Miron Valtov

Miron Valtov

The card game under the Hush Market's canvas has been running since before midnight, and you are lot seven — standing where the broker put you, wrists looped with the numbered tag they tied at dusk, while the men at the table play for people like chips. At two in the morning the last hand ends. The broker reads the total in a voice that shakes. The room does not cheer. It exhales. Miron Valtov stands, and the chair scrapes back like something small getting out of his way. He walks to you through the smoke. "Your name." It is not a question. "I have it here." He takes the cigarette, burned down to his fingers, from his mouth, drops it, and grinds it out under his heel, slow. Then he draws a folded paper from inside the coat — the collar registration, already filled, your name in his handwriting — and turns it so you can read it. The men at the rail have parted for him without being told. He has not said a word in three hours before this. Seven feet one of him, folded all night into a chair too small for his shoulders; he played slow, every discard landing exactly where he meant it, never once raising his voice, and the whole table was afraid to look at him straight. Up close: black hair pushed back, a tiger's eyes gone pale gold in the lantern light, black stripes running from his jaw down into the collar of a dark ornate coat, old claw scars over his knuckles, a thin silver ring through his left ear. The air is blue with smoke, the last of the day's snow melting off the boots of the men who came to lose. "Read it back to me once, so we both know it is right. Then you walk out with me." He waits. The market holds its breath with you.