Lawrence Osborne - The Ballad of a Small Player

“You had a bad night at the tables?” he said calmly. “I hear you, brother, I hear you.”

“It happens.”

“Yes, yes, it does happen.”

“I’m glad you understand.”

“But the thing is, it’s not the perfect moment at my end either. Don’t be deceived by the table. That’s old man Hong’s tab and I’m just sitting in. See? I had a pretty rocky night myself. I went to the Venetian and made a pig’s dinner out of it. The old woman’s screaming at me for losing so much money. I wasn’t expecting this, as you can imagine. We all thought you were flying high. What happened anyway?”

“Never mind that. I need some kwai .”

A panicked look came over him.

“I never come to parties with wads of cash. Not that I have wads of cash. But even if I did I wouldn’t come to a party like this with it. I’d be too afraid I’d spend it all on women.”

“Solomon, just give me half what you have down there. Don’t be a prick about it. Don’t make me empty your pockets.”

“I don’t mind emptying my pockets,” he retorted proudly.

But he would never do it.

“Just five hundred,” I said.

“I can’t, I only have three.”

“One fifty?”

My voice went high-wire.

“I could give you the three,” he tried, sensing it would be bad if he didn’t.

“You’d better because I don’t have anything for the cab home.”

“Jesus, Lord Doyle. You’ve really crashed?”

“Crashed and flamed. You know that feeling, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I guess I do.”

He felt in his pockets. I knew that the notes he had there were too big to take out without blowing his ruse, so he had to find another ruse.

“Let me get you a drink,” he said. “I’ll be right back out. What’ll you have?”

“Bloody Mary.”

“I’ll make it lethal.”

I waited, furious and impotent, and through the glass doors I kept an eye out for Lipett, he of many unpaid obligations. I was going nowhere on this quest for a repay, but I had nowhere else to go and I had to keep at it. After a short age Solomon returned with two Bloody Marys and we proceeded to down them too quickly while I tried to think of a way out of my mess and he tried to think of a way to give me as little money as possible.

“How bad is it?” he asked.

“My luck ran out.”

“All of it?”

“All of it.”

“Are you going to make a run for it?”

“Where would I go?”

He shrugged.

“Mongolia?”

“I haven’t paid the hotel bill. They’d come and get me. The Chinese would come and get me.”

“I see what you mean. Nasty.”

“I have to play my way out of it.”

“Play your way out of it?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I have to play my way out of it. There’s nothing else for it.”

“You can’t play your way out of it.”

“Why not? I played my way into it, didn’t I?”

Inescapable logic.

“But what if you lose the next round?”

It was occurring to him that our positions had merely reversed, and that now it was I who was going to play the money he would be giving me. Neither of us could remember whose money it actually was, or had been originally. It was just money, like fluids passing between animals. It was eternal, while we were anything but.

“I am not going to lose the next round. If I do, I’ll disappear.”

He laughed.

“You’ll disappear?”

“I might. Why not?”

“Nothing rash, eh, Freddy?”

He fumbled in his pocket. His voice broke a little and I must have appeared as desperate as I actually was.

“Can’t you pay back five grand now?” I said tensely. “I need it to get through the next few days. The next few days are going to be hard.”

“Five thousand won’t get you anywhere.”

“I know, but you owe it.”

“How about two?”

“Three fifty.”

“Three. All right, three. It’s breaking my back, though.”

“Those tarts in there cost more than that for a half hour.”

The three grand came out and was passed over like heroin that mustn’t be seen.

“It’ll keep me alive for two days,” I said.

“You’re not going to play it?”

“I’m going to eat, that’s all.”

And it was true. At that point, anyway.

“Then you can take me to dinner at Fernando’s. We can walk there.”

“But I just bought you dinner the other night.”

“You had the money. Just like you have it now.”

“You gave me everything?”

“Absolutely everything.”

“You’re a damn liar.”

“I’m not emptying my pockets for you, but it’s damn true.”

“You’re worse than those pigs in there.”

He turned and glanced through the window.

“It’s funny to think,” he said, “that it’s we who finance them.”

“It doesn’t matter. I can pay for dinner, I guess.”

“Doyle, it’s just Fernando’s. I’m not suggesting anywhere fancy.”

“So you say.”

We went downstairs and the cigar smoke got into my lungs and the sight of the Chinese violinist made me want to stay a little longer. I must have been deluded to think that I could belong to this world. Who was I? The insect at the bottom of the glass. Chinese crime bosses fed at a tureen of punch that a girl in satin doled out with a silver cup, and they picked the slices of orange out of their glasses with wet fingers. Red plastic lions stood under the lights, and I walked past them thinking of my three thousand and what I could use it for before all the lights in my life went out with a bang.

Solomon led the way confidently. He lit up a cigar when we were out of the wind. The path down to the beach hissed with tormented junipers.

“I don’t even know why I came out tonight,” he said nonchalantly, the burning end of the cigar lighting the way. “I thought I’d pick up a girl and then I didn’t. One of them said I was a miser.”

“So you are.”

“Broke, but not miserly.”

“Clearly, you’re not broke.”

We stepped onto the sand. The lights of the village at the far end were clear, and we went toward them, through the whipped nets and along the edge of the angry surf. Fernando’s was crowded with Macanese families, and we took our place at the back of the room far from the TV sets and launched into plates of baccalau asado and bottles of Perequita.

Solomon tucked a napkin into his shirt and declared his sympathy for the Portuguese working class who had created this place but who now no longer existed in Asia. Too bad for them. He tore through our first bottle and promptly ordered a second. I tried to restrain him, thinking nervously of the dent it would make in my three grand, but of course the whole point was to make a considerable dent in my three grand. He drank in great, fluid drafts, as if the wine didn’t matter so much as arriving at a point on the further side of it. As he got tipsier he confessed to his own losses during the previous week, and then to a small rebound on the weekend.

“And the most fantastic thing is the dreams I’ve been having these last few nights. The ghosts are trying to speak to me.”

“Are they?”

“Yes. I had a dream I was driving with two gamblers through a village in Spain. We weren’t gambling. We were eating and drinking and looking for a parking spot. Suddenly these helicopter drones came out of nowhere with white plastic propellers and followed us to a dingy café somewhere. We sat down and the drones disappeared and the old men started singing ancient songs in Spanish. Then all the lights in the village came on. I have no idea what it means. I think it means my bad luck is about to change.”

He raised a hand.

“Waiter, another bottle.”