Improbable

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Chapter One

"It's twenty to you, Caine. In or out?"

David Caine could hear the words, but he couldn't respond;his nose wouldn't let him. The smell was unlikeanything he had experienced before -- a perverse stew ofrancid meat and rotten eggs floating in a vat of urine. Hehad read on the Internet that some people killed themselvesbecause the smell got so bad. At first he didn't believeit, but now ... now it didn't seem so crazy.

Even though he knew that the smell was a by-productof a few confused nerve cells, it didn't matter. Accordingto his brain, the smell was real. More real than the cloudof cigarette smoke hovering over the table. More realthan the greasy scent of McDonald's that still hung inthe air from Walter's midnight snack. More real than thesmell of sweat mixed with despair that permeated theentire room.

The smell was so bad that his eyes had begun to water,but as bad as it was, Caine didn't hate it as much as whatit represented. The smell meant that another one wascoming, and judging by the intensity of the vomitinducing,brain-crying stench, it was going to be a doozy.Worse still, it was coming on fast, and of all the times itcould happen, he couldn't afford to have it happen now.

Caine squeezed his eyes shut for a moment in a vainattempt to hold off fate. Then he opened them andstared at the crumpled red-and-yellow box of fries sittingin front of Walter. It pulsed before his eyes like acardboard heart. Caine turned away, suddenly afraid hemight puke.

"David, are you okay?"

Caine felt a warm hand on his shoulder. It was Sister Mary Straight,an ex-nun with oversize dentures that were older than he was. Shewas the only woman at the table -- hell, she was the only woman inthe whole club except for the two emaciated Romanian waitressesNikolaev kept around to make sure no one ever had a reason to getup. But Sister Mary was the only female player. Despite that everyonecalled her "Sister," she was more like a surrogate mother to the menwho lived down in the cellar or, as the Russians liked to call it, thepodvaal.

Technically, no one truly lived in the podvaal, but Caine was willingto bet that if he asked any of the twenty-odd men crowded around thetables where they felt most alive, they'd say it was here, in thecramped, windowless basement fifteen feet below the East Village. Allthe regulars were like Caine. Gamblers. Addicts. Sure, some had fancyoffices on Wall Street or important-sounding jobs in midtown andbusiness cards with raised silver lettering, but they all knew none ofthat mattered. All that mattered were the cards you were dealt andwhether you were in.

Every night they returned to the cramped basement beneath Chernobyl,the Russian supper club on Avenue D. Although the barwas dirty, the games Vitaly Nikolaev ran were clean. When Caine firstlaid eyes on Vitaly, with his pasty white complexion and thin, girlisharms, Caine would have guessed he was a CPA rather than a Russianmobster.

But all his doubts disappeared the night when Vitaly Nikolaev beatthe living shit out of Melvin Schuster, a harmless old man who pickedthe wrong club to cheat. Before Caine knew what was happening,Nikolaev had transformed the paunchy grandfather's face into a red,pulpy mess. No one ever cheated at the podvaal after that.

And yet this was the place Caine chose to call home. The minusculestudio he had on the Upper West Side was just where he slept,showered, and occasionally shaved. Every now and then, he would geta girl to come up, but that hadn't happened in a long while. Not surprising,considering the only woman Caine had any interaction withwas Sister Mary.

"David, are you all right?" Sister's question brought Caine back to the world of the living. He blinked his eyes and gave Sister a quicknod, which was enough to make his nausea return.

"Yeah, I'm cool, Sister. Thanks."

"You sure? Because you look a little green."

"Just trying to earn some green," Caine said with a halfhearted grin.

"Are we through coffee-housing, or you two wanna get a room?"Walter sneered through yellowing teeth. He leaned in close enoughfor Caine to smell the onions on his breath. "Twenty. To. You. In. Or.Out?"

Caine looked down at his hand and then again at the up cards,stretching his long, sinewy arms over his head of unruly black hair. Hepushed the nausea back down his throat and forced himself to ignorethe smell as he decided what to do.

"Stop running the odds and bet," Walter said, picking at a hangnail.

Caine was known for doing the complex math in his head necessaryto calculate the odds of nearly anything. The only variable thatCaine couldn't quantify was the probability that his opponents werebluffing, but he tried nonetheless. Caine felt like Walter was purposelytrying to rush him, so he gave the old man a bored look andcontinued analyzing the board.

The game was Texas Hold 'Em and the rules were simple. Eachplayer was dealt two cards, which was followed by "the flop" whenthree cards were turned over for everyone to see. Then the dealerwould flip over a fourth card, known as "the turn," and then the fifthand final card, known as "the river." There was a round of betting aftereach flip, and then the players revealed. Whoever had the best fivecardpoker hand -- out of the five shared cards in the middle and thetwo cards in his hand -- won.

The beauty of the game was that at any given moment an intelligentplayer could look at the board and know the best possible handthat could be made ...

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Excerpted from Improbable: A Novel by Adam Fawer
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