The Ballad of a Small Player (8 page)

“You had a bad night at the tables?” he said calmly. “I hear you, brother, I hear you.”

“It happens.”

“Yes, yes, it does happen.”

“I’m glad you understand.”

“But the thing is, it’s not the perfect moment at my end either. Don’t be deceived by the table. That’s old man Hong’s tab and I’m just sitting in. See? I had a pretty rocky
night myself. I went to the Venetian and made a pig’s dinner out of it. The old woman’s screaming at me for losing so much money. I wasn’t expecting this, as you can imagine. We all thought you were flying high. What happened anyway?”

“Never mind that. I need some
kwai
.”

A panicked look came over him.

“I never come to parties with wads of cash. Not that I have wads of cash. But even if I did I wouldn’t come to a party like this with it. I’d be too afraid I’d spend it all on women.”

“Solomon, just give me half what you have down there. Don’t be a prick about it. Don’t make me empty your pockets.”

“I don’t mind emptying my pockets,” he retorted proudly.

But he would never do it.

“Just five hundred,” I said.

“I can’t, I only have three.”

“One fifty?”

My voice went high-wire.

“I could give you the three,” he tried, sensing it would be bad if he didn’t.

“You’d better because I don’t have anything for the cab home.”

“Jesus, Lord Doyle. You’ve really crashed?”

“Crashed and flamed. You know that feeling, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I guess I do.”

He felt in his pockets. I knew that the notes he had there were too big to take out without blowing his ruse, so he had to find another ruse.

“Let me get you a drink,” he said. “I’ll be right back out. What’ll you have?”

“Bloody Mary.”

“I’ll make it lethal.”

I waited, furious and impotent, and through the glass doors I kept an eye out for Lipett, he of many unpaid obligations. I was going nowhere on this quest for a repay, but I had nowhere else to go and I had to keep at it. After a short age Solomon returned with two Bloody Marys and we proceeded to down them too quickly while I tried to think of a way out of my mess and he tried to think of a way to give me as little money as possible.

“How bad is it?” he asked.

“My luck ran out.”

“All of it?”

“All of it.”

“Are you going to make a run for it?”

“Where would I go?”

He shrugged.

“Mongolia?”

“I haven’t paid the hotel bill. They’d come and get me. The
Chinese
would come and get me.”

“I see what you mean. Nasty.”

“I have to play my way out of it.”

“Play your way out of it?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I have to play my way out of it. There’s nothing else for it.”

“You can’t play your way out of it.”

“Why not? I played my way into it, didn’t I?”

Inescapable logic.

“But what if you lose the next round?”

It was occurring to him that our positions had merely reversed, and that now it was I who was going to play the money he would be giving me. Neither of us could remember whose money it actually was, or had been originally. It was just money, like fluids passing between animals. It was eternal, while we were anything but.

“I am not going to lose the next round. If I do, I’ll disappear.”

He laughed.

“You’ll disappear?”

“I might. Why not?”

“Nothing rash, eh, Freddy?”

He fumbled in his pocket. His voice broke a little and I must have appeared as desperate as I actually was.

“Can’t you pay back five grand now?” I said tensely. “I
need it to get through the next few days. The next few days are going to be hard.”

“Five thousand won’t get you anywhere.”

“I know, but you owe it.”

“How about two?”

“Three fifty.”

“Three. All right, three. It’s breaking my back, though.”

“Those tarts in there cost more than that for a half hour.”

The three grand came out and was passed over like heroin that mustn’t be seen.

“It’ll keep me alive for two days,” I said.

“You’re not going to play it?”

“I’m going to eat, that’s all.”

And it was true. At that point, anyway.

“Then you can take me to dinner at Fernando’s. We can walk there.”

“But I just bought you dinner the other night.”

“You had the money. Just like you have it now.”

“You gave me everything?”

“Absolutely everything.”

“You’re a damn liar.”

“I’m not emptying my pockets for you, but it’s damn true.”

“You’re worse than those pigs in there.”

He turned and glanced through the window.

“It’s funny to think,” he said, “that it’s we who finance them.”

