The Ballad of a Small Player (4 page)

We were soon having tea together every week. She was obsessed with her savings and her investments, and being a creature of intuition and habit she refused to discuss these with anyone else at the firm. Every Thursday morning I walked from the firm’s offices to her timbered mock-Tudor on Summerhill Lane and pulled the iron bell
chain set into the door and waited under a fringe of honeysuckle for her padded step. We took Earl Grey and sandwiches in the sunroom, and she talked about her husband. She called him “my glorious Teddy.”

“Oh, my glorious Teddy organized everything for me before he died,” she would say, forgetting that she had said the very same thing the week before. “But now I seem to have got into a tizzy about it all. He always told me to move my money around and keep it fresh. Do you agree?”

“Your husband was perfectly correct.”

“But there’s no one I trust, you see.” Her eyes shone with a kind of crazy flinty gullibility. “Except you, of course. Perhaps you could take some of my funds out of Rio Tinto and put them somewhere else? I am going to authorize Mr. Ashburton at Lloyd’s to give you access. Now, why don’t you try one of my chutney sandwiches? I make the chutney myself with Mr. Porter’s raisins from Sunte Avenue. Go on.”

She barely recognized me in the later days, when I came by to chat with her and hold her hand and assess the value of her moldering but well-stocked property. She sometimes thought I was her nephew, or the doctor, or who knows who else. While she dozed in her armchair in the front room, I wandered through her mansion and pocketed, for fun, the occasional trinket. She never noticed. And so I began to steal from her very gradually, a hundred pounds here, a hundred pounds there, and when
I progressed to higher sums I saw that it made no difference. No one was watching over her affairs but me, and no one had access to her bank account but me. There must have come a point, I reflected as I sat there looking at the Binokel card, when I realized that I could get away if not with murder then with the second best thing.

I must have passed the better part of two years laboring at this secret game. I became, gradually, much richer than anyone around me, and much richer than I myself had ever been before—because I had never been even well off, let alone seriously affluent. Quite the contrary. I came from the loins of a vacuum cleaner salesman. I had never had anything. In fact I had noticed, hitherto, a certain snobbery toward me on the part of the other lawyers at our firm, and certainly a distinct snobbery coming from the partners. They could tell by a sixth sense that I was not one of them. I had not gone to a public school, not even Ardingly, down the road, where most of them had spent their miserable boyhoods loafing around willowed ponds. I had been to the local state schools. To Scrayes Bridge Comprehensive and then Haywards Heath Grammar, where I had picked up my A levels. I was an orphan in the Hindu-style English caste system, a “ghost” indeed. To them I was therefore faintly detestable, comically inferior, and they were a little surprised, I imagine, that I had even made it that far. Nottingham was not a bad university but it didn’t exactly ring any bells; it had no meaning to the boys who had come down
from Oxford and King’s. The only thing that confused them was my accent.

As I say, I had studied their accent and reproduced it. As the country as a whole went more and more prole in its accents, I went the other way and I did it on purpose, because of course now I was at war with it all and I wanted to win at parody while siphoning off as much of Mrs. Butterworth’s money as I could. I stashed it away in various accounts and soon I had an account in Hong Kong, which I was able to open with the help of a friend. It proved to be invaluable. Into Hong Kong I poured all my secrets and hopes. It seemed then like the land of freedom and invisibility.

China. A police state would not seem the ideal place for escape. But what if it was a police state that didn’t like our police? My enemy’s enemy is my friend. No one would go looking for me in a place like Macau, because Macau wasn’t Hong Kong; it was one of the most secretive places on earth. I thought about it a great deal as I paced around Haywards Heath at night, that empty and tomblike place in which only the railway line is a source of life after midnight. It could not be any worse, I thought, than the prison I was already living in. Lodging in a private flat with Mrs. Eaglin on Denman’s Lane, riding to work on a bicycle when it wasn’t raining. A company car, otherwise, a Vauxhall Astra perfect for country lanes but terminally undistinguished. The only thing that redeemed this unworthy
existence was the idea that I could get away with the Butterworth dosh. It was a strange thought that I was acquiring all the wealth of that long-dead mining executive. Anglo-American Copper and its tributaries, a vile company in all likelihood, and its treasures had ended up in my secret bank account in Hong Kong. Why would it be immoral to gamble that money away? Would that be worse than the way it had been gained? I remembered how guiltless I had felt, the first time I spent a week in Hong Kong on holiday. Within days I knew the Macau casinos back to front.

