The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More (19 page)

From that day on, no matter where he was or what he was doing, Henry made a
point of
practising
with the candle every morning and
every evening. Often he
practised
at midday as well.
For the first time in his life he was throwing himself into something with
genuine enthusiasm. And the progress he made was remarkable. After six months,
he could concentrate absolutely upon his own face for no less than three
minutes without a single outside thought entering his mind.

The yogi of
Hardwar
had told the Indian fellow that a
man would have to
practise
for fifteen years to get
that sort of result!

But wait! The yogi had also said something else. He had said (and here Henry
eagerly consulted the little blue exercise-book for the hundredth time), he had
said that on extremely rare occasions a special person comes along who is able
to develop the power in only one or two years.

"That's me!" Henry cried. "It must be me! I am the
one-in-a-million person who is gifted with the ability to acquire yoga powers
at incredible speed! Whoopee and hurray! It won't be long now before I'm
breaking the bank in every casino in Europe and America!"

But Henry at this point showed unusual patience and good sense. He didn't rush
to get out a pack of cards to see if he could read them from the reverse side.
In fact, he kept well away from card games of all kinds. He had given up bridge
and canasta and poker as soon as he had started working with the candle. What's
more, he had given up razzing around to parties and weekends with his rich
friends. He had become dedicated to this single aim of acquiring yoga powers,
and everything else would have to wait until he had succeeded.

Some time during the tenth month, Henry became aware, just as
Imhrat
Khan had done before him, of a slight ability to see
an object with his eyes closed. When he closed his eyes and stared at something
hard, with fierce concentration, he could actually see the outline of the
object he was looking at.

"It's coming to me!" he cried. "I'm doing it! It's
fantastic!"

Now he worked harder than ever at his exercises with the candle, and at the end
of the first year he could actually concentrate upon the image of his own face
for no less than five and a half minutes!

At this point, he decided the time had come to test
himself
with the cards. He was in the living-room of his London flat when he made this
decision and it was near midnight. He got out a pack of cards and a pencil and
paper. He was shaking with excitement. He placed the pack upside down before
him and concentrated on the top card.

All he could see at first was the design on the back of the card. It was a very
ordinary design of thin red lines, one of the commonest playing-card designs in
the world. He now shifted his concentration from the pattern itself to the
other side of the card. He concentrated with great intensity upon the invisible
underneath of the card, and he allowed no other single thought to creep into
his mind. Thirty seconds went by.

Then one minute. . .

Two minutes. . .

Three minutes. . .

Henry didn't move. His concentration was intense and absolute. He was
visualizing the reverse side of the playing-card. No other thought of any kind
was allowed to enter his head.

During the fourth minute, something began to happen. Slowly, magically, but
very clearly, the black symbols became spades and alongside the spades appeared
the figure five.

The five of spades!

Henry switched off his concentration. And now, with shaking fingers, he picked
up the card and turned it over.

It was the five of spades!

"I've done it!" he cried aloud, leaping up from his chair. "I've
seen through it! I'm on my way!"

After resting for a while, he tried again, and this time he used a stop-watch
to see how long it took him. After three minutes and fifty-eight seconds, he
read the card as the king of diamonds. He was right!

The next time he was right again and it took him three minutes and fifty-four
seconds. That was four seconds less.

He was sweating with excitement and exhaustion. "That's enough for
today," he told himself. He got up and poured himself an enormous drink of
whisky and sat down to rest and to gloat over his success.

His job now, he told himself, was to keep
practising
and
practising
with the cards until he could see
through them instantly. He was convinced it could be done. Already, on the
second go, he had knocked four seconds off his time. He would give up working
with the candle and concentrate solely upon the cards. He would keep at it day
and night.

And that is what he did. But now that he could smell real success in the
offing, he became more fanatical than ever. He never left his flat except to
buy food and drink. All day and often far into the night, he crouched over the
cards with the stop-watch beside him, trying to reduce the time it took him to
read from the reverse side.

Within a month, he was down to one and a half minutes.

And at the end of six months of fierce concentrated work, he could do it in
twenty seconds. But even that was too long. When you are gambling in a casino
and the dealer is waiting for you to say yes or no to the next card, you are
not going to be allowed to stare at it for twenty seconds before making up your
mind. Three or four seconds would be permissible.
But no
more.

Henry kept at it. But from now on, it became more and more difficult to improve
his speed. To get down from twenty seconds to nineteen took him a week of very
hard work. From nineteen to eighteen took him nearly two weeks. And seven more
months went by before he could read through a card in ten seconds flat.

His target was four seconds. He knew that unless he could see through a card in
a maximum of four seconds, he wouldn't be able to work the casinos
successfully.

Yet the nearer he got towards the target, the more difficult it became to reach
it. It took four weeks to get his time down from ten seconds to nine, and five
more weeks to go from nine to eight. But at this stage, hard work no longer
bothered him. His powers of concentration had now developed to such a degree
that he was able to work for twelve hours at a stretch with no trouble at all.
And he knew with absolute certainty that he would get there in the end. He
would not stop until he did. Day after day, night after night, he sat crouching
over the cards with his stop-watch beside him, fighting with a terrible
intensity to knock those last few stubborn seconds off his time.

The last three seconds were the worst of all. To get from seven seconds to his
target of four took him exactly eleven months!

