Lawrence Osborne - The Ballad of a Small Player

“I quite agree,” I said, bowing obsequiously.

The upper floors were deserted and I felt I was being watched as I opened my door and even as I pushed into my room and quickly surveyed the contents to be sure they had not been rummaging around there. But everything was as it had been. I felt a twinge of glee.

I laid the money out on the bed and ran a bath. Before I dipped into the water I shaved, but I looked away from the face in the mirror. I held my head underwater and counted to thirty and in the space of those thirty seconds I came out of my funk and came back to life. But I then saw that the number written on my palm had not washed off. I scrubbed my hands again, dried them, and still the numerals remained. She must have used an unusually strong ink that would not fade for weeks. Forgetting them, I did the usual, dressing up with care, going back to my old self, dabbing a bit of musk and oiling down the locks. The charmer reemerged from the ruins and I packed my cash and walked out again into the night, wild with opportunity and risk. The only problem was that I had to bypass reception without them seeing me. This was done with a few dashes and sleights of hand and using squadrons of Chinese matrons as cover (they move like buffalo en masse, ruminating their way across hotel lobbies). And so to Neptune VIP, garish navel of my desires.

Aweekend night, and I include Thursdays, is the worst time to play calmly because you are jostled and disrupted by the red faces from across the border spewing their cheap cigarette smoke. But I had no choice. I had to win at least ten thousand by midnight or be thrown like a sack of garbage into the street. Losses would amount to the same result and it was, in other words, a perfectly thrilling dilemma to be in.

At ten the Neptune was packed, the Mongolian hookers in white boots clinging to high rollers as they reached the zenith of their nightly escapades. Along corridors of grooved steel punctuated by glass columns, the night’s bedraggled losers padded their way with nervous looks, as if searching for an exit from their purely mental miseries. Hungry ghosts indeed, driven by intensities they did not examine or understand. Like a circular labyrinth, the casino trapped them like bluebottles.

In these VIP rooms the bets are attractive, and somewhere deep inside myself I knew that I already had them beaten. I felt invincible, though that was a feeling I often had, and let’s face it, it had often led me astray. No matter. All my fear of Grandma, even, had dissipated, and I no longer much cared if she was there or not. I was going to destroy this room of mainlanders and walk away with their hard-earned kwai , leaving them in the dust. No matter how much money they had accumulated manufacturing their diapers, their safety pins, their crappy paper clips and plastic widgets of the world, I would clean them out in an hour and show them how terrible the winds of Luck really are when you are on the wrong side of them. You can make as many paper clips as you like up there in your gloomy factories , I said to them in my thoughts, but when you are down here pissing it all down the drain, you are at the mercy of divine forces and of the implacable Lord Doyle .

I sat at a crowded table where there seemed to be plenty of action. Chips swept across its surface like litter, were scooped up and then appeared again in grubby mounds. I could smell the cash being forked out from those malodorous pockets, banknotes as old as Mao with their disgusting scent of ink, paraffin, and sweat. The cash that now rules the planet, the cash that we are all now forced to eat like horse feed. Bitter hard-earned cash with a smell of blood on it, the sort of tender we in the West never see much of these days. I liked the swirl and lust around this table, the way the women screamed at every outcome and the way their eyes then went hard and snakelike. I liked its intensity. This was the right spot, right in the eye of the storm. After the days and nights in Lamma with Dao-Ming, after that glimpse of unaccomplished love, this was the return to hard facts.

I converted my cash in its totality because there was no point playing by half measures. It was all or nothing. The banker, covered with appalling acne, asked if I spoke Chinese and I nodded. The table bristled. Nothing worse than a foreign chimp who speaks the language.

I threw down five hundred. The cards came slithering out and I scored a natural, a perfect nine. The chips came my way, looking sulky and whorish. There was a collective sigh, a shaking of heads, and a few of the stragglers who had been hanging back waiting for the winds to alter wandered over to us to have a look.

“There’s a lucky gwai lo ,” I heard someone say, and the girls came flocking also in their immodest way. I played in my yellow gloves and the toughs gave me the eye. A second nine, and there was a small sensation. A gwai lo with two nines in a row? Unheard of. I looked through the tussle of bodies and saw a superbly dressed woman on the far side of the room get up, adjust her necklace, and leave the room alone.

I raked in a hundred thousand and cashed the chips straight away. Suddenly the blood began to shoot through my system and, belying long-held prejudices, I wanted to dance. The whole room stared at me as I exited with my attaché case and made my way to the New Wing, where I had not been in a while — not since losing a hundred thousand, in fact, during a miserable evening in March. My reentry was therefore very different from my last exit, and I allowed myself a bit of puffery going in, snapping my fingers for my chips as I threw out a few bundles of fresh cash. The New Wing was a place I always feared a little because I seemed to have a tendency to lose there, but now I wanted to slap it in the face and prove to it, and to myself, that the I Ching was on my side after a long period of cosmic disloyalty. I lost no time, therefore, in sitting down and placing a daring bet of thirty-five hundred, unsure as yet how far I should test the waters of this treacherous place. They didn’t know me there yet so the bet was accepted indifferently, the staff barely looking at me until the natural was turned. A perfect nine, the four and the five flipped simultaneously and showering me with golden warmth. The bankers permitted themselves a few grimaces at this brutal result for the house, but they carefully controlled themselves and there was not the slightest ruffling of their feathers. I got up calmly and walked over to a different table. Some naughty lemonade was promptly brought (get the punters drunk and they’ll lose quicker), and I felt bold enough to knock it back without batting an eyelid. This corner of the room was emptier and I played with a couple of mainlander dotards who didn’t seem to be paying any attention, watched from afar by the group I had thrashed. My new companions played as if dreaming, as if sleepwalking, and I knew how they felt because at any given moment I feel like I am sleepwalking — sleep-playing, you could say — and no one knows who I am except a bunch of dead people on the far side of the world.

Ilaid down the chips and waited with an unprecedented inner coldness as the natural was turned. So I was rolling. I swept up the gains and laid them all down again immediately, winning a second time. Four naturals in a row. I already had far more than I had stolen from Dao-Ming and I suppose I could have walked out right then and made a deal with management with regard to settling the bill. I could get the rest from Adrian Lipett and limp on for a few more weeks. But then again, it would not be enough to retire on; and, besides, when you are on a roll you must roll and roll, so I threw everything down on the next hand. Nine!