STICKY FINGERS

 

STICKY FINGERS

 

by

 

Albert Woods

 

The rattle of the plastic bead curtain, as he walked through it, induced the first pinprick of doubt in Trevor's mind. Surely these people could afford something better. Would they really have enough money to pay out on his bet, let alone keep such a sum on the premises? Behind him, on the other side, he had left the sumptuous casino hall, with its polished mahogany and brass-footed tables; some inlaid with expensively etched leather, others topped in perfectly flat bowling-green baize. But now, he was behind the scenes, passing the staff room - which was a hovel - on his way to the inner sanctum, the holy of holies; the manager's office.

 

Chewing on a string of tired spearmint gum, the leggy hostess-cum-croupier who was leading the way, turned and smiled at him by the lift.

 

Trevor had seen lifts like this one in films - usually documentaries that dealt with urban decay, and the folly of high-rise flats; empty cigarette packs and dead matches on the floor, marker pen and lipstick graffiti on the walls; the cheesy stink of spilled milk - which accounted, he guessed, for at least some of the stains, and stickiness, underfoot. What a dump.

 

During the jerky ascent, the girl delved into her patent leather shoulder bag and produced a tightly screwed up packet of hand rolling tobacco, along with a dog-eared clip of Rizla cigarette papers. "Wanna rolly?" she offered.

 

"Er.. no thanks," Trevor declined; fascinated by the sight of the classy looking creature teasing out a tuft of the weed, skilfully arranging it along the length of an open paper. With a practised flick, she brought the bottom edge over to tuck under the top, and a single pass from her moist, pointed tongue had the gum tacky, and the operation complete. She struck a red match - filling the lift cage with obnoxious sulphur - and dragged heavily, whilst continuing to chew.

 

The elevator shuddered to a halt. Trevor opened the latticed door, and they walked along to the end of the corridor. "'Ere y'are," said the girl, speaking through the smoke cloud evacuating her nostrils. With that, she pushed the office door open, turned on her stiletto heels, and click-clacked away. He paused, watching her, approvingly.

 

"Mister Dunsmore, I take it," the manager didn’t bother to get up from his plush executive chair. "Sit down."

 

Trevor looked around him. This room, at least, was more in keeping with the quality image that the public side of the gaming club projected. He sized up his host; a gross dinner-jacketed whale; jet black, sleeked back hair, smarmed down with oily brilliantine - reeking of lavender, or something similar. And he had fat lips; bluish crescents of saliva-soaked flesh which almost drooped under their own weight. He was, Trevor concluded, an altogether predatory-looking specimen.

 

There was hardly time to make himself comfortable before the manager launched into him. "So you're a pro," the man accused.

 

Trevor frowned. "Oh, pro," he echoed. "No sir; certainly not. As I told your young lady, just now, I'm only in London for the weekend; came up to visit my sick aunt in Shoreditch."

 

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," the manager sneered. "And I suppose you called in here to pick up her prescription."

 

"What?" Trevor gawked.

 

"Bullshit!" the manager started to flush up red, already tiring of the exchange. "I've seen this all before. We don't take kindly to being ripped off."

 

"I'm sorry; how do you mean... ripped off?"

 

The big man sat back, and unclipped his elasticated bow tie. "All right," he sighed. "We'll call a spade a spade. You've just had three consecutive bets on number eight; and every single one of them comes up. You know, as well as I do, that's unheard of. It never happens."

 

"Doesn't it?" asked Trevor. "Well, I wouldn't know - see, I've never been in one of these places before. I'm not a gambling man, by nature."

 

At this point, the office door opened behind Trevor and, without looking round, he became uneasily aware of a presence; two extremely large presences.

 

"You realise," continued the manager, "that if I were to accept what you say as kosher, it would mean you'd have won enough to virtually buy us out."

 

Trevor's eyes widened. "I'd not do that," he said. "I've got a good job. What would I want with a place like this? Ehm... as a matter of interest, exactly how much is it I've won?"

 

"Nobody's agreeing that you've won anything. But if you had, it would be... let me see... oh, at thirty-six to one, a time, er... I don't know - something around a quarter of a million."

 

"I'm amazed," Trevor swallowed hard, tightly shutting one eye, as if focusing the other on an imaginary pot of gold. "All I did was copy the chap next to me. ‘Let it ride,' I heard him say, so I put a fiver on my choice and, when it came up, said what he did. I thought it was the thing to do; didn’t want to show my ignorance, and I’d no idea how much winnings was accumulating."

