Sokolov Rules
Nadia
The first time I took Lev Sokolov’s money, I was wearing my dead father’s watch and carrying his debt like a second spine.
The watch was too big for me. Steel, Soviet, wound by hand every morning since 1979, first by Misha Volkov and now by his daughter. I wore it on the inside of my left wrist the way he had, face turned toward the pulse, so I could read the time while my hands were busy and no one at the table could read it with me. Dealers aren’t supposed to wear jewelry. Nobody at the Volga Room had ever told me to take it off.
Nobody at the Volga Room told me much of anything. They told me where to stand and when to start and how much I still owed.
Three hundred and twelve thousand dollars, at the beginning. Two hundred and ninety-one thousand, four hundred, the night Lev Sokolov sat down at my table. I knew the number the way I knew the deck: without looking, to the dollar, at all times.
The Volga Room was the second floor of Sadko, the restaurant on Brighton Beach Avenue with the blue onion domes painted on the awning and the best pelmeni between Coney Island and the end of the world. Downstairs, grandmothers in fur hats ate borscht under crystal chandeliers and the Q train shook the silverware every eleven minutes. Upstairs, behind a door with no handle on the outside, six men a night lost more money than the grandmothers would see in their lives.
The room was walnut paneling and green baize and one long window painted black. It smelled like cigar smoke that had soaked into the wood decades before smoking indoors was illegal, and like the black tea the house served in glass cups with silver holders, because the Sokolovs were old-fashioned about some things. Vodka for the players. Tea for the house.
I didn’t drink either while I worked. My father’s first rule: the dealer is the only sober person at the table, or she isn’t a dealer, she’s a guest.
I had a lot of my father’s rules. I’d been collecting them since I was six years old and he let me shuffle his practice deck on the kitchen table in our apartment on Brighton Sixth, my hands too small to bridge the cards, scattering them across the linoleum while he laughed and made me pick up every one.
Count them as you pick them up, Nadya. Fifty-two. If you get fifty-one, something is wrong with the world.
By twelve I could tell him which card was missing from a deck after watching it dealt once. By nineteen I was counting shoes at blackjack tables in Atlantic City with a fake name and a real talent. By twenty-six, four casinos had walked me politely out the door and asked me not to come back, which my father considered the proudest moment of my life.
By twenty-nine I was standing in a dead man’s shoes behind a Bratva card table, working off markers he’d supposedly signed in his last year alive. Markers I had never been allowed to see.
Lev Sokolov came up the back stairs at eleven forty, which was not when he was supposed to come.
I knew who he was before he was through the door. Everyone on Brighton Beach Avenue knew who he was, the way you know which way the ocean is without turning around. Arkady Sokolov’s only son. The heir. Thirty-five years old, educated somewhere expensive, back in Brooklyn for six years now and rising so quietly that you only noticed how high he’d gone when you looked up and realized he was standing over you.
I’d seen him exactly four times in the two months I’d been dealing. Always in the doorway, never at the table. He’d watch a few hands with his shoulder against the frame, say something low to his uncle Gennady, and leave. Each time, he’d looked at my hands. Not my face, not my body in the black vest and white shirt and slim black trousers that made up the house uniform. My hands.
It had made the back of my neck hot every time, and I’d hated that.
Tonight he didn’t stop in the doorway. He walked to the table, and the five men playing at it sat up straighter, and Feliks the dentist, who had been losing steadily and loudly since nine, actually put down his drink.
“Gentlemen.” Lev’s voice was lower than I’d expected. No accent, except when he wanted one. “Don’t let me interrupt.”
He took the empty seat. Seat six, directly across from me, where the light from the brass lamp fell full on him.
He was big without being bulky, long in the bones, dark hair cut close at the sides and left longer on top, as if he’d started to care about it and then stopped. Charcoal suit, no tie, white collar open at the throat. The shirt was buttoned high enough to hide whatever was there, but not high enough to hide that something was. Ink, the dark edge of it, right where his collarbone started.
And his hands. He laid them flat on the green felt, and I read them the way I read everything.
Long fingers. A scar across the knuckles of the right hand, pale and old. Letters tattooed on the four fingers of the left, below the knuckles, Cyrillic, faded to the blue-gray of a winter sea. I couldn’t read them upside down without staring, and I didn’t stare.
I did notice that on the inside of his right wrist, where the cuff rode up, there was a single playing card inked in black and red. The ace of hearts. With a hole through the center, like someone had shot it.
“Chips, Mr. Sokolov?” I said.
His eyes came up from my hands to my face, and for the first time I saw what color they were. Gray. Not cold gray. The gray of the ocean at six in the morning off the end of the boardwalk, when it can’t decide yet what kind of day it’s going to be.
“Fifty,” he said.
Fifty thousand. I counted it out without blinking and slid it across.
“You’re Misha Volkov’s daughter,” he said.
“I’m the dealer.” I squared the deck. “The game is no-limit hold’em, gentlemen. Blinds are five hundred and a thousand. Mr. Sokolov is in the big blind.”
Feliks laughed, nervous. A few of the others traded looks. You didn’t talk to the heir that way. I knew it, and I did it anyway, because I had been on my feet for six hours and I owed his family two hundred and ninety-one thousand, four hundred dollars, and I wasn’t going to owe them my manners too.
