Prologue
The Table
The room had no windows, and nobody who came into it ever asked why.
It was long and warm and quiet, with a thick gray carpet and a dozen leather chairs set round a table the size of a car. The table was green, like the ones in casinos, but it had no numbers on it and no dealer. In the middle, built into the wood, lay a flat black screen the width of a bed. Eleven people sat round it. They had come in ones and twos through the evening, in good coats, and handed the coats to a young man at the door who did not look at their faces.
Nobody was talking much. A man in a blue suit was eating almonds out of a paper bag. A woman with silver rings on every finger was doing a crossword in pencil. Two men at the far end shared a joke in low voices and then both looked at the screen and stopped.
On the screen was one dot.
It sat on a pale gray map, very small, in a square of streets near the bottom. It was blue. Beside it was a name, and beside the name, in a thin white font, a line of figures that kept changing. At the top of the screen, in the corner, a clock showed 21:59:12.
"Are we going to start?" said the woman with the crossword.
"Two minutes," said a man at the head of the table. He was not tall. He had a round, pleasant, tired face, like a man who ran a good restaurant, and he wore a gray cardigan with the elbows going. In front of him there was a deck of cards, still in its box, and a glass of water. He had not touched either. "Be patient, Margaret. It's not a train."
"I'm only saying."
"I know what you're saying." He smiled at her. "You're saying you've got a plane at midnight."
There was a little laughter. It sounded careful.
At the end of the table, as far from the screen as the room allowed, a woman sat alone in a chair that did not match the others. It was an ordinary wooden chair, with a cushion. She was in her sixties, small and straight-backed, in a dark blue coat that she had not taken off. Her hair was gray and cut short. She had a cup of tea in front of her. It had gone cold an hour ago, and she had not noticed.
She was the only one who had not brought anything to put on the table.
The others had. Each of them had a small stack of black chips, set out in front of them in neat columns, like the stacks in a bank. They were not casino chips. They had no numbers. They were plain, heavy, and matte, and when one of the men moved his stack with a finger, the sound was a soft dry click, like a bone.
"One runner," said the man in the gray cardigan. "I did say. Four at a time made it a crowd. A crowd is only noise. One is a story."
Everyone looked at the screen. The blue dot sat in the middle of a block of streets, very still.
"Ethan Cole," he said. "Thirty-four. Appliance repair. He owes about seventy thousand dollars, mostly to people who send letters, and he has a little girl who likes horses." He took the cards out of the box at last and turned them over in his hand, once, as if weighing them. "He took the money on Friday morning. He didn't take long. Most of you were out by half a point on that."
"I wasn't," said the man in the blue suit, still chewing. "I said he'd say yes."
"You said Wednesday."
"I said he'd say yes."
"Mr. Grant said Friday. Mr. Grant's chips are over here." A dry little smile. He pushed a stack with one finger across the green felt to a man who had said nothing all evening, and the man took it, and stacked it, and did not smile back.
The clock said 21:59:48.
The woman with the silver rings put down her pencil.
"Is it true what they say?" she said. "That the hunters don't get told the face?"
"They get told the face. They don't get told the reason."
"And the money? Is it really there? For the one who walks out?"
The man in the cardigan looked at her for a moment without any expression at all.
"Margaret," he said, very gently. "I'd keep the crossword."
She picked up her pencil.
At the end of the table, the woman in the coat had gone very still. Her fingers lay flat on the wood on either side of her cup. She was looking at the screen, at the small blue dot, and her mouth was pressed into a thin line, and for one second, perhaps less, something crossed her face that none of the others saw. It was not hope. It was not fear. It looked more like a person at the edge of a cold lake, deciding.
"Mrs. Reeves," said the man in the cardigan, without turning. "You're welcome to leave at any time. I want to say that again."
"I know."
"No one will think the less of you."
"I know," said the woman. "I'd like to stay."
"Then you'll want to put something on the table. It's the custom. Even a chip."
"I don't gamble."
"Everyone here gambles." He said it quite kindly. "Some of us just do it with money."
She did not answer. Her hand stayed where it was.
The clock changed. It said 22:00:00.
Nobody cheered. Nobody leaned forward. A man at the far end took a sip of his drink. The woman with the rings made a small mark on her crossword. On the screen, the blue dot began to move.
The man in the cardigan drew a single card from the deck, and laid it on the felt, face up, in front of the empty chair at his right.
It was a joker. A thin gray one, with a cracked blue face, and in the corner, in black pen, someone had written a number.
5.
"Place your bets," said Roy Vance.