The Ballad of a Small Player (19 page)

“Gum lei take care la.”

D
arkness and gold, and the sound of water from afar: the ghosts alive and drinking, tortured by their thirst just like me. I drank heavily in my room. Vodka and cranberry, and gin with lemon twists. I didn’t notice the days and nights and the interludes in between where nothing happened. The distant clatter of the casinos, that white noise of the Lisboa, had almost passed out of consciousness altogether. There was a hush to the heavily carpeted corridors, where the staff passed on leather soles with their trays balanced on one hand. The smell of passing waffles and
dim sum and bok choy cooked in sauce. The smell of eggs and toast and the
clock clock
of knuckles rapping on doors where men lay half unconscious on their beds in their long black socks waiting for change. I had not had the itch for baccarat for some time. Mr. Souza was correct when he pointed out that worried money never wins.

EIGHTEEN

T
wo nights later I put on my gloves and placed the totality of my winnings in the Adidas bag. I wore a tuxedo with a white carnation and, in a touch of sad panache, a pair of two-tone shoes. Greased down, pomaded, brushed, and polished, I looked like a cartoon as I left the room with a quiet click and heaved my bag into a gold-plated elevator filled with smoking trolls. The mirror made me think of those incomparable words of Joseph Roth commenting upon a picture someone had done of him:
Yeah, that’s me all right, nasty, drunk but clever
. I adjusted the buttonhole and listened to the fools dissing me in their dialects, thinking I didn’t understand. And so to the Fortuna VIP room, temple of my baccaratic fate.

I was stopped at the doors by two managers who had clearly been told to look out for me. They were all toothpaste-ad smiles and handshakes, smooth as razor wire and metal to the core.

“Lord Doyle, how nice to see you! Is that a bag full of money?”

“It is indeed,” I replied, swinging it with dash. “I had a whim,” I said. “I’ve been away from the tables far too long, and it’s time I played a hand or two. You know how it is.”

“We’re glad to hear it, Lord Doyle. One minute, please.”

One of them spoke into a walkie-talkie.

“Would you like a private room?” the other one then said, as they let me in, walking on either side of me. “We can arrange it.”

“Not necessary. I like a crowd.”

But we don’t
, they implied.

“Very well,” they said. “We understand that it adds to the enjoyment of the game.”

“I like to show off, I guess. I’m an old-fashioned exhibitionist. Especially when I lose. Imagine that.”

“We have many high rollers like that, Lord Doyle.”

“Do you? I wouldn’t call myself a high roller exactly. I’m more like a low roller. A low rolling stone covered with moss and pigeon shit.”

They tried to laugh at a joke they didn’t get. I noticed they wore the same cuff links that Mr. Souza wore: black dice.

“Should we count the money? Most of our high-rolling clients insist on it.”

“Sure, count it if you feel like it. Mind if I have a cigar?”

They pulled out a huge Havana before I could make a move. It was clipped and lit in a jiffy.

“Thank you very much. I’ll sit here while you count.”

They went into an adjoining room and returned in ten minutes. A slip of paper was handed to me with the exact sum written on it.

“Satisfactory,” I said. “It’s the same total I came to myself.”

“Naturally it is.”

They bowed.

A waitress in a long, slitted cocktail dress appeared, her face heavily made up. She asked me in Chinese if I’d like a complimentary glass of champagne before I sat at the table.

“Very kind of you. I’ll drink it here.”

I sat on the heavy Louis XV armchair and sank back into its satin upholstery. The minders bowed again and said that when I had selected my table they would bring the chips to it.

“Fine. But I have one question. I know you have a minimum bet of ten thousand here. What if I bet two million? You know that I am permitted only one hand.”

“We are aware of that, Lord Doyle.”

“Then I need to know if there is a maximum bet.”

This seemed not to have occurred to them.

“I am not sure,” one of them muttered. “I will call Mr. Souza.”

“You do that. I’d like to know.”

“May I ask why?”

“It’s occurred to me that I might bet the whole lot on one hand.”

“Lord Doyle?”

“You heard me. The whole lot on one hand.”

“But Lord Doyle, that is quite crazy.”

They laughed at once to offset the possibly injurious implications of such a remark.

“Not,” the speaker amended, “that I am suggesting you are crazy.”

