Page 28 of Fake Dating the Mafia Boss
“You do now. His name is Marcel and he’s impossible.” She tips her chin at a passing tray, glowing. “Inventing staff for you is the most fun I’ve had all week.”
“You’re doing the face again,” she says under her breath, smiling at a shipping magnate’s wife.
“I have one face.”
“You have two. There’s the bored one, which is most of the time. Then there’s this one, which is the I’m-about-to-financially-destroy-someone-in-public one. It’s a good face. Very king of the jungle. The senator looks like he might be sick.”
“He should be. He owes me money.”
“See, this is the problem. I can never tell if you’re flirting or conducting business.”
“With you,” I tell her, low, just for her, “it’s stopped being possible to tell the difference.”
I have the satisfaction of watching it hit home. Watching her lose her place in whatever she was going to say next, the color coming up under the couture. I add it to the night’s growing pile of small wins and get to work on the large one.
Because there’s a real war happening under the party, and the party is the camouflage. I feel Lev across the salon before I see him, a still point in the glitter, the one man not performing delight. Patience like that on a stranger’s face in my own house reads like a drawn knife.
His name is Lev, the man waiting for me at the high-baccarat table, and he belongs to Morozov. He’s no envoy this time, no old wolf sent to carry a message. He’s a player. Gleb’s chosen proxy, sent to sit across a felt from me with seven figures on the line and beat me in front of the only audience that matters.
If Morozov can’t put a bullet in me yet, he can try to put me on my knees over cards and let the families watch me kneel. The pot is theater. The real stake is the thing no money can buy, which is the room’s belief that I’m the strongest man standing in it.
So I sit down across from Gleb’s man. I take off my watch. I play.
The watch goes face down on the felt. Around us the crowd arranges itself into rings, money on the inside, curiosity further out, the staff drifting the edges like sharks who’ve been told to smile. Somebody’s perfume is arguing with somebody’s cigar. The salon has gone quiet the way a room goes quiet for a duel, which is what this is, with chips for pistols.
I won’t bore anyone with the cards. Baccarat is a stupid game, a coin flip in a tuxedo, which is exactly why the rich love it,because it lets them believe luck is a skill you can sharpen. I’ve watched a man lose a shipping fleet at this table without blinking, then weep over the cufflinks he put up to keep playing.
The game was never the cards. The game is what the cards let a man reveal at a safe remove, and tonight Gleb has paid seven figures for the privilege of revealing himself to me. But there’s a sliver of it that isn’t luck, the read, the nerve, the willingness to push when a smaller man folds, and that sliver is where I live.
Lev is good. Gleb didn’t send a fool. He’s patient. He’s careful. He has a face nearly as dead as mine, and for the first hour we trade blows like two men who both know exactly what this table is really for.
It helps that Cynthia is standing behind my left shoulder for the back half of it, ostensibly there to look ornamental, which she does, in the green dress, well enough to pull the eyes of every man at the table including the one I’m trying to ruin. She isn’t only ornamental. Now and then her hand finds my shoulder, a light squeeze when Lev’s about to push, a slow withdrawal when he’s about to fold, the private language we built over the whale’s corpse running again underneath a fortune in chips.
Half the room thinks she’s draped on me because she can’t keep her hands off the pakhan. Lev thinks it too. He’s wrong. The wrongness is going to cost him a seven-figure pot. There’s something obscene and wonderful about a man getting beaten by a read he mistakes for a woman fawning.
“Darling.” She leans to my ear at one point, bored, perfect, like she’s asking about dinner plans. “His pinky. He taps it twice when he likes his cards.” Then she straightens and orders me an ice water in the voice of a woman who has been rich since birth. Lev watches her do it and dismisses her, visibly, one moreornament in a room upholstered with them. The pinky taps twice on the next hand. I bury him for it.
Then I find his tell on my own, the way Cynthia found the whale’s. A fractional thing, a stillness he drops into a half-second before he commits to a bluff. Once I have it, the game stops being a coin flip. It becomes an execution with a dress code.
I take him apart slowly, because slowly is the message. Fast would look like luck. Slow looks like inevitability. I let him climb, let him think he’s found his rhythm, then I break it under him. I let him win a hand so the room leans in, then I take the next three. On the third he looks up at me for the first time, really looks, and I give him the face I keep for this, polite, patient, infinitely uninterested, the face that says the money was never the point, neither are you.
Across his shoulders, something quits. I bleed him in front of the senator, the prince, the brothers from Macau, the whole watching city, and I never once raise my voice. The pile in front of me grows until it stops looking like money and starts looking like architecture.
Each hand ends on the same sounds, the dealer’s paddle, the rake of chips, a little exhale from the crowd like surf. I never change my face. I do nothing but exactly what a man does when the outcome was never in question. By the time the final hand turns, Lev is staring at a felt that holds a fortune of Gleb Morozov’s money sliding across to my side, and the room has its answer, written in chips a foot high.
The pakhan is not soft. The pakhan is not overextended. The pakhan just took Los Angeles apart for sport, smiled the whole time, then went back to his drink.
Lev stands, buttons his jacket, and gives me a small bow with murder behind it, the bow of a man who has to go report a humiliation to a master who does not forgive humiliations. “Gleb will be very interested to hear how the night went,” he says.
“Tell him every detail,” I say. “Use small words. He’s old.”
The room laughs, because the room is mine, and Lev carries my answer back to California. For one bright, vicious moment I have never felt more like exactly what I am.
Cynthia leans down to my ear under cover of the noise, her mouth almost on my jaw, and for one second I think she’s going to say something sweet.
“That was the hottest thing I’ve ever watched a man do with his clothes on,” she murmurs. “Which is a problem, because we’re in public, and you have at least an hour of king stuff left.”
I turn my head a fraction. She’s close enough that I can see the green dress isn’t the only thing affected by what just happened at this table, the flush, the look, the way her breath has gone shallow watching me take a man apart. It does something to me that no amount of money on the felt did.
