The Sam Gunn Omnibus (108 page)

“I’ve sent her a bottle of
champagne with a note apologizing for taking you away from her,” Sam said
cheerfully. “She’ll be asleep in twenty minutes, half an hour at most.”

Before I could say another word the
elevator doors slid open. Two of Popov’s grim-faced thugs were already in it.

“Come to escort me to the game?”
Sam said to them. “How thoughtful the Godfather is!”

I
had no option
except to go with Sam up to the main floor, with all its .garish lights and
arcades, and into Dante’s Inferno.

The casino was strangely empty.
Popov’s people had closed the gaming center to the general public—meaning
Rockledge personnel. Sam and I, followed by the two silent, stone-faced goons,
threaded our way through tables for roulette, craps, blackjack, all covered by
gray plastic sheets. The slot machines and video games were dark and still.
Most of the overhead lights were off: the casino was draped in shadows, mysterious
and somehow threatening.

Except for one green-topped card
table, sharply lit by halogen lamps, in the middle of the vast floor. Popov sat
there, still in his tux, Ms. Chang at his side and a half-dozen more gorillas
on their feet behind him. One empty chair waited across the table from Popov.
An unopened pack of cards rested on the table, with two piles of chips, one in
front of Popov, the other at the empty chair that was waiting for Sam.

“You’re late, Sam,” said Popov as
we stepped into the pool of glaringly bright light.

“I had to stop on the way and pick
up my partner,” Sam said carelessly, gesturing toward me. Just like the lying
little sneak, blaming me.

Sam plopped in the empty chair and
noisily cracked his knuckles. I shuddered. Popov smiled in such a sinister way
that it made me shudder even more. Ms. Chang smiled too, but much more
alluringly.

“We each have a hundred thousand dollars
worth of chips,” Popov said, his grating voice sounding ominous. “We play until
one of us goes broke. Okay by you?”

“Okay by me,” said Sam.

I
stood behind Sam.
There was no other chair for me to sit in. Popov called the first round:
five-card draw poker.

I
have never seen
such cheating in my entire life! As I stood behind Sam, I saw treys turn into
aces before my astounded eyes; cards changed their suits, going from spades to
hearts or whatever Sam needed. It was all I could do to keep my eyes from
popping out of my skull.

Popov must have been cheating too.
He had to be, or else Sam would have blown him out of the water in the first
ten minutes. He
’
d win a hand, and Sam
would fiddle with one of his shirt studs and take the next pot. I realized that
both men were loaded with every electronic and optical sensor known to
humankind.

Sam began to pull ahead. The pile
of chips in front of him grew while Popov’s diminished. Ms. Chang played
hostess, getting up from time to time to bring drinks to the two players. The
goons behind Popov never moved; they stood there like menacing statues.

After a while I realized that
whenever Ms. Chang refreshed Sam’s drink Popov started winning. Sam didn’t seem
to mind: soon enough he’d pull ahead again with full houses and straight
flushes, no matter which cards he was dealt.

“Let’s take a kidney break,” Popov
said at last. His chips were down to a perilously low level.

“Okay by me,” said Sam cheerfully
from behind a small mountain of chips. He got up and headed for one of the
restrooms; Popov went in the opposite direction, convoyed by his gorillas,
leaving Ms. Chang alone.

I
was getting
frantic. If Sam won, I’d be ruined—and Popov would take it out on me. I glanced
at my wristwatch. It was almost two
am
I
hadn’t counted on Sam’s cheating. I could have kicked myself for being so
stupid. Of course the despicable little scoundrel would cheat!

I
followed Sam into
the restroom. “Sam, you’re cheating,” I accused.

“No kidding,” he answered lightly. “What
do you think the Godfather is doing, playing tiddlywinks?”

“I can’t allow cheating. It’s
wrong, Sam.”

“Tell Popov. Those goons standing
behind him are reading my cards with infrared sensors for him.”

“The cards are marked?”

“Does Santa C
l
aus live at the North Pole?”

“But—”

“I’ve been using nanomachines kind
of creatively, myself,” Sam admitted. “It’s one helluva game.”

A duel of double-dealing, swindling
con artists. I had the terrible feeling that in a competition like this against
Sam, the Mafia was like a gang of schoolyard bullies trying to beat up on
Superman.

Sam started back to the table with
me following glumly behind him. Sam’s got to lose, I kept repeating to myself.
Everything depends on Popov beating him.

For the next couple of hours the
game seesawed back and forth while I stood there sweating. Gradually, Popov’s
pile of chips was growing, Sam’s shrinking. Both men were still cheating with
every device known to modern technology.

One of Popov’s goons moved Ms.
Chang’s chair to Sam’s side of the table, and she sat demurely beside him. I still
had to stand. Sam covered his cards so carefully that I could no longer see
them. Ahah! I thought. He doesn’t trust his inamorata.

For the next hour Popov won
steadily. Sam fiddled with his shirt studs, scratched behind his ears, adjusted
his cufflinks, all to no avail. He even took off one of his shoes and shook it
as if it were filled with pebbles. It did no good. The chips were flowing
across the table to Popov’s pi
l
e, hand
after hand. Sam looked grimmer and grimmer; he pulled his bow tie loose and ran
his hands through his bristly hair. Popov just smiled wider and wider. Even the
thugs standing behind his chair began to relax and nudge each other knowingly.

At last Sam looked across the table
at Popov and his massive pile of chips and said, “Okay, Godfather. Let’s put an
end to this. High card takes it all.”

