The Ballad of a Small Player

ALSO BY LAWRENCE OSBORNE

The Wet and the Dry

The Forgiven

Bangkok Days

The Naked Tourist

The Accidental Connoisseur

American Normal

The Poisoned Embrace

Paris Dreambook

Ania Malina

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 by Lawrence Osborne

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

HOGARTH is a trademark of the Random House Group Limited, and the H colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Osborne, Lawrence, 1958–
    The ballad of a small player / Lawrence Osborne. — First edition.
         pages cm
    1. British—China—Hong Kong—Fiction. 2. Gambling—China—Hong Kong—Fiction. 3. Casinos—China—Hong Kong—Fiction.
I. Title.
PR6065.S23B36 2014
823′.914—dc23                       2013035201

ISBN 978-0-8041-3797-3
eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-3798-0

Jacket design by Anna Kochman
Jacket photograph by Yiu Yu Hoi

v3.1

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

FAUSTUS:
How comes it then that
thou art out of hell?

MEPHISTOPHELES:
Why this is hell,
nor am I out of it
.

—CHRISTOPHER
MARLOWE

ONE

A
t midnight on Mondays, or a little after, I arrive at the Greek Mythology in Taipa, where I play on those nights when I have nowhere else to go, when I am tired of Fernando’s and the Clube Militar and the little brothel hotels on Repubblica. I like it there because there are no Chinese TV stars and because they know me by sight. It is one of the older casinos, archaic and run-down. Its woodwork reeks of smoke, and its carpets have a sweet rancid sponginess that my English shoes like. I go there every other weekend night or so, losing a thousand a week from my Inexhaustible Fund. I go there to scatter my yuan, my dollars, my
kwai
, and losing there is easier than winning, more gratifying. It’s more like winning than winning itself, and everyone knows you are not a real player until you secretly prefer losing.

I like the bars stocked with Great Wall and Dragon Seal wine, which you can mix with Dr Pepper. I like the Greeks themselves. Zeus at the top of the gold staircase
and the friezes of centaurs. I like the receptionists in cherry hats who sleep with you if you pay them enough. I even like the deserted traffic circle at the end of the street where I can go to catch my breath during a losing streak. The air in Macau is always sharp and clean, somehow, except when it’s foul and humid. We are surrounded by stormy seas.

The crowd is mainlander at New Year: an outpouring of the nearby cities of Guangzhou and Shenzen and their choking suburbs. They look like crows, like swarms of birds. I wonder what they make of the murals of happy nymphs. Among them one can spot the safety-pin millionaires, the managers of the Pearl River factories, the mom-and-pop owners of manufacturing units specializing in computer keyboard buttons and toy cogs and gears for lawn mowers. All here to blow their hard-earned wads on the
I Ching
. The doors are of that bright gold that the Chinese love, the carpets that deep red that they also love and that is said to be the color of Luck. Droplet chandeliers plunge from ceilings painted with scenes from Tiepolo, with the zephyrs given Asian canthi. Corridor flowing into corridor, an endless system of corridors, like every Macau casino.

I
pass into a vestibule. Red vases, where the glass screens are frosted with images of Confucius and naked girls. In a private room, briefly glimpsed, two Chinese
players are laying down $100 HK bets every minute, but with a show of macho lethargy and indifference. One of them smokes an enormous cigar from the open box of complimentary Havanas on the table, flicking the ash into a metal conch shell intended to echo the cheap reproductions of Botticelli cut into the blue walls. My hands begin to sweat beneath the gloves I always wear inside the gaming houses. The smell that curls into my nose is that of humans concentrating on their bad luck, perspiring like me because of the broken fans.

The game here is punto banco baccarat. It involves no skill, and that is why the Chinese like it. Each table has a vertical electronic board upon which the patterns of Luck are displayed as mathematical trends in columns of numerals. The crowds gather around these boards to decide which tables are lucky and which are not. They scrutinize the lines of numbers, which change minutely with every hand that is played at the table. It is a way of computing the winds of change, the patterns of Luck, and I daresay the Western eye cannot read them at all. But then, they are not intended for our eyes.

