The third round was where it got interesting.
After the flop, I had a pair of sixes. Then the fourth and fifth cards were revealed to the table. The turn and the river (I knew not only the rules of poker, but the rather poetic terms too). I now had two kings as well.
A fairly strong hand.
I sensed the rest of the table.
Melissa had a pair of threes. Dietmar had a strong hand – a straight – and was feeling pretty confident putting a nice pile of chips forward to raise the bet. We were playing for one thousand, four hundred euros. If I didn’t at least match Dietmar’s raise, I would have to fold. So I matched it. Anne and Benjamin and José had nothing, and all of them folded. Flavio had an eight in his hand to match the eight on the table. He mulled it a moment, then folded too. Art raised. Melissa matched it.
It was time to place a doubt in Dietmar’s mind. Which was easy. His mind was the softest and most malleable I had entered since poor Brian’s at the beach restaurant. And the doubt I pressed into him was a simple one: Something feels wrong.
He was suddenly so nervous he folded, to his own confusion.
‘Why did I do that?’ he asked, in English.
So now it was just Melissa and Art and me.
Melissa was already starting to feel paranoid and antsy of her own accord, because she was on a cocaine downswing and vowing to do a full week of ashtanga yoga and vegetable juice after the holiday, so she bailed. And now it was just me and Art. He looked at me. I met his eyes. And for the first time since I had sat down at the table, I caught an opening, a tiny rip in his mental fabric. I didn’t waste the moment. I sneaked straight in like a burglar through a window.
He had a similar hand to mine, I realised, as he sipped his whisky. Two pairs. Two fours and, like me, two sixes. The difference was my two kings trumped his lower pair. But it wasn’t just the cards I wanted to read. So I took my chance to go deep.
Contradictions
Art Butler’s mind was a forest of contradictions. There was nothing particularly good in it, but it did contain a lot of oppositional forces.
He was full of pride and shame, ego and insecurity, cold and heat, fear and determination, apathy and passion, reservation and impulsivity, everything and nothing. He was a sitting paradox. A terminally flawed lifeform. He was, in short, a human.
But. But. There was something else going on. There was more to his mind than I could reach. Something there but not there. An unseen element, something that blurred darkness and light, a mysterious penumbra lurking in the cave of his psyche. Something hurt and sad and soft.
I don’t want to make him sound too enigmatic or charismatic. He was a killer. He had killed the politician Ricardo Martinez. Maybe others. And he would have killed Christina. And he was prepared to kill Marta. But to know is to conquer. And I wanted to know him.
Another note that struck me was that he was filled with a kind of mental yearning. I pictured it as a hole that kept collapsing the more he tried to fill it. He was in it. In the hole. Freefalling for ever. He was worth £889 million and ached to make it to a billion. He had a very big yacht. He travelled everywhere and drank and consumed expensively. But really, I sensed he wasn’t living. He had replaced the idea of life with something else, with the kind of hunger that can’t be sated.
He laid down his cards and I laid down mine. He took the defeat as he took everything – personally. I gathered the chips and his anger grew. I could feel him in my thoughts like shade across a lawn.
We played again. I won again. The six became five as Melissa left the game. Then four as Dietmar yawned out of the room, defeated.
Because I could mentally read everyone’s cards, I knew when to play and when to bail. I felt I had cracked the whole key to life. Knowing which hands to play and which hands to give up on. And which bad hands I could play with and still win. I wasn’t even trying to play it safe. I wanted to weaken him, make him vulnerable. There was a risk he would get angry, but there was a bigger risk in leaving him. So I continued.
But I must be honest here.
I was enjoying myself. And that was no small thing.
Joy!
Me. The person who had never even indulged in a lottery ticket. I know it is probably terrible of a former teacher to tell their former student about the joy of playing poker at five in the morning, but it wasn’t the gambling. It was the sense of doing something old widows aren’t supposed to do. It felt like Caesar coming back and crossing the Rubicon. The turn and the river. As though I had this night taken risks and left an old version of myself behind and expanded the territory of who I was. Sometimes the rules of who we are supposed to be need to be broken. Sometimes we need to obey something deeper. I wondered if Karl would approve or disapprove of me being in Ibiza, using my newfound paranormal gifts to play poker with a psychopath, and then realised that was irrelevant. I was done with the diktats of ghosts. It was sometimes good to be naughty, especially when the naughty thing was actually a good thing in disguise. Within an hour at the table, I had accumulated, together with the earlier winnings elsewhere in the casino, fifty-six thousand euros. In other words, I had more than half the amount I needed. I felt like I was not only dominating the game but dominating the mysterious Art Butler too.
The dealer – a tall man with mother issues – was smiling at me. He didn’t like Art Butler very much. And Art just stayed there, not saying a word. And we had quite a crowd now.
It was all going well.
But then, after losing that final round, I saw Art smile at me. And as he smiled I felt a sudden terror, a feeling like I had walked into a trap that I didn’t know existed.
‘It’s funny,’ he said, speaking for the first time as he stared at me across the table. ‘The thing with poker is you have to discover every player’s weakness. The thing that will distract them. I think I have discovered yours. She is standing in the other room.’
Then his face changed, and he looked towards the exit with an intense glower. Even the other players noticed. But they obviously didn’t realise what was happening.
And there, right on cue, was the moment.
Because that was when I heard the rising hubbub from the other room. There was a scream. And I felt the force of fear emanating from Alberto’s mind. It came to me as clearly as a sight or scent, a siren of panic.
And then his distant voice.
‘Marta!’
A Lot to Take In
Just because something happened, you are under no obligation to believe it. All I will do is lay out the facts as I remember them and leave it to you to interpret them how you wish. The only thing I ask is that you leave a door open in your mind to possibility. We are never at the finish line of understanding. There is always something about life and the universe that we are still to discover. That has been the ultimate lesson for me. That at any moment along the line of our existence it can branch off. We get so used to it going in a straight line that we believe that is all life is, and then, suddenly, it twists or turns or takes a sudden right angle.
So.
Here goes.
Here is what happened as I remember it.
I left the poker table and headed to the main room.
When I got there I saw Marta was lying on her back on the diamond-patterned carpet, in her jolly striped trousers and her blue dot T-shirt, struggling for breath. A small crowd loomed over her. I pushed my way through. A faint purple hue was on her cheeks, her wild hair even wilder than usual, as if she’d been in some kind of struggle. A crowd was gathered. Alberto was on his knees beside her. He looked up with boyish fear. Eyes wide.
