The Ballad of a Small Player (6 page)

“Look at that foreigner,” the boys muttered. “He’s got it fixed.”

Why they should have said this I didn’t know. It was only one hand and I hadn’t won with a natural.

Yet I felt exceptional as the next hand was dealt, as a shaman might who had been selected by a higher power to
perform a single extraordinary task. But what was that task? Who had done the selecting?

I laid down a five-thousand-dollar bet. The room turned like something that has a rotating axis. I won two more hands. These consecutive wins suddenly induced a mood of hysterical superstitiousness in the entire room, and I noticed the tables thinning out as people migrated to mine. Success is irresistible. It’s like a crime scene, something that enchants the worst side of the mind. It was a spectacle for them, and soon the word
flow
circulated around the smoky space and became a wavelike sound, a word that ebbed and flowed itself.

“Sir,” the principal banker asked me, “are we going on?”

“Why not?”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Do I look otherwise?”

“As you wish.”

“When I say I want to go on, I go on.”

“Yes, sir.”

His tone was jittery. Beneath his show of concern for my risky behavior lay a distinct apprehension caused by the unpredictability of
gwai lo
behavior when Luck suddenly reversed. He glanced toward the door, through which he appeared to be expecting someone to walk at any moment. But as he did so it was a couple that appeared, or at least a man and a woman going through the motions of being a
couple, and I saw at once that the woman was Dao-Ming and that she was dressed up for the night with a certain level of taste and refinement that she had not had the last time we met. She also saw me at once and her face went cold and tense, and yet it was also possible, I thought, that it was not Dao-Ming at all but someone else altogether. This woman, whoever she was, dropped the man’s hand and as he went off to a table she sat alone on one of the sofas and waited for a server. Her escort was middle-aged and obviously familiar to her, and I watched him sit at a distant table, oblivious to our glances. It was definitely her, I then realized, and my heart slumped a little.

I
waited patiently for the next hand to be played out, and I had a feeling that it was going to be a natural, a perfect nine.

As I waited for the cards to be turned, the woman on the sofa watched me with great interest, and as she did so she occasionally turned away and powdered her face in a hand mirror. I was now emboldened by something—by the thought of a winning streak, by the woman watching me as if with sexual interest (but it couldn’t be)—and I could have withdrawn at that moment and saved myself, but all these other factors were weighing in and this is the way we are, we addicts. We can’t ignore signs. So I played on. I said to the croupier that for the fuck of it I’d place
everything I’d won on the last hand on this one. Insanity, but that’s the whole point. The thrill is in the edge of the blade and sliding along it.

“It’s a bold move, sir.”

“It’s just a move.”

I cut open a cigar like a braggart and had it lit. The chips were laid down and there was a pause in the instruments of fate and I must admit I rather enjoyed it, because I didn’t know what was going to happen next, and that is the feeling that every player lives for. Centuries of players, of brothers in arms, have felt the same.

SIX

A
t that moment I looked up and past the crowd and saw a middle-aged woman playing at a full table at the far side of the room. She was wearing a bulging cocktail dress distorted by her mass and a black hat of some kind stuck through with an emerald feather like the plume from a giant extinct cockatoo. I recognized her at once. It was the bitch from that night at the Greek Mythology. She was chain-smoking and throwing down cash like nobody’s business. I caught the banker’s eye and asked him who it was. He shrugged scornfully. “That’s Grandma. She’s always in here on a Wednesday night. She cleans us out.”

“Grandma?”

“We call her Grandma. She’s the wife of a property developer. He’s Hong Kong money. He plays around with the women. She’s allowed to gamble away his money. We call it marriage. It’s a nice arrangement for us.”

He was unpretentious about it. Now there was complicity
between us: the bank that always wins and the punter who has gotten lucky for a single night, both allied against the terror of Grandma.

“What’s her name?”

“We don’t speak her name. She’s just Grandma.”

He leaned down then.

“I wouldn’t play with her, sir. She’s an opportunist.”

“Aren’t we all?”