Lev didn’t seem offended. If anything, something at the corner of his mouth eased.
“The dealer,” he agreed. “Deal, then.”
He played for two hours, and he was good.
Not good the way rich men are good, which is mostly loud. Good the way my father had been good. Still. Patient. He folded hand after hand without a flicker, let Feliks bully the table, let the shipping man from Odessa win three pots in a row. Then, at one forty in the morning, he picked off Feliks’s stack with a pair of nines that he’d held through two raises without changing his breathing, and Feliks went home in a cab with his tie undone, muttering in Russian about the devil.
By two thirty it was down to the regulars who couldn’t sleep, and then it was down to no one. The last man shook Lev’s hand and left. Gennady’s bouncer, Rostik, went downstairs to lock the restaurant. The Q train rattled past the painted-black window and shook the tea glasses on the sideboard.
I started to collect the cards.
“Leave them,” Lev said.
He was still in seat six. He’d taken off his jacket at some point, and his sleeves were rolled to the elbow. I’d been trying not to look at his forearms for an hour. The left one was ink from wrist to elbow, a fan of playing cards rendered so fine they looked like they’d been pressed into him, five of them, smoke curling between them.
Four hearts and a spade. A busted flush.
“The game’s over, Mr. Sokolov.”
“The house game is over.” He reached into his shirt pocket and set something on the felt between us. A fresh deck, still in its cellophane. “This is mine.”
I didn’t touch it. “I’m a dealer. I don’t play.”
“You played in Atlantic City.”
The room went very quiet. Even the train had gone.
“I was a tourist in Atlantic City,” I said.
“For seven years. Under four different names.” He unwrapped the deck himself, slowly, and the cellophane crackled in the silence. “Resorts banned you in twenty twenty-two. Borgata the year after. You took the Tropicana for sixty thousand over one long weekend before their surveillance figured out the redhead with the reading glasses was the brunette from the month before.” He fanned the cards face up across the felt, checked them with a glance, swept them together. “My father would have hired you on the spot. He has a soft spot for thieves.”
“Counting isn’t stealing.”
“No,” he agreed. “It’s memory. And patience.” He looked up. “Which is why I’d like to play you.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve watched you deal for two months, and you know where every card in the deck is by the fourth hand.” He said it without accusation, the way you’d tell someone their shoe was untied. “You never use it. You deal clean. You don’t tip anyone off. You just know. I want to see what you do when you’re allowed to use it.”
I should have said no.
I should have thanked him for the game and wiped down the felt and walked down the back stairs to the cold street where the ocean wind would slap some sense into me. Men like Lev Sokolov didn’t play with women like me. They played with us, which was a different preposition entirely.
But he’d said allowed.
Two months of standing behind this table with my hands tied, knowing every card, watching rich men make stupid choices with my father’s watch ticking against my pulse. Two months of Gennady Sokolov’s cologne and his soft hand on my shoulder at the end of every shift, his voice saying two hundred and ninety-one, Nadezhda Mikhailovna, we’re getting there. Two months of being the only person at the table who wasn’t allowed to win.
“What are the stakes?”
“My stake.” He pulled his whole stack toward him. I’d counted it as he played, of course. Seventy-four thousand, five hundred. He split it into two equal towers with three quick passes of his fingers and pushed one across the felt to me. “Thirty-seven thousand, two hundred and fifty each. You play with my money. You lose, you’ve lost nothing. Whatever you walk away with goes against your father’s paper.”
My heart did something I didn’t approve of.
“That’s not a bet. That’s charity.”
“It’s a bet.” He leaned back in his chair. “Against my pride. Which, I’m told, is considerable.”
“And the rules?”
The corner of his mouth moved again. This time it was almost a smile.
“Sokolov rules,” he said. “One deck. No burn cards. No reshuffle until the deck runs out, and if the stub can’t finish a hand, it’s dead. Every card that’s folded gets turned face up before the next hand. Heads up, no limit, until one of us has the other’s stack.” He slid the deck across the table to me, and his fingertips brushed the backs of mine, and the touch went up my arm like a struck match. “My game. I invented it when I was fifteen, to beat my uncles. Nobody’s beaten me at it since I was nineteen.”
A one-deck game where nothing got hidden and nothing got reshuffled. A game where, by the end of each deck, a player with a perfect memory would know exactly which cards were left.
He’d built a game for someone like me. Years before he knew I existed.
I picked up the deck.
I’m going to tell you how I beat him, because it matters, and because it’s the last time in this story I was entirely in control.
The first deck, I lost. Not much. I let him take eleven thousand off me in four hands while I watched how he bet when he was strong, and how he bet when he wanted me to think he was strong, and the difference was so small I almost missed it. When he was bluffing, he didn’t look at his chips at all. When he had it, he glanced down once, as if checking they were still there.
The second deck, I won it back and six thousand more.
The third deck, at three fifteen in the morning, I knew everything.
There were nine cards left in the stub when he dealt the last hand. Exactly nine: two for him, two for me, five for the board. Not one card to spare. I knew all nine by name. I’d watched the other forty-three come out, get played, get folded, get turned face up under his own rule, and I had filed every one of them away in the quiet room at the back of my head where my father had taught me to keep them.
