The Ballad of a Small Player (3 page)

The rain continued as if nothing had happened, and deep within myself I was sure that I would see her again, because although the city is a reef where the confused fish never meet twice unless a goddess intervenes, intervene she sometimes does. Solitude and loss are the rule, and years go by before one realizes it, but one can always meet a woman twice in a city. It’s not like living on the mainland, lost among the billions. There are hundreds of Dao-Mings, and thousands of Tangs, but a connection made is a connection never forgotten, or almost not forgotten, and one day, I was sure, I would once again find the girl who generously gilded the deer of Sando.

FOUR

T
he following night at eight exactly, I put on my darkest suit and took the elevator down from the seventh floor of the Hotel Lisboa. It was the hour of the “second shift” in the world’s most profitable casino, and the revolving doors turned like turbines as crowds poured through them and hurled themselves toward the labyrinth of casinos scattered throughout the hotel. Seven million dollars a day in revenues and a pall of smoke that never moved, that hovered near the tops of the tangerine trees from which hung a thousand red New Year envelopes like venomous fruit. Smoke that hit the throat like sawdust mixed with powdered metal.

I went down to the hotel’s main mass-market casino, the Mona Lisa, where the games are endless in their diversity:
pai kao, fanton, cussec
, Q, and stud poker, and of course punto banco baccarat, that slutty dirty queen of casino card games. The boys brought me a cognac and sausage rolls, and I ordered a buttonhole from the street.
Cut a figure, O my brothers, and have them believe that you really are a lord
. But I lost again. I played fish-prawn-crab dice for an hour, forgetting myself completely, then moved off down the elevators to the Crystal Palace, which is like descending into an ice grotto. Waves of glass shards fall from the ceilings in shades of green and orange. A place where the rational mind comes apart. From there I navigated in total solitude to the Club Triumph and the Lisboa Hou Kat, a place that has a secretive feel to it, like a buried palace in Crete from the time of Linear B, with a circular room of leather sofas and tangerine trees with New Year envelopes. How can such places exist?

The hours passed. The money slipped away. A bead of sweat at the base of the spine, and my sweet vertigo. After a long losing spree I went back to my room to freshen up, then took the elevator down to the casinos for a second try. It was eleven and the night shift was just in. Brutal, cynical men with red faces and cheap suits, smoking continuously, their eyes little lusty slits that sucked everything in and spat it out again. On the ground floor they stood by the Throne of Pharaoh, a reproduction chair from Tutankhamen’s tomb, and a large vertical oil painting with its title provided:
La Mère Abandonnée
. A woman with a lyre sighing over a baby sleeping in a wheeled carriage. This scene of rural misery from nineteenth-century France did not arouse their curiosity at all, and they turned their backs to it as they waited for the elevators. They carried bags of
gaming chips and cans of winter melon tea. Their breath smelled of oyster sauce. I bought a cigar in the underground mall and went back up to the VIP rooms, where Renoirs loomed on the walls. Here in the four innermost rooms the bets were a minimum of ten thousand up to a maximum of two million. Three plays at a time, usually. There was a separate entrance leading into the hotel to encourage the high rollers to roll right out of bed and into the VIP rooms with sleep in their eyes. Bright red armchairs had dropped out of the surrounding Alma-Tadema paintings of ancient Rome. Laughing maidens gamboling down flowery slopes. Air and light and lust. Scenes from the second century, or the first century, or the fourth century, or the never-never century. So many centuries reduced to a mural. So many centuries of pointless pleasure. And here the factory managers who had never read a book about Rome, much less visited, sat and lounged and tensed their minds as they threw themselves like disoriented moths against Luck’s candle flame. They didn’t know where they were. Eastwest.

I
played side baccarat for a while, and I was impressed by the way the staff brought me my supply of chips, like men stoking an engine fire in a train. I cheered up as my luck improved; I won three hands out of six. Four hundred back in. The myth paintings grew pinker as the
hours went by. I became jolly again and won two hands more. I felt a stab of sadistic vitality.

With a modest profit I retired to the armchairs, in the décor of Paris 1900, and marveled at the gold mosaic floors of the elevators, which shone for a moment as the doors opened. I had made about $600 HK—it was nothing to brag about, but it wasn’t a loss. Peanuts add up.

