The Ballad of a Small Player

by Lawrence Osborne

  “I just don’t know if I can go on,” he said. “I’m down to the last of my savings from my bank days, and I thought that would last forever. What the hell have I done with it?”

  “Don’t you ever win? Not ever?”

  He shook his head.

  “Not in three months. Losses every night. It can’t be, it just can’t be. I ruin everything I touch.”

  “It’s not the case, Adrian. We’re playing punto banco—it’s a game of pure luck. You’re talking like the Chinese.”

  “Don’t we all?”

  “But we don’t think like them. Surely?”

  “I don’t know anymore. Maybe I do think like the Chinese. Why shouldn’t I?”

  As we lingered there trying to forget our misfortune, Yo Yo came up with the look of someone who has been searching for her sugar daddy and been unable to find him. She covered Adrian with kisses and we went downstairs, back into the din and musk and percussive voices. A place where the old are not allowed to be old, where the chandeliers look like model zeppelins chained to the ceilings and where their fairy light is a gold that makes the skin itself look metallic. A mix of human voices and the string music of Europe, and actors dressed as characters from the operas of Puccini wandering about in their costumes breaking out into arias or ringing bells and turning cartwheels among the Taiwanese tourists who are so anxious to capture them on film. Look, a Pulcinello. A Bohemian. Flesh turned to metal and air and pedigree. Adrian turned to me while Yo Yo went to the bathroom, and he had grasped the poisoned nettle of his situation with a shocking clairvoyance.

  “Doyle, lend me another four thousand for the rest of the week. I won’t play it, I swear. I’ll use it to entertain Yo Yo. You don’t know how demanding she is. She eats money like a badger eats grass. She’s insatiable. She sucks everything up and then demands more. She’s like a housewife cleaning up and I’m the dog poop in the corner. She’s a money vacuum cleaner. You can afford it, it’s nothing to you now. I couldn’t have known that your luck had run out. Quick, while she’s in the bathroom!”

  There’s no explaining why I gave it to him, and I didn’t even intend to tot up what he owed me because I knew I would never get it back.

  “You’re a sport,” he gushed, pocketing the notes with lightning speed. “You’re a sport and the Goddess of Luck will reward you.”

  “Repayment?”

  “Next week, next week. I have a scheme.”

  We all had a scheme, and the pity of it was that none of us knew what the scheme was. It was there somewhere in the back of our minds, but it was perpetually obscure to us.

  When Yo Yo returned, we went out to the canal and rode for a while in a gondola under a honeyed moon. It was just like Venice, as it is intended to be, with the water slapping the stones and the moon above gilding insignias and crenellations and gothic devices. Adrian said nothing and Yo Yo and I talked in Chinese, and as we spoke I knew that it was Adrian’s luck that had failed to deliver the natural and not mine. I had no idea why I was so sure of this. Eventually we went our separate ways and after a snack at the Florian I walked off back to the Lisboa, and as I was passing through the main doors I caught sight of Adrian sitting at one of the baccarat tables with Yo Yo behind him, his face distorted and blushing, losing with the alacrity and lack of style with which he always lost. So there it was. One loses and one wins, and one submits to the law of sports and pastimes, but I, on this occasion, was off the hook.

  SEVENTEEN

  The following morning a letter was delivered to my room by the Lisboa management, carried there by a bellhop in full regalia. Unusually for me I was up early, taking my Earl Grey and toast in the room where I was reading the South China Post. The mood of happiness from the night before was still upon me, and I felt a kind of self-assurance that was quiet and intimate. It was, if you like, a quiet self-confidence, a sense of being a little bit superior to my circumstances. People with inferiority complexes often feel this way after a few hours of unexpected good luck. The note, meanwhile, was from one of the senior managers of the hotel and invited me to stop by his office later in the day to discuss the unusual scale of my winnings the night before, on which I was congratulated in the politest terms. It is, he wrote, normal procedure when a customer of ours has won such a sum. My ass, I thought. They always singled me out.

  I told the messenger to say that I would be down within an hour. But as it turned out I was stopped by an elegant young Chinese executive as I made my way to the elevators. He asked me to step into a private office on the floor above. It was, in fact, the writer of the note, a Mr. Chang Souza, and he was as full of charm and precision as an executive can be, in his official Lisboa tie and his cuff links shaped like black dice and his black oxfords with tooled caps. We went into an office opened with a magnetic key and paneled with red wood. There was a juniper bonsai on the desk and a photograph of a small girl in a sailor suit, and Mr. Souza placed himself behind it with a comfortable ease and assurance that seemed intended to make his task easier. On his computer he brought up the transactions in which I had been involved two nights before, and there was a look of surprised consternation on his face as he neared the summit of my considerable tally. “Nine naturals in a row,” he said, breaking into a frigid smile. “Never been seen before.”

  “Not by me, anyway.”

  “Lord Doyle, you are a lucky man.”

  “Luck?”

  It made him smile. He scanned down my winnings and I was sure that he was skimming through some surveillance videos at the same time. Every moment of every game is filmed; they can be recalled on the company computers in a second. Millions of such moments were captured daily and stored for future use, and they formed an encyclopedia of our gaming experiences. Souza’s face was still young, untarnished by pleasure. His eyes, enlarged behind wire-frame spectacles, seemed as if they were blue when they were nothing of the sort.