I looked at my two cards. Jack of clubs. Ten of diamonds.
The flop came queen of hearts, nine of spades, four of diamonds.
That left four cards in the whole world that I hadn’t seen. His two, and the two still to come. Four of clubs. Four of hearts. Three of spades. Eight of hearts.
Lev bet twenty thousand. And before he pushed the chips forward, his eyes dropped to his stack. Once. Checking it was still there.
He had it.
There was only one way to have it out of those four cards. If he’d held a four and something else, he’d have a weak pair of fours on a board with a queen on it, and Lev Sokolov didn’t glance lovingly at his chips over a weak pair of fours. He had both fours. He’d flopped three of a kind, and he thought he had me dead.
Which meant the two cards left in the stub were the three of spades and the eight of hearts, in some order. Which meant that whatever order they came in, I was going to make a straight, queen high, and beat him.
I didn’t have odds. I had arithmetic.
“All in,” I said.
His eyes lifted from the table to my face and stayed there. The lamp hummed. I felt my pulse beating under my father’s watch, steady, steady.
“You’re bluffing,” he said softly.
“Call and find out.”
He called.
We turned our cards over. His fours, the pair of them, black and red. My jack and ten, which looked like nothing at all.
He turned the next card off the stub. The three of spades.
One card left. He didn’t need to turn it. I watched him realize it, watched him count back through the deck in his own head and come up with the same answer I had. His hand hovered over the last card for a long second.
Then he turned it anyway, because a rule is a rule. The eight of hearts.
He sat motionless, looking at the five cards on the felt. Then he laughed. It was low and real and completely unexpected, and it changed his whole face, made him look younger and far more dangerous.
“You knew,” he said.
“I always know.”
“You knew before I called.”
“Your rules, Mr. Sokolov.” I pushed back my chair. My legs weren’t quite steady, and I hoped he couldn’t tell. “Seventy-four thousand, five hundred against the paper. Two hundred and sixteen thousand, nine hundred left. I’d like that in writing from your uncle by Friday.”
“You’ll have it by tomorrow.”
I nodded and turned to go, and he said, “Nadia.”
Not Miss Volkova. Not dealer. My name, in that low voice, like he’d been saying it to himself for a while.
I stopped with my hand on the door. I didn’t turn around. I wasn’t sure what my face was doing, and I didn’t trust him to read it less well than I’d read his.
“Friday,” he said behind me. “Come back Friday. After close. I want a rematch.”
“With what? You’re out of stake.”
“Different stakes.” I heard his chair creak, heard him stand. I could feel where he was in the room without looking, the way you feel heat from a stove. “I’ll make you an offer you can refuse. That’s the only kind I’m interested in.”
My hand was sweating against the brass plate of the door.
“And if I don’t come?”
“Then you’ll owe two hundred and sixteen thousand, nine hundred dollars and never wonder about anything again.” A pause. “But you’ll come.”
“You don’t know me, Mr. Sokolov.”
“I’ve been watching your hands for two months.” His voice was closer now. Not touching me. Not even near enough to touch. Just close enough that I could hear him breathing, slow and even, the patient breathing of a man who’d held a pair of nines through two raises. “They shake right before you win. Very slightly. Only the left. Nobody else would ever see it.”
I looked down at my left hand on the door. Under my father’s watch, it was trembling.
I walked out without answering, down the back stairs and out into the wet October dark, and the ocean wind didn’t slap any sense into me at all.
An Offer You Can Refuse
Lev
I hadn’t lost at my own game in sixteen years, and I drove home along the boardwalk at four in the morning grinning like an idiot.
Stas, who had been driving me since I was twenty-two and had seen me come out of rooms bleeding with less expression on my face, kept glancing at me in the mirror.
“Good night?” he finally said, in Russian.
“I lost seventy-four thousand dollars.”
He thought about that through two traffic lights. “To who?”
“The dealer.”
Stas made a noise that in another man would have been a laugh. In Stas it was a small, contained earthquake. He didn’t ask anything else. That was why I kept him.
My apartment was the top floor of a pale brick building at the end of Brighton Fifteenth, where the boardwalk bends and the lights of Coney Island start to blink in the distance. Floor-to-ceiling glass on the ocean side. I’d bought it for the view and spent the first year with the blinds down, because a man in my family learns early not to stand in front of windows. Lately I’d started leaving them open. The ocean at night was black and enormous and didn’t care who my father was.
I put the kettle on. Black tea, a spoonful of cherry jam stirred into the glass the way my grandmother made it. My father thinks it’s a peasant habit. My father also thinks I should carry a gun to dinner. We disagree on many things.
I stood at the glass and drank my tea and thought about her left hand.
I should explain about the paper. It’s the part of this I’m least proud of, and a man ought to say the worst thing about himself first.
I’d first seen Nadia Volkova eight weeks earlier, on a Tuesday, from the doorway of the Volga Room. I’d come up to talk to my uncle Gennady about a liquor license. I stayed twenty minutes and forgot what the license was for.