The great moment came on a Saturday evening. A card lay face down on the table
in front of him. He clicked the stop-watch and began to concentrate. At once,
he saw a blob of red. The blob swiftly took shape and became a diamond. And
then, almost instantaneously, a figure six appeared in the top left-hand
corner. He clicked the watch again. He checked the time. It was four seconds!
He turned the card over. It was the six of diamonds! He had done it! He had
read it in four seconds flat!

He tried again with another card. In four seconds he read it as the queen of
spades. He went right through the pack, timing himself with every card. Four
seconds! Four seconds! Four seconds! It was always the same. He had done it at
last! It was all over. He was ready to go! And how long had it taken him? It
had taken him exactly three years and three months of concentrated work.

And now for the casinos!

When should he start? Why not tonight?

Tonight was Saturday. All the casinos were crowded on Saturday nights.
So much the better.
There'd be less chance of becoming
conspicuous. He went into his bedroom to change into his dinner-jacket and
black tie. Saturday was a dressy night at the big London casinos.

He would go, he decided, to Lord's House. There are well over one hundred
legitimate casinos in London, but none of them is open to the general public.
You must become a member before you are allowed to walk in. Henry was a member
of no less than ten of them. Lord's House was his
favourite
.
It was the finest and most exclusive in the country.

Lord's House was a magnificent Georgian mansion in the centre of London, and
for over two hundred years it had been the private residence of a Duke. Now it
was taken over by the bookmakers, and the superb high-ceilinged rooms where the
aristocracy and often royalty used to gather and play a gentle game of whist
were today filled with a new kind of people who played a very different sort of
game.

Henry drove to Lord's House and pulled up outside the great entrance. He got
out of the car, but left the engine running. Immediately, an attendant in green
uniform came forward to park it for him.

Along the
kerb
on both sides of the
street stood perhaps a dozen Rolls-Royces.
Only the very wealthy
belonged to Lord's House.

"Why hello,
Mr
Sugar!" said the man behind
the desk whose job it was never to forget a face. "We haven't seen you for
years!"

"I've been busy," Henry answered.

He went upstairs, up the
marvellous
wide staircase
with its carved mahogany banisters, and entered the cashier's office. There he
wrote a
cheque
for one thousand pounds. The cashier
gave him ten large pink rectangular plaques made of plastic. On each it said £100.
Henry slipped them into his pocket and spent a few minutes sauntering through
the various gaming rooms to get the feel of things again after such a long
absence. There was a big crowd here tonight. Well-fed women stood around the
roulette wheel like plump hens around a feeding hopper. Jewels and gold were
dripping over their bosoms and from their wrists. Many of them had blue hair.
The men were in dinner-jackets and there wasn't a tall one among them. Why,
Henry wondered, did this particular kind of rich man always have short legs?
Their legs all seemed to stop at the knees with no thighs above. Most of them
had bellies coming out a long way, and crimson faces, and cigars between their
lips. Their eyes glittered with greed.

All this Henry noticed. It was the first time in his life that he had looked
with distaste upon this type of wealthy gambling-casino person. Up until now,
he had always regarded them as companions, as members of the same group and
class as himself. Tonight they seemed vulgar. Could it be, he wondered, that
the yoga powers he had acquired over the last three years had altered him just
a little bit?

He stood watching the roulette. Upon the long green table people were placing
their money, trying to guess which little slot the small white ball would fall
into on the next spin of the wheel. Henry looked at the wheel. And suddenly,
perhaps more from habit than anything else, he found himself beginning to
concentrate upon it. It was not difficult. He had been
practising
the art of total concentration for so long that it had become something of a
routine. In a fraction of a second, his mind had become completely and
absolutely concentrated upon the wheel. Everything else in the room, the noise,
the people, the lights, the smell of cigar smoke, all this was wiped out of his
mind, and he saw only the white numbers around the rim. The numbers went from 1
to 36, with an O between 1 and 36. Very quickly, all the numbers blurred and
disappeared in front of his eyes. All
except
one, all
except the number 18. It was the only number he could see. At first it was
slightly muzzy and out of focus. Then the edges sharpened and the whiteness of
it grew brighter, more brilliant, until it began to glow as though there was a
bright light behind it. It grew bigger. It seemed to jump towards him. At that
point, Henry switched off his concentration. The room swam back into vision.

"Have you all finished?" the croupier was saying.

Henry took a £100 plaque from his pocket and placed it on the square marked 18
on the green table. Although the table was covered all over with other people's
bets, his was the only one on 18.

The croupier spun the wheel. The little white ball bounced and skittered around
the rim. The people watched. All eyes were on the little ball. The wheel
slowed. It came to rest. The ball jiggled a few more times, hesitated, then
dropped neatly into slot 18.

"Eighteen!" called the croupier.

The crowd sighed. The croupier's assistant scooped up the piles of losing
plaques with a long-handled wooden scooper. But he didn't take Henry's. They
paid him thirty-six to one.
Three thousand six hundred pounds
for his hundred.
They gave it to him in three one-thousand pound plaques
and six hundreds.

Henry began to feel an extraordinary sense of power. He felt he could break
this place if he wanted to. He could ruin this fancy high-powered expensive
joint in a matter of hours. He could take a million off them and all the
stony-faced sleek gentlemen who stood around watching the money rolling in
would be scurrying about like panicky rats.