“Go on, swear,” she said.
“Zau gei!”
“That’s better. You’ll win tomorrow.”
“I’m sleeping tomorrow.”
Her bags of cash were brought over and she looked at me coquettishly.
“It all looks so impressive when they bring it over in bags.”
You know what they call a blow job in Mandarin? I thought. Shooting down the jet.
“Would you like to take me to dinner?” she asked.
I had to make a prompt excuse.
“I am expected at Coloane,” I said.
She looked genuinely disappointed.
“Oh? And I can’t persuade you to pull out?”
“I am not lucky tonight,” I said. “It’s one of those nights.”
“If you need money—”
Her eyes sparkled, pure mischief.
“I always need money,” I said grimly.
She laughed long and hard. I ground the two chips in my right pocket hard between my perspiring fingers.
“I can lend you a few thousand.”
“Not necessary,” I said imperiously, holding up a hand.
I slipped off the stool and she did the same. The bankers bowed and thanked us. I nodded to them with an air of stern unconcern. I was totally bankrupt, but there was an honest satisfaction in not appearing so.
Delicately, I saw her off in the lobby of the Lisboa itself. I had no idea what time it was and the clocks behind the reception desk all looked askew, as if they were intentionally lying to us. Grandma held her three bags bulging with cash and they threw her a little off balance. She laughed and made a small scene. Everyone there knew her. The thought that all that cash was actually mine made me anxious, and I was probably capable of doing something rash. She told me to go to bed and get some sleep and we would see each other the following night. But of course we would not. I would be making other plans.
I saw her to the door, then watched her totter down the steps toward the waiting taxis. I wanted to kill her. I turned, then, and went back up to the New Wing and cashed in the two chips without anyone noticing. That got me about $400 HK, not much, but a meal at least at Noite e Dia. I started off toward the elevator to do exactly this, but as I waited for it to arrive I began to reconsider. Four hundred wasn’t much to gamble with, but if I won a single hand I could double it and then play that. Within five minutes I’d have enough for food for a week. I thought about it. Why blow my only remaining asset on a single plate of fried lamb chops when I could use it right now to secure myself a week’s worth of fried lamb chops? The casino was thinning out and my meager bet would not be noticed by anyone I cared about. I’d tell the boys it was a joke, a formality. All bets are accepted, even the tiniest. When the elevator arrived and the button lit up I hesitated. The screw turned inside me and I failed to walk through the opening doors. I stood there paralyzed and simply stared into the empty car. Then I tuned on my heel and walked calmly back into the casino.
I went to the nearest table and sat down within a small group. I threw down both chips and lost.
SEVEN
I went back to my room then and fell onto the unmade bed. I could not think. When I was awake again after an hour’s tortured sleep, I searched through the suite for leftover banknotes. I had remembered that that night there was a casino executive party at the Hyatt in Coloane and I could hit someone up for a loan, perhaps even one of the same people who only a few hours or days ago had hit me up for a loan. With luck, Solomon would be there and I could get repaid. God knew, he owed me. There was also an Englishman by the name of Adrian Lipett, who had borrowed five grand from me a month ago and whom I had not seen since. If I was in luck, and they were in pocket, I could get something back and then clear my wits and see where I stood. Which might be on thin ice about to crack, but one never knew and it was worth the try.
I got dressed after finding a few hundred under the bed and in the bathroom and went down to the taxi rank. Crossing the causeway, I saw the moon on the water, and as we crossed Taipa the car shuddered with strong winds. It was much earlier than I had realized, before midnight, and the ludicrous thought occurred to me that I had actually slept for twenty-four hours and it was now the following night. The roads were empty. The wooded hills of Coloane twisted by, the moon peeping between tossing trees. By the Hyatt the small curved beach was alive with surfer waves and the volleyball nets swung back and forth. Chinese lanterns set on the terraces leading up to the hotel also rocked in the monsoon gusts.
In the forecourt of the hotel a marquee had been set up along with a small stage; a large flat-screen TV in the upstairs bar showed a Rolling Stones concert. The American casino men sprawled in the leather chairs with their Chinese mistresses were saying how good Jagger looked for his age, very agile, and it gave them all secret hope. Red streamers dangled from the ceilings with long gold ribbons inside them. The Year of the Rat was truly upon us. The stage lit up outside and a Chinese violinist climbed onto it. With impeccable classical technique, the girl launched into a few numbers from Riverdance. I slipped through the crowd looking for my fellow con men, and soon I was upstairs in the hotel bar with its balcony overlooking the cove. The Americans were now out in force. The robust men of Nevada in their Singapore suits and their Ferragamo ties. They didn’t notice me, because the loser always has a certain unconscious invisibility.
I threaded my way through them until I caught sight of Solomon McClaskey drinking himself under the table with a group of Chinese, and I motioned for him to follow me out onto the balcony. The group was pulling crackers and eating a roast pig. At first he pretended not to see me but was forced to acknowledge that he had and reluctantly got up from his sofa and his gimlet. He came out gingerly onto the balcony, where we were alone because of the inclement weather, and he saw the alarming signs in my face at once. The wind was loud and I had to strain to make myself understood. I said I needed the loan I had made him back. It was a sticky situation and I needed every kwai. I said the table he was at seemed fairly groaning with goodies and that he must have struck it good at one of the casinos, though it was none of my business. I just wanted the dough back in good order. I said it in a friendly way, without urgency, just stating the case and saying it was one of those days. One of those cursed days that must always come upon us.
“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.”
The Ballad of a Small Player Page 6