“What if I were crazy? It doesn’t matter as long as you permitted the bet.”

“That is true. I was not implying that it would be to our advantage if you bet everything. But I must say, it is. Are you prepared to lose everything?”

“That’s my business. Let’s say I am.”

T
he conversation with Mr. Souza took some time. The waitresses brought me some complimentary chocolates and I thought for a moment of Dao-Ming and her lovely offering at the Intercontinental. It was a full night and the rooms were smoky, loud, and claustrophobically tense. I heard imprecations and curses from inside the pits,
and tightly clustered crowds shouting at a lucky hand. My skin grew cold and prickly. My tongue dried out. Insomnia and dehydration again. Yet again I was going to skin them alive, and if it happened that they skinned me it would be even better. Thus is the yin and yang of the punter’s pleasures. Skinning and being skinned are the same. You get to be sadist and masochist not just in the same day or night, but in the same moment. There is something lordly about it after all.

I was on my third glass when one of the gentlemen returned. His look was noticeably apprehensive and he cleared his throat behind a clenched fist before telling me that Mr. Souza had approved the bet.

“I hope, however, that I can persuade you not to make it, Lord Doyle. You have won an enormous amount of money at our tables and in my opinion you would do better to leave with it all now.”

“Leave? But I’m just getting started.”

“Forgive me, but you cannot be serious. There is only so much you can win from a casino. I would say that you must have reached that limit.”

“I don’t feel the same way at all. I feel like I am just setting out on my streak of luck.”

“Lord Doyle?”

“You know how extravagant we lords are.”

“I remember Mr. Souza saying something about that.”

“We are complete zanies.”

He stiffened.

“But Lord Doyle, you stand to lose every last
kwai
, every last dollar. In one bet. Is that rational?”

“What do I care if it’s rational? Nothing in life is rational. Life isn’t rational. It’s animal.”

“Oh?”

He looked highly concerned; his tone implied doubt.

“But Lord Doyle, we have to be rational sometimes.”

“Do we?”

I knocked back the last of the champagne.

“Is Grandma rational? Is Mr. Souza?”

“I couldn’t say. They try to be.”

“Is Guan Yin?”

“Please, keep your voice down. We can’t mention that name in a loud voice.”

“I have decided to be completely superstitious at last, to trust in the winds. I’ve made up my mind.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Maybe you are. But then again you might win it all back. You must be at least slightly tempted by that outcome?”

“We’re only human.”

An unfortunate phrase
, I thought.

I got up, shedding a flurry of ash crumbs around me.

“It wasn’t my idea to have one last hand. It was your idea.”

We moved in pantomime toward the private rooms
where the safety-pin millionaires were suffering at the hands of the goddess who was not listening to them. My floor manager made signs to the dealers to stop their motions, and we inspected room after room until I had found the table I wanted. There were six players already there, and it was explained to them that I would be placing an astronomical bet on the table. The buzz went out at once and soon the table was full. I sat at one end and my chips were piled up in front of me. The others were high rollers in their own right, hard men from the southern cities, and there was no mawkish voyeurism in the way they eyed up my pile. They were simply calculating what might be raked in if that amount were put in play. At that moment, however, the second manager came quietly into the room and explained that the table was now closed to everyone except me. They got up, therefore, and filed out with a few incendiary words. The door was closed and the managers remained. I asked for another glass of bubbly and a bowl of nuts. The dealers asked me politely if I spoke Chinese, and I said I would prefer to game in Mandarin, if that was all right with them. We settled down and I noticed a subtle change in the air, as if the air-conditioning had been turned up or the filters enhanced. I felt a little giddy with the alcohol. The manager then leaned toward my ears.

“Lord Doyle, there is a gentleman who would like to play against you. His name is Mr. Cheng. He has asked us specifically. Would you accept?”

I turned and saw an ancient high roller in a Savile Row suit coming through the door with a handkerchief pressed for a moment against his mouth and a look of dour hunger in his eye. TB? He was about seventy, immensely wealthy from the looks of him, and he had come in quietly. He bowed to me and we shook hands. Mr. Cheng from Hong Kong, billions in the bank, and billions out of it, too. I said “Welcome” in Mandarin and he sat at the other end of the table, offloading a sack of chips onto the table’s surface and then locking his fingers together and flexing them. We exchanged some pleasantries. Mr. Cheng asked me if it was true that I’d stake my entire pile on a single bet.

