The Ballad of a Small Player (15 page)

“There’s a lucky
gwai lo
,” I heard someone say, and the girls came flocking also in their immodest way. I played in my yellow gloves and the toughs gave me the eye. A second nine, and there was a small sensation. A
gwai lo
with two nines in a row? Unheard of. I looked through the tussle of bodies and saw a superbly dressed woman on the far side of the room get up, adjust her necklace, and leave the room alone.

I raked in a hundred thousand and cashed the chips straight away. Suddenly the blood began to shoot through my system and, belying long-held prejudices, I wanted to
dance. The whole room stared at me as I exited with my attaché case and made my way to the New Wing, where I had not been in a while—not since losing a hundred thousand, in fact, during a miserable evening in March. My reentry was therefore very different from my last exit, and I allowed myself a bit of puffery going in, snapping my fingers for my chips as I threw out a few bundles of fresh cash. The New Wing was a place I always feared a little because I seemed to have a tendency to lose there, but now I wanted to slap it in the face and prove to it, and to myself, that the
I Ching
was on my side after a long period of cosmic disloyalty. I lost no time, therefore, in sitting down and placing a daring bet of thirty-five hundred, unsure as yet how far I should test the waters of this treacherous place. They didn’t know me there yet so the bet was accepted indifferently, the staff barely looking at me until the natural was turned. A perfect nine, the four and the five flipped simultaneously and showering me with golden warmth. The bankers permitted themselves a few grimaces at this brutal result for the house, but they carefully controlled themselves and there was not the slightest ruffling of their feathers. I got up calmly and walked over to a different table. Some
naughty lemonade
was promptly brought (get the punters drunk and they’ll lose quicker), and I felt bold enough to knock it back without batting an eyelid. This corner of the room was emptier and I played with a couple of mainlander dotards who didn’t seem to be paying any
attention, watched from afar by the group I had thrashed. My new companions played as if dreaming, as if sleepwalking, and I knew how they felt because at any given moment I feel like I am sleepwalking—sleep-playing, you could say—and no one knows who I am except a bunch of dead people on the far side of the world.

I
laid down the chips and waited with an unprecedented inner coldness as the natural was turned. So I was rolling. I swept up the gains and laid them all down again immediately, winning a second time. Four naturals in a row. I already had far more than I had stolen from Dao-Ming and I suppose I could have walked out right then and made a deal with management with regard to settling the bill. I could get the rest from Adrian Lipett and limp on for a few more weeks. But then again, it would not be enough to retire on; and, besides, when you are on a roll you must roll and roll, so I threw everything down on the next hand. Nine!

The room stirred. The banker gave me an irritable look and pushed toward me a pile of chips such as I had never seen.

Their tone toward me altered. I tugged at my gloves and I was aware of how rigid and glassy my bearing had become and how much more I now conformed to the idea of an English lord living it up in the East. In the
East, people always told me—or at least gamblers always told me—they believe in the significance of coincidences. In the idea of the supernatural ordering the natural. Jung comments on this somewhere; it is due, he says, to the Chinese having a different sense of time, which in his commentary on the
I Ching
he called synchronicity. The Chinese, he said, did not believe in causality. They believed that when a cluster of things happened at the same time there was a meaningful connection between them. The Chinese mind seems to be exclusively preoccupied with the chance aspect of events. What we call coincidence is the chief concern of this peculiar mind, and what we worship as causality passes almost unnoticed. Yes, that was how a scholar would make sense of it. Right then, as I staked that formidable pile of chips on a single hand, I knew that there was no causality behind what would happen next. In the East, as someone also remarked,
one doesn’t die
. At the same moment I felt myself flowing into a great river of Luck, and I also felt how endless and immortal this river must be. Dopamine flooded my body as I merged into the flow, and I felt invulnerable as the hand was turned and I saw a fifth nine.

I took off my gloves to let my hands breathe off their sweat. As soon as I laid my right hand out on the edge of the table I noticed that it was wide open with the telephone number scrawled across it, and I closed it at once, but not before the ink stains had been noticed.

S
oon I was aware of a wildfire of gossip spreading around me, the word
nine
repeated under the breath as spectators formed an ever-tightening ring around the table, their hands lit by the glare of the overhead lamps. I was aware of the oysterized breath and the scent of gum and the precision of the gazes as this ring closed in upon me and the question arose—telepathically—whether I would risk it all on yet another hand. This, after all, is what these voyeurs are always waiting for, like people assembled under a bridge where a man in tattered underwear is threatening to throw himself off.

“Play?” the bank asked in a gentle tone.

I wasn’t sure. I could see that he had noticed the number on my palm and I felt that he was on the brink of asking me to open my hand and let him have a look. A crib could never help at a game like baccarat, but there is an elemental superstition and suspicion at work here, a collective paranoia, and a bank is always bound to be on the lookout for scams. His eyebrows did indeed rise and, to forestall a question, I said that it was a phone number and nothing more. He nodded, but with a clear absence of conviction.

“Really,” I insisted, but still drew my gloves back on.

I didn’t want him to see the number because these boys have photographic memories. It must have seemed to him a cheap way for a lord to store what was in all
probability a woman’s phone number. Scrawled on the hand, as a teenager would have done it. He attended to the Shuffle Master and I was surprised to see a few high rollers seat themselves at the table.

“May we?” one of them asked.

