Streaking. Brian Stableford
limit, but the croupier didn’t bother to seek permission from above to let the bet stand; he had the discretion to accept it, and he had his own notion of style.
“What the hell,” said Stevie, putting down five hundred Euros. “I’ll keep you company, mate—even though I don’t have a country estate.”
“You must get paid at least thirty thousand a week, plus perks,” Canny pointed out. “And the estate’s in a valley so shallow and narrow that it hardly qualifies as a dale.”
“It’s in bloody Yorkshire as well,” Stevie said, feigning contempt, “but you’ll have it till you die, and I might break a leg on Sunday. We have personal financial advisors too, you know. I lost my last club shirt in the dotcom crash. I’m a sensible investor now.”
“If you were sensible,” Canny muttered, “you’d bet the whole thousand. When it’s all or nothing, the Kilcannons always come through.”
“Is that the family motto?” Stevie asked, not moving a muscle to add to his stake—but Canny watched Lissa Lo reach out a delicately manicured hand, and place five hundred Euros of her own on zero. On another night, with a slightly different crowd, she might have started a rush, but it was four o’clock in the morning and tired sanity held sway. Nobody else joined in. Canny didn’t know whether to be glad or not.
Well, Daddy, he said to himself, silently, this is the end. From now on, I’ll be just like you, at least for a while. No more grandstanding. But he was very keenly aware that there was one more spin of the wheel to go. He really wasn’t certain that he would win, when the croupier spun the wheel and dropped the ball—but as soon as he saw the streak he knew that he’d been a fool to doubt himself.
Visually speaking, it was a beauty. It wasn’t the brightest he had ever seen, but it was certainly the most complex. Given that he was about to win more than forty thousand Euros at long odds he might have expected it to be brilliantly white, but it had all the colors of the rainbow in it, not ordered into a spectrum but fragmented and mingled in a kaleidoscopic effect that was literally dizzying. The physical sensations accompanying the visual were equally complex; as expected, there was an element of euphoria and a rush of supreme self-confidence, but they were part of a compound whole whose other elements were unnamable. Some of them, at least, he had never felt before. He felt as if he had been moved sideways and wrenched out of shape, but he hadn’t really moved at all. He was sitting perfectly still.
The experience was all the more thrilling because he knew that no one else would have the slightest memory of the experience; if they felt it at all, or saw anything at all, it would leave no trace.
Afterwards, the heady cocktail of immediate sensation gave way to the customary wrench of nausea and the surge of objectless fear—the “aftertaste of triumph” his father had always called it—but he was well used to steeling himself against the possibility of collapse.
While the inner wheel of the machine spun, its glossy black casing surrounded it with a halo of reflected light, making the whole ensemble seem a mirror of wayward fate.
Then the silver ball dropped meekly into the zero slot.
This time, there was an audible effect—not a communal intake of breath, but an abrupt collective exhalation.
“Bugger me,” Stevie murmured. “You did it. Thanks, boss.”
Even Lissa Lo permitted herself a slight smile—but she wasn’t looking at Canny any more, and she studiously ignored the stacks of chips that the croupier was counting out, one by one, before raking them out. She was whispering to her companions, whose expressions suggested that she was bidding them an apologetic farewell.
Canny calculated that thirty-six times one thousand two hundred and seventy was forty-five thousand seven hundred and twenty—ten Euros shy of forty-seven thousand, including the stake. The croupier had already signaled to one of his peers, who came to collect the chips on Canny’s behalf. A brief nod sufficed to confirm that it was his intention to cash up. Canny took back a hundred Euro tip and tossed it to the man at the wheel; it seemed the least he could do.
As natural as breathing, he reminded himself, as he stood there watching the boy, savoring the prospect of the walk to the cashier’s office. Set a good example, now—leave them wanting more. He half-expected Henri Meurdon to emerge from the office to shower him with felicitations, but Meurdon had an image to maintain too. Forty seven thousand? he imagined the manager saying, in his slightly perfumed English. People walk out of here with that sort of money every day of the week. You could too, if you were lucky—and we’d be glad of the ad.
Before he moved off, Canny permitted himself one last glance at the three models. Two of them were staring; one wasn’t. It was the one who wasn’t to whom he addressed himself, although he didn’t look directly at her and spoke distinctly enough to be heard by everyone at the table. “I need an early night,” he said, carefully making his apologetic tone ring false. “I have to go home—Daddy’s so ill that he might not last the week, alas. Henri will have to do without me for quite a while, I fear—I hope he won’t miss me too much.”
The frowns that greeted this speech were all male. Canny heard a whispered Arabic phrase, and had seen enough of the Makhtoums at Ascot and Epsom to know that it meant “the luck of the devil”. He smiled. There was no need to take it personally. Long experience had rammed home the lesson that no one ever credited his own good fortune to the devil, or anyone else’s to the angels.
Having observed her whispered conversation, Canny wasn’t entirely surprised when Lissa Lo got up too. He didn’t read anything into the coincidence; it wasn’t unusual for women to get up and follow him when he left a table—many of the women he encountered on a day-to-day basis loved winners, and not a few were masochistically intrigued by evident disinterest that wasn’t overtly queer—but Lissa Lo was in an altogether different class. It was said that she never got out of bed for less than Stevie Larkin got for playing a game of football, but that you couldn’t get her into one for what he got paid for a whole league season, whoever or whatever you might be.
As Canny walked away from the table, though, the model moved on to a convergent path. He didn’t look around to see what kind of expression Stevie Larkin was wearing, but he could imagine it easily enough.
“I’d better call it a night too,” the model said, as they made their way over to the cashier, walking in step but not quite together. “The boat’s waiting to take me to Nice—the jet has to be in the air by six. I have to put down at some ridiculous RAF base west of York, so that a fast car can whisk me off to Harewood House for a shoot.”
Canny frowned, partly because of a momentary confusion as to the significance of the word “shoot” and partly because her reference to the RAF base west of York rang such an eerie bell. “Do you mean Church Fenton?” he said, as he stood politely aside to let her cash up first.
“Yes—do you know it?”
He only hesitated for a moment before answering. “The family pile’s only twenty miles away,” he admitted. “Approximately north by north-east—a little place called Cockayne. Church Fenton’s practically local—two hundred miles more local than Heathrow, at any rate”
“Cockayne! How charming.” The model’s delicately-etched eyebrows increased their curvature slightly, delicately but firmly implying that she was fully capable of savoring the resonance of the name. “In that case, I suppose I ought to offer you a lift.”
The rainbow quality of the streak took on new meaning as Canny calculated the possibilities implicit in the invitation. The rules forbade him to waste his erotic energies on frivolity, of course, but the majority of his ancestors had taken a very dim view of the supposed pleasures of the bedchamber, so that wasn’t surprising. They were Yorkshiremen, after all. The fact that his father had always sided with the rules probably had as much to do with the Earl of Credesdale’s disapproval of his son’s attitude to life as with any real fear of diminishing the brightness of the family’s lucky streak.
Well, why not? Canny thought. If Daddy’s share of the pot is all but