Philip Kerr - If the Dead Rise Not

“And I can always extend you the same courtesy.”

“To answer your earlier question.” The thick lips stretched like a cheap, pink garter. “The eleven-thirty show is always the more difficult one to handle. People have had more to drink by that time of the evening. And sometimes there’s trouble if they can’t get in. The police station on Zanja is conveniently close, but it’s not unknown that they need a cash incentive to put in an appearance.”

“Money talks.”

“It does in this city.”

I glanced down at the backgammon board if only to avoid looking at his ugly face and inhaling the even uglier stink of his breath. From almost a meter away I could smell it. To my surprise, I found myself staring at a backgammon set of a design that was remarkable in its obscenity. The points on the board, black or white and shaped like spearheads on any ordinary set, were here each shaped like erect phalluses. Between phalluses, or perhaps draped over them like artists’ models, were naked figures of girls. The checkers were painted to look like the bare behinds of black and white women, while the two cups from which each player would throw his dice were the shape of a female breast. These slotted together to form a chest that would have been the envy of any Oktoberfest waitress. Only the four dice and the doubling cube met the eye with any kind of decorum.

“You like my set?” he asked, chuckling like a foul-smelling mud bath.

“I like mine better,” I said. “But my set is locked, and I can’t remember the combination. So if it amuses you to play with this one, that’s fine by me. I’m quite broad-minded.”

“Have to be if you live in Havana, right? Play on pips or just the cube?”

“I’m feeling lazy. All that math. Let’s stick to the cube. Shall we say ten pesos a game?”

I lit a cigar and settled into my chair. As the game progressed, I forgot about the board’s pornographic design and my opponent’s breath. We were more or less even until García threw two more doubles in a row and, turning the four to an eight, pushed the doubling cube my way. I hesitated. His two doubles in a row were enough to make me cautious to accept the new stake. I’d never been the kind of percentage player who could look at the positions of all the checkers on the board and calculate the difference in pips between myself and the other player. I preferred to base my game on the look of things and my remembering the run of the dice. Deciding I had to be due a double soon to make up for his three, I picked up the cube and immediately threw a double five, which at that particular moment was exactly what I needed, and left both of us bearing off, neck and neck.

We were each down to the last few checkers in our home boards-twelve in his and ten in mine-when he offered me the cube again. The math was on my side, so long as he didn’t throw a fourth double, and since this seemed improbable, I took it. Any other decision would have demonstrated a lack of what the Cubans called cojones and would certainly have had a disastrous effect on the rest of the evening’s play. The stake was now 160 pesos.

He threw a double four, which now left him even with me and likely to win the game unless I threw a double myself. His eyes hardly flickered as once again I threw a one and a two when I needed it least and managed to bring off only one checker. He threw a six and a five, bearing off two. I threw a five and a three, bearing off two. Then he threw another double and took off four more-his two against my five. Not even a double could save me now.

García didn’t smile. He just picked up his cup and emptied the dice, with no more feeling than if it had been the first throw of the game. Meaningless. Everything still to play for. Except that the first game was now over, and I had lost.

He bore off his last two checkers and slipped the big paw into the pocket of his tuxedo again. This time it came out with a little black leather notebook and a silver mechanical pencil, with which he wrote the number 160 onto the first page.

It was eight-thirty. Twenty minutes had passed. An expensive twenty minutes. García might have been a pornographer and a pig, but there wasn’t much wrong with his luck or his ability to play the game. I realized this was going to be harder than I’d thought.

IHAD STARTED PLAYING BACKGAMMON IN URUGUAY. In the café of the Hotel Alhambra in Montevideo, I had been taught to play by a former champion. But Uruguay was expensive-much more expensive than Cuba-which was the main reason I had come to the island. Usually I played with a couple of secondhand booksellers in a café on Havana’s Plaza de Armas, and only for a few centavos. I liked backgammon. I liked the neatness of it-the arrangement of checkers on points and the tidying of them all away that was required to finish the game. The neatness and order of it always struck me as very German. I also liked the mixture of skill and luck; more luck than was needed for bridge and more skill than was needed for a game like blackjack. Above all I liked the idea of taking risks against the celestial bank, of competing against fate itself. I liked the feeling of cosmic justice that could be invoked with every roll of the dice. In a sense my whole life had been lived like that. Against the grain.

It wasn’t García I was playing-he was merely the ugly face of Chance-it was life itself.

So I relit my cigar, rolled it around in my mouth, and waved a waiter toward me. “I’ll have a small carafe of peach schnapps, chilled, but no ice,” I told the man. I didn’t ask if García wanted a drink. I hardly cared. All I cared about now was beating him.

“Isn’t that a woman’s drink?” he asked.

“I hardly think so,” I said. “It’s eighty proof. But you may believe what you like.” I picked up my dice cup.

“And for you, señor ?” The waiter was still there.

“A lime daiquiri.”

We continued with the game. García lost the next game on pips, and the one after that when he declined my double. And gradually he became a little more reckless, hitting blots when he should have left them alone and then accepting doubles when he should have refused. He began to lose heavily, and by ten-fifteen I was up by more than a thousand pesos and feeling quite pleased with myself.

There was still no trace of emotion on the argument in favor of Darwinism my opponent called his face, but I knew he was rattled by the way he was throwing his dice. In backgammon, it’s customary to throw your dice in your home board, and both dice have to come to rest there, completely flat. But several times during the last game, García’s hand had got a little overexcited, and his dice had crossed the bar or not landed flat. In each case the rules required him to throw again, and on one occasion this meant he had missed out on a useful double.

There was another reason I knew I had rattled him. He suggested that we should increase our ten-peso game stake. When a man does that, you can be certain he thinks he’s already lost too much and is keen to win it back and as quickly as possible. But this is to ignore the central principle of backgammon, which is that it’s the dice that dictate how you play the game, not the cube or the money.

I sat back and sipped my schnapps. “How much were you thinking of?”

“Let’s say a hundred pesos a game.”

“All right. But on one condition. That we also play the beaver rule.”

He grinned, almost as if he had wanted to suggest it himself.

“Agreed.” He picked up the cup, and although it wasn’t his turn to throw first, he rolled a six.

I rolled a one. García won the throw and simultaneously made his bar point. He pushed himself close to the table, as if eager to win back his money. A little sheen of sweat appeared on his elephantine head, and, seeing it, I doubled immediately. García took the double and tried to double back until I reminded him that I hadn’t yet taken my turn. I rolled a double four, which took both of my runners past his bar point for the moment, rendering it redundant.