Now, like Morphy, Bond lifted his head and looked straight into Drax’s eyes. Then he slowly drew out the queen of diamonds and placed it on the table. Without waiting for Meyer to play he followed it, deliberately, with the 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, and the two winning clubs.
Then he spoke. “That’s all, Drax,” he said quietly, and sat slowly back in his chair.
Drax’s first reaction was to lurch forward and tear Meyer’s cards out of his hand. He faced them on the table, scrabbling feverishly among them for a possible winner.
Then he flung them back across the baize.
His face was dead white, but his eyes blazed redly at Bond. Suddenly he raised one clenched fist and crashed it on the table among the pile of impotent aces and kings and queens in front of him.
Very low, he spat the words at Bond. “You’re a che…”
“That’s enough, Drax.” Basildon’s voice came across the table like a whiplash. “None of that talk here. I’ve been watching the whole game. Settle up. If you’ve got any complaints, put them in writing to the Committee.”
Drax got slowly to his feet. He stood away from his chair and ran a hand through his wet red hair. The colour came slowly back into his face and with it an expression of cunning. He glanced down at Bond and there was in his good eye a contemptuous triumph which Bond found curiously disturbing.
He turned to the table. “Good night, gentlemen,” he said, looking at each of them with the same oddly scornful expression. “I owe about £15,000. I will accept Meyer’s addition.”
He leant forward and picked up his cigarette-case and lighter.
Then he looked again at Bond and spoke very quietly, the red moustache lifting slowly from the splayed upper teeth. “I should spend the money quickly, Commander Bond,” he said.
Then he turned away from the table and walked swiftly out of the room.
PART TWO: TUESDAY, WEDNESDAY
CHAPTER VIII
THE RED TELEPHONE
ALTHOUGH HE had not got to bed until two, Bond walked into his headquarters punctually at ten the next morning. He was feeling dreadful. As well as acidity and liver as a result of drinking nearly two whole bottles of champagne, he had a touch of the melancholy and spiritual deflation that were partly the after-effects of the benzedrine and partly reaction to the drama of the night before.
When he went up in the lift towards another routine day, the bitter taste of the midnight hours was still with him.
After Meyer had scuttled thankfully off to bed, Bond had taken the two packs of cards out of the pockets of his coat and had put them on the table in front of Basildon and M. One was the blue pack that Drax had cut to him and that he had pocketed, substituting instead, under cover of his handkerchief, the stacked blue pack in his right-hand pocket. The other was the stacked red pack in his left-hand pocket which had not been needed.
He fanned the red pack out on the table and showed M. and Basildon that it would have produced the same freak grand slam that had defeated Drax.
“It’s a famous Culbertson hand,” he explained. “He used it to spoof his own quick-trick conventions. I had to doctor a red and a blue pack. Couldn’t know which colour I would be dealing with.”
“Well, it certainly went with a bang,” said Basildon gratefully. “I expect he’ll put two and two together and either stay away or play straight in future. Expensive evening for him. Don’t let’s have any arguments about your winnings,” he added. “You’ve done everyone-and particularly Drax-a good turn tonight. Things might have gone wrong. Then it would have been your fingers that would have got burned. Cheque will reach you on Saturday.”
They had said good-night and Bond, in a mood of anticlimax, had gone off to bed. He had taken a mild sleeping pill to try and clear his mind of the bizarre events of the evening and prepare himself for the morning and the office. Before he slept he reflected, as he had often reflected in other moments of triumph at the card table, that the gain to the winner is, in some odd way, always less than the loss to the loser.