He turned on his heel and went into the corridor. Marty followed. It was empty. Downstairs, the girl on the desk-not the same he’d spoken with-was giggling with the coat-check clerk.
“Wait a moment.”
When the waiter looked back, Marty was producing his wallet, still amply enough filled to present a decent bribe. The other man stared at the notes with undisguised greed.
“I just want to ask a few questions. I don’t need the number of his bank account.”
“I don’t know it anyway.” The waiter smirked. “Are you police?”
“I’m just interested in Mr. Mamoulian,” Marty said, proffering fifty pounds in tens. “Some bare essentials.”
The waiter snatched the money and pocketed it with the speed of a practiced bribee.
“Ask away,” he said.
“Is he a regular here?”
“A couple of times a month.”
“To play?”
The waiter frowned.
“Now you mention it I don’t think I’ve ever seen him actually play.”
“Just to watch, then?”
“Well, I can’t be sure. But I think if he did play I’d have seen him by now. Strange. Still, we have a few members who do that.”
“And does he have any friends? People he arrives with, leaves with?”
“Not that I remember. He used to be quite pally with a Greek woman who used to come in. Always won a fortune. Never failed.”
That was the gambler’s equivalent of the fisherman’s tale, the story of the player with a system so flawless it never faltered. Marty had heard it a hundred times, always the friend of a friend, a mythical somebody whom you never got to meet face-to-face. And yet; when he thought of Mamoulian’s face, so calculating in its supreme indifference, he could almost imagine the fiction real.
“Why are you so interested in him?” the waiter asked.
“I have an odd feeling about him.”
“You’re not the only one.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s never said or done anything to me, you understand,” the waiter explained. “He always tips well, though God knows all he ever drinks is distilled water. But we had one fellow came here, this is a couple of years ago now, he was American, over from Boston. He saw Mamoulian and let me tell you-he freaked out. Seems he’d played with a guy who was his spitting image, this is in the 1920s. That caused quite a buzz. I mean, he doesn’t look like the type to have a father, does he?”
The waiter had something there. It was impossible to imagine this Mamoulian as a child or a pimply adolescent. Had he suffered infatuation, the death of pets, of parents? It seemed so unlikely as to be laughable.
“That’s all I know, really.”
“Thank you,” said Marty. It was enough.
The waiter walked away, leaving Marty with an armful of possibilities. Apocryphal tales, most likely: the Greek with the system, the panicking American. A man like Mamoulian was bound to collect rumors; his air of lost aristocracy invited invented histories. Like an onion, unwrapped and unwrapped and unwrapped again, each skin giving way not to the core but to another skin.
Tired, and dizzy with too much drink and too little sleep, Marty decided to call it a night. He’d use the hundred or so left in his wallet to bribe a taxi driver to drive him back to the estate, and leave the car to be picked up another day. He was too drunk to drive. He glanced one final time into the baccarat room. The game was still going on; Mamoulian had not moved from his station.
Marty went downstairs to the bathroom. It was a few degrees colder than the interior of the club, its rococo plasterwork facetious in the face of its lowly function. He glanced at his weariness in the mirror, then went to relieve himself at the urinal.
In one of the stalls, somebody had begun to sob, very quietly, as if attempting to stifle the sound. Despite his aching bladder, Marty found he was unable to piss; the anonymous grief distressed him too much. It was coming from behind the locked door of the stalls. Probably some optimist who’d lost his shirt on a roll of the dice, and was now contemplating the consequences. Marty left him to it. There was nothing he could say or do; he knew that from bitter experience.