Lawrence Osborne - The Ballad of a Small Player

I went out into the drizzle. My Lisboa room key was still inside the front pocket of the trousers, along with rolls of banknotes, and I thought to myself, I’m in better order, I am remade , and there was the phone number in case I fell back on hard times and needed her again. I felt she had expected me to steal her money all along, and she wouldn’t have minded. I felt a little more confident and rational, less confused, as I swept down the hill and passed for the last time through the restaurants. I was sure there was a last boat over to Macau, and I was right. But I had to wait an hour for it to arrive. The moon came up and yet it rained. I could not understand the contradiction. The moon pale and hesitant, the rain fine and soundless, emerging from a clear sky.

On the ferry I stood at the rear watching the distant lights of the mainland immersed in fog changing their dimensions relative to the wider view. I began to calm down at last and I felt the cash close to my chest and I didn’t care about anything but playing the next round at the Hong Fak or wherever else fortune would take me in a few hours’ time. The names of those casinos had begun to reappear in my mind, whetting its appetite. As Macau loomed up — the first thing you see is the Sands casino flashing its ripe strawberry lights across the water, a ghostly wheel spinning in the dark — I promised, yet again to myself, that I would send her back the money in an envelope after my first score at the tables. I would pay her more, in fact, to thank her for rescuing me from the Intercontinental and nursing me back to health. At least I resolved to do this, but I’d never actually do it. Even as I make sincere resolutions, I know that I won’t honor them. I thought, It’s all her fault anyway. She shouldn’t have rescued me in the Intercontinental. She should have left me to pay the bill and be deported .

It was twilight when I disembarked, and the crowds were suffocating as they churned between the ferry and the Sands. I was relieved and anxious and exultant and fearful to be back. I wanted to play at once. Walk to a casino and play, simple as that. I didn’t even know what day it was. Thursday? Friday? It didn’t matter, just as it didn’t matter what time it was.

I walked and thought it out. I bristled with all that cash, like a hedgehog, and I followed the crowds that milled toward Vulcania, the Roman mall with its fiberglass Colosseum and its cloaked Chinese centurions, who wandered around crying “Hail!” to passing tourists and giving them the Roman salute (the tourists jumping back as if stung). I went into the invented Portuguese avenue where all the outlets were, things like Aussie and H 2O, and I just went with the crowd since it was useless to go against the flow of such a large and muscular gathering. The shell of the Colosseum was lit up with cream lights and for a moment it looked terrifyingly realistic, a Trajan’s Column in front, equally real-looking, and charcoal fires in open braziers. A world made for us trippy ghosts, us hungry and foreign and exhausted shades.

A man on stilts lumbered by, dressed as a sinister bird, and I went through the crowds with all my dread held close to the chest, looking up at Moorish minarets and Dutch gables and the sign for the Camoes restaurant. Before long I could feel the cash beating like something mammalian against my nipple and I found myself filled with unreasonable joy striding into the Lisboa with open eyes and ears, super-alive, purposeful, unconscious, like a raccoon on its way to a Dumpster, like a scavenger smelling bones amid the trash. The staff, however, noticed me at once.

“Lord Doyle?” the young receptionist said, getting off her chair, circling the marble desk, and coming into the open space of the lobby to intercept me. She was in their regulation sexy-authoritarian uniform, tailored skirt, chignon, tight waistcoat, and name badge. They are dressed like the corporate officers of the future, like the staff of inexpressible hotels, and they are as quiet as machines, they glide and purr and rotate and murmur. They are frictionless but powerful, for inside their realms they are omnipotent, they are the soft arm of the law. Who can resist them?

“Is it you, Lord Doyle?”

“That’s me.”

“I thought it was,” she went on.

“I went on a trip,” I said.

“We thought so.”

Are you back? her look asked.

“I am back now.”

“Yes, I was sure it was you.”

There was only one other permanent gwai lo guest at the Lisboa, the decrepit Frenchman Lionel, some sort of disgraced journalist whom I sometimes saw creeping about with plastic bags of food and chips as he sailed from casino to casino in the middle of the night. I could not be him, so it was a process of simple deduction given that all foreign ghosts look the same.

Life is a game , I thought, or as the Qur’an has it, a sport and a pastime. It’s a sport and a pastime and therefore we have to play it as such. Here, the casino is our temple of life.

The tangerine trees shone around the monumental staircase and the jade galleons shone with them, and all of it added luster to the bristling, wet mouth and perfect powder of the receptionist as she intercepted me and asked me a delicate question, namely if I had settled or intended to settle my bill before too long , as she put it.

“The manager asked me to ask you,” she said, bowing in the Asian way to excuse herself.

“Yes,” I said, “I had been thinking about that.”

“He asked me to ask if you’d pay it before midnight tonight, if that’s possible.”

Theatrically I glanced down at my watch.

“Oh, midnight tonight?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, I could, I don’t see why not. What time is it now? Nine. Well, let me just go up to my room and get some money and I’ll be down before midnight.”

“Now, sir?”

“Well, before midnight. I want to have a shower and some dinner.”

“I think the manager said it was quite urgent.”

“No doubt it is, yes.”

“He says he would rather if you paid straight away.”

“Yes, well, the thing is I never carry my wallet around with me.”

“But you have just returned from a trip.”

“Yes, true, but I always take cash with me on trips and I make a point of spending it all. It’s the way I was brought up.”

She blinked.

“I think you’ll agree,” I went on, “that I am one of your more loyal long-term clients.”

“There’s an outstanding balance of thirty thousand dollars Hong Kong.”

“It adds up, doesn’t it?”

But she didn’t laugh as I’d hoped.

“I see your point,” I amended quickly. “I won’t forget.”

I decided to put her in an impossible position by actually moving physically toward the elevators and the Throne of Tutankhamen. She would have to obstruct me, which she could not and would not do, or she would have to insist in some other equally primeval way and I knew she couldn’t and wouldn’t. Instead, she followed me with an anxious disappointment at her own indecisiveness. I was a debtor, but I was also indefinably valuable to the establishment. I couldn’t be enraged or made desperate, and because I was Lord Doyle and not just some commoner I couldn’t be made to lose face or subjected to any kind of humiliation. I was momentarily invulnerable as I hurled myself toward the elevators with many a soothing promise (they had heard them all before). The girl hung back respectfully as I pushed the button and politely reiterated her hope, her insistence, that I should be down promptly to settle the thirty thousand. It would be better for everyone, she implied, and in this she was no doubt correct.