Any establishment called The Printworks is going to be one of two things. Option A: It’s a trendy wine bar situated on the site of an old factory that used to print newspapers, pamphlets and the like. Option B: It’s still a printworks and the name of the business is just ‘The Printworks’ because it’s in a socialist nightmare of a country that feels the need to do away with snappy names for things. This place was the former. A small factory floor which had once housed rows of printing equipment had, years ago, been converted into a mid-sized wine bar.
When Emanuel had first seen it it’d reminded him of the sort of bar white folk would have drunk at in a hot, war-torn country said white folk were in the middle of ‘colonising’. The bar was a big square in the centre with bottles of cognac and whisky in a circle behind the bar staff, who were dressed a fraction too posh for the surrounding area. Dimly-lit booths with leather seats and marble tables lined each of the four walls but for a small entrance where a rhinoceros-sized bouncer stood, cruelly squeezed into a human-sized tuxedo.
A few things changed when Emanuel bought the place out, financed by a couple of called favours and a sold diamond that had been stolen years before from a guy who didn’t deserve it. Aside from allowing the staff to dress more casually and adding a variety of drinks, hard and soft, that the average punter could afford, Emanuel made use of two extra rooms that had previously been used for smoking, snooker or storage. In one, the snooker table’s baize had been repurposed to cover an oval-shaped poker table. In the other, Emanuel had been able to set up an actual, miniature printworks using equipment that had been kept in the basement for decades on end.
As the bar became self-sufficient, Emanuel began to spend more and more time in that second back room, locked away from the hustle and bustle of the bar, seeing to the old printing machinery. Every part needed cleaning, refurbishing and putting back together again after accumulated wear and tear from decades ago, or simply from having rotted away in the cellar. Soon enough, he had enough equipment, and enough accumulated knowledge, to print bar menus, posters and flyers. Within a few more weeks, he’d become able to make playing cards to be used in the poker room. Beautiful things, they were. Deep red with spotted white fractal patterns and the logo of the bar situated tastefully in the top-left and bottom-right corners.
The legal status of gambling on Calorborne was definite: No high-stakes poker or you go to prison. In bars, the only gambling one could do was via slot machines, and even then only for a $25 maximum payout. Those were highly regulated, and so impossible to ‘game’ the system even if he’d wanted to. When it came to poker, it was only legal to play for small denominations in bars. 5 cents maximum per hand. Nowhere near enough to be remotely exciting. People tended to play for fun with matchsticks, or with monopoly money, or not at all, with the majority choosing the latter. High stakes poker was only legal in casinos, and casinos had been banned, so that was that.
If he was going to get some high-stakes poker going, it would have to be under the radar. Emanuel generally avoided what he called ‘stupid-gambling’, the kind where you bet more than you can afford and you gamble with your ability to pay rent for the next month. He liked a flutter here and there, but when it came to laying down hundreds of dollars on a poker table, he’d prefer to be the one picking up a percentage at the end of the night.
He put a word out through one of the more trustworthy of the total scallywags he’d met on his time on the island, and within a week the bar had had a number of visits from patrons he hadn’t seen before, waggling their eyebrows in the direction of the manager, wanting ‘in’ for this poker tournament he’d started rumours about. The idea had attracted large, balding 40-something men in white shirts and chinos and guys wearing thick gold chains with polo shirts and caucasian guys with tans darker than the mahogany of the bar and guys who wore fedoras and kept them on indoors and guys who wore an expensive watch on their right wrist and guys whose wives looked like a five year-old fashioned a barbie doll out of old leather and pencils and women who covered their face in make-up every morning and drew a picture of a moron on top of it and women who had one of those smoking sticks like Audrey Hepburn and ladies who had one of those manufactured accents like Katherine Hepburn and men who waggled the keys to their BMW in front of people they met. Basically, anyone who’d bought into the idea that the accessory they’d adorned themselves with was something that had caused them to rise into the upper echelons of society, completely leaving behind their past selves. Each and every one of them was oblivious to the fact that they were still a [expletive deleted].
They say that if you look around the poker table and you can’t find the mug, then it’s you. When the first batch of poker players arrived for the first heat, held at midnight on a warm Thursday evening / Friday morning, Emanuel wasn’t sure who wasn’t the mug, which he took as a good sign.
Nine challengers would play in every heat, playing until only three remained. Those three would advance to a ‘final’ that hey hadn’t yet organized. He’d considered making the buy-in a modest $100, to be paid directly to the bar (off the books, naturally) but had been convinced to put that up to $1000, and soon realised he could well have put that figure much further north. The first night, polo shirt and gold chain won, with two other complete cretins in second and third. Emanuel had acted as croupier for the first two hours, before handing over to a member of his bar staff who he trusted. That first two hours were enough to convince him there’d be no real trouble. He had a swift drink and went to bed.
Waking up the next morning, everyone had gone. The barman-turned-croupier arrived for work in the evening and told him what had happened. He’d told the three winners that the buy-in for the final had been set at $10,000, because the winners had asked him and he panicked and just made up a high number. One of them, the guy who came in third, had paid him already.
Emanuel made sure to funnel the money back through the bar. Creating ‘sales’ that never happened, making the bar 10% busier a day for a while would work to burn through a sizeable chunk of the money he’d get.
The second heat, held two weeks later, was a similar story.
Night three was when Emanuel had met him.
He looked at the description on his phone again. Maybe it was the guy Sue Dysos was looking for, maybe it wasn’t. Either way, it was someone he definitely owed a visit to.
—
Zero Sum
Pressure mounts on Patterick as Bulls slump
Pressure mounts on Patterick as Bulls slump
Not only have the Bulls ceded the advantage they gained at the start of qualifying, Yasone Urdanibia may have cost Sean Patterick his job. Were it not for the fact that the Muradil game is just around the corner, he may have lost it already.
Patterick lined the side up the same way as he had done for the Turori game, albeit with two changes as Anxo Osorio started in Puskás’s stead, and Jay Van Beuren began in defensive midfield in place of Iago Cacho.
Neither would perform particularly badly, but both would be pulled in the 80th minute as a panicked Patterick, chasing at least a point, threw caution to the wind, throwing on strikers Athenasios Lagrange and Santiago Rosel to try and grab the equaliser, to the ironic cheers of the home crowd.
Audioslavia, moving to a 4-4-2 for the final ten minutes, found a fired-up Astograth side increasingly difficult to take the ball off, and a wayward strike from Knudsen on 88 minutes was their best opportunity of that period.
As the final whistle blew, jeers filled the stadium.
Patterick’s situation reminds many of what happened to Txo Morea back in cycle 62, wherein the stricken manager, playing players in positions they weren’t entirely happy with, was photoshopped with a picture of a cauliflower superimposed onto his face.
It remains to be seen what particular vegetable may soon be associated with Patterick.
The coming match against Muradil is must-must-must-win.
