Lawrence Osborne - The Ballad of a Small Player

The room stirred. The banker gave me an irritable look and pushed toward me a pile of chips such as I had never seen.

Their tone toward me altered. I tugged at my gloves and I was aware of how rigid and glassy my bearing had become and how much more I now conformed to the idea of an English lord living it up in the East. In the East, people always told me — or at least gamblers always told me — they believe in the significance of coincidences. In the idea of the supernatural ordering the natural. Jung comments on this somewhere; it is due, he says, to the Chinese having a different sense of time, which in his commentary on the I Ching he called synchronicity. The Chinese, he said, did not believe in causality. They believed that when a cluster of things happened at the same time there was a meaningful connection between them. The Chinese mind seems to be exclusively preoccupied with the chance aspect of events. What we call coincidence is the chief concern of this peculiar mind, and what we worship as causality passes almost unnoticed. Yes, that was how a scholar would make sense of it. Right then, as I staked that formidable pile of chips on a single hand, I knew that there was no causality behind what would happen next. In the East, as someone also remarked, one doesn’t die . At the same moment I felt myself flowing into a great river of Luck, and I also felt how endless and immortal this river must be. Dopamine flooded my body as I merged into the flow, and I felt invulnerable as the hand was turned and I saw a fifth nine.

I took off my gloves to let my hands breathe off their sweat. As soon as I laid my right hand out on the edge of the table I noticed that it was wide open with the telephone number scrawled across it, and I closed it at once, but not before the ink stains had been noticed.

Soon I was aware of a wildfire of gossip spreading around me, the word nine repeated under the breath as spectators formed an ever-tightening ring around the table, their hands lit by the glare of the overhead lamps. I was aware of the oysterized breath and the scent of gum and the precision of the gazes as this ring closed in upon me and the question arose — telepathically — whether I would risk it all on yet another hand. This, after all, is what these voyeurs are always waiting for, like people assembled under a bridge where a man in tattered underwear is threatening to throw himself off.

“Play?” the bank asked in a gentle tone.

I wasn’t sure. I could see that he had noticed the number on my palm and I felt that he was on the brink of asking me to open my hand and let him have a look. A crib could never help at a game like baccarat, but there is an elemental superstition and suspicion at work here, a collective paranoia, and a bank is always bound to be on the lookout for scams. His eyebrows did indeed rise and, to forestall a question, I said that it was a phone number and nothing more. He nodded, but with a clear absence of conviction.

“Really,” I insisted, but still drew my gloves back on.

I didn’t want him to see the number because these boys have photographic memories. It must have seemed to him a cheap way for a lord to store what was in all probability a woman’s phone number. Scrawled on the hand, as a teenager would have done it. He attended to the Shuffle Master and I was surprised to see a few high rollers seat themselves at the table.

“May we?” one of them asked.

“I am playing one more hand,” I said.

I heard the murmur go up: English bastard — playing one more hand — lucky tonight—

“Very well, sir. How much are you betting?”

“Everything.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely sure.”

“Everything?”

I repeated the word in English.

It was those words that made me famous that night in Macau. Lord Doyle says absolutely sure!

“Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen.”

All my life I had been dreaming of a moment like this. Absolutely sure and filled with a creamy terror. The others were no doubt pressured by the same emotion. They closed in and their greed and fear reached a fever pitch in their faces. How many naturals can the luckiest Englishman ever pull off in a single night? Ah, do the math! Not six, not seven. The laws were against it.

In that moment I thought of myself walking by a tow-path near Newhaven when I was a child. A path by the river Ouse, my father egging me on to swim across the narrow river to a rusted abandoned tanker on the far side and pick off a barnacle. Memories from elsewhere. I swam to the tanker and as I latched onto the weeds growing on the metal I began to sink, to drown, and the weeds came off in my hands and I couldn’t stay afloat except by hugging the rusted steel and I heard my father shouting to me from the bank, “No cowards in this family,” and there was a merry music of church bells from Piddinghoe nearby. “Fear no man,” my grandfather used to say in Latin. “No cowards in this family and no losers either: recall the regimental flags, old son.”

A breeze of summer rot and sea salt and a life yet to begin, and I swam back with a barnacle in my fist. The cards were turned.

“Natural.”

“Nine wins, nine wins.”

“Fuck!”

The player nearest me exploded in heartfelt grief.

“It’s the way it is,” I said coolly.

The dealer stiffened like a napkin being tugged at both ends, his bow tie slightly askew, and while everyone else was consumed in the negative passion of the moment he made a slight gesture to me, depressing a thumb into the palm of his opposing hand, a smile of wan hatred spreading over his face.

Five hundred ten thousand dollars richer, I made my way back to reception and gave over my bags after having the contents counted out for me. The bellhops eavesdropped and rubbed their hands with a mysterious gesture as they offered unnecessarily to show me to the elevators. The night managers couldn’t resist a few admiring remarks. The decrepit gwai lo they had known only a few hours ago had been replaced by the human equivalent of a phoenix. It was the power of Luck, and since it was what their palace had been built on, they were inclined to submit to its diktat.

I summoned the receptionist who had pestered me before and with some ceremony apologized for it being a few minutes after midnight.

“I was detained,” I said, “by a friend. I am sorry to have kept you waiting for a few minutes.”

She, too, looked at her watch, and her face was all consternation and regret. Had she earlier managed to insult what was now a formidable client, and would her superiors notice the awkwardness of the gaffe? People were fired for less, for much less.

“It’s quite all right, Lord Doyle. Thank you for remembering.”

“Oh, I don’t forget a thing like that. I pay my debts.”

“Yes, Lord Doyle.”

I took out an imposing wad of dough and slapped it down on the counter.

“Counted it out myself.”

“Well, I don’t know what to say, Lord Doyle.”

“Just call me Lord if you like. It’s my pleasure.”

She hesitated. Was it a gwai lo joke?

The cash was grubby but it was cash. It was their cash.

“I’m sorry if I was impertinent before,” she said. “It was management’s orders.”

“Quite understood. I’ve decided to ask for a larger room. A suite perhaps. Do you have any suites?”

“Of course we do, Lord Doyle.”

“Then get me a suite if you can.”

“We can move you tomorrow if that is satisfactory.”