Episode 32
“Tell me more,” he says, lying in bed. “The word is you were quite the gambling-hall star in your early days, the croupier deluxe. Tell me about palming a card, about weighting a roulette wheel. These places are all rackets, right? They must have loved you. He must have loved you while you were on his team, the big man, Huérfano. Orphan. Interesting.”
“I worked out how to steal from him,” she says. “I never did it, but I made the plan.”
“Tell me,” he says. “Then I can write it.”
So she tells him. His eyes widen.
“Tell me again. How much money could you have taken?”
Anna tells him precisely how much. Francis begins to giggle. Really: to giggle like a child.
“Yes, darling,” she confirms.
“But you never did it.”
“Of course not, darling.”
Francis is thinking. Anna waits.
“What I think,” he says at last, “is that this is definitely a movie.”
“In the movie he’d come after me,” she says. “He’d never give up. In the end he would find me and come for me with his guys. That’s the climax. We just need to think of an ending, in which, preferably, you and I both come out alive.”