Lawrence Osborne - The Ballad of a Small Player

“Okay, welcome,” the dealers said, and passed the shoe toward me for the beginning of the next hand. I didn’t have my gloves with me, and I felt a little out of place touching the backs of the cards without the usual intervening material. But it didn’t matter. I kept the ink numbers well hidden.

I was only laying down a thousand by way of an experiment, and it was really to see what would happen with the hand that I was dealt. I was brimming with this curiosity, which was more than curiosity. I was proving something to myself — namely, that I was not haunted by the spirit world. That my luck was my own and not the gift of ghosts. Because if it was the latter I would be a candidate for the psychiatric hospital. The shoe passed down the table and the players sat back for a moment and flexed their fingers and minds. The kids looked me over. I was still rain-specked and semielegant but a tad worse for wear. There must have been something about me that suggested an overeagerness. They could not, however, know the real heat rising inside me. My feet tapped. It was caused by happiness at being back at a table. I looked across the room and saw Casanova staring back at me from behind a white mask. The pallet flipped. I looked at my watch. “So,” the banker said quickly. “The gentleman has drawn a natural. Nine! Nine!”

Glasses of naughty lemonade with straws appeared on waitered trays to make them forget their momentary misfortune. I raked in the chips. It was a modest haul, and I said I wouldn’t play on.

The banker said, “Very well,” and motioned to a staff member to take me to the cashier’s window. I got up and straightened my jacket and walked behind the man to the window, causing the mantle of smoke above me to oscillate and divide. The room was deathly quiet now as I counted my money and pocketed it. I took the escalator back to the lobby. The Beefeaters with Chinese eyes saluted as I walked to the doors. When I got there I was out of breath, burning with thirst. As I made my way out into the street I had to hold my throat. In the soft, insidious rain a woman walked past the gates, a secretary on her way home perhaps. She wore a raincoat with water stains and a strictly tightened belt. Without thinking, I stepped toward her, holding out the money I had won, the notes crushed inside my fist like a handful of trash. We stopped as we almost collided and her face changed from blankness to alarm, her eyes widening into soft black holes. I begged her to take the money. She stammered, perhaps considered whether it might be lucky or unlucky money, and then shook her head, walking on with a quick “Thank you, but no,” in English. For a moment I was sure that she, too, had glimpsed a ghost standing behind me. I turned and my heart was beating quickly. So here was a city where you couldn’t even hand out free money. You couldn’t even make a gift of it to a stranger.

I dove into the night having forgotten my umbrella, and soon after I went to a bar at the Venetian for a nightcap. It seemed to me then that I was doing something entirely automatic, and that the night itself was merely a joke, a pretext for being endlessly alive and unreal and lucky.

As I was sitting there with my mai tai, oblivious to the gondolas and the wedding parties and the slabs of venison glistening under halogens some distance away, I ran into (after all our near misses) the lugubrious Adrian Lipett, who was there gambling with his latest conquest. As I have said, I knew Adrian quite well. We borrowed money from each other and compared notes on our lucky and unlucky casinos. Like McClaskey, I saw him sometimes at the Canidrome throwing irrational bets at dogs with names like Lucky Bride and Purple Streak. He was a born loser, but he managed to survive and he always had a girl on his arm. He usually told them that he was a baronet and it worked well for a week or so, which was enough, and then when they were disillusioned he would move on to the next, for there are thousands and unlike us they do not compare notes.

He wore a tacky Singapore suit spattered with rain like mine and a wilted buttonhole peering out like a puffed and beaten eye. For that matter, his whole face looked like a puffed and beaten eye. If he’d had a nickname it would have been the Eye. He was always on the lookout for scams. He had his Chinese girl on his arm, indistinguishable from the last one, and he was on yet another predictably tragic losing streak in the grand confines of the Venetian, which flattered both his vanity and his senses without giving anything back. He came sidling up with the girl — unsteady after a few vodkas, I imagine — and clapped a hand on my shoulder as he pulled a look of friendship grievously wounded and betrayed.

“You’ve been hiding, Doyle. No one has seen you anywhere. This is Yo Yo. Yo Yo, this is Lord Doyle.”

“Oh, Lor Doy?”

I bowed for her.

“At your service, ma’am.”

It immediately crossed Yo Yo’s infernally calculating mind that I might be a better long-term bet than the sodden Englishman she was so temporarily attached to, and I noticed a sudden detachment from his arm in my favor.

“Lord Doyle,” Lipett said, “I have been at the tables for three hours and I thought Yo Yo was going to bring me luck tonight. No such thing. She has been a disaster all along.”

Not understanding, she smiled sweetly.

“I have gone from catastrophe to catastrophe. Who can understand it? Last night it was all going so well. I walked away from the Landmark with three thousand in pocket.”

“Yeah, it’s a bitchy world.”

“Yo Yo here made us both pray to the Goddess of Luck, but it only made it worse. The thing is, you know they enrich the air with oxygen? I feel high in here. I feel like a million quid. I can’t stop.”

“You seem to have the cash for it, Adrian.”

“Why, that’s just the problem, old man. I can feel that there’s a change of luck just around the corner. I can practically taste it with my tongue. You know that feeling. You of all people, Doyle.”

“I can’t lend you what you need. I shouldn’t be lending anything, it’s my retirement money.”

His eyes lit up.

“Retirement? You’re out? But nobody gets out unless they go broke and are deported. And that’s the funny thing. None of us goes entirely broke. We always have just enough to hang on.”

Life as perpetual debt , I thought. Until we hit it big. Then we’re out .

The look of despair that crossed his face was priceless.

“Have you hit it that big,” he whispered out of hearing of his blinking date. “Is it all true? Millions at the Fortuna VIP?”

“I can’t disclose all the details — but yeah, you cunt, my luck changed at long last and say what you will but I deserved it.”

“Shit, shit. Did you pray to that damn goddess of theirs that they all swear by?”

“Of course not.”

“Superstitious peasants. I knew it.”

His fists clenched, his knuckles white with envy.

“Doyle, you were the biggest loser of all. I can’t understand it.”

“That’s why it’s called luck.”

“What?”

“Luck, it’s luck.”

“No, no. There’s no such thing as luck. You turned a corner. Look, we have to stick together. We’re all ghosts as far as they’re concerned. We don’t even exist. Even my own girlfriend calls me a ghost to her friends. Can you imagine? On the phone to her friends she says, ‘I can’t talk right now, I have a ghost here .’ We represent nothing to them whatsoever, except evil ghosts. Scavengers, opium traders, and the like. Look around you. They love all this crap, they can’t stay away from it. But they still hate us in some way.”