Lawrence Osborne - The Ballad of a Small Player

“Solomon, that’s the third bottle.”

“So what? You’re paying. We need to celebrate your crash to earth. Your imminent flight to Mongolia. I may never see you again.”

“It’s not a joking matter.”

“How are you going to pay the rent? Don’t complain to me about the bill until you know how to pay the rent.”

“I have to win again.”

“But you were flying high for a while there.”

“We’re always flying high for a while, aren’t we? I should have quit while I was ahead. The problem was—”

“You weren’t far enough ahead to quit.”

“That’s just it.”

He exhaled.

“One is never far enough ahead to quit.”

“And the thing is,” I went on, “I do want to quit. I need to make my pile and quit. All I think about is quitting.”

“You’d never quit.”

“Seriously, I would. I have to.”

“We all think that. Like we said before.”

After an unpleasant pause, he said, “Where would you go?”

“I don’t know. The mainland. One has to find a spot to die.”

“You’re not ready to die. You’ve got a chapter left in you.”

“A chapter?”

“A few lines anyway.”

I gave in, and I stopped worrying about the three grand. We ordered more dishes. Oysters, onion rings, late-night clam dim sum, sardines. We ordered grappa and flan. Solomon suggested that we finish the whole bottle of grappa. Behind my eyes the tears were beginning to well up, to dribble down into my nose, but I held them back and kept up with him. It had occurred to me that I might be arrested on my arrival back at the Lisboa. Arrested and deported. It happens all the time to gamblers down on their luck.

“I just saw a terrible thing in the newspaper,” Solomon said. “In Bangkok, a head was found dangling by a nylon hiking rope from the Rama VIII Bridge, loosely attached to a white plastic bag. There was a picture of it in the Bangkok Post . A human head swaying in the wind, with a crowd on the bridge looking down in disbelief. It was a Caucasian head, and the tabloids were full of rumors about it being a mafia hit. But then it seems the forensics people determined that a fifty-three-year-old Italian architect down on his luck had been thrown out of a cheap hotel nearby, had stomach cancer, and had decided to hang himself. But he was slightly overweight, and the force of his fall had severed the head from his body, leaving the head swaying at the end of the rope with the plastic bag, a nightmarish end, they said, for a man of great sensitivity and cultural tastes, who had once worked with the great Milanese architect Cacciarli. His friends in Italy mourned him, but no one knew what he was doing in Asia. He was penniless. His passport showed that he was drifting from country to country, impelled, his friends said, by a love of Eastern art. You should take a look at that head swinging on a rope before you decide to disappear.”

“What would it tell me?”

“It would tell you wait a little longer. You don’t have stomach cancer like poor old Maurizio Tesadori. You’re not at the end of your rope.”

“But I am,” I said bluntly. “I am at the end of my rope.”

“No you’re not. The night is long and young. If you have a thousand left after dinner, go and try a bet at Fortuna. The boys say it’s been paying out very nicely this week.”

“I can’t spent my last thousand there. Are you nuts?”

“Of course you can. You’ll win. And what difference does it make if you don’t spend it? It isn’t enough for anything.”

“Especially after six bottles of grappa.”

“Keep your voice down, your lordship. Appearances. Let’s have a cigar and lie down on the beach like homeless people. They never call the police. The grappa has calmed you down. It’s been useful.”

We went out into the turbulent night, where everything seemed to be in motion because of the winds. Branches and tin cans rolling across the sands and striking the walls and the volleyball nets halfway to being ruined. I had forgotten nature for months, living in the interior world of the casino, in the system of cards and cash. Now it was a shock to feel the sea air and the light of the moon unmediated by electric light and neon and the allure of sex.

I laid myself out on the sand and Solomon lay skeptical beside me. We talked about our fathers, whom neither of us had known very well, and both of them it seemed had been unlucky. Unlucky men breed unlucky men. Solomon seemed undisturbed by anything in life, neither good luck nor bad, not even the bad luck of his father, who had flown planes for Continental and lost all three of his wives to alcoholism. It rolled off Solomon and in the end it was the same. Like America, he said, he would die in a pauper’s grave and he didn’t mind. Someone had to die in paupers’ graves. Just not a pauper’s grave in China, where no one understood the nobility of being a pauper in the first place. His debts had risen to over a million in Hong Kong dollars and his wife had bailed him out and forced him to sign a contract under which he would never gamble again, but of course it had done no good. Addiction is fate. We were the same in that respect, and the unluckiness of my own father seemed reassuring when it was counterweighed by his story. My father, dutiful and doomed till the end, a marcher to other people’s brass tunes who had marched right along into a foolish early grave.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “I am going to play all day at the Venetian and win back the hundred thousand I lost last week. Wait and see.”

It was clear he wanted to go back to the Hyatt party, which would run late, with girls and coke and other amusements, without which, he added, life would be quite unbearable. What he wanted from it I couldn’t say, but I would have to let him go and get whatever it was. The pleasures of life and flesh, the small advantages of the popular man. I couldn’t blame him. We walked back to the hotel. The sound of Riverdance did not calm my anxieties. For a moment I was tempted to try to find the elusive Adrian Lipett again, but I knew in advance now that he would evade me with his customary skill and that I would be made a fool of. I was beginning to feel shabby, a tramp at the feast of others, and as soon as one feels this way one has to beat a retreat into the shadows. I found a cab outside the main door and Solomon embraced me. Was I sure I didn’t want to come in? “To do what,” I asked. “To salivate for the things on the far side of the glass?”

“I see your point,” he laughed.

I was back in Macau within half an hour, and with nothing better to do I decided to go to the movies and think it all over. By dawn I would have a decision, and after that I would sail into nothingness. What was left to me now wasn’t enough to gamble anyway.

Iwent to a bar near the Landmark, and I set out to get myself into the calm neutrality of total intoxication achieved through Chinese brandy. The bar was called Jilted and there was a kind of shooting range at its far end where patrons could pin up images of their ex-lovers and throw beer glasses at them. A sobbing Russian girl was doing just that. I let the memory of Dao-Ming flood back into me and soon there was very little of that memory. Through the darkened windows the first glimmers of dawn were bouncing off the metallic sides of the streets, off the windows covered with stickers and the shutters of the computer stores, and the stale odor of all the spent nights seeped back into my head and made it ache. I wondered if I should go back to the hotel and get a shot of free vodka from the mini-bar that I hadn’t paid for, and on reflection that seemed like a pretty fine idea since the shots at Jilted were not the cheapest. There was nowhere else to go and I had the wild idea finally that I might collect my things — as if I had things— and then go down to the ferry terminal and cross over to the Hong Kong side. No reason. Just because it was something to do.