Popov looked at Sam for a long,
silent moment. “One trick for the whole pot?”

Sam nodded slowly. I saw sweat
trickling down his cheek.

Popov nodded back and called for a
fresh pack of cards. “High card wins it all,” he said as one of the goons
unwrapped the new deck.

Sam shuffled the cards. Popov cut
the deck, then pushed it across the green-topped table to Sam.

“Draw,”
he said.

Sam
pushed the deck back toward him. “You go first, Godfather.”

Popov
looked from Sam to Ms. Chang to me and then back at Sam again. He reached out
one hand and took the top card from the deck.

An
eight of clubs.

No
one spoke. No one even breathed. My mind was spinning. My legs went weak. An
eight! Sam can top an eight easily. I’m ruined!

Sam
shook his head slightly, then pulled the next card.

Four
of diamonds.

“Oh,
Sam,” breathed Ms. Chang.

“Shit,”
said Sam.

The
goons behind Popov chuckled. Popov himself allowed a satisfied smile to creep
across his craggy face.

“Well,
that’s it, Mr. D’Argent,” he said to me, playing his role to the end. “You owe
me forty billion dollars.”

With
a relieved smile I replied, “No, I don’t. Sam owes you, not me.”

“You’re
my partner!” Sam yelped. “You’ve got to—”

“As
of midnight Rockledge Industries dissolved its partnership with S. Gunn
Enterprises,” I announced. “You’re on your own, Sam.”

He
shot out of his chair. “You can’t break our partnership unilaterally!”

“I
can and I did,” I told him, perhaps a trifle smugly. “You should have read our
agreement more carefully, Sam. The contract clearly states in clause
thirty-seven, subparagraph sixteen, that either party can dissolve the
partnership on moral grounds.”

“Moral
grounds!” Sam yipped. “What moral grounds?”

I
drew myself up to my full height. “Rockledge
Industries will not be party to an operation that promotes gambling and
prostitution, even though it might be legal in the locality in which it is
situated.”

“But
you knew about it from the git-go!”

I
shook my head. “That makes no difference. The
partnership is dissolved. Rockledge has no further responsibilities to you, Mr.
Gunn.”

He
stood there gaping at me, his collar open and bow tie hanging loosely down the
wrinkled, sweaty front of his shirt.

“You
can’t do this to me!” Sam whined.

“It’s
done,” I said. Then I turned on my heel and headed for the casino’s exit,
grinning happily. This was going to cost Rockledge twenty billion, I knew, but
it’d be worth it to get rid of Sam Gunn—and my CEO, in the bargain.

From
behind me I heard Popov’s voice: “Sam, you owe me forty bill.”

I
quickened my pace
and practically ran out of the casino, thinking, This is the end of Sam Gunn.

By the time I got my hotel suite I was
almost feeling sorry for Sam. But then I told myself that he
’
d brought this on himself. It’s not my
fault. He’s the one who went to the Mafia, or the Syndicate, or whatever they
called themselves. Sam should have known better. Play with fire and you get
burned.

I
took a dose of
tranquilizers and crawled into bed beside my sleeping wife, knocking over the
ice bucket and what was left of the champagne in the process. They fell to the
luxurious carpet in dreamy lunar slow motion. She barely stirred. I thought I’d
have bad dreams but actually I slept quite soundly. Perhaps knowing that I’d
never again be troubled by Sam Gunn helped.

The next morning as my wife and I waited
in our hotel-furnished dressing gowns for room service to deliver our
breakfast, Ms. Chang phoned. She was pale and had dark circles beneath her
eyes; she looked much less slinky and sultry than the night before, for which I
was thankful, since my wife was in the room.

“I just want you to know, Mr. D’Argent,
that the little problem we discussed earlier about your return flight to Earth
has been resolved. There will be no difficulties about it, none at all.”

I
felt a wave of
relief surge through me. Despite my better instincts, though, I asked, “And
what about Mr. Gunn?”

Her face became somber. “Don’t ask
about Sam, Mr. D’Argent. It’s too gruesome to talk about.”

And she broke off the connection.

So we rode back to Earth in comfort
and safety.

Once I was safely back in my office
in Montreal, I phoned my CEO to tell him that I’d dissolved Rockledge’s
partnership with Sam.

“Dissolved it? You mean he owns the
Hell Crater complex without us?”

“Yes,” I said, trying to hide my
elation. “And we’re paying Sam’s company—or what’s left of it—twenty billion
dollars to get out of the deal.”

“Twenty billion?” I’d never seen
the CEO turn purple before.

It all went exactly as I planned
it. The CEO wanted to fire me, of course, but I used the corporation’s
intricate dismissal procedures to delay that process until Rockledge’s next
quarterly board meeting. Once the board members—including Mrs. CEO—heard that
we had incurred a debt of twenty billion, ostensibly to S. Gunn Enterprises,
they scowled mightily at the CEO. He tried to pin the fiasco on me, of course,
but I pointed out that despite my warnings he had enthusiastically supported
the idea of Rockledge getting into the euphemistically named entertainment
industry.

“Once I learned that entertainment,
in this case,” I said sternly, “meant gambling and prostitution—and the Mafia—I
wanted to pull out of the deal immediately. But I was overruled by the CEO.”

The board members gasped at the mention
of the Maf
i
a. They grumbled among
themselves. They groused at the CEO. By the end of the meeting, just as I had
planned, they voted to remove the CEO as board chairman. They wanted to fire
him altogether, but he narrowly averted that fate, by a single vote: his wife’s.