Lawrence Osborne - The Ballad of a Small Player

While we drank a pot of oolong tea, he asked me if I had played at other casinos around the world before coming to Macau. Monte Carlo, Las Vegas, the Genting Highlands? Or Caracas, the dreadful places in Pailin?

“I expect,” he said, “you are a globetrotter, a high roller on several continents, a sharