The Ballad of a Small Player

by Lawrence Osborne

  I left the note on the table. Finally I put on my overcoat, which had been hanging on the door, and prepared to leave. As I closed the front door I happened to look down and saw that she had written a telephone number on the inside of my right palm, which I hadn’t noticed earlier for some reason. It was curious. I held my palm up under the porch light and saw that there were eight numbers, which is not usual for Hong Kong, and that she had scrawled them there with a felt pen by way of a light au revoir. Eight numbers in blue etched diagonally across my hand. To remind me, to let me know that she was there and that I should call her. I marveled at the nearness of the numbers. She must have written them while I was asleep.

  I went out into the drizzle. My Lisboa room key was still inside the front pocket of the trousers, along with rolls of banknotes, and I thought to myself, I’m in better order, I am remade, and there was the phone number in case I fell back on hard times and needed her again. I felt she had expected me to steal her money all along, and she wouldn’t have minded. I felt a little more confident and rational, less confused, as I swept down the hill and passed for the last time through the restaurants. I was sure there was a last boat over to Macau, and I was right. But I had to wait an hour for it to arrive. The moon came up and yet it rained. I could not understand the contradiction. The moon pale and hesitant, the rain fine and soundless, emerging from a clear sky.

  On the ferry I stood at the rear watching the distant lights of the mainland immersed in fog changing their dimensions relative to the wider view. I began to calm down at last and I felt the cash close to my chest and I didn’t care about anything but playing the next round at the Hong Fak or wherever else fortune would take me in a few hours’ time. The names of those casinos had begun to reappear in my mind, whetting its appetite. As Macau loomed up—the first thing you see is the Sands casino flashing its ripe strawberry lights across the water, a ghostly wheel spinning in the dark—I promised, yet again to myself, that I would send her back the money in an envelope after my first score at the tables. I would pay her more, in fact, to thank her for rescuing me from the Intercontinental and nursing me back to health. At least I resolved to do this, but I’d never actually do it. Even as I make sincere resolutions, I know that I won’t honor them. I thought, It’s all her fault anyway. She shouldn’t have rescued me in the Intercontinental. She should have left me to pay the bill and be deported.

  It was twilight when I disembarked, and the crowds were suffocating as they churned between the ferry and the Sands. I was relieved and anxious and exultant and fearful to be back. I wanted to play at once. Walk to a casino and play, simple as that. I didn’t even know what day it was. Thursday? Friday? It didn’t matter, just as it didn’t matter what time it was.

  I walked and thought it out. I bristled with all that cash, like a hedgehog, and I followed the crowds that milled toward Vulcania, the Roman mall with its fiberglass Colosseum and its cloaked Chinese centurions, who wandered around crying “Hail!” to passing tourists and giving them the Roman salute (the tourists jumping back as if stung). I went into the invented Portuguese avenue where all the outlets were, things like Aussie and H2O, and I just went with the crowd since it was useless to go against the flow of such a large and muscular gathering. The shell of the Colosseum was lit up with cream lights and for a moment it looked terrifyingly realistic, a Trajan’s Column in front, equally real-looking, and charcoal fires in open braziers. A world made for us trippy ghosts, us hungry and foreign and exhausted shades.

  A man on stilts lumbered by, dressed as a sinister bird, and I went through the crowds with all my dread held close to the chest, looking up at Moorish minarets and Dutch gables and the sign for the Camoes restaurant. Before long I could feel the cash beating like something mammalian against my nipple and I found myself filled with unreasonable joy striding into the Lisboa with open eyes and ears, super-alive, purposeful, unconscious, like a raccoon on its way to a Dumpster, like a scavenger smelling bones amid the trash. The staff, however, noticed me at once.

  THIRTEEN

  “Lord Doyle?” the young receptionist said, getting off her chair, circling the marble desk, and coming into the open space of the lobby to intercept me. She was in their regulation sexy-authoritarian uniform, tailored skirt, chignon, tight waistcoat, and name badge. They are dressed like the corporate officers of the future, like the staff of inexpressible hotels, and they are as quiet as machines, they glide and purr and rotate and murmur. They are frictionless but powerful, for inside their realms they are omnipotent, they are the soft arm of the law. Who can resist them?

  “Is it you, Lord Doyle?”

  “That’s me.”

  “I thought it was,” she went on.

  “I went on a trip,” I said.

  “We thought so.”

  Are you back? her look asked.

  “I am back now.”

  “Yes, I was sure it was you.”

  There was only one other permanent gwai lo guest at the Lisboa, the decrepit Frenchman Lionel, some sort of disgraced journalist whom I sometimes saw creeping about with plastic bags of food and chips as he sailed from casino to casino in the middle of the night. I could not be him, so it was a process of simple deduction given that all foreign ghosts look the same.

  Life is a game, I thought, or as the Qur’an has it, a sport and a pastime. It’s a sport and a pastime and therefore we have to play it as such. Here, the casino is our temple of life.

  The tangerine trees shone around the monumental staircase and the jade galleons shone with them, and all of it added luster to the bristling, wet mouth and perfect powder of the receptionist as she intercepted me and asked me a delicate question, namely if I had settled or intended to settle my bill before too long, as she put it.

  “The manager asked me to ask you,” she said, bowing in the Asian way to excuse herself.

  “Yes,” I said, “I had been thinking about that.”

  “He asked me to ask if you’d pay it before midnight tonight, if that’s possible.”

  Theatrically I glanced down at my watch.

  “Oh, midnight tonight?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, I could, I don’t see why not. What time is it now? Nine. Well, let me just go up to my room and get some money and I’ll be down before midnight.”