An hour later I migrated back to the Crystal Palace, where the air was sweet and heavy with female perfumes. Teenage girls aplenty. Hong Kong men in blue suits. I lost it all and then some. It’s the way it goes, and I didn’t care. It was well after midnight by the time I got down to the new Sands and strode through that monumental hall whose din makes you feel mad and happy at the same time—not
exactly
the same time, but close.

I was feeling more reckless than I usually do, and the losses that I sustained on the slot machines did not serve to deter me from getting into deeper water. When did losses ever do that? I went to the first-floor buffet restaurant and sat there calculating my losses and my remaining reserves. The math was simple, but sliding. The fact was that after several months of playing the tables almost nonstop every night I had burned through the greater part of the money I had saved up over the years and had brought to Macau. A small fortune that had been supposed to last me a fair while, assuming that on average I would win almost as
much as I lost, or maybe even more. But it had not worked out that way. It never does.

After a glass of Lello Douro, I made my way past the floor show and the Jade Monkey slot machines to the entrances of the separate private gaming rooms. I was guided by staff dressed in the yellow uniforms of the witch’s guards in
The Wizard of Oz
, who took me right to the door, assuming, I suppose, that I was a high roller. I was certainly tempted by the nearby roulette tables, with names like Lucky Seals and Fairy’s Fortune, but since I was now resolved upon risking a much bigger sum of money, I let myself be escorted upstairs to the Paiza Club, at that time the most exclusive private gaming room in Macau. Besides, everyone knows that roulette lends a 2.7 advantage to the house, no matter what you do. For baccarat it’s a mere 0.9.

T
he staff upstairs were in black and gold uniforms with gold buttons. I was surprised to hear that they already knew my name.

“Lord Doyle,” they said, swinging a welcoming hand toward the rooms called pits, which were arranged around a circular structure only half revealed by a luxurious dimness.

The atrium was cavernous, with a huge tasseled lantern suspended at its center. The style was very Chinese.
Terra-cottas in niches and dragons everywhere. The world’s biggest chandelier, my escort said, indicating it with her hand. I was then given a choice of private rooms, some of them with fires in grates, bloodred panels, and gray tables. I chose a room where I could play against the bank alone with $10,000 HK hands.

I sat myself down there and waited for a bottle of wine to be brought up from the cellar. I took off my gloves and the banker bowed to me and announced his name, which was unusual. We relaxed into some anticipatory banter and then I was given my chips.

It was by now nearing dawn and the other rooms had their occupants, wealthy punters from the Territories in sleek suits, with briefcases of money laid at their feet like waiting dogs.

I settled down with a cigar courtesy of management and played a few hands at a more relaxed pace than I am used to. I had to admit to myself that the game was much more enjoyable played like this, without the hustle and bustle of a Chinese mob around me, at my own pace and without the internal tension that usually drove me forward. I thought a little more carefully about what I was doing. These are the ideal conditions for gaming if the individual doesn’t want to lose a lot of money quickly on a series of small, fast bets. The game is the same, but the ambience is not.

It was now that I felt the compulsion that always
drives me from within as I see the pallet turn the cards and I feel them slipping like skin under my finger pads. A sensual moment, empty but charged with anticipation. The mind emptying out like a drain, or else scurrying like a small, wingless bug.

There are a few moments of this total calm before I start to move, like the moments that I imagine precede jumping off a cliff. Even in these exclusive rooms the dealer will tell you the table’s “luck numbers” if you ask him, and there will be a place in your mind that wrestles with the superstition.

The gambler is a man finely tuned to the supernatural. He is superstitious, wary of portents and omens. He is on edge for this reason. I wear kid gloves at the table, a habit in which I had indulged those past two years, and this was also a superstition. I put them on at the last moment after I have felt the cards, and through their supple material I feel the laminated surfaces all over again. I feel ready to win or lose.

Lose, in this case. It didn’t matter so much this time because I had written off any losses that night in advance. I did not sweat it as the first ten grand hit the dust. I poured myself another glass of wine. The dealer rolled back on his heels and asked me if I felt confident enough to go up to fifteen thousand, and perhaps provoked by the undertow of his tone, I said that I would.