“Yes, sir. But she’s bad news.”

At that moment Grandma looked up from her hand and caught sight of me at the very moment that I was scrutinizing her myself.

“She doesn’t look so bad,” I said.

“She’s a terror, sir.”

She recognized me at once and there was a cruel avidity in her eyes as she cashed in her game, got up, and waddled over to our table. The punters seemed to know her and made way for her. As she came into the table’s harsher light her thickly painted and cratered face looked like an overripe peach, furred and uneven, and the eyes were worlds of private pain. She pushed her way to the far end of the table and a place was found for her. She laid a vulgar sequined bag on the table’s edge and took out a pair of reading glasses, which she placed on the end of her nose. Her lips looked as if they had been dipped in hibiscus juice. There are certain faces that appear to be caving in from the inside in slow motion, like cliffs dynamited
by experts. Faces that remind you that life is not what you think it is, and that no one escapes scot-free.

But in this instance I also recognized the face, as one will recall an image from a long-ago dream that has remained in the mind for a reason. And the recognition was mutual.

“You,” she said to me. “I remember you. You are a bad gambler, as well as being a
gwai lo
. I have been hearing stories about you. I heard you won a natural downstairs.”

The table was all ears.

“Oh yeah,” she went on. “This guy scored two nines downstairs earlier this evening. I have it from reliable sources.”

The bankers looked at me sternly; the crowd muttered.

“Jinxed,” I heard a voice say.

“It’s true,” I said. “I’m having a run.”

Grandma huffed.

“You call it a run.”

My voice rose.

“I’m on a run. I have means.”

She smiled.

“Do you want to ask the boss if it’s okay to go on?”

“I don’t have to ask him.”

“You have to ask him.”

“I have the money. I have the chips. It’s all in three dimensions.”

Baccarat is virtually impossible to cheat at. Grandma
opened her horror bag and took out a huge roll of cash. The crowd stirred.

“I’m not afraid of this foreigner,” she spat at me. “If I lose it I don’t care.”

“Would madam like a glass of champagne?” I asked.

She lightened up and we exchanged a smile. I am a famous charmer. Grandma didn’t go for niceties, even though she liked a bit of male attention.

“Make it cold, boys. I’m going to play this genius.”

I looked over at the clock: 12:04. I was now more conscious of the time, the exact times that games were being played. As if time itself now were more carefully partitioned and hoarded. It was even possible that I was becoming superstitious about it.

The champagne came. Pol Roger bucketed in mounds of crudely cut ice. Not the best, not the worst.

“That’s the way I like it,” Grandma cried.

“Xie xie,”
she said after a sip.

Soon the cards were dealt to seven players surrounded by a large group of onlookers. They began to mutter the words that Macau baccarat players always mutter when they are given their cards,
tsui tsui tsui
, or blow blow blow. This is to
blow away
one point on a card, as when a player draws a jack and knows that if the second is a nine he will win and if it is a ten he will lose. Peeping at the second card from the side, he cannot tell a nine from a ten and so will
blow
on it as it turns. There is in fact a whole slang connected to
peeping at the cards before they are turned and counting the number of points visible along their edge. The ten card, for example, has four points along its edge and the Chinese call it
say bin
, after the word for edge, bin. An eight card has three points on its edge, and is called
sam bin
.

I let the others turn their hands first and waited until Grandma had pulled a seven. She looked pleased with herself, as well she might have. It was going to be the winning hand and she knew it. I turned mine: a three and a two. At first, no one said anything. I looked again at the clock. It was 12:25. For a moment the crowd stirred slightly and resettled like a patch of grass stirred by a breeze. Their faces betrayed a premonition that had no real shape, and I thought that some reassurance was called for, some verification from a higher source that all this was not going to end in tears, but what would it be? “That makes five,” Grandma said as she collected the chips. She actually laughed at it, just as the other players abruptly rose and left the table.

“My husband would love this,” she went on. “He would bet against the Englishman on the next hand. He’d say no one can lose against an Englishman.”