  “As far as we can see,” he began, “there is nothing illegal about your winnings. We have been puzzling over it for some hours. I wonder if you are aware of the statistical odds of scoring nine nines in a row?”

  While we drank a pot of oolong tea, he asked me if I had played at other casinos around the world before coming to Macau. Monte Carlo, Las Vegas, the Genting Highlands? Or Caracas, the dreadful places in Pailin?

  “I expect,” he said, “you are a globetrotter, a high roller on several continents, a sharp on the loose.”

  “Not at all,” I objected.

  But he laughed; he liked the idea. A lord on the loose. A rogue of the baccarat tables, winging his way around the globe on Bruno Magli slippers. What could be more fine?

  For the deskbound managers who actually ran the casinos, such a figure was bound to be irresistibly mysterious. One saw such figures painted on all the walls of the casinos, proud and erect on their Arabian horses, and so when one saw the real thing it was a pleasant surprise. Mr. Souza was one of these sedate managers. For him the world divided into the humdrum—factories, offices, work, labor, sweat salt mines, and mortgages—and the magical sphere of privileges.

  He was quite bright with curiosity at this point. His eyes sharpened like needles that will prick their way under skin.

  “I’ve never been anywhere,” I said, “except the casinos of Pailin. They were not to my taste.”

  “No indeed. Khmer Rouge, eh?”

  “I was once in Las Vegas. I lost everything.”

  “They are crooks in Las Vegas, too, I have heard. Terrible, terrible people. But I imagine,” he said tentatively, “that you played privately at Oxford, or some such?”

  “Yes, privately. Poker.”

  He sat back and held his teacup between two slender fingers.

  “I’ve always imagined Oxford gentlemen playing poker. Before I was posted here I was running a casino in Jordan for Steve Wynn. A casino frequented by Palestinians.”

  “Palestinians?”

  “Yes. They shot it up in the end.”

  “Did they?”
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br />   “It was against their religion.”

  “Ah.”

  “It was a hard experience for me and my family. We were happy to come back to China. Here, as you know, everything is more reasonable. You can pay for anything and get it. Everything is for sale on some level. Do you know what I mean?”

  “It’s a real talent.”

  “I think so—sometimes. They call us the Jews of the East. Except that there are one point four billion of us. Imagine one point four billion Jews.”

  I threw up a hand, and he sensed that he had said enough.

  He poured my tea.

  “Miss Silva ran a background check on you. She found nothing at all. It is quite puzzling. It’s as if you stepped one day out of nowhere, out of a different dimension, and into our little town and brought nothing with you. They tell me there is a code of secrecy among you gamblers, and perhaps you want to keep it that way.”

  Souza then put down his cup and adjusted his glasses. I had not, as he had hoped, offered any background information about myself, and he had to proceed anyway. I said that he understood my position. Being a foreigner in a strange land, even so denatured and cosmopolitan a place as Macau. He comprehended it to the fullest degree. There was nowhere to turn. One had to be secretive, and he understood it.

  He twirled his pen in his hand and looked at me frankly. What did I think I would do with my winnings? I could leave Macau for the mainland and live a lot better for less. I could fly off to Bangkok and live well for a while. The East was my oyster.

  “I may stay here,” I said.

  “I’ll come to the point. Some of our Chinese executives are very superstitious. One of them was watching your surveillance videos last night and she swore she saw a figure standing behind you. She swore she saw it, and many of our colleagues believe it. They say that your nine nines cannot be a fluke or a piece of luck. Think of us as superstitious if you like. It’s the way it is. My bosses are asking me to ask you not to play again at the casino. It is not even that they are afraid of incurring further losses. They are afraid of the spirit world and they say, pardon me, that you have a ghost attached to you.”

  “I’d like to see that video.”

  “There’s nothing on it. My boss, I should add, is a very superstitious woman. Her name is Helen. She offered me a rather odd proposition. She said you could play one more hand in this casino. I thought it was an original idea. One hand. You can play it any time you want. Night or day. And then, if you win, you have to leave the Lisboa tables for good. If you lose, we’ll rethink. It will prove the ghost is no longer there.”

  I couldn’t help laughing.

  “You have to be kidding me, Souza.”

  “No, all too serious. If you are harboring a ghost, we cannot have you in the casinos. That is her position. Morale among our employees would collapse. It is unthinkable.”

  “Harboring?”

  “I don’t know what other word to use. We are not saying it is your fault. Something may have happened—you may have attracted some presence that you are not aware of. It has been known to happen.”

  “You are telling me a ghost story.”

  He opened his hands and smiled. You know how we are.

  I sat very still for a while and digested this change in my situation. I listened attentively to the shuddering hum of the air-conditioning unit, the muted clank of cranes and cement mixers and the sibilance of the computer itself, where my image was no doubt frozen by the pause button. Sounds from a parallel world that did not have my interests at heart. He was not going to tell me what he had really seen on that screen, or what his female colleague had seen, and so from now on we were just wasting time. I wanted to be gone, and yet I wanted to know what the casino would do if I actually won that last hand they had permitted me. I asked.

