Aces and Knaves

to speak with you," Stan said, leading the way to a door underneath the stairs.
    I had a moment of panic as I realized that Mr. Buchanan would know I wasn't Ned Mackay, but I should have thought of that before. Stan opened the door and motioned me in ahead of him.
    The small room I entered had a sloping ceiling over part of it, caused by the stairway it was under. It was dimly lit and a number of television monitors were being watched by young men who were clones of Stan in dress and appearance. None of them appeared to be older than 30.
    I glanced at several of the monitors and realized I had been correct in assuming that I was being watched. They were all connected to surveillance cameras, not only outside the house, but looking down on the tables in the casino room, also. The latter monitors were undoubtedly to catch cheaters.
    Stan closed the door and walked past me to a man who sat on a high stool behind the men in front of the monitors. From his vantage point he could see all the monitors. He was older, with gray hair, but it was still cut short. He was the most casually dressed person in the room, wearing a loud sport shirt and a pair of pants that appeared in the dim light to be some shade of yellow.
    "Here he is, Mr. Buchanan." Stan said to the man.
    Mr. Buchanan rotated the seat of his stool toward me and looked me up and down as he transferred a glass from which he had been drinking through a straw from his right hand to his left. Then he stepped down off the stool and said, "Hi, I'm James Buchanan."
    He was considerably shorter than I. His hand was cold from the glass as I shook it. I had another moment of panic, but I couldn't lie any more. "Karl Patterson."
    "Well, Karl Patterson," he said with a smile, "I'm glad to know your real name."
    I felt I owed him an explanation. "Ned is planning to be here tonight," I said. "He told me to wait outside, but he's late and I figured..."
    "You figured you might as well come inside. And you suspected you wouldn't get in if you used your real name. Well, at least you passed the test."
    "The test?"
    "The ship and the boiler. A favorite of mine, not because it's terribly complex, but because you have to straighten out the confusing verbiage before you can solve it."
    "You mean you wouldn't have let me in if I hadn't gotten the right answer?"
    "That's correct." Mr. Buchanan smiled at the look on my face. "I can anticipate your next question. Did everybody who is here tonight solve it? With couples, we only ask one of them to come up with the answer. We do discourage groups of more than four riding in on one person's answer, however. We want to keep the intellectual level elevated as much as possible."
    Was he serious? "May I ask you a question, Mr. Buchanan?"
    "Only if you call me James."
    "Since you obviously knew from the beginning that I wasn't Ned, why did you let me in?"
    "Because I like a good puzzle, and I wondered who you really were." However, he didn't ask me any more questions. Instead, he said, "Would you like a tour to pass the time until Ned gets here?"
    "Sure." My job was to gather information.
    "You've already seen our monitors. Let's go into the main room."
    James opened the door and preceded me into the much more brightly lit casino room. Track lighting shone down from what I was now sure was a false ceiling and kept all the tables illuminated. Some of his young men were acting as croupiers and one was dealing blackjack, from only one deck, I noticed, approvingly. Others served drinks to the patrons.
    James called a server and asked me what I wanted to drink. I said iced tea. When he came back with it a couple of minutes later I started to pull out my wallet, but James stopped me by putting up his hand. Without being asked, the waiter had also brought James another iced drink in a tall glass with a straw. It contained a clear liquid.
    We strolled from table to table. He didn't give a boring explanation of the obvious, but instead let me watch each game for a bit. I saw a blackjack player take a hit when he should have stood and the itch inside told me I could do better. I saw a woman roll three consecutive sevens at the craps table and I wished my money was riding on her.
    As we passed through the room James said hello to many of the people and joked with others. At a table where two men were engaged in a game of chess he said to one who appeared to have the worst of it, "Tom, you'd better lay off the booze. Your brain cells aren't operational