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me.”
    “Sign,” Sugarface said. “You owe Joy a favor you don’t want to do.”
    “What favor?”
    “You listening?” Denno said. “One you don’t want to do. Sign. You have a year and a day. Don’t make her come asking.”
    It didn’t seem ridiculous. Everything felt very important. My ears were ringing. I looked at the card, the big stingered insects. Everyone watched me.
    Joy’s page said “1) D.o.B. Favor,” and then the signatures. I signed.
    Sugarface clapped. Joy nodded and took her notebook back. Denno poured me an expensive wine.
    “Long time since I saw an induction,” Sugarface said.
    He collected the cards. I watched the yellow lady with the gas station logo on her back fold in with the rest of them. He shuffled.
    “Mine was in Moscow,” he said. “’66.”
    “Your induction?” Denno said. “Kinshasa, me. Eleven years ago.”
    Joy said, “Swansea Bridge Club.”
    I said nothing. I got dealt three of a kind. I won a little money. I wasn’t focusing any more. No one said anything else about the favor owed.
    “Having a good time?” Sugarface said.
    The card didn’t show up again. I rubbed the deck between my fingers and it felt standard and cheap.
    When we were done and packing up, I walked as nonchalantly as I could to the bookshelf and picked up those rules. I checked the contents page and the index, for Dowager, Bees, Hidden Suits, Suits (Hidden). Nothing.
    I realized that the others had stopped talking and were staring at me indulgently.
    “Bless him,” Denno said.
    “The round’s finished,” Sugarface told me. “You won’t find anything now.”
    He threw all three decks into the trash. I was still reading, looking through the lists of hands. There was nothing about a Full Hive.
    “You’re only inducted once,” Joy said. “Buy yourself something nice.”
    She waited in the doorway without complaining while I went to the bin and rummaged around in the cigarette ash and fished out every card and separated out the deck I’d bought.
    It contained no Dowager of Bees. I did find extra cards: there were fifty-five, but two were Jokers, and one was instructions for Solitaire.
    I made sure I had her address, and three hundred and forty-seven days later, I found Joy and did her a favor I didn’t want to.
    The second time I saw a hidden suit was in Manchester.
    It was six years later. I wasn’t a Poker top-ranker but I could hold my own, and besides, I’d diversified, could play you at Baccarat, Whist, Rummy, Bridge, Faro, Spoil Five Euchre, Chemin-de-Fer, Canasta, Uruguay Canasta, Panguingue, Snap. Pretty much anything. I’d find ways to bet on any of them too. I won my first car at Tarabish. It made me want to win more.
    There was a GameFest (they called it) at the Corn Exchange. Mostly families checking out kids’ stuff. The few professionals there were goofing around or accompanying friends. There were five of us in a little roomlet made with temporary walls in the corner of the hall. We were drunk and playing unlikely games for petty cash and giggles.
    We were on Old Maid. That’s the one where you start by removing one Queen, then deal the fifty-one and pass cards one hand to the next and get rid of pairs until everyone’s out except some poor schmuck who’s left holding just that last mismatched Queen, the Old Maid. They lose.
    A civilian would say it was pure luck. No such thing.
    We thought up a way to bet. Antes into a pot, which got distributed as people came out. Whoever had the Old Maid would end up losing double. It was a burning hot day and I remember a blaze of light came right down through a high window and made our table shine.
    I was out, sitting back safe, having made my cash. People took cards from each other and discarded pairs triumphantly. Three people left. More passing. Pairs down. Two. A woman in her twenties with a strawberry-blond bob and a leather jacket too battered not to be secondhand, facing down a plump, blinky, middle-aged guy in a corduroy