  “You keep it, of course. You keep everything.”

  From his tone it was suggested that he didn’t believe this would happen.

  “All of it?”

  “It’s a casino—of course you keep it. We have a reputation to uphold. We aim to create a true experience for the customer, remember. It’s like a journey, a voyage. We’ve built everything around that concept of an experience. So your own journey will come to a satisfying end, no? We want you to have a beautiful experience.”

  “You do?”

  “Don’t look so skeptical.”

  But I changed the subject.

  “Mr. Souza, do you yourself think that I am haunted?”

  He steadied himself and blinked, because now he had to tell the truth. He said that was exactly what he thought, though “haunted” was not the word he would have used. Blessed? At the door, he shook my hand, using that curious mixture of Cantonese and English that people here often break into.

  “Gum lei take care la.”

  Darkness and gold, and the sound of water from afar: the ghosts alive and drinking, tortured by their thirst just like me. I drank heavily in my room. Vodka and cranberry, and gin with lemon twists. I didn’t notice the days and nights and the interludes in between where nothing happened. The distant clatter of the casinos, that white noise of the Lisboa, had almost passed out of consciousness altogether. There was a hush to the heavily carpeted corridors, where the staff passed on leather soles with their trays balanced on one hand. The smell of passing waffles and dim sum and bok choy cooked in sauce. The smell of eggs and toast and the clock clock of knuckles rapping on doors where men lay half unconscious on their beds in their long black socks waiting for change. I had not had the itch for baccarat for some time. Mr. Souza was correct when he pointed out that worried money never wins.

  EIGHTEEN

  Two nights later I put on my gloves and placed the totality of my winnings in the Adidas bag. I wore a tuxedo with a white carnation and, in a touch of sad panache, a pair of two-tone shoes. Greased down, pomaded, brushed, and polished, I looked like a cartoon as I left the room with a quiet click and heaved my bag into a gold-plated elevator filled with smoking trolls. The mirror made me think of those incomparable words of Joseph Roth commenting upon a picture someone had done of him: Yeah, that’s me all right, nasty, drunk but clever. I adjusted the buttonhole and listened to the fools dissing me in their dialects, thinking I didn’t understand. And so to the Fortuna VIP room, temple of my baccaratic fate.

  I was stopped at the doors by two managers who had clearly been told to look out for me. They were all toothpaste-ad smiles and handshakes, smooth as razor wire and metal to the core.

  “Lord Doyle, how nice to see you! Is that a bag full of money?”

  “It is indeed,” I replied, swinging it with dash. “I had a whim,” I said. “I’ve been away from the tables far too long, and it’s time I played a hand or two. You know how it is.”

  “We’re glad to hear it, Lord Doyle. One minute, please.”

  One of them spoke into a walkie-talkie.

  “Would you like a private room?” the other one then said, as they let me in, walking on either side of me. “We can arrange it.”

  “Not necessary. I like a crowd.”

  But we don’t, they implied.

  “Very well,” they said. “We understand that it adds to the enjoyment of the game.”

  “I like to show off, I guess. I’m an old-fashioned exhibitionist. Especially when I lose. Imagine that.”

  “We have many high rollers like that, Lord Doyle.”

  “Do you? I wouldn’t call myself a high roller exactly. I’m more like a low roller. A low rolling stone covered with moss and pigeon shit.”

  They tried to laugh at a joke they didn’t get. I noticed they wore the same cuff links that Mr. Souza wore: black dice.

  “Should we count the money? Most of our high-rolling clients insist on it.”

  “Sure, count it if you feel like it. Mind if I have a cigar?”

  They pulled out a huge Havana before I could make a move. It was clipped and lit in a jiffy.

  “Thank you very much. I’ll sit here while you count.”r />
  They went into an adjoining room and returned in ten minutes. A slip of paper was handed to me with the exact sum written on it.

  “Satisfactory,” I said. “It’s the same total I came to myself.”

  “Naturally it is.”

  They bowed.

  A waitress in a long, slitted cocktail dress appeared, her face heavily made up. She asked me in Chinese if I’d like a complimentary glass of champagne before I sat at the table.

  “Very kind of you. I’ll drink it here.”

  I sat on the heavy Louis XV armchair and sank back into its satin upholstery. The minders bowed again and said that when I had selected my table they would bring the chips to it.

  “Fine. But I have one question. I know you have a minimum bet of ten thousand here. What if I bet two million? You know that I am permitted only one hand.”

  “We are aware of that, Lord Doyle.”

  “Then I need to know if there is a maximum bet.”

  This seemed not to have occurred to them.

  “I am not sure,” one of them muttered. “I will call Mr. Souza.”

  “You do that. I’d like to know.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “It’s occurred to me that I might bet the whole lot on one hand.”

  “Lord Doyle?”

  “You heard me. The whole lot on one hand.”

  “But Lord Doyle, that is quite crazy.”

  They laughed at once to offset the possibly injurious implications of such a remark.

  “Not,” the speaker amended, “that I am suggesting you are crazy.”