 

"Didn’t you really?" the manager was starting to bristle. "I can't buy you as anything other than a hustler. What I'd like to know is who you're in league with. It's one of the dealers, obviously. Armstrong, is it? Always had sticky fingers, that one."

 

Whilst in town, Trevor had meant to treat himself to one of those Soho massages he'd heard about; but the two massive hands that were now kneading his shoulders were not exactly what he'd had in mind. He began to feel decidedly ill at ease. "Look;" he said, "this is some sort of mix-up. I simply came in here to kill time. If I've won anything, it was purely a fluke; a stroke of luck – and, heaven knows, I don't have much of that."

 

"Right;" the manager waved to his two gorillas, "take him outside and break his arms."

 

This was unreal; the sort of thing that only happened in fiction. "No, please," Trevor protested. "I'm not in league with anybody. Besides, even if I was, how could they be certain that the same number would come up three times?"

 

The manager shook his head, tiredly. "Show him, Shorty," he sighed.

 

The gargoyle-featured Shorty, whose nickname had obviously been coined by somebody with a warped sense of humour, lifted Trevor right out of his chair, by the lapels, swung him over to a redundant roulette table in the corner of the office, and said, "Gissa number."

 

Trevor shrugged his aching shoulders. "Twenty-four."

 

"You spin it," Shorty grunted. Trevor obeyed.

 

The ball rattled around the perimeter of the wheel, clonked against the central spindle then, as though blind to all other beds, plopped, positively, into twenty-four, and stayed there.

 

"That's remarkable," Trevor had to concede. "How did you do that?"

 

Shorty laughed; a dumb, childlike chuckle that betrayed his obvious fondness for playing games. "Gissanother," he grinned.

 

"Thirty-four."

 

The exercise was repeated and, after the usual bouncing and rattling, the ball docked exactly where nominated.

 

"I saw you that time," Trevor challenged. "You were doing something under the table, with your foot."

 

"He got me boss," the goon admitted, pulling back the curtain to reveal a treadle-like arrangement of two foot pedals.

 

"As I imagine you well know, it's quite simple," said the manager, coming over to demonstrate. "A hit on the left lever controls the tens," - he depressed it down through three ratchet clicks - "and the right one, zero through to nine."

 

"But that's cheating," Trevor protested. "It's illegal, surely."

 

"Go on," the manager did the wide-eyed and innocent look. "And there was me thinking it’s perfectly legit. Now, cough up!" his face began to contort. "It was Armstrong, wasn't it."

 

"Armstrong? I don't know anyone called Armstrong," Trevor insisted. "And, until you just showed me, I didn't know anything about your mechanism thing, either. Even if I did, don't you think it would look a bit obvious, coming in and winning on the same blinking number, three times on the trot? As you said, it never happens."

 

"He's gotta point," the second heavy observed.

 

"Who asked you?" the manager turned on him, briefly, then sat back down to think; concluding, as he did so, that it was true enough; the man did have a point.

 

"Shall we do 'im over now?" Shorty asked.

 

"No," said the manager. "Look here," he waved a stubby forefinger at Trevor. "I'm still not sure I buy your crap; and I certainly don't intend to let you just waltz out of here with all that money - so here's what I'm prepared to do. What I always say to people who claim that they're on a lucky streak, is have another go. What have you got to lose? Surely your luck’ll hold up. We'll go back down to the tables, and you can have one final stab - double or quits. You pick an evens bet, and put the lot on it. If you win, we'll pay you in full. Lose, and... well, let's just say that I'll still give you the benefit of the doubt, and allow you to leave intact. Know what I mean?"

 

"What's the alternative?" enquired Trevor.

 

The manager didn't need to answer. He merely looked up at his two henchmen, and Trevor got the message.

 

"All right;” he accepted, “but there are a couple of conditions. First, I want you to announce what's going on to the other customers; that way you won't be able to renege on it if I win."

 

"Seems fair enough," the manager smiled. "I’ll talk you up as some famous gambling hotshot. It'll be good for business."

 

"Right," Trevor nodded. "And the other thing is that there's to be none of your people behind the table. It's to be a genuine, fair gamble."

 

“Absolutely,” the manager nodded in the affirmative; straight-faced but, inwardly, mightily relieved; knowing that he would now avoid the loss that the syndicate would never forgive. "Let’s do it," he snapped, then led the way to the lift.