“I only have one hand to play,” I said. “So I thought I might.”

“I might consider matching it.”

He had a face like rock, and it was disturbing to watch it move as he spoke.

“I would like that,” I replied.

“I have heard about you. They say you are lucky.”

“Everyone is lucky once.”

Mr. Cheng turned rhetorically to the others.

“The man has some wisdom!”

A hand of baccarat is so short, so abrupt, that the preliminaries are sometimes difficult to disengage from. When the bet is enormous, this is even more true. There is a need among both players and house staff to drag it out
a little. So we smoked for a few minutes and Mr. Cheng asked me who I knew in Hong Kong. He was curious. Nobody? That seemed unlikely for a man in
my position
.

“I am rather shy and private,” I explained. “It doesn’t do for someone in my position, as you put it, to throw himself around too much.”

Mr. Cheng certainly understood that. Wealth brings its burdens as well as its pleasures. It is double-edged. He nodded and said that this was certainly correct; it was a malicious and gossipy city, like all cities, and one couldn’t be too careful.

“I think I have seen you around,” he smiled. “You lunch sometimes at the Intercontinental, don’t you?”

“Sometimes.”

“I have seen you there.”

The dealers prepared themselves and Mr. Cheng looked me over long and hard.

“I never forget a face,” he added wistfully.

“I like the view at the Intercontinental.”

The managers stepped forward discreetly.

“Are you betting the whole amount, Lord Doyle?”

“I am.”

Mr. Cheng divided his chips into two piles, an amount that put together would not be far off from mine. He then placed first one, then the other onto the table and announced that he was betting both on the banker. The cards were slicked out through the shoe, mine first (the
highest bettor is always dealt first), and then Mr. Cheng placed a hand over his most leftward card. We waited, and I felt a concentration of perspiration materialize between my eyebrows. It hung there like a stud in a button and then, exposed to the air-conditioning, evaporated. The cards were turned and I had drawn a two and a nine. Modulo ten, that made one. The managers raised their eyebrows and then did not lower them as Mr. Cheng turned a hand of eight with a six and a two. The scores were called and the dealer then dealt me a third card, as was my right, and it happened to be an eight, that most fortunate of numbers in the Chinese universe.

This made Mr. Cheng laugh and he took a drag on the cigar lodged stiffly between the fingers of his right hand.

“Natural,” the dealer said loudly. “Congratulations, Lord Doyle.”

“You got lucky there,” Cheng said quietly, and he said it with a graceful good nature that was apparently genuine. “You have my sincere congratulations.”

“Thank you. I would play you a second hand, but the management has decided against it.”

“So they told me. I cannot quite understand it.”

The chips formed piles like models of cities, and they were not raked together. Cheng didn’t even look at them. His eyes were moist and chilled, like oysters, and instead he sneered at the floor managers.

“They are chickens. Mr. Hui, you are chickens, are you not?”

The managers bowed stiffly.

“That’s how chickens bow. Look at them. Doyle, shall we go for a drink at least?”

The chips I had won were not gathered into a bag for me. The managers explained that I would be given a check downstairs instead; I could collect it whenever I wanted. They were frostily impressed, as people a little down the ladder often are when they see a flash of undeserved success.
Why couldn’t it be us?
they think to themselves.
Why shouldn’t it be us?
I said that this was considerate of them, and I went out with Mr. Cheng while the managers followed at a slight distance. We sauntered down the curved corridor and Cheng related to me all the times he had won big at this particular casino. A total of three times in eleven years, he admitted with a roll of the eyes and an expression of pained disgust. These people were crooks, pure and simple, exploiting the weaknesses of helpless addicts. The casino was like a hospital catering to heroin addicts. Inexcusable, if you looked at it sensibly. He waved a hand, as if killing something invisible to the naked eye. The displeasure of a billionaire who has lost one ten-thousandth of a percent of his fortune to crooks. He led me to a bar where aged Scotches filled the glass shelves, including one called Brora that my father used to drink and that was no longer
made. We sat in leather chairs. Vivaldi, perfumes, the ease of gentlemen. He spoke softly so the staff wouldn’t hear, and he said, “You cleaned them out, you really did. Millions in one blow. They’ll be up to see you shortly.”