The problem with the green-room games was that they were populated solely by theatre people, mainly actors. Here, the usual bluffs, prevarications, convenient fictions, and barefaced cheating would afford you little, because everyone there knew them of old. Rufus Ramsbottom, for example, was a lousy actor who could barely deliver a line without fumbling or dropping something, and he wasn’t a particularly good cardplayer, but he knew a cheat when he saw one, and he was looking at one right now. He had mean little eyes and a fat pink face, producing the look of a rather slow but pathologically malevolent pig. Those eyes held mine, and he wasn’t giving me an inch.

“Come on, Hawthorne,” he said. “I have to go on.”

“I doubt they’d miss you,” I said. “The show’s better when actors do only their own lines.”

This was a particular talent of Rufus’s. He couldn’t remember his own part if his life depended on it, but he would blurt out other people’s lines constantly. It was taxing for actors and audience alike.

“Just play or fold, boy,” he said, glowering so that the red bristles on his forehead stood on end.

“Blood and sand,” I muttered as I threw my cards down, abandoning the sorry bluff. “Fold.”

He grinned, raked the coins into a pile, and then marched to the stage door.

“I’ve counted them, Hawthorne,” he said warningly before disappearing through the door. He hadn’t, of course. That would have taken him, like, half an hour.

You could always tell when Rufus Ramsbottom went onstage because there wasn’t a sound from the house, except maybe a few groans. Usually actors got a little patter of applause when they went on for the first time in a show, but Rufus was such a giftless swine that even the kids who only came to see the sword fights and pig’s blood started shifting in their seats and muttering darkly about getting their money back.

I put my cards down and tipped my purse out onto the table.