 

 

"Ladies and gentlemen," the voice came over the public address system. "Tonight, we have, with us, one of the country's keenest roulette players... Mister Trevor Dunsmore."

 

Instinctively, some people began applauding; few admitting to their partners that they had never heard of the man.

 

"As you know," the announcement continued, "we have a relatively modest house limit. However, on this special occasion – in honour of his visit - we have agreed to make an exception. In view of his international reputation, we are prepared to accept Mister Dunsmore's wager of two hundred and fifty thousand pounds, against selecting an evens bet on the wheel."

 

The room was filled with gasps. Like a flock of sheep, all other players left their places, filing over to the main table. The manager allowed them to settle, bid the croupier vacate her post, and gestured for Trevor to place his bet.

 

The buzz died, eager faces bobbing up and down all around, vying for position to watch the man make his choice. Trevor weighed the pile of chips in his hand, extended his arm, and allowed it to hover above the baize. “Red or black,” he considered aloud. “Odds or evens.”

 

He selected... “Impair,” - odd number.

 

In a sham overt demonstration of unquestionable fair play, the manager pulled back his cuff, leaned over, set the wheel turning, and invited a member of the audience to cast in the ball. It was a woman. She squealed, girlishly, as she parted her fingers to allow the tiny orb of ivory to drop, jumping back for safety, as though avoiding possible injury from a ricochet.

 

But for the action on the wheel, absolute silence reigned.

 

Click, click, click... the ball hopped from segment to segment, running, betweentimes, up and down the central hub.

 

Click... click, it bounced again, this time in and out of twenty-nine, and in and out of eight.

 

It changed direction on the rebound.

 

Then... click! it finally dropped home. Nineteen... odd.

 

“What the hell!” the manager gagged, his eyes bulging; his instinctive protests drowned by the spontaneous cheer; hands patting, near thumping, Trevor's back. Already, there was a surge starting in the direction of the cashier's desk. Everybody, it seemed, wanted to see what half a million smackers actually looked like.

 

From the side of the quivering mouth, which he was just about managing to hold in a false smile, the manager told Trevor that he was now certain of a fiddle - and wouldn't rest until he'd got to the bottom of it. Almost closing his eyes to spare himself the pain, he took the case of money from the cashier, handed it over, and stormed off through the bead curtain, back up to the office to contemplate his future.

 

There were only two punters left in the place at six am. The manager had been waiting for an opportunity to inspect the roulette wheel, but wouldn’t do so, earlier, with several people still playing. "Take those stragglers into the coffee lounge," he told an aide. "Say we're having a break for essential maintenance work."

 

At last, they were gone. The manager locked the four doors that led into the hall, and sank to his knees under the table. Unlike the Heath Robinson affair in his office, this one had a cleverly concealed mechanism; a fraction of the size of its predecessor; all contained in a small metal box with a simple selector dial. Operated manually or, more usually, by remote control, the whole device could be quickly removed in the event of an unexpected visit from the police, or the gaming board. Flicking back the retaining clips, he let it drop into his hand, then screwed up his beetroot face in disgust, as well as rage.

 

 

But for the two early morning travellers, the first class carriage was empty. Trevor sat back watching the London suburbs rousing from sleep; paperboys running up the deserted cul-de-sacs abutting the viaducts, some kitchen windows open already, exhausting vapours which, he guessed, would likely be from kettles, or bacon and eggs. Bacon and eggs. Hmm, yes; he could murder a plate of bacon and eggs. But there was no buffet car on this train. He'd have to wait until they reached Dover before he could eat. "God, I'm hungry," he said aloud.

 

His companion looked up from behind her 'True Romance' magazine. "Shall we nosh on the boat, or get somefing in the town?" she enquired.

 

"On the boat, I think," said Trevor. "We don't want to hang around any longer than necessary."

 

She nodded. "S'pose you're right. ‘Ere;" she said, rummaging in the depths of her bag, "’ave some of this; it’ll keep ya goin’."

 

At that very moment, the casino manager was immersing his bulbous fingers in hot, soapy water to remove the goo – and not looking at all pleased. Trevor, on the other hand, was feeling most content, positively beaming at his pretty companion. "Yes I will, thanks," he said to her, accepting a stick of Wrigleys. "You know, Miss Armstrong; I was just thinking how useful this stuff is; how it helps your luck hold up; and – as you say - keeps ya goin’."

 

**  **  **

Copyright Albert Woods (2013)