“I am playing one more hand,” I said.

I heard the murmur go up:
English bastard—playing one more hand—lucky tonight—

“Very well, sir. How much are you betting?”

“Everything.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely sure.”

“Everything?”

I repeated the word in English.

It was those words that made me famous that night in Macau. Lord Doyle says
absolutely sure!

“Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen.”

All my life I had been dreaming of a moment like this. Absolutely sure and filled with a creamy terror. The others were no doubt pressured by the same emotion. They closed in and their greed and fear reached a fever pitch in their faces. How many naturals can the luckiest Englishman ever pull off in a single night? Ah, do the math! Not six, not seven. The laws were against it.

In that moment I thought of myself walking by a tow-path near Newhaven when I was a child. A path by the river Ouse, my father egging me on to swim across the
narrow river to a rusted abandoned tanker on the far side and pick off a barnacle. Memories from elsewhere. I swam to the tanker and as I latched onto the weeds growing on the metal I began to sink, to drown, and the weeds came off in my hands and I couldn’t stay afloat except by hugging the rusted steel and I heard my father shouting to me from the bank, “No cowards in this family,” and there was a merry music of church bells from Piddinghoe nearby. “Fear no man,” my grandfather used to say in Latin. “No cowards in this family and no losers either: recall the regimental flags, old son.”

A breeze of summer rot and sea salt and a life yet to begin, and I swam back with a barnacle in my fist. The cards were turned.

“Natural.”

“Nine wins, nine wins.”

“Fuck!”

The player nearest me exploded in heartfelt grief.

“It’s the way it is,” I said coolly.

The dealer stiffened like a napkin being tugged at both ends, his bow tie slightly askew, and while everyone else was consumed in the negative passion of the moment he made a slight gesture to me, depressing a thumb into the palm of his opposing hand, a smile of wan hatred spreading over his face.

F
ive hundred ten thousand dollars richer, I made my way back to reception and gave over my bags after having the contents counted out for me. The bellhops eavesdropped and rubbed their hands with a mysterious gesture as they offered unnecessarily to show me to the elevators. The night managers couldn’t resist a few admiring remarks. The decrepit
gwai lo
they had known only a few hours ago had been replaced by the human equivalent of a phoenix. It was the power of Luck, and since it was what their palace had been built on, they were inclined to submit to its diktat.

I summoned the receptionist who had pestered me before and with some ceremony apologized for it being a few minutes after midnight.

“I was detained,” I said, “by a friend. I am sorry to have kept you waiting for a few minutes.”

She, too, looked at her watch, and her face was all consternation and regret. Had she earlier managed to insult what was now a formidable client, and would her superiors notice the awkwardness of the gaffe? People were fired for less, for much less.

“It’s quite all right, Lord Doyle. Thank you for remembering.”

“Oh, I don’t forget a thing like that. I pay my debts.”

“Yes, Lord Doyle.”

I took out an imposing wad of dough and slapped it down on the counter.

“Counted it out myself.”

“Well, I don’t know what to say, Lord Doyle.”

“Just call me Lord if you like. It’s my pleasure.”

She hesitated. Was it a
gwai lo
joke?

The cash was grubby but it was cash. It was their cash.

“I’m sorry if I was impertinent before,” she said. “It was management’s orders.”

“Quite understood. I’ve decided to ask for a larger room. A suite perhaps. Do you have any suites?”

“Of course we do, Lord Doyle.”

“Then get me a suite if you can.”

“We can move you tomorrow if that is satisfactory.”

“I suppose it’ll have to be.”

“I can move you at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”

“I want gold taps on the bath.”

We laughed; it is such a well-known Chinese vice, the gold taps.

“No problem,” she assured me.

I wondered what other petty revenge I could exact upon her at this point, but none came to mind so I wished her a good night and went to the basement mall and bought a cigar. The
relojerias
were open and I went into a few to try on some Piaget watches. It was, to say the least, a novel experience. I couldn’t quite afford them just yet, but I had to savor the way the salesmen came tumbling over to fawn upon me. I said I wanted diamonds in there somewhere, perhaps around the face but certainly not on the band. “Try them on,” they cried, “try them on!” In the end, however,
I couldn’t make up my mind and went watchless for my Horlicks and chocolate cake. I sat at an outer table so the high-class Mongolians could see me and lit my Havana. It was, in our humble terms, the kind of moment for which we addicts live but which I had never experienced before with such fullness. Nine times nine was a
cosmic
run if I had ever heard of one, and it could not be repeated, I was sure of that. By the same token I was also sure that it had never happened before. And perhaps I would never have to play the tables ever again. I could retire.

Just at that moment, though, I wondered to myself what would have happened if I had played a tenth hand. Would I have won with a tenth nine?

I even thought of going up to the Mona Lisa and trying it, just to remove the nagging doubt. I thought about it, but in the end I controlled the urge. It was too much, and sometimes one has to
not
know. And when all was said and done I was fine as I was. At one o’clock in the morning I was a Midas in the Noite e Dia, and everyone knew of my nines. Men stopped at my table and congratulated me in Chinese. They asked me what my secret was and who I was praying to. When I said no one, they didn’t believe me but they were too polite to object. It seemed as if I was concealing a secret, and some of them merely passed the table and held up a signing hand and said
gao
, nine, as if that were enough to establish an understanding. And at length I took off my gloves.