It seemed to me that unlike the snobbish and closed world from which I came, this place had a violent democracy about it. I compared it to Haywards Heath and I was charmed. I formed the idea of eloping there with my spoils. A foolish idea, no doubt, childish and naïve. But I was sure that sooner or later the directors would smoke me out, as indeed they eventually did. I didn’t want to go back to the unworthy existence, let alone face psychiatric evaluation and possibly prison, and wanted to keep Mrs. Butterworth’s money, which otherwise would have been sent to the International Society for the Humane Treatment of Marine Mammals.

It was a tense wire to be balanced upon, and I was a poor tightrope walker. One afternoon the senior partner of our firm, Mr. Strick, invited me into his office at the top of the building and frostily asked me to take a seat. He was a very old-school character, much like Mr. Butterworth, I
imagine, and he believed in the sterling value of “man-to-man” chats.

“Look here, Doyle,” he said, taking off his glasses and inserting one of the grips into the corner of his mouth, “I’ve always thought you were a rather decent chap, even if you do keep yourself to yourself a bit too much. Some of the others were wondering if a chap like you might feel a tad uncomfortable with chaps like them. I said, he’s a funny old chap and that’s all there is to it. What do you say, Doyle? No after-work pints for you?”

“I’m not much of a drinker, sir.”

“Ah, so that’s it, eh, you’re not a chap who likes to drink too much?”

“No, sir.”

How could I forget that office, with its paperweights filled with pieces of Pacific coral and the golf clubs in glass cases? That smell of shag and woodland mud and stale PG Tips?

“Well, look here, old chap, I’ve noticed that you’ve been eating every lunch at Tiffany’s French place across the roundabout. Rather dear for you, isn’t it?”

“I’ve developed a taste for it, sir.”

“Yes, yes. But what I mean is, Doyle, you seem to have a bit of money to knock around. I’m not aware we gave you a raise.”

We laughed, and for the first time I had an inkling of
his suspicion, of the close eye that he was keeping on me. “Everything all right with the Butterworth account? You and Mrs. Butterworth seem awfully tight. You are going there every week? It must be a frightful bore.”

“Not at all. We talk about old films.”

“Do you now? She seems like a frisky old bird. I knew her husband, you know. We played golf together at Ardingly. Spiffing chap and all that, but a bit morose for my taste. They say he made a lot of money in precious metals. But I suppose you’d know all about that.”

I said that I did, and that I took great interest in the account.

“Good show,” he concluded, putting his glasses back on. “But, Doyle—we do have to keep an eye on Mrs. Butterworth. She is not quite in her right mind. I wouldn’t want any irregularities to occur.”

At that moment, in Macau, I looked up from the elaborately designed cards and into the eyes of the English seigneurs on their thoroughbreds. I hated nothing more than them. I saw the puffed face of Mrs. Butterworth laid back against an antimacassar. She had been sweet and arrogant in equal measure. A woman who looked down on me when she had had her wits about her. I had taken her hand when I entered the room and spoken to her close to, stooped to the ear.
Yes, Mrs. Butterworth; no, Mrs. Butterworth
.

“Are you the lawyer chap?” she had asked over and again. “My husband says never trust a lawyer. He says you’re all cheerful scum.”

W
hen I returned to business I was revived by the cold water. I played two hands of fifteen each, losing one and winning one. I was emboldened to ratchet it up to twenty, at which point I had to unseal the second of the padded envelopes of cash I had brought with me.

I laid the money out and got my cards. I was sure, in that moment, that someone was watching me from behind one of the paintings (I assumed they had observation windows built into them) and when I turned my hand to reveal a four and a six, I was sure that someone somewhere had smiled. A four and a six is a baccarat, a zero hand worth nothing, or to be technical, a ten modulo ten: the worst hand you can draw. It was as crushing a losing hand as I could have pulled, and the dealer himself shook his head empathetically before awarding me a commiseration of sorts. He wished me better fortune for the next play.

