Джанрико Карофильо - Rome Noir

First of all, it should have seemed bizarre that a Chinese guy was so expansive with a stranger, and, furthermore, a Westerner. Then there was Yichang’s perfect Italian and the business of the suite at the Hotel Excelsior. Even a child would have been suspicious. But as I said, at that time I had a tendency not to think too much. In a single stroke, while drinking beer and looking at whores, I had found a new place to live and won two hundred and fifty euros: I confined myself to thinking this.

Yes, because between one thing and another the little game had gone on for hours and, in spite of the fact that the bets were limited, I had left the Forbidden City with a tidy sum in my pocket. I may not have been a great player, but Yichang showed himself to be even worse. Above all he was obstinate. In the sense that he seemed purposely to do his utmost to lose. And this was the thing that should have made me suspicious. But I was intoxicated by the ease with which I was winning money.

Yichang kept his word. That night we went together to the Excelsior and he introduced me to Signor Ho. There was no problem. After a few preliminaries and a handshake, the suite was officially mine. For a deposit I left the two hundred euros that I had won at cards. With a warm smile, Yichang said that I couldn’t refuse him the right to recoup.

I couldn’t, as a matter of fact. We decided to meet at the Forbidden City at 3 in the morning. I won that night, too, but a little less, because Yichang succeeded in taking a few hands himself. I discovered that losing, rather than worrying me, increased my desire to keep playing. For reasons that in time I understood but which were then completely obscure to me, winning a hand after having lost one made me feel stronger. So that I even considered losing some on purpose, a little out of vanity and a little out of pure enjoyment. In spite of the money I won, however, cards still essentially bored me. I never changed my ideas on the subject. For me, there’s nothing more tedious or foolish than poker. Maybe that’s why I remained a terrible player.

You understood perfectly, I said terrible. Little by little, I don’t even know how, I began to lose. And the more I lost the more I raised the stakes and the more I wanted to keep playing. Every night I went to the Forbidden City, I sat at a secluded table, and I played. I played and lost. From time to time, raising my head from the cards, I’d find my eyes meeting those of a girl who was dancing, and for an instant I’d feel nostalgia for the time when drinking a beer and looking at whores had been the crowning moment of my daily routine.

But it was really just an instant. In less than a second I was plunged back into the idiotic questions that assail the mind of a cardplayer. Pass, bluff, stand. All bullshit, and the moral of this bullshit was that I lost and Yichang won.

Yichang and his friends. Because a couple of other players always joined us, and none spoke a word of Italian. They won, too, but less than Yichang.

In the space of two months I accumulated debts of nearly two hundred thousand euros. A sum I had never seen in my life. Yichang seemed to take it lightly. We played with chips and when, at dawn, the accounts were settled, Yichang wrote everything down in a notebook, but he never asked me for a cent. In fact, he told his friends that he would be my guarantor. He said that there was no problem. That I was an established professional who wrote for the papers. When he said that, I trembled inside.

Then came the crash, the devaluation, or I don’t know what. As I said, I’ve never understood anything about the economy. The fact is that prices began to rise, including the rent on the suite at the Excelsior. So my debts spread like an oil spill, and with that we finally come to the time when I had the strange dream of the dead girl in the bed.

Later that night, Yichang asked me if by any chance I could lend him a thousand euros. I had gotten to know these people a little and I am well aware that when a Chinese person circles around a problem, it means that he’s presenting the bill. He had said “lend” but in effect he meant pay. And not only a thousand euros but also the rest of my debt, or at least a considerable part of it. I had no idea where to go to get fifty, let alone a thousand and the rest. I told him that he must excuse me but I was a bit short.

“A bit short in what sense?” He couldn’t understand how a journalist like me didn’t have enough to lend a friend a thousand euros.

I had to tell him the truth. I would have been better off making up some more nonsense, but I saw no way out. And then I’d had it up to my ears. The situation was tearing me to pieces. I wanted to go back to my old life and stop playing, stop losing, stop fooling a friend. Because Yichang had behaved like a true friend, he had shown that he trusted me. And how had I rewarded him?

I would have liked to see him outside of the poker game. Have a few beers and talk about this and that. Yichang was in fact an amiable companion, a cultivated person. While we played, he often recounted interesting details about the history of Rome. He was a real expert. He had read Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire five times. Before meeting Yichang I didn’t even know the names of the seven hills, but thanks to him I learned a lot of things. For example, that the greatness of Rome consisted above all in its eternal decadence.

I wonder if my life went as it did because I’m a Roman. It’s consoling to be able to convince ourselves that our ruin is a kind of predestination, something genetic, or some such nonsense. It relieves you from the obligation of being sorry for all you have not done or could have not done. Like telling Yichang the truth.

I didn’t expect him to take it so badly. I imagined that he would be pissed off, of course. I owed him a boatload of money, basically, and maybe he had already made plans for how to spend it. But what happened caught me off balance. He made me understand that I had understood nothing, excuse the wordplay.

On the table were the cards, the bottles of beer, a couple of ashtrays full of butts, and the piles of chips. Yichang raised his arms, held them suspended a moment, then pounded his fists down violently. The objects tottered, tipped over, fell to the floor. The two other Chinese guys gave signs of smiling. I bit my lower lip and hung my head.

“Look at me,” said Yichang.

I did.

His face was a mask of tension. He was breathing hard through his nostrils. He stared at me for moments that, it seemed, would never pass, then he pointed at me with his index finger and uttered my full name.

“Tommaso Pincio. You... you... you...”

He never said what he was about to say. He got up abruptly and went off somewhere. The other two Chinese sat motionless in their places, staring at me. I thought it was best not to move, either.

At the Forbidden City, no one noticed a thing. All was proceeding as usual. The girls’ bodies swayed lazily to the rhythm of the music. One of them came down from the stage to sit on the knees of a client, an Asian man of around fifty.

I recall that at that moment they were playing a remix of “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).” The one by the Global Deejays, you know it? A rather silly tune, but then the Chinese are not very sophisticated. Every so often in the song you hear a female voice saying the names of various cities. Paris, London, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and a bunch of others. Even Baghdad. And I would have liked to find myself anywhere, including Baghdad, but the Forbidden City.

Then Yichang returned to the table. He gathered up the cards, lit a cigarette, and said, “Okay, let’s get back to the game.”

The expression on his face was indecipherable. He seemed to have calmed down, but I glimpsed a light in his eyes that I didn’t like. I tried to say that I would rather not play. I wanted to go home. I felt like a shit. I had lied. I had accumulated a mountain of debts that I would never be able to pay.