  “Now, sir?”

  “Well, before midnight. I want to have a shower and some dinner.”

  “I think the manager said it was quite urgent.”

  “No doubt it is, yes.”

  “He says he would rather if you paid straight away.”

  “Yes, well, the thing is I never carry my wallet around with me.”

  “But you have just returned from a trip.”

  “Yes, true, but I always take cash with me on trips and I make a point of spending it all. It’s the way I was brought up.”

  She blinked.

  “I think you’ll agree,” I went on, “that I am one of your more loyal long-term clients.”

  “There’s an outstanding balance of thirty thousand dollars Hong Kong.”

  “It adds up, doesn’t it?”

  But she didn’t laugh as I’d hoped.

  “I see your point,” I amended quickly. “I won’t forget.”

  I decided to put her in an impossible position by actually moving physically toward the elevators and the Throne of Tutankhamen. She would have to obstruct me, which she could not and would not do, or she would have to insist in some other equally primeval way and I knew she couldn’t and wouldn’t. Instead, she followed me with an anxious disappointment at her own indecisiveness. I was a debtor, but I was also indefinably valuable to the establishment. I couldn’t be enraged or made desperate, and because I was Lord Doyle and not just some commoner I couldn’t be made to lose face or subjected to any kind of humiliation. I was momentarily invulnerable as I hurled myself toward the elevators with many a soothing promise (they had heard them all before). The girl hung back respectfully as I pushed the button and
politely reiterated her hope, her insistence, that I should be down promptly to settle the thirty thousand. It would be better for everyone, she implied, and in this she was no doubt correct.

  “I quite agree,” I said, bowing obsequiously.

  The upper floors were deserted and I felt I was being watched as I opened my door and even as I pushed into my room and quickly surveyed the contents to be sure they had not been rummaging around there. But everything was as it had been. I felt a twinge of glee.

  I laid the money out on the bed and ran a bath. Before I dipped into the water I shaved, but I looked away from the face in the mirror. I held my head underwater and counted to thirty and in the space of those thirty seconds I came out of my funk and came back to life. But I then saw that the number written on my palm had not washed off. I scrubbed my hands again, dried them, and still the numerals remained. She must have used an unusually strong ink that would not fade for weeks. Forgetting them, I did the usual, dressing up with care, going back to my old self, dabbing a bit of musk and oiling down the locks. The charmer reemerged from the ruins and I packed my cash and walked out again into the night, wild with opportunity and risk. The only problem was that I had to bypass reception without them seeing me. This was done with a few dashes and sleights of hand and using squadrons of Chinese matrons as cover (they move like buffalo en masse, ruminating their way across hotel lobbies). And so to Neptune VIP, garish navel of my desires.

  FOURTEEN

  A weekend night, and I include Thursdays, is the worst time to play calmly because you are jostled and disrupted by the red faces from across the border spewing their cheap cigarette smoke. But I had no choice. I had to win at least ten thousand by midnight or be thrown like a sack of garbage into the street. Losses would amount to the same result and it was, in other words, a perfectly thrilling dilemma to be in.

  At ten the Neptune was packed, the Mongolian hookers in white boots clinging to high rollers as they reached the zenith of their nightly escapades. Along corridors of grooved steel punctuated by glass columns, the night’s bedraggled losers padded their way with nervous looks, as if searching for an exit from their purely mental miseries. Hungry ghosts indeed, driven by intensities they did not examine or understand. Like a circular labyrinth, the casino trapped them like bluebottles.

  In these VIP rooms the bets are attractive, and somewhere deep inside myself I knew that I already had them beaten. I felt invincible, though that was a feeling I often had, and let’s face it, it had often led me astray. No matter. All my fear of Grandma, even, had dissipated, and I no longer much cared if she was there or not. I was going to destroy this room of mainlanders and walk away with their hard-earned kwai, leaving them in the dust. No matter how much money they had accumulated manufacturing their diapers, their safety pins, their crappy paper clips and plastic widgets of the world, I would clean them out in an hour and show them how terrible the winds of Luck really are when you are on the wrong side of them. You can make as many paper clips as you like up there in your gloomy factories, I said to them in my thoughts, but when you are down here pissing it all down the drain, you are at the mercy of divine forces and of the implacable Lord Doyle.

  I sat at a crowded table where there seemed to be plenty of action. Chips swept across its surface like litter, were scooped up and then appeared again in grubby mounds. I could smell the cash being forked out from those malodorous pockets, banknotes as old as Mao with their disgusting scent of ink, paraffin, and sweat. The cash that now rules the planet, the cash that we are all now forced to eat like horse feed. Bitter hard-earned cash with a smell of blood on it, the sort of tender we in the West never see much of these days. I liked the swirl and lust around this table, the way the women screamed at every outcome and the way their eyes then went hard and snakelike. I liked its intensity. This was the right spot, right in the eye of the storm. After the days and nights in Lamma with Dao-Ming, after that glimpse of unaccomplished love, this was the return to hard facts.

  I converted my cash in its totality because there was no point playing by half measures. It was all or nothing. The banker, covered with appalling acne, asked if I spoke Chinese and I nodded. The table bristled. Nothing worse than a foreign chimp who speaks the language.

  I threw down five hundred. The cards came slithering out and I scored a natural, a perfect nine. The chips came my way, looking sulky and whorish. There was a collective sigh, a shaking of heads, and a few of the stragglers who had been hanging back waiting for the winds to alter wandered over to us to have a look.

  “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 s
aid, 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.

  Soon 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.