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jacket. We watched them swap and throw down cards, their faces set, and then someone gave a little cry and I frowned because the two of them were sitting back staring at each other, and each still held a single card.
    “Did we mess up?” someone said. “Did we miscount?”
    The man turned his: the Queen of Spades. He was the Old Maid.
    We all looked at the young woman. Her eyes were wide. She looked at me. The back of her card looked the same as all the others. I didn’t feel drunk any more.
    “Show,” I said.
    She lowered it face up. Its background was dark flat gray. The design was of two rows of four links of metal picked out in white.
    She swallowed. She said, “Eight of Chains.”
    Someone went to bar the door.
    “What now?” her opponent said. He was terrified. “I don’t know what happens.”
    “None of us do,” I said.
    “Gin’s my usual game, I don’t … What’s the rule ?”
    A tall guy to the young woman’s right was leafing through a tatty paperback of Hoyle’s . The fat man looked up a gaming site on his phone.
    “I don’t understand,” said a boy of about seventeen. “What is that?”
    By that time I knew that, definitionally, if he didn’t, everyone else present did understand what was happening. If there’s any, there’s only ever one.
    “You’ve been inducted,” I told him. “Just watch and listen. Who else had it?” I said. “At any point?”
    The guy looking with the rule book raised his hand. “I got dealt it,” he said. “She took it from me. Here we are.” He started to read. “Old Maid: Rules for Hidden Suits. It’s the what of Chains?”
    I said, “The Eight,” but the man with the Queen interrupted.
    “Got it,” he said, squinting at his phone. He sagged with relief. “I’m still the loser,” he said. “I still lost.”
    I could see the boy was about to complain that he didn’t understand again and I showed him a warning finger.
    The young woman licked her lips. “There must be a forfeit, though,” she said. “Even so.”
    The big guy hesitated and nodded and passed her his phone. She read. The rest of us were too polite to ask but I caught the eye of the man with the rule book and he gave me a tiny reassuring nod.
    “OK,” the young woman said. She was tense but controlled. “OK, that’s not so bad.”
    “Right?” her opponent said. “It could be worse, right?”
    “That’s not so bad.”
    We all breathed out. I picked up the cards and folded them back into the deck and shuffled. We all got silly as the tension eased. I made the cards spring from one hand to the other and dance about. People cheered.
    “I don’t understand,” the boy said. “Can I see?” He held out his hand for the deck and I made the cards jump through the air to land right in front of him and everyone laughed, even the woman who’d ended up with the Chains.
    “You can try,” I said. “I wouldn’t hold your breath, though.” He went through the deck and, of course, did not find the card. Without asking, he picked up the phone too, but the round was over and there was nothing about the hidden suits on the site, or on any site.
    The young woman took a while to clear up her stuff and she kept looking at me. She wanted me to wait for her.
    “You’re really good at that stuff,” the big man said, making flickering fingers.
    “Many hours,” I said. “Sleight and magic.”
    He glanced behind him. The woman was putting on her jacket. He lowered his voice.
    “I almost didn’t give her the phone,” he whispered. “The Eight’s not so bad. Which is good, because …”
    I shook my head so he wouldn’t tell me more.
    “But if she’d seen what it said about the Nine,” he said, and shook his head. “Or the Six. Or if she’d ended up with the Two of Scissors … !”
    “She didn’t,” I said. It was crass of him to talk this way. “There’s no percentage thinking about the might’ves.”
    He left as the young woman approached. He gave me a friendly