She was dealing to six men who’d lost their manners somewhere around midnight, and she didn’t seem to notice them at all. Her face was calm and closed, dark hair pulled back so tight it looked like it hurt, a little crease between her brows that never went away. She was not soft-looking. She had a sharp chin and a mouth that seemed built for saying no. But her hands—
I’ve watched cards dealt my whole life. My father’s games, my uncles’ games, the games in the back of a bathhouse in Sheepshead Bay when I was nine and too small to see over the table. I have never seen hands like hers. The cards didn’t leave her fingers. They arrived where she sent them, flat and silent, like they’d been waiting all along to be in front of that player. She shuffled the way other people breathe.
And she knew. I could see it by the third hand. When Feliks the dentist folded a hand he should have played, the crease between her brows deepened a fraction. When the shipping man went all in on a hand that couldn’t win, her eyes flicked once toward the stub, and away. She knew where the cards were. She was keeping a perfect count in her head and dealing as if she didn’t, and the effort of that, of knowing everything and saying nothing, lived in the line of her shoulders.
I knew that effort. I’d been the heir to Arkady Sokolov since I was born. I’d been knowing everything and saying nothing my entire life.
Then, at the end of the shift, my uncle Gennady walked behind her and put his hand on her shoulder. Just rested it there, soft and heavy, while he told her the figure. Three hundred and eight, Nadezhda Mikhailovna. We’re getting there.
She didn’t flinch. She didn’t move at all. She went so still that I understood she’d been practicing being still for him.
I asked my uncle about her on the stairs. He told me about Misha Volkov, who’d dealt for my father for twenty years and died in March with his heart blown out like a tire, and the markers Misha had left behind. Three hundred and twelve thousand. Gambling debts, Gennady said, shaking his head. Who would have thought. The most careful man in Brighton. The girl was working it off, Gennady said. Good worker. Very good. He’d keep an eye on her.
He said keep an eye on her the way some men say keep her.
I bought the paper from him the next morning.
I paid cash. Three hundred and eight thousand, the balance as it stood, in a gym bag I put on his desk in the counting room. Gennady counted it twice and asked me why, and I said I liked her hands and didn’t want them broken, which was true enough to be a good lie. He laughed. He was strangely easy about it, I remember. Almost relieved. At the time I thought he was just pleased to see cash.
I told him to keep administering it. Keep her on the table, keep crediting her wages against the balance, keep the books exactly as they were. Don’t tell her who holds the note now. And don’t touch her again. Not her shoulder. Not her chair. Not the air near her.
He promised.
So here is the worst thing about me: for eight weeks, I had owned Nadia Volkova’s debt, and she didn’t know it.
I told myself I was protecting her. If she knew I held the paper, every look between us would be about the paper. She’d be grateful, or she’d be afraid, and I didn’t want her grateful or afraid. I didn’t want her at all, I told myself. I just wanted Gennady’s hand off her shoulder.
I told myself a great many things for eight weeks. Then tonight she’d looked at me across my own table and said call and find out, and I’d understood that I was a liar.
I finished my tea. The sky over the water was turning the color of a bruise healing. I went to bed and didn’t sleep.
At noon I went to the counting room above the restaurant and told Gennady to write her a statement.
“Seventy-four thousand against the balance,” I said. “Signed. Dated today. She gets it by tonight.”
My uncle is my father’s youngest brother. He is sixty-one and wears cologne that smells like cloves and expensive leather, and he has the soft, pleasant face of a man who would sell you a car with no engine and send you a card at Christmas. He took off his reading glasses and looked at me.
“You played her.”
“She played me. She won.”
“At your game?” His eyebrows went up. “Levushka. She took you at Sokolov rules?”
“She did.”
He laughed, but his eyes didn’t join in. He wrote out the statement on the family’s cream letterhead in his neat accountant’s hand and slid it across. “Your money, your toy,” he said. “But be careful. That one’s like her father. Smart in the wrong places.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing.” He put his glasses back on. “Misha saw too much and talked too little. It didn’t make him happy.”
I folded the statement into my pocket. “I’d like to see the original markers. Misha’s.”
There was a pause. Short. A half second. On another man I’d have missed it.
“They’re at the bank,” Gennady said. “In the box. I’ll bring them up when I’m next there.”
“Do that.”
“Of course.” He smiled at me, warm, avuncular. “Anything for you, Levushka.”
I walked downstairs into the noise of the lunch rush and stood for a moment in the kitchen doorway with the smell of dill and frying onions, and thought about that half second.
Then I put it away. I had a rematch to plan.
She came on Friday at two in the morning, and she didn’t wear the uniform.
I’d been sitting alone at the table in the Volga Room for forty minutes with a glass of tea going cold and a fresh deck in front of me, trying to decide whether I was a fool. When the door opened and she walked in, I stopped trying. I was a fool. It was fine.
Black jeans. Low boots. A dark green sweater that slid off one shoulder and showed the strap of something black underneath. Her hair down, for the first time since I’d seen her. It was longer than I’d thought, past her shoulder blades, and it moved when she walked. She’d put on lipstick, a dark red, the color of the hearts on a new deck.
She’d dressed for me. Or she’d dressed for a fight. I suspected, with her, there wasn’t much difference.
“You got the statement,” I said.
“I got it.” She didn’t sit. She stood across the table from me with her hands in the back pockets of her jeans, which pushed her shoulders back and did unhelpful things to the sweater. “Two hundred and sixteen thousand, nine hundred. In your uncle’s handwriting. So it’s real.”
