The chip jockey handed him two trays filled with chips.

As Tom placed them on the table in front of him, he flicked a glance at Ness, knowing it was the last honest one he’d be able to give anyone for the duration of this game. He didn’t care. Like a novice high-board diver seeking a nod from his coach far below, he needed to know he was going to be okay.

Ness read his face and cocked an amused eyebrow. She leaned against him and he felt her soft skin brush against him as she breathed into his ear, ‘It’s only money, Tom.’

*

It was only money. But it was a lot of ‘only money’. And, thank God, by the time Ness touched his neck with those warm, soft fingers five hours later, a good sum of it had accumulated in a navy-and-white cityscape in front of Tom.

The relief that washed over him was almost palpable. He’d played out the hand because he’d been dealt a pair of eights, but he was almost relieved to see the old black guy turn over a straight. Tom didn’t even want to delay long enough to count another pile of chips into another plastic tray.

As the other players put out their blinds, Tom slid a fifty-dollar chip to the dealer and stood up.

‘You leaving with our money?’ The bottle-blonde looked at him through lizard eyes.

Tom swallowed his knee-jerk response and bobbed his head to her. ‘Ma’am.’

‘Don’t you “ma’am” me, you chickenshit homo.’

Tom piled his racks on top of each other, while the eyes of every other player at the table bored into him. After what seemed like for ever, he turned away from the table. Ness was nowhere to be seen.

‘That’s right,’ the bottle-blonde said loudly. ‘Go home and jerk off your boyfriend.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

He didn’t wait to watch the woman’s reaction, although he wanted to quite badly.

He went to the cash window where a wrinkled Filipina gave him a brief smile. ‘Congratulations, sir. Would you like a cheque?’

‘Uh, no. Cash will be fine, thank you.’

‘Yes, sir.’ She leaned slightly away from the window and called down the row. ‘Mr Collins! Cash going out!’

Collins, a muscular, shaven-headed man in a tuxedo, stood and watched with gimlet eyes as the cashier counted out $37,700, encased it neatly in elastic bands in three ten-thousand-dollar piles and one $7,700 pile, and slid it under the window to him. ‘Thank you for playing, sir.’

He waited for her to ask for his ID, but she said nothing.

‘Would you like an escort to your car, sir?’ Collins asked.

‘Er …’ Tom glanced around as if a mugger might be waiting patiently behind him right now. ‘No, thanks.’

Collins nodded. As long as he’d asked, and someone had heard him ask, he’d done his job. This guy was on his own.

Tom pushed the thick wads of money deep into his jeans pockets. They bulged like football pads on his thighs. He felt self-conscious walking out, but nobody looked at him. He glanced back at table forty-one, but even the bottle-blonde’s back was turned.

He drove a quarter-mile down the strip, buzzing with the joy of winning – almost hard with it. Every time he looked into his rear-view mirror he realized he was grinning like a kid. He hadn’t felt this goofily good since he was nine and his dad had bought him his first real bike. An ice-blue-metallic Peugeot racer with ten gears. It was a bittersweet memory: eighteen months later he’d left it unlocked outside Target’s, and come out to find it gone. The two memories – joy and loss – were locked together inside him for ever. Now he brushed the loss aside: getting the bike had felt like this.

Ness was already picking at a bear-claw in the doughnut shop. She looked up as the bell announced him, and gave the half-smile that made her look so desirable he could hardly believe it was for him. He realized she must be amused by his beaming good mood. Her eyes flicked down to his jeans. ‘Is that thirty-seven thousand dollars in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?’

They grinned and he slid into the plastic chair opposite hers. He jammed his hand into his pants to retrieve the money but she gazed out through the window and said, ‘Not here, Tom.’

He was surprised, and she explained, ‘I only came in for the doughnut.’

In her car – a small black Lotus – she allowed him to hand her the winnings, along with the untouched ten-thousand-dollar stake money. She peeled off $2,700 and handed it back to him. ‘Nice job.’

He smiled, still buoyant, the way he always was after a win.

She dropped the rest of the money into a cloth bag and pushed it under her seat. Then she put the key into the ignition and looked at him expectantly.

He wondered what happened now. Decided to find out. ‘Buy you a coffee?’

‘Sorry, I have to get going.’

She smiled to soften the blow but Tom felt suddenly abandoned. ‘Sure.’

‘Tom,’ she said, a little awkwardly, ‘I have a boyfriend.’

He shrugged. ‘Is he bigger than me?’

She laughed.

He sighed and got out of her car, then watched, like a dog tied to a gate, as she drove away.

For the second time in a month Tom was deprived of someone to celebrate with.

12

IRVING, TEXAS, WAS no place for a Chinaman. This thought passed with ever-increasing bitterness through the mind of Chuck Zhong about fifty times a night as he made the rounds of the WAE plant.

Two years ago he’d thought this was a vacation job, something to keep him out of the hellhole of a summer kitchen at the Lucky Eight restaurant in downtown Irving. Two years ago he’d enjoyed the irony of the fact (or what he’d believed then would be the fact) that he was working security at the plant where soon he hoped to be making a living as an aeronautical engineer.

That first summer he’d made his beat a constant one. While Jeff and Lyle huddled together and played gin rummy with their backs to the security screens, Chuck had walked every inch of the place, soaking up every aspect of the first aircraft-engineering plant he’d ever be a part of – even if he was just security for now. Soon he’d be part of it for real, testing, improving, hypothesizing, showing them all how good he could be.

He wanted so badly to show everyone how good he was, and graduating top of his class in aeronautical engineering at the age of twenty-three was no bad way to start. Chuck was the first person in his family to go to university, and he was already the biggest success in his particular branch of Zhong family history. That was what his parents always said anyway, not wanting to disrespect their ancestors by setting Chuck up as the evolutionary pinnacle of the entire Zhong dynasty.

But, hell, thought Chuck, to find someone who’d done better you’d have to go back to goddamn Genghis Khan or some such shit. If he discovered that a Zhong had built the Great Wall single-handed, then maybe – just maybe – he’d concede defeat.

But that success was two years ago.

For the thousandth time since he’d got the job, Chuck ran his flashlight across the rows of parts waiting to be packed and shipped, each with an FAA Form 8130-3 attached – its own birth certificate, a white docket of authentication that allowed airlines to trust a million lives to each tiny part.

That was the pinnacle, as far as he was concerned. These gleaming, virgin pieces of metal, tooled and machined and filed and polished until their surfaces were jewels, precious gems in reverse, which had begun pristine and priceless and would be buried in the innards of an engine for the rest of their lives, fated for their beauty to be hidden from all eyes but those of common grease-monkeys. Their appreciation could never match his, of course, but they would at least treat those metal jewels with respect every time they were exposed to the light of maintenance.

Chuck Zhong sighed heavily. The production line was starting to turn from a thrill to a taunt and – not for the first time – he laid the blame for everything that had gone wrong in his life at the door of his parents.

They had been in Texas for forty-seven years, transported as children to a new world from an ancient one in the wake of the war, with no expectations other than avoiding starvation. They had met in Irving, married in Irving and – apart from a single trip to China – Chuck couldn’t remember the last time they’d been outside Irving. Maybe they never had. They hardly went outside the Lucky Eight.

Neither Ling nor Tong Zhong could speak English, and Chuck’s Cantonese was so rusty that he barely spoke to his parents any more. He hardly saw them, now that he’d chosen not to sweat himself into a pork-scented grave in the restaurant kitchen. They had brought up three children and had named them Chuck, Billy and Mary-Lou, as if their names alone would earn them a welcome in a place where at best they would never feel accepted, and where at worst they’d suffer lifelong discrimination.