I sit and take out my crocodile wallet. I play in yellow kid gloves and everyone there thinks I am a lord of some kind, a lord on the run with a unlucky streak that can be mitigated by the forces of the
I Ching
. The waiter asks me if I would like another drink, a bottle of champagne, perhaps? I order a bottle of something or other and
I think,
I’ll drink it all anyway, sooner or later, I always do
. I never seem to get drunk either way. There is a middle-aged woman at the table and no one else. She looks over her spectacles toward me and there is the usual xenophobic hatred in her eye, and yet she is coquettish, she is a pro at the tables, she is dolled up in clothes from the malls in Tsim Sha Shui. She is playing with a mixture of mainland
kwai
and Hong Kong dollars, with a few tourist tokens thrown in. Easy pickings, she is thinking, looking at this plump
gwai lo
in his gloves and bow tie, with his look of a New England literature professor out on the town without permission from his wife. She looks me over, this bitch, and I enjoy the thought of skinning her alive with a few good hands. This encourages me to settle in.

The bets are $50 HK a hand. I begin to smoke, as I always do—Red Pagoda Hill and Zongnanha, the stuff that kills. The dealer gives me a little look. He, too, recognizes me; there are only a handful of
gwai lo
players in the whole city. “The wind,” he says kindly, “is blowing the wrong way tonight.” Bail out?
But
, I think,
the bitch is making money. She is sucking
my
money out of me
. No, no. “Keep at it,” I say.

“Sure?”

“Sure.”

I double my bets. I put down hundred-dollar bills on the three card plays and watch them disappear to the other side of the table. “One fifty,” the woman says in Mandarin,
tossing a green chip into the middle of an even greener table.

“Two hundred,” I say in Cantonese.

“Two fifty.”

“Three fifty!”

“All right,” she sighs.

We play for four hands, and I lose three. A plate of baccalau appears on the table and the woman picks up a plastic fork with undisguised relish. The
I Ching
is with her.

I now see how much gold she is wearing. I get up unsteadily and decide to backtrack to the men’s room and cool off. The dealer hesitates and says, “Sir?” but I wave him down. “I’ll be back,” I say.

I never give up on the night until I am ready to fall down. I walk off, as if it doesn’t matter to me at all. As if I really will come back from the men’s room and skin her alive, and I am sure I will.

TWO

W
hen I came back the older woman had disappeared. She had pulled her loot while ahead and was even now hauling a velvet bag of chips to the cashier. In her place another woman had sat down, but much more nervously and with a different weight to her hands. At a table, it is always the hands that I notice first. There are rapacious hands and expert ones, experienced hands and naïve ones, killer hands and victim hands. She was much younger, too. She perched at the far end of the table with a vulgar little handbag of the kind you can buy in the markets in Shenzen, badly made Fendi with gilt metal that flakes away after a week, and her left hand rested protectively on a small pile of lower-denomination red chips. She hoarded them in this way while her eyes scanned the surface of the table as if it were something she had never seen before. So she had sat at what she thought was an empty table. The bottle of champagne was still in its bucket, however. The waiter came up—he knew me—and said, in the
heavy irony which the boys used with me in those days, “More champagne, Lord Doyle?”

As he said this, the girl’s eyes rose for a moment. They shifted sideways to the electric number board behind me. The rows of yellow numbers had suddenly altered and I could hear them click, as if the luck force field were flicking them over like cards.

“Is that a change of luck?”

“It must be, your lordship.”

We laughed. I was the jolliest loser. I turned in my seat and motioned to the girl.

“Why not ask the señorita if she’d like a glass of champagne?”

He leaned down to my ear.

“Are you sure, sir?”

“Sure.”

I pulled away from his whisper and gripped the neck of the bottle, extracting it from a rustle of ice.

“Why not?”

The waiter spoke to her in Mandarin. She said, “That’s nice” in Cantonese. I spoke to her in the same language.

“It’s vintage, you know, it’s not just any old bubbly.”

In the white noise of the sixty baccarat tables, where a crowd of munitions workers were hurling down their company-secured chips with curses and hoorahs, I thought for a moment that I had gone deaf, and when my hearing returned the girl was talking to me across a pall of
smoke. She was saying
thank you
or some such thing, and her lips moved like two parallel fingers playing a game of rock-paper-scissors. They were overpainted, as was the style there. She wore a small crocus-white dress, and that was all I cared to notice. Not especially pretty, as the boy had been quick to observe. Not especially pretty but not especially unattractive either. She drank the champagne awkwardly, holding the glass with two fingers so that it almost fell, and I half wished I hadn’t bothered.

We played for a while.

“Is it your first time?” I asked her between hands, as the machine shuffled the cards and the dealer twirled his pallet; her nod made him wonder as well.