“It’s real.”
“Good.” She tilted her head. “So. Different stakes, Mr. Sokolov. I’ve been thinking about it for two days. I’ve thought of about fifteen things you might want, and I don’t like any of them.”
“Tell me the worst one.”
“That you’ll try to buy me.”
It went through me like a blade, clean and cold, and I didn’t let it reach my face. I’d had thirty-five years of practice not letting things reach my face.
“No,” I said. “I’m not going to try to buy you.”
“Then what?”
I nudged the chair across from me out from the table with my foot. She looked at it, then at me, and stayed standing. All right.
“A rematch,” I said. “Sokolov rules. Heads up. If you win, your father’s paper is gone. All of it. The two hundred and sixteen. I’ll put it in writing before we deal the first card, and my uncle never says his name to you again.”
Her hands came out of her pockets. She didn’t move otherwise, but I saw her swallow.
“And if you win?”
“If I win, you give me three nights.”
The radiator ticked in the corner. Downstairs, someone was stacking chairs in the empty restaurant, a long scraping rhythm.
She laughed, short and unamused. “There it is.”
“Let me finish.”
“I don’t think I need you to finish.”
“You do,” I said. “Because this is the part that matters. Three nights. And you set every rule.”
That stopped her. I watched it stop her. The crease between her brows came back.
“Every rule,” she repeated.
“Every one. Where. When. What happens and what doesn’t. What I’m allowed to touch and what I’m allowed to say. Whether I’m allowed to touch anything at all. You write the rules, I follow them. If your rule is that we sit on opposite ends of my couch for three nights and watch old movies, then I’ll learn to love old movies.”
“And if I want to stop?”
“Then you stop.” I held her eyes. “Any night, any minute, for any reason or none. You say a word and it’s over, and you walk out, and you don’t owe me the rest. Your paper stays exactly where it was before tonight. No penalty. No interest. No hard feelings, and if there are hard feelings, they’re mine to deal with, not yours.”
“That’s a stupid bet,” she said slowly. “For you.”
“Probably.”
“I could lose on purpose, sit on your couch for an hour, say my word, and walk out with exactly what I came in with.”
“You could.”
“Then what do you get out of it?”
I’d thought about that for two days too. I’d had a number of clever answers ready. I looked at her standing there in her green sweater with her red mouth and her hands that shook right before she won, and I didn’t use any of them.
“The chance,” I said. “That you don’t.”
She was quiet so long I heard the radiator tick twice. The chairs downstairs had stopped scraping. I could hear the ocean, faint, three blocks away, or maybe that was my own blood.
“And if I say no to all of it?” she said. “Right now. No rematch.”
“Then you go home. You come back Monday and deal. Two hundred and sixteen thousand, nine hundred, same as this morning. I don’t come up the stairs anymore. You never see me in that doorway again.”
“Just like that.”
“Just like that. It’s an offer you can refuse, Nadia. I meant it. I don’t want anything from you that you’d rather not give.”
She looked at me for so long that I began to understand what it must have felt like for the casino floor managers in Atlantic City, watching a woman at a blackjack table who seemed to be doing nothing at all and was, in fact, doing everything.
Then she pulled out the chair and sat down.
She didn’t reach for the deck. She folded her hands on the green felt, the left one over the right, the old steel watch facing up at me from the inside of her wrist.
“Why three nights?” she said. “Why not one?”
“Because one night is a transaction.” I didn’t look away. “Three is a question.”
“What question?”
“Whether you’d want a fourth.”
Her mouth parted, very slightly. The lipstick caught the lamplight.
I’d been told my whole life that patience was my one real talent. My father said it with contempt, my mother with worry, my teachers in Geneva with the bored respect people give to a long-distance runner. I could wait out anyone. I could hold a pair of nines through two raises without my pulse moving.
Sitting across from Nadia Volkova, waiting for her to answer, I felt my patience as a physical thing. A rope in my hands, fraying.
“I have conditions,” she said.
“I expected you would.”
“Not for the three nights. For the game.” She reached out, finally, and picked up my deck, and turned it over in her fingers without opening it. “We don’t play for chips.”
“No?”
“No. Chips are boring. Chips are what rich men play for when they’re afraid of losing something that matters.” She tapped the deck once against the felt, squaring it, a sound like a door latch. “We play for what we’re wearing.”
My heart stopped, and then remembered what it was for, and went at twice the speed.
“Every hand you lose,” she went on, very calm, like a dealer explaining the blinds, “you take something off. Every hand I lose, I take something off. We both start with the same number of things. First one with nothing left to lose loses the match.”
I found my voice somewhere it shouldn’t have been. “You’ve thought about this.”
“I told you. Two days.” She slid the deck back across the table to me, her fingertips grazing mine exactly the way mine had grazed hers on Tuesday, and I understood that she’d done it on purpose, that she was returning a touch she’d been carrying around for three days like a stolen card. “And we don’t play here. Not under your uncle’s roof.”
“Where?”
“Your place.” Her chin came up. “Tomorrow night. Midnight. I’ll bring my own deck, because I don’t trust yours, and I’ll bring the rules for the three nights in writing, in case you win. You won’t see them unless you do.”
