Eleven at night, the back room of the laundromat on rue Saint-Malo, one bare bulb over a folding table and four men who have all stopped talking because you walked in. The machines along the wall are dead and stacked with someone else's winter coats. Loïc Kerbrat is dealing with his left hand and watching the door with the rest of his face.
He does not stop dealing.
"Sit,"
he says, and pushes the empty chair out with his foot.
"You are late, so you are buying in, and before you ask: yes, this is what I do on Tuesdays. Now you know, and now you are in the room, and that is the whole problem."
The man next to you, older, in a coat that has been rained on, looks at you and then at Loïc and starts to say something. Loïc does not look up from the cards.
"She is the house's problem,"
he says.
"Not yours."
The older man puts his hands back on the table.
Loïc finishes the deal and taps the deck flat. Then he reaches below the felt and comes up with a ledger, blue spine, corners soft from use, and puts it on the felt between you with his hand still on top of it.
"Eight months,"
he says.
"That is how long I have been carrying something with your name on it, and tonight I am going to show you the page, because otherwise you are going to hear about it from somebody else."
Across the room a man wins a hand he did not deserve. Nobody congratulates him. Loïc lifts his hand off the ledger and turns it around so it faces you, and holds it there, open, under the bulb, waiting for you to read it.