Four playing card suits in ornate linework

Nobody on the lower ring played with paper any more. Chips did the work, and chips could be read by anyone with a cheap lens. But paper kept its secrets in the fibres, and these suits had been cut by hand, every club a little different from the next, their white filigree laid over black stock like frost on a cold window. Hearts glowed the colour of a furnace door. Diamonds burned orange at the centre, and the spades held their ink like a night sky with the stars left in.

Old Teodor laid down his hand: three spades, the ace fanned out in pale scrollwork, and a club he had never once taken off the table. He smiled like a man who had waited thirty years to be caught. I turned my own cards face up one at a time, slowly enough that the room could follow the pattern, and when the heart came last, the whole table saw the thin gold lines catch the reading lamp.

He paid out without a word. At the door he stopped, touched the edge of the deck in my palm, and said the suits were prettier than the men who had made them. I told him the men were the ones who did the prettiness. Then I slid the cards into my coat, where the press had stamped its mark inside the lining, and walked out into the corridor, where the air tasted of hot metal and rain.