“And if I say no to your conditions?”
The smile she gave me then was the first one I’d seen on her. It was small and sharp and it went straight through every defense I’d spent thirty-five years building, like they were made of paper.
“Then you’ll never wonder about anything again, Mr. Sokolov,” she said. “But you’ll say yes.”
Seven Things
Nadia
I counted my clothes in front of the mirror at eleven fifteen, the way other women might count their courage.
Left earring. Right earring. Small gold hoops that had been my mother’s, the only thing of hers my father kept. Left boot, right boot. The black jeans. The green sweater, because I’d seen the way Lev Sokolov looked at it slipping off my shoulder and I wasn’t above using a weapon twice. And under the sweater, the black silk slip I’d bought on Saturday on Kings Highway for more money than I’d spent on clothes in a year, cut on the bias, thin straps, long enough to reach the middle of my thighs.
Seven things.
What I wore under the slip didn’t count. That was going to be my first condition. The game ended before that, or it didn’t happen.
I put my father’s watch on last. That didn’t count either. Nothing in the world would make me take it off for Lev Sokolov.
In my bag: my father’s last deck, still in its cellophane, bought from the same shop on Avenue U where he’d bought every deck he ever used. And an envelope, sealed, with one page inside, folded twice. I’d written it on Friday night at my kitchen table after I walked home from the Volga Room. I’d rewritten it four times. The last version was the shortest.
I’d told myself all weekend that I was going to win. That I was going to sit down at his table and take his game apart card by card the way I had on Tuesday, and walk away with my father’s name clean, and never see him again.
I’d also bought the slip.
My hands were steady on the zipper of my bag. That was how I knew I was lying to myself.
Stas drove me. He was waiting outside my building on Brighton Sixth at eleven forty in a black car with the engine running, a big gray-haired man with a boxer’s nose who said “Miss Volkova” in a voice like gravel in a bucket, opened the door for me, and didn’t say another word for nine blocks.
Lev’s building stood at the end of the boardwalk where the street turned and the wind came straight off the Atlantic. The doorman didn’t ask my name. The elevator was paneled in dark wood and smelled like cedar, and it opened directly into his apartment, which I hadn’t been ready for.
No hallway. No door to knock on and change my mind in front of. Just the elevator doors sliding back and the whole place opening in front of me: a long room in shades of gray and dark wood, low furniture, books stacked on the floor beside full shelves, and on the far side, an entire wall of glass and nothing behind it but night and the black moving ocean.
He was standing at the glass with his back to me. He turned when the doors opened.
White shirt, sleeves down this time, silver cufflinks. Dark trousers. Black shoes. The old steel of a watch on his left wrist. No jacket, no tie. He’d shaved. I was annoyed by how much I liked that he’d shaved.
“You came,” he said.
“I told you I would.”
“You told me I’d say yes. You didn’t say anything about yourself.” He crossed the room toward me, unhurried, and stopped at a polite distance. Close enough that I smelled him for the first time, something like cedar and black tea and clean skin. “Can I take your coat?”
I let him. His knuckles brushed the back of my neck as he lifted it off my shoulders, and I pretended not to feel it, and I think he pretended not to know that I was pretending.
There was a table set up by the window. Not a card table. A round dining table in black walnut, two chairs, a brass lamp pulled close, a glass of tea in a silver holder at one place and nothing at the other.
“I didn’t know what you drink,” he said.
“Nothing, when I play.”
“Your father’s rule?”
I looked at him sharply.
“He dealt for my father for twenty years,” Lev said. “I was a kid hanging around the back rooms. He told me once that the dealer is the only sober man at the table.” His mouth eased. “I asked him what the players were. He said, customers.“
It hit me harder than I expected. Somewhere in this man’s head was a version of my father I’d never met. Younger. Talking to a dark-haired boy in a back room.
I sat down before my knees could make the decision for me.
“Conditions,” I said.
He sat across from me. “Go on.”
“Seven things each. We count them out loud before the first hand, so nobody cheats.” I took a breath. “Underwear doesn’t count. On me. Your trousers don’t count. On you. The game ends before either of those. If you win, what happens after the game is in the envelope.” I took it out of my bag and set it face down on the table, at my elbow. “If you try to read it before you’ve won, I walk out.”
“Agreed.”
“Folding counts as losing the hand. Showdown, best hand wins. Ties, nobody takes anything off. Sokolov rules otherwise. My deck.”
I put my father’s deck on the table. He looked at it, at the shop’s little gold sticker on the cellophane, and something in his face went quiet.
“Avenue U,” he said.
“You know it?”
“Misha used to send me there for decks when I was twelve. Paid me five dollars to run.” He didn’t touch it. “Count your seven, Nadia.”
I counted them. I pointed to each thing as I named it. Left earring, right earring, left boot, right boot. Sweater. Jeans. I hesitated for half a second before the last one, and then I reached up and hooked one finger under the black strap where it showed at my shoulder and pulled it into the light.
“And this,” I said.
His eyes followed my finger, and stayed on the strap a long moment, and came back up to my face, a shade darker than they’d been.
“Seven,” he agreed. He didn’t touch anything as he counted his own, just named them in that low, even voice, watching me the whole time. “Watch. Left cufflink. Right cufflink. Left shoe. Right shoe. Belt. Shirt.”