“It doesn’t matter. I can pay for dinner, I guess.”

“Doyle, it’s just Fernando’s. I’m not suggesting anywhere fancy.”

“So you say.”

We went downstairs and the cigar smoke got into my lungs and the sight of the Chinese violinist made me want to stay a little longer. I must have been deluded to think that I could belong to this world. Who was I? The insect at the bottom of the glass. Chinese crime bosses fed at a tureen of punch that a girl in satin doled out with a silver cup, and they picked the slices of orange out of their glasses with wet fingers. Red plastic lions stood under the lights, and I walked past them thinking of my three thousand and what I could use it for before all the lights in my life went out with a bang.

Solomon led the way confidently. He lit up a cigar when we were out of the wind. The path down to the beach hissed with tormented junipers.

“I don’t even know why I came out tonight,” he said nonchalantly, the burning end of the cigar lighting the way. “I thought I’d pick up a girl and then I didn’t. One of them said I was a miser.”

“So you are.”

“Broke, but not miserly.”

“Clearly, you’re not broke.”

We stepped onto the sand. The lights of the village at the far end were clear, and we went toward them, through the whipped nets and along the edge of the angry surf. Fernando’s was crowded with Macanese families, and we took our place at the back of the room far from the TV sets and launched into plates of
baccalau asado
and bottles of Perequita.

Solomon tucked a napkin into his shirt and declared his sympathy for the Portuguese working class who had created this place but who now no longer existed in Asia. Too bad for them. He tore through our first bottle and promptly ordered a second. I tried to restrain him, thinking nervously of the dent it would make in my three grand, but of course the whole point was to make a considerable dent in my three grand. He drank in great, fluid drafts, as if the wine didn’t matter so much as arriving at a point on the further side of it. As he got tipsier he confessed to his own losses during the previous week, and then to a small rebound on the weekend.

“And the most fantastic thing is the dreams I’ve been having these last few nights. The ghosts are trying to speak to me.”

“Are they?”

“Yes. I had a dream I was driving with two gamblers through a village in Spain. We weren’t gambling. We were eating and drinking and looking for a parking spot. Suddenly these helicopter drones came out of nowhere with
white plastic propellers and followed us to a dingy café somewhere. We sat down and the drones disappeared and the old men started singing ancient songs in Spanish. Then all the lights in the village came on. I have no idea what it means. I think it means my bad luck is about to change.”

He raised a hand.

“Waiter, another bottle.”

“Solomon, that’s the third bottle.”

“So what? You’re paying. We need to celebrate your crash to earth. Your imminent flight to Mongolia. I may never see you again.”

“It’s not a joking matter.”

“How are you going to pay the rent? Don’t complain to me about the bill until you know how to pay the rent.”

“I have to win again.”

“But you were flying high for a while there.”

“We’re always flying high for a while, aren’t we? I should have quit while I was ahead. The problem was—”

“You weren’t far enough ahead to quit.”

“That’s just it.”

He exhaled.

“One is never far enough ahead to quit.”

“And the thing is,” I went on, “I do want to quit. I need to make my pile and quit. All I think about is quitting.”

“You’d never quit.”

“Seriously, I would. I have to.”

“We all think that. Like we said before.”

After an unpleasant pause, he said, “Where would you go?”

“I don’t know. The mainland. One has to find a spot to die.”

“You’re not ready to die. You’ve got a chapter left in you.”

“A chapter?”

“A few lines anyway.”

I gave in, and I stopped worrying about the three grand. We ordered more dishes. Oysters, onion rings, late-night clam dim sum, sardines. We ordered grappa and flan. Solomon suggested that we finish the whole bottle of grappa. Behind my eyes the tears were beginning to well up, to dribble down into my nose, but I held them back and kept up with him. It had occurred to me that I might be arrested on my arrival back at the Lisboa. Arrested and deported. It happens all the time to gamblers down on their luck.