“I drew a baccarat yesterday,” I said. “Two in two days.”

“Tut tut.”

“I am not smelling the winds.”

I paused and dabbed my forehead with a cocktail napkin, because a moment before everything had seemed
so clear—even if only for a few seconds—and now I no longer knew if I should play another hand or go home with half my envelope intact.

“You want a pause, sir?”

“I can’t lose twice with a baccarat.”

A
s the table was prepared, the sound of the
erhar
rose up from somewhere, and I thought it must be dawn outside, or close. I waited for my mind to calm and clear and then laid my twenty thousand on the table.

“Are you sure this time?” the dealer asked politely.

I flipped the first card and noted the five. The dealer looked at me suavely, and I think he was genuinely curious.

The coal fire crackled behind us, and his back must have been warm. I turned a four and won the hand with a natural. Surprised, he stepped back for a moment. He raised a moist hand towel to his mouth and nodded a mute congratulation. I sat back and watched the chips pushed my way, a great salacious pile of them, and I paused to smoke for a few minutes. I may have imagined it, but I thought I heard a bell ringing somewhere deep inside the complex of pits. What kind of bell, I had no idea. Perhaps a bell went off whenever a punter made a large winning.

The dealer shuffled the cards again and we took our ease, bantering about the trade. He then asked me if I felt inclined to take on another hand. I was now feeling
roused, aggressive. A sudden win will do that to you. It will lift you out of months of depression and self-doubt, days of quiet dread. A surge of animal arrogance of the kind that one needs to feel in order to remember that you are alive. Doomed to be alive.

“Lady Luck is with me,” I said in English.

He dealt my two cards and I turned a three and a two. He therefore dealt me a third card. It was a four.

“Natural,” he said, raising his eyebrows for a moment and then stepping back from the table with a slight twitch of the head.

I
looked at my watch and saw that it was five thirty-five a.m. I could feel the wind of fortune switching direction around me like something physical, a real breeze admitted by a door suddenly opened. I stood and bagged the mound of chips as the manager came in a second time and congratulated me, bowing and hoping that I would return to the Paiza soon.

“We welcome you anytime, Lord Doyle.”

I was given a small attaché case for the cash and escorted politely to the main doors, where a tour bus from Shenzen had just arrived, offloading fresh crowds for the main floors of the Sands. I went through to get to the main road, shrugging off their overdoses of scent, and soon I was walking into Avenida da Amizade. I didn’t even know
exactly how much it was: hundreds and hundreds of thousands. Kenny Rogers had it right. You never count your money when you’re sittin’ at the table.

I walked back to the Lisboa in the dawn, past the yawning molls of the Rua de Pequim and the Fortuna casino, passing by that strange fragment of the Rue de Rivoli. Inside the Lisboa lobby I gave my case to reception so that they could entrust it to the house safe, and then I wandered around the galleries, staring at those antique ink stones and Chinese seismographs that seem to be permanently on sale there. There was a jade galleon, too, and farther down a gilded peacock from Garrard’s of London displayed with a glass of blue wine next to it. The luxury goods that I passed every day without much noticing them. And finally I came to a spinach-green jade figure of Guan Yin herself standing next to a pendulum clock of the same material.

Properly, it is Guashi’yin. They shorten it to Guan Yin. She is a bodhisattva. Her name means
listening to the sounds of the world
. Or, one could put it, listening to the
cries
of the world. Because she is also the goddess of mercy and compassion. For the Taoists she is an immortal. She is the female form, in East Asia, of the Indian male bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara.

I stood there for some time, mentally lost inside that lustrous greenness, the face and eloquent hands of a jade bodhisattva, and something within me began to revolve,
to change direction, and I felt how impossible it would be to just go upstairs and go to sleep. My victory had crystallized and now it fragmented again like a glass ball dropped from a great height. I turned and walked calmly back to reception.

“Give me the case back,” I said. “Yes, all of it.”

Their looks were questioning, but after all they didn’t care.