“Socks?”
“Go with the shoes. I’m not giving you socks as a separate win. I have some pride.”
“Not much, after Tuesday.”
He laughed, that low real sound again, and opened my father’s deck.
The first hand, he won. I’d expected it. I was still watching.
I took off my right earring and set it on the walnut by the lamp, a small gold circle. He watched me do it the way some men watch a car crash.
The second hand, I won. He unfastened his watch, an old steel thing almost as plain as my father’s, and set it beside my earring. As he did, his left cuff rode up, and the fan of inked playing cards slid into view along his forearm. I looked at it longer than I should have.
“You’ve noticed my hand,” he said.
“It’s a bad hand. Four hearts and a spade. A busted flush.”
“I was nineteen. My uncle Gennady and I played Sokolov rules for my first real money. I chased that flush through three raises. The spade came on the river.” He tugged the cuff back down over the ink. “Last time I ever lost at my own game. Until Tuesday. I had it put on my arm the next week so I’d remember.”
“Remember what?”
“That wanting a thing badly enough to chase it doesn’t make it come.”
I didn’t have an answer to that. I dealt.
He won the next hand, and I sent my left earring to join its sister without a word. He lost the one after it, and he didn’t move to take anything off. He just sat back and looked at me across the lamp.
“Why didn’t you leave?” he asked. “After Atlantic City. You could have gone to Las Vegas. Macau. Anywhere they haven’t learned your face yet.”
“I was going to.” I squared the deck, though it didn’t need squaring. “I had a ticket. February. My father was going to come out in the summer and complain about the heat.”
“And then March.”
“And then March.” I hadn’t meant to say anything else. It came out anyway, low and even, the way I’d learned to say things that hurt. “Your uncle came to the funeral. He stood at the back of the church in that camel coat and waited until the priest was done, and then he walked up to me at the graveside and kissed me on both cheeks, and told me how sorry he was. And then he told me the number.”
Lev’s face didn’t change, but something under it did. “At the grave.”
“At the grave. Three hundred and twelve thousand. Markers my father signed at the Volga in his last year. I said I wanted to see them.” I dealt the next hand, quick and clean, because my hands needed something to do. “He said of course, of course, they were in a safe place, he’d bring them by. He never did. In April his men came and took everything in the apartment that could be sold. In August he told me there was a place for me at the table if I wanted to work off the rest. Or I could leave, and the debt would stay on my father’s name. On his grave, he said. Forever.” I looked up. “My father dealt clean for forty years. I wasn’t going to let anybody put that on his grave.”
For a while neither of us said anything. The ocean moved behind the glass.
“You still haven’t taken anything off,” I said. “You lost that hand.”
He looked at me for another long moment. Then he reached down without breaking my gaze and took off his left shoe, and then, after a pause, his right, and set them side by side under the table.
“That’s two,” I said. “You only lost one.”
“The second one’s for your father,” he said quietly. “Deal.”
It went the way good games go: slowly, and then all at once.
He lost his left cufflink to a pair of jacks, and his right one on the very next hand, when I caught him trying to bluff with his eyes on my face instead of on his chips. I lost my boots on two hands in a row, the second to a straight he’d been sitting on so quietly I almost admired it, and I bent down to unzip them one at a time while he watched with his elbows on the table and his chin resting on his folded hands, and I took longer than I needed to on the second one.
Five things gone from him. Four from me.
The apartment was very warm. Or I was.
I won the next hand with a full house that I’d known was coming for two hands, and he sat back in his chair and looked at me.
“Shirt or belt,” I said. “Your choice.”
He held my eyes and started unbuttoning his shirt.
I’d known it was coming. I had known, the way I knew cards, that sooner or later that shirt was coming off, and I’d thought I was ready. I’d seen the ink at his collar. I’d seen his forearms. I was a grown woman of twenty-nine who had seen men take their shirts off before.
I was not ready.
He did it without hurry, one button at a time from the throat down, and the white cotton fell open on a chest and stomach that were all long hard lines, not gym-built, the kind of body that comes from work and walking and not much sleep. And ink. Under each collarbone, an eight-pointed star, black, sharp-edged. The old kind. The kind men in his family have earned for a hundred years and that I’d only ever seen on very old men in the steam rooms on Coney Island Avenue, faded into their skin like water stains. His were dark and clean and terrifying.
Along his left ribs, curving with the bone, a single word in Cyrillic. I could read it from across the table.
Терпи. Endure.
He shrugged the shirt off his shoulders and draped it on the back of his chair, and when he turned to do it I saw that across the whole span of his upper back, wings to shoulder to shoulder, there was a lion. Not snarling. Lying down. Its great head turned to look over its shoulder at whoever stood behind him. Patient. Watching.
Lev means lion. I’d known that. It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder whether he knew it too.
He turned back and sat down. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. He knew exactly what he’d done.
“You picked the shirt on purpose,” I said. My voice came out lower than I meant it to. “Over the belt.”
“I did.”
“That’s cheating.”
“That’s strategy.” He picked up the deck and started to shuffle, because it was his deal, and the muscles in his forearms shifted under the inked cards. “You’re allowed to look, Nadia. I’m not going to charge you for it.”
