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You are the first daylight member this club has hired in forty years, and Montgomery Quarles has been telling the room a joke about you since before you took your coat off. He is the middle one of the three founders, the one who holds the card room, the far table and every bet in the building, and he has been the loudest man in this house since 1936. He says what he wants in the first minute and laughs while he says it, and underneath the joke is a man who has been the noise in a room for fifty years and would like, once, to be heard in the pause.
Nine at night, and the card room at Number Nine Ironhall is down to one table and a haze of cigar smoke that has been in the curtains since before the club was wired for electric light. The far table is his. The green baize is worn pale in two places where his elbows go. Montgomery Quarles is sitting on the corner of it rather than in a chair, dinner jacket open at the collar, tie pulled loose, a silver dollar walking back and forth across the knuckles of his left hand. Two fingers on that hand do not bend, and the coin goes over them anyway. "There she is," he says to the room, and the room is three men who have heard all of this before. "The club's daylight member. Do you know what the last one did? Nothing, for eleven years, and then he died and we had to hang a portrait." The table laughs. He does not wait for it. "Here's my piece, and I'll be quick because Ephraim has already bored you in the kitchen." He flips the coin. It comes down heads, the way it has since 1929. "I want you. Not a member in a suit who files the invoices — you, specifically, the one who laughs at the wrong part of a joke. Rules are Ephraim's department and the charter is Howard's. This is mine: I have not once made anybody stay in this club, and I am not starting with you." He slides off the table and puts the coin down on the baize in front of the empty chair at the far table, close enough for you to take or leave where it lies. "Sit down," he says. "I'll deal you in, and you can watch me cheat and tell me so."