“I just saw a terrible thing in the newspaper,” Solomon said. “In Bangkok, a head was found dangling by a nylon hiking rope from the Rama VIII Bridge, loosely attached to a white plastic bag. There was a picture of it in the
Bangkok Post
. A human head swaying in the wind, with a crowd on the bridge looking down in disbelief. It was a Caucasian head, and the tabloids were full of rumors
about it being a mafia hit. But then it seems the forensics people determined that a fifty-three-year-old Italian architect down on his luck had been thrown out of a cheap hotel nearby, had stomach cancer, and had decided to hang himself. But he was slightly overweight, and the force of his fall had severed the head from his body, leaving the head swaying at the end of the rope with the plastic bag, a nightmarish end, they said, for a man of great sensitivity and cultural tastes, who had once worked with the great Milanese architect Cacciarli. His friends in Italy mourned him, but no one knew what he was doing in Asia. He was penniless. His passport showed that he was drifting from country to country, impelled, his friends said, by a love of Eastern art. You should take a look at that head swinging on a rope before you decide to disappear.”

“What would it tell me?”

“It would tell you wait a little longer. You don’t have stomach cancer like poor old Maurizio Tesadori. You’re not at the end of your rope.”

“But I am,” I said bluntly. “I am at the end of my rope.”

“No you’re not. The night is long and young. If you have a thousand left after dinner, go and try a bet at Fortuna. The boys say it’s been paying out very nicely this week.”

“I can’t spent my last thousand there. Are you nuts?”

“Of course you can. You’ll win. And what difference
does it make if you don’t spend it? It isn’t enough for anything.”

“Especially after six bottles of grappa.”

“Keep your voice down, your lordship. Appearances. Let’s have a cigar and lie down on the beach like homeless people. They never call the police. The grappa has calmed you down. It’s been useful.”

We went out into the turbulent night, where everything seemed to be in motion because of the winds. Branches and tin cans rolling across the sands and striking the walls and the volleyball nets halfway to being ruined. I had forgotten nature for months, living in the interior world of the casino, in the system of cards and cash. Now it was a shock to feel the sea air and the light of the moon unmediated by electric light and neon and the allure of sex.

I laid myself out on the sand and Solomon lay skeptical beside me. We talked about our fathers, whom neither of us had known very well, and both of them it seemed had been unlucky. Unlucky men breed unlucky men. Solomon seemed undisturbed by anything in life, neither good luck nor bad, not even the bad luck of his father, who had flown planes for Continental and lost all three of his wives to alcoholism. It rolled off Solomon and in the end it was the same. Like America, he said, he would die in a pauper’s grave and he didn’t mind. Someone had to die in paupers’ graves. Just not a pauper’s grave in China, where no one understood the nobility of being a pauper in the first place.
His debts had risen to over a million in Hong Kong dollars and his wife had bailed him out and forced him to sign a contract under which he would never gamble again, but of course it had done no good. Addiction is fate. We were the same in that respect, and the unluckiness of my own father seemed reassuring when it was counterweighed by his story. My father, dutiful and doomed till the end, a marcher to other people’s brass tunes who had marched right along into a foolish early grave.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “I am going to play all day at the Venetian and win back the hundred thousand I lost last week. Wait and see.”

It was clear he wanted to go back to the Hyatt party, which would run late, with girls and coke and other amusements, without which, he added, life would be quite unbearable. What he wanted from it I couldn’t say, but I would have to let him go and get whatever it was. The pleasures of life and flesh, the small advantages of the popular man. I couldn’t blame him. We walked back to the hotel. The sound of
Riverdance
did not calm my anxieties. For a moment I was tempted to try to find the elusive Adrian Lipett again, but I knew in advance now that he would evade me with his customary skill and that I would be made a fool of. I was beginning to feel shabby, a tramp at the feast of others, and as soon as one feels this way one has to beat a retreat into the shadows. I found a cab outside the main door and Solomon embraced me. Was I sure I
didn’t want to come in? “To do what,” I asked. “To salivate for the things on the far side of the glass?”

“I see your point,” he laughed.

I was back in Macau within half an hour, and with nothing better to do I decided to go to the movies and think it all over. By dawn I would have a decision, and after that I would sail into nothingness. What was left to me now wasn’t enough to gamble anyway.