a good rule," she said.
"It was the best."
"Is the boy okay?"
"He's got a limp."
"Is he your friend?"
He thought about it.
"Yes," said Ethan. "I think he is."
"Good." She yawned. "Can we have toast?"
When she had gone back to bed, he sat for a long time at the kitchen table in the first thin light.
He had made the toast. He had cut it in triangles, and brought it up, and sat on the end of the bed while she ate it, and told her a story about a cat who learned to drive. She had gone to sleep in the middle of a sentence, with a crust in her fist. He had taken the plate, and tucked in the sheet, and stood for a minute in the doorway, looking at the lamp shaped like a mushroom, and the stars on the ceiling, and a drawing on the wall above the bed. It was a horse. It was blue. There was a new one next to it now, in gold, in a hat.
He'd come back to the kitchen.
The laptop was still open. The screen had gone to sleep. He woke it with a finger, and the white line of type was still there, quite steady, in the middle of the black.
SEAT 12 IS YOURS.
He looked at it.
He thought of Jack Ford, in a prison infirmary two hundred miles north, with one lung and a window and a notebook that had been taken from him by order of the court, saying, in a thin dry voice to a woman from the district attorney's office: Forty-three. He thought of Linda Pratt, who had pleaded, who had asked for wool. He thought of Pierce, in a witness box, with his wife in the front row, saying that he'd like very much to go home. He thought of the long empty chair at the head of a table that had been, by the time the police got there, in a very ordinary rented hotel room, quite clean, with the carpet freshly vacuumed and a bowl of almonds on the sideboard.
They'll never find him.
They'll never find any of them.
They've got forty-one lawyers.
He thought of Helen, in her kitchen, on a Sunday, with the whistle on a nail by the window. He thought of Chris, who walked now with a stick, and whose mother had a room on the hill, with a window and a garden. He thought of Jean Wise, in a kitchen in another town, opening a letter from a firm of lawyers and sitting down very suddenly on the nearest chair.
I won, he thought.
It did not feel like anything.
He had been told, once, by a man who wrote the rules, that the winner would never be asked what it cost. He had thought it was a threat. He saw now that it was only a fact, like the weather. Nobody asked. Nobody ever would. You walked out of the gate, with your life in your hands, into a sunny morning, and everyone said thank God. And you stood on the grass. And in a warm room thirty miles away, a man in a cardigan counted what he had won on you.
What would you do?
It was a thing he had asked himself, as a boy, about a hundred imaginary dilemmas. A burning house. A drowning child. A bag of money on a road. He'd always known. I'd go back. I'd stay. I'd do the decent thing. It had been the easiest thing in the world to be a good man, in his head, with his feet on the carpet.
He looked at the card.
It was only a card. It was thin, and gray, and a little soft at the corners. In the cracked blue face of the joker, with its idiot grin and its little curled hat, he thought he could see, very faintly, a kind of patience. It was waiting for him to decide.
He did not throw it away.
He told himself it was evidence. He opened the drawer under the table, where he kept the string and the batteries and the takeout menus, and laid it carefully on top of the other one, the first one, the card that had come in the envelope a year ago. They were identical. They lay face up, side by side, in the light. Two small gray jokers, each with a number in black pen, each with the same cracked blue face.
5.
6.
He shut the drawer.
On the table, the laptop gave a soft electronic chime, and the screen lit up for the last time. A line of type came up in the middle of it, white on black. It was the same plain, clean, courteous, friendly font as the rest. It stayed there for about five seconds, and then it faded, and the screen went dark.
The House wishes you luck.