actor. But there were to be no encores. The performer's enthusiasm for Goethe had been 
interpreted as pro-Nazi propaganda; the thief found him hanging, joy decayed, from a 
telegraph pole. He was naked. His bare feet had been eaten at and his eyes taken out by 
birds; his torso was riddled with bullet holes. The sight pacified the thief. He saw it 
as proof that the confused feelings the actor had aroused were iniquitous; if this was 
the state to which his art had brought him the man had clearly been a scoundrel and a 
sham. His mouth gaped, but the birds had taken his tongue as well as his eyes. No loss.
    Besides, there were far more rewarding diversions. The women the thief could take or 
leave, and the boys were not to his taste, but the gambling he loved, and always had. So 
it was back to the dogfights to chance his fortunes on a mongrel. If not there, then to 
some barrack-room dice game, or-in desperation-betting with a bored sentry on the speed 
of a passing cloud. The method and the circumstance scarcely concerned him: he cared only 
to gamble. Since his adolescence it had been his one true vice; it was the indulgence he 
had become a thief to fund. Before the war he'd played in casinos across Europe; chemin 
de fer was his game, though he was not averse to roulette. Now he looked back at those 
years through the veil war had drawn across them, and remembered the contests as he 
remembered dreams on waking: as something irretrievable, and slipping further away with 
every breath.
    That sense of loss changed, however, when he heard about the cardplayer-Mamoulian, 
they called him-who, it was said, never lost a game, and who came and went in this 
deceitful city like a creature who was not, perhaps, even real.
    But then, after Mamoulian, everything changed.
    
    2
    So much was rumor; and so much of that rumor not even rooted in truth. Simply lies 
told by bored soldiers. The military mind, the thief had discovered, was capable of 
inventions more baroque than a poet's, and more lethal. So when he heard tell of a master 
cardsharp who appeared out of no where, and challenged every would-be gambler to a game 
and unfailingly won, he suspected the story to be just that: a story. But something about 
the way this apocryphal tale lingered confounded expectation. It didn't fade away to be 
replaced by some yet more ludicrous romance. It appeared repeatedly-in the conversation 
of the men at the dogfights; in gossip, in graffiti. What was more, though the names 
changed the salient facts were the same from one account to the next. The thief began to 
suspect there was truth in the story after all. Perhaps there was a brilliant gambler 
operating somewhere in the city. Not perfectly invulnerable, of course; no one was that. 
But the man, if he existed, was certainly something special. Talk of him was always 
conducted with a caution that was like reverence; soldiers who claimed to have seen him 
play spoke of his elegance, his almost hypnotic calm. When they talked of Mamoulian they 
were peasants speaking of nobility, and the thief-never one to concede the superiority of 
any man-added a zeal to unseat this king to his reasons for seeking the card-player out.
    But beyond the general picture he garnered from the grapevine, there were few 
specifics. He knew that he would have to find and interrogate a man who had actually 
faced this paragon across a gaming table before he could really begin to separate truth 
from speculation.
    It took two weeks to find such a man. His name was Konstantin Vasiliev, a second 
lieutenant, who, it was said, had lost everything he had playing against Mamoulian. The 
Russian was broad as a bull; the thief felt dwarfed by him. But while some big men 
nurture spirits expansive enough to fill their anatomies, Vasiliev seemed almost empty. 
If he had ever possessed such virility, it was now gone. Left in the husk was a frail and 
fidgety child.
    It took an hour of coaxing, the best part of a bottle of black-market vodka and half 
a pack of cigarettes to get Vasiliev to answer with more than a monosyllable, but when 
the disclosures came they came gushingly, the confessions of a man on the verge of total 
breakdown. There was self-pity in his talk, and anger too; but mostly there was the 
stench of dread. Vasiliev was a man in mortal terror. The thief was mightily impressed: 
not by the tears or the desperation, but by the fact that Mamoulian, this faceless 
card-player, had broken the giant sitting across the floor from him. Under the guise of 
consolation and friendly advice he proceeded to pump the Russian for every sliver of 
information he could provide, looking all the time for some significant detail to make 
flesh and blood of the chimera he was investigating.
    "You say he wins without fail?" "Always." "So what's his method? How does he cheat?" 
Vasiliev looked up from his contemplation of the bare boards of the floor.
    "Cheat?" he said, incredulously. "He doesn't cheat. I've played cards all my life, 
with the best and the worst. I've seen every trick a man can pull. And I tell you now, he 
was clean." "The luckiest player gets defeated once in a while. The laws of chance-" A 
look of innocent amusement crossed Vasiliev's face, and for a moment the thief glimpsed 
the man who'd occupied this fortress before his fall from sanity.
    "The laws of chance are nothing to him. Don't you see? He isn't like you or me. How 
could a man always win without having some power over the cards?" "You believe that?" 
Vasiliev shrugged, and slumped again. "To him," he said, almost contemplative in his 
utter dismay, "winning is beauty. It is like life itself." The vacant eyes returned to 
tracing the rough grain of the floorboards as the thief somersaulted the words over in 
his head: "Winning is beauty. It is like life itself." It was strange talk, and made him 
uneasy. Before he could work his way into its meaning, however, Vasiliev was leaning 
closer to him, his breath fearful, his vast hand catching hold of the thief's sleeve as 
he spoke.
    "I've put in for a transfer, did they tell you that? I'll be away from here in a few 
days, and nobody'll be any the wiser. I'm getting medals when I get home. That's why 
they're transferring me: because I'm a hero, and heroes get what they ask for. Then I'll 
be gone, and he'll never find me." "Why would he want to?" The hand on the sleeve fisted; 
Vasiliev pulled the thief in toward him. "I owe him the shirt off my back," he said. "If 
I stay, he'll have me killed. He's killed others, him and his comrades." "He's not 
alone?" said the thief. He had pictured the card-player as being a man without 
associates; made him, in fact, in his own image.
    Vasiliev blew his nose into his hand, and leaned back in the chair. It creaked under 
his bulk.
    "Who knows what's true or false in this place, eh?" he said, eyes swimming. "I mean, 
if I told you he had dead men with him, would you believe me?" He answered his own 
question with a shake of his head. "No. You'd think I was mad . . ." Once, the thief 
thought, this man had been capable of certainty; of action; perhaps even of heroism. Now 
all that noble stuff had been siphoned off: the champion was reduced to a sniveling rag, 
blabbering nonsense. He inwardly applauded the brilliance of Mamoulian's victory. He had 
always hated heroes.
    "One last question-" he began.
    "You want to know where you can find him." "Yes." The Russian stared at the ball of 
his thumb, sighing deeply. This was all so wearisome.
    "What do you gain if you play him?" he asked, and again returned his own answer. 
"Only humiliation. Perhaps death." The thief stood up. "Then you don't know where he is?" 
he said, making to pocket the half-empty packet of cigarettes that lay on the table 
between them.