“Shall we?” I said icily.

“I’m not afraid of you, and I’ve already said it. You may have money, but not as much as my husband.”

“I’d like to know who he is.”

“It’s none of your business who he is. He could buy all these casinos out if he wanted, and they know it.”

“Why isn’t he here?”

“Play?” the banker tried.

“Shut up, we’re talking. It’s not every day I talk to an American.”

“English,” I corrected.

“Same thing. You’re not Chinese or French. Or Portuguese. Waiter, bring me a spit bowl.”

The banker leaned forward.

“There’s a sixty-dollar spit fine, Grandma.”

“I need to spit, to hell with the fine.”

She spat into a silver bowl.

“Feels good,” she sighed. “I love spitting.”

She offered the bowl to me.

“Nothing like a good spit.”

“No, thanks.”

“Shall we play again?”

I was calculating wildly to myself.

“Of course,” I said irritably.

“Have you still got your balls?”

“Sewed them back on myself,” I said.

“Good. That makes you the exception.”

The bankers looked at me gently. I had made a mistake and they had seen it coming from a mile off.

“I like a man who can operate on himself,” Grandma said.

I had eight thousand on me and a hundred thousand in the room, but I had to pay the hotel bill imminently and
it was more than those two sums combined. I would have to bargain with the Lisboa management as it was, and who knew what they would say. Grandma was right. I ought to withdraw with a bit of winnings and pay off my tab with the Lisboa. I ought to cut my losses. But I couldn’t. I was a swine in that moment and I loved the swinishness, the feeding anxiety next to the trough. I stood my ground and fingered the last notes in my pocket, which I now extracted, handing them to a staff member. All eight thousand. I wished I hadn’t left the hundred thousand in my room; I would have burned through that in exactly the same moment. The man took them almost apologetically. He knew the smell of desperation and fever. A fever in the Congo, like that of a white man decomposing in his hammock hour by hour.

When the chips came I laid them all down in four installments. Grandma laid down large bets of her own, and our game was as slow as a very fast game can be. Her crest of bird feathers quivered just below the line of floating smoke, and she occasionally turned around and abused the champagne. My two cards were turned and there were a two and seven, against her baccarat. The onlookers touched their mouths as if they were watching a botched execution and they grew much quieter than they had been. The banker bowed to us both and pushed the chips over to me. Grandma, seemingly stunned, looked at her watch and then shrugged, as if to herself, her plump shoulders rolling for a moment, then subsiding. She must have once been
a woman of considerable beauty. For a moment the
gwai lo
scum was a winner, and winners are always interesting. This lasted for about three minutes. The very next hand I lost and saw half my eight thousand vanish to the bank. Grandma laughed so loud the boys flinched.

“Oh, we’re flying now!” she roared.

She turned to the staff.

“Get me thirty thousand in chips.”

“Thirty thousand, Grandma?”

“You heard what I said, you morons. Do I look like I fumbled a zero?”

The chips came over. Like Soviet tanks facing a defenseless German village.

“Come on, your lordship. Open your credit line.”

I didn’t have one, of course.

The bankers laughed it off.

Grandma looked around the room.

“He doesn’t have a credit line?”

“I prefer not to,” I said.

“What kind of gambler doesn’t have a credit line? I thought every
gwai lo
had a credit line.”

“Not me.”

“How rotten. If you lose we can only play two hands.”

“I’ll win.”

She smiled lasciviously and tapped my arm with her folded glasses.

“You have a system,” she said.

“I’m not using one. If I were—”

“You’re suckering me in. It’s the oldest trick in the world.”

She said she didn’t care either way. Money was cheap, common as earth. It always returned to you, like bathwater.

We played; I won a modest hand.

“Oh,” she cried. “You suckered me in.”

After a while, she said, “It’s quite clear that you’re using some system, I don’t know what. I can’t even imagine what system one would use with a game like this. It doesn’t make any sense at all.”

“Shall we go a little higher?” I said.

It was madness but I had to take her down a notch. She was becoming insufferable.