The other players sensed a tension between the two gamblers and there was silence as Le Chiffre fingered the four cards out of the shoe.
The croupier slipped Bond’s two cards across to him with the tip of his spatula. Bond, still with his eyes holding Le Chiffre’s, reached his right hand out a few inches, glanced down very swiftly, then as he looked up again impassively at Le Chiffre, with a disdainful gesture he tossed the cards face upwards on the table.
They were a four and a five – an unbeatable nine.
There was a little gasp of envy from the table and the players to the left of Bond exchanged rueful glances at their failure to accept the two million franc bet.
With a hint of a shrug, Le Chiffre slowly faced his own two cards and flicked them away with his fingernail. They were two valueless knaves.
‘Le baccarat,’ intoned the croupier as he spaded the thick chips over the table to Bond.
Bond slipped them into his right-hand pocket with the unused packet of notes. His face showed no emotion, but he was pleased with the success of his first coup and with the outcome of the silent clash of wills across the table.
The woman on his left, the American Mrs Du Pont, turned to him with a wry smile.
‘I shouldn’t have let it come to you,’ she said. ‘Directly the cards were dealt I kicked myself.’
‘It’s only the beginning of the game,’ said Bond. ‘You may be right the next time you pass it.’
Mr Du Pont leant forward from the other side of his wife: ‘If one could be right every hand, none of us would be here,’ he said philosophically.
‘I would be,’ his wife laughed. ‘You don’t think I do this for pleasure.’
As the game went on, Bond looked over the spectators leaning on the high brass rail round the table. He soon saw Le Chiffre’s two gunmen. They stood behind and to either side of the banker. They looked respectable enough, but not sufficiently a part of the game to be unobtrusive.
The one more or less behind Le Chiffre’s right arm was tall and funereal in his dinner-jacket. His face was wooden and grey, but his eyes flickered and gleamed like a conjurer’s. His whole long body was restless and his hands shifted often on the brass rail. Bond guessed that he would kill without interest or concern for what he killed and that he would prefer strangling. He had something of Lennie in Of Mice and Men, but his inhumanity would not come from infantilism but from drugs. Marihuana, decided Bond.
The other man looked like a Corsican shopkeeper. He was short and very dark with a flat head covered with thickly greased hair. He seemed to be a cripple. A chunky malacca cane with a rubber tip hung on the rail beside him. He must have had permission to bring the cane into the Casino with him, reflected Bond, who knew that neither sticks nor any other objects were allowed in the rooms as a precaution against acts of violence. He looked sleek and well fed. His mouth hung vacantly half-open and revealed very bad teeth. He wore a heavy black moustache and the backs of his hands on the rail were matted with black hair. Bond guessed that hair covered most of his squat body. Naked, Bond supposed, he would be an obscene object.
The game continued uneventfully, but with a slight bias against the bank.
The third coup is the ‘sound barrier’ at chemin-de-fer and baccarat. Your luck can defeat the first and second tests, but when the third deal comes along it most often spells disaster. Again and again at this point you find yourself being bounced back to earth. It was like that now. Neither the bank nor any of the players seemed to be able to get hot. But there was a steady and inexorable seepage against the bank, amounting after about two hours’ play to ten million francs. Bond had no idea what profits Le Chiffre had made over the past two days. He estimated them at five million and guessed that now the banker’s capital could not be more than twenty million.