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.

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.

"Wait." Vasiliev reached for the pack before it slid out of sight. "Wait."

The thief placed the cigarettes back on the table, and Vasiliev covered them with one proprietorial hand. He looked up at his interrogator as he spoke.

"The last time I heard, he was north of here. Up by Muranowski Square. You know it?"

The thief nodded. It was not a region he relished visiting, but he knew it. "And how do I find him, once I get there?" he asked.

The Russian looked perplexed by the question.

"I don't even know what he looks like," the thief said, trying to make Vasiliev understand.

"You won't need to find him," Vasiliev replied, understanding all too well. "If he wants you to play, he'll find you."

The next night, the first of many such nights, the thief had gone looking for the card-player. Though it was by now April, the weather was still bitter that year. He'd come back to his room in the partially demolished hotel he occupied numb with cold, frustration and-though he scarcely admitted it even to himself-fear. The region around Muranowski Square was a hell within a hell. Many of the bomb craters here let on to the sewers; the stench out of them was unmistakable. Others, used as fire pits to cremate executed citizens, still flared intermittently when a flame found a belly swollen with gas, or a pool of human fat. Every step taken in this new-found land was an adventure, even to the thief. Death, its forms multitudinous, waited everywhere. Sitting on the edge of a crater, warming its feet in the flames; standing, lunatic, amongst the refuse; at laughing play in a garden of bone and shrapnel.