That summer in Sydney, which the newspapers identified as exceptionally hot and particularly profitable for the restaurant industry, the Greeks played cards in a private gaming room above a fruit-and-vegetable shop on Glebe Point Road. Lucky arrived early. The house opened at 8 pm, the first games began an hour later, and he stood alone with his coffee at a table near the windows. Here the high tables were for drinking; the regular tables reserved for cards. He came early to see which players arrived together, to spot friends or cronies who might soft play or otherwise collude with each other. The room had a washstand sink, a stove for the briki, a tray for bottles, another tray for glasses. On one of the yellow walls hung a framed print of a painting, unsigned, a nineteenth-century panoramic: the Battle of Borodino. The door of the gaming room was locked and a coat hung over the doorknob to cover the keyhole. Up here, above the fruiterer’s shop, Lucky assumed they were adequately hidden from police and might only be identified from deep in the park opposite, through binoculars, by some marvel of spying.

He laid small bets. Gambling wasn’t a problem for him yet; it wouldn’t be that way for decades. To Lucky, the value of gaming was in the play, the action, the second act, the complication, regardless of the final result or whether his fortune was decided in terrifying speed, or over the course of several hours. Betting took him right out of the franchise world. The gameplay was drama; it was a bending of reality, a disruption, fantasy life adumbrated on a table. The play could be as overwhelming as sex. By 1965 it functioned, for Lucky Mallios, as a replacement for sex.

At the largest table he sat with five players, mostly sober-looking, all appearing a little pent-up, and he dealt the first game, making small talk. Lucky might have been the most well-known, successful man in the room, but his Greek—and this was obvious from the first word he uttered—was categorically the worst. For the most part he loved speaking his parents’ language (Lucky’s Greek had improved since the franchise started), but some nights it came as a relief when the conversation moved to English. It got to be oppressive the way some Greeks expected others to hold on to culture and language without error, like a treasure, two generations, three generations deep in a new country. The pride in depth of ethnicity. The shame in its lack. Any point-scoring about authenticity had long since come to bore Lucky. He no longer took offence. The idea of ethnic purity was a diaspora fantasy. Everyone in this room was a mixture of influences, a new type of person. They accepted their impurity or they didn’t.