I looked. God help me, I looked.
I lost the next hand. I’m still not sure whether I lost it because the cards fell wrong or because for thirty seconds I forgot how to count past one.
I pulled the green sweater over my head.
The air of the apartment touched my bare arms and shoulders. The silk of the slip whispered against me, thin as nothing. I set the sweater on the table beside the little pile of his things and mine, earrings and cufflinks and watch, and I didn’t look at him, and then I did.
He wasn’t looking at my body. He was looking at my face. As if it was the most interesting thing in the room, as if he was trying to read something there and couldn’t, quite, and the wanting to read it was making him a little crazy.
His hands on the deck had gone completely still.
“Deal,” I said.
He dealt.
I lost again. A pair of queens to his three tens.
I stood up. My legs were not entirely reliable. I unbuttoned the jeans and slid them down over my hips and stepped out of them, and the slip fell back into place against my thighs, black against my skin, and I folded the jeans and set them on my chair and sat back down on them, and every part of me that the silk touched was awake.
Six things gone. He was down to the belt.
One thing left. Each.
“Last hand,” he said. His voice was rough. “Whoever loses this one loses the match.”
“I know how counting works, Mr. Sokolov.”
“Lev,” he said. “I think you can call me Lev, sitting there like that.”
“Deal the cards, Lev.”
Here is what I knew.
There were twenty-two cards left in the stub of my father’s deck when the last hand began. I knew all of them. I watched him deal my two cards and his, and I watched the flop come down, and I added it up in the quiet room at the back of my head, and the answer was very simple.
I was going to win.
Ace of spades and king of spades in my hand. Queen, jack, and ten of spades on the flop. A royal flush. The best hand in poker, the hand amateurs dream about and professionals see twice a career. It was already made. There was nothing left in the stub, nothing in his hand, nothing in the world that could beat it.
All I had to do was play it out. Two more cards and I’d win, and my father’s name would be clean, and I’d walk out of this apartment in my slip and my debt-free life and never feel this way again.
Lev looked at his cards, and then at his belt, and then, very briefly, at me.
He checked.
I looked at the flop. Queen, jack, ten, all spades, black and perfect under the brass lamp. I looked at my own two cards in my hand, the ace and the king, that I’d known were coming since the deal.
I looked at the envelope by my elbow.
Then I put my cards face down on the walnut and pushed them toward him.
“Fold,” I said.
The silence was so complete I heard the ocean through the glass.
He stared at my folded cards. Then at me. Then back at the cards.
“Sokolov rules,” I said, and my voice didn’t shake, but my left hand did, under my father’s watch, in my lap where he couldn’t see it. “Every card that’s folded gets turned face up.”
He turned them over.
The ace of spades. The king of spades. He laid them on the table next to the flop, and the royal flush sat there in the lamplight between us, complete, unbeatable, and thrown away.
He didn’t say anything. Ten seconds. Twenty. Then he stood up, slowly, and came around the table.
I stood up too. I don’t know why. To meet him, maybe. To be on my feet for whatever this was.
“You knew,” he said. He was close now. Close enough that I could feel the heat off his bare chest. Close enough to see the fine lines at the corners of his eyes and a small white scar through his left eyebrow that I hadn’t noticed before. “You had the best hand in the world, and you knew.”
“I always know.”
“Then why?”
I had told myself all weekend that I would win. I had bought the slip. I had written my rules four times, and the fourth time I’d started with if he wins and I’d known, writing it, that I didn’t mean if.
“Because I wanted to lose to you,” I said, “more than I wanted to win.”
For one more second he didn’t move. I watched it land in him. I watched his patience, that famous patience, the thing that let him hold a pair of nines through two raises, go taut as a wire.
Then his hand came up and slid along my jaw and into my hair, and his mouth came down on mine.
It wasn’t a gentle kiss. It wasn’t rough either. It was the kiss of a man who’d been waiting eight weeks in a doorway, slow and deep and certain, his thumb at the hinge of my jaw tilting me up to him. He tasted like cherry jam and black tea. I made a sound I’d never heard myself make and grabbed his belt, the last thing he had, and held onto it like a railing, and he walked me back one step until the edge of the walnut table pressed into the backs of my thighs and the cards scattered and his watch and my earrings slid and rang against each other on the wood.
He kissed me until I couldn’t remember the count. Any count. Then he pulled back just far enough to look at me, his forehead against mine, both of us breathing like we’d run up from the beach.
“You lost,” he said against my mouth.
“I did.”
“Three nights.”
“Starting now.” My hand was still fisted in his belt. I made myself let go. I reached behind me without looking, and found the envelope by feel, and pressed it flat against his bare chest, over his heart, over the star. “Open it.”
He took it from me. He didn’t step back. He tore the envelope open one-handed, with his other hand still in my hair, and unfolded the page between us, and read it.
I watched his face while he read. I watched him get to the first line, and stop, and read it again. Something moved in his throat.
He looked up at me, and the gray of his eyes had gone almost black.
“Rule one,” he said quietly.
“Read it to me.”
He held the paper so I could see it, my own handwriting, the fourth draft, the one I’d sat up until three in the morning to write.
“Rule one,” he read, in that low voice, every word deliberate. “Tonight, you don’t get to use your hands.”