“Good for you, sir. Courage often wins.”

Does it?
I thought.
Does it really play a part in outcomes?

“It’s a superstition,” I replied.

A manager came in then and shook my hand. He was beautifully dressed and he asked me if everything was to my satisfaction.

“Lord Doyle, isn’t it?”

“Well, if you say so.”

He laughed.

“I do say so.”

The dealer then bowed.

“Do you like the cards? Special from Germany,” the manager said. “Binokel with Württemberg artwork.”

I glanced down; they were indeed unusual.

“They are fine.”

“Mr. Hui here will look after you. He is one of our best bankers. We can bring you some light dishes if you need them. Do you?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“As you prefer.”

I felt the sweat now moving slowly down my back, clinging to the spine, an area of moistness developing between my eyes. When the manager had retired, I asked Mr. Hui if I might have some iced water with some lemon juice. While waiting for it, I looked over the English equestrian paintings on the walls and the iron dogs of the fireplace. It reminded me of an actual room I had seen in
England, a room in a large country house that I had been in once upon a time, perhaps a famous country house. I tried to think if I knew those long, aquiline faces of long-dead noblemen, their Caucasian faces subtly distorted by copiers not familiar with them. One of them might have been the real Lord Doyle for all I knew. I wondered if indeed there was one, or whether I had chosen my Macau name with inspired good luck all those years ago. I half-remembered, in fact, reading the name in a newspaper somewhere and it must have stuck in my unconscious. Alternatively, perhaps, I had been to a house where Lord Doyle was mentioned or represented. I could no longer remember.

Yet the past, at that particular moment, was suddenly vividly present. I became distracted and lost my focus. Memories that I had long repressed must have been aroused in me by the cold sweat running in a trickle down my back, but why would a trickle of sweat make me think of my long-lost days in Cuckfield, I wondered. Though then again perhaps I had heard of a Lord Doyle in that Sussex village where I had lived for years as a lawyer, and it was possible he might even have been one of our firm’s clients. It was unlikely, however. I looked again at the Binokel cards and I felt myself lost in time, and I was sure that it must have been because of this intensely English and nostalgic décor in which I was now immersed. The cartoon lords were staring down at me as if I owed them money. No one in China knew why I was there, why I was sitting
there at that very moment looking down at some Binokel cards after almost a decade in exile. They never asked why I never went home, or even if I had a home. They were never indiscreet enough to ask, and even if they had asked I would not have been able to tell them. It was not a pretty story I could recount over dinner.

I
had been accused of an embezzlement with regard to one of my elderly clients, and I had not departed in a way that reflected well upon me. It had been a flight under cover of dark, a sudden
sauve qui peut
. I had not even told my sisters. The money was gone from the lady’s account and it was I who was in charge of that account, and worse than that I had spent everything and could not restore it. The directors of the firm had discovered the matter on a Thursday; by Friday night I was out of the country with a suitcase of money that I took with me and did not declare. The bulk of the money had already been wired to Hong Kong.

The lady I had stolen it from was one of those elderly widows one sees everywhere holed up secretively in the suburban houses of Haywards Heath or Wivelsfield, in the timbered Tudor mansions of Hassocks or Cuckfield or Lindfield. Plump townlets and manicured villages filled with colonial and military retirees and outpastured bank managers, with their yew hedges and their grumbling
lawns and their churches filled with tattered flags. This was the world into which I was born, having won (as Cecil Rhodes once had it) first draw in the lottery of life: born an Englishman.

Mrs. Butterworth was married to a copper mining executive and had inherited all his money. They had once lived in South America, and her house retained a strange and faint tropicality. She loved caged birds and dark yellow silks, and there was a sunroom at the back of the house that seemed to rise to the occasion even of a dull English summer. The husband had been dead a quarter century. It’s possible that I reminded her of him. A young man in a dark suit, with hesitant manners. But I must have been more insecure than her former husband. He had gone to Rugby and belonged to a decent London club—I think it was even White’s. It is possible that she was too senile already to notice these unfortunate aspects of her well-groomed visitor. Perhaps she didn’t care to look too closely. I was able to fake the accent and the easy charm, and it is likely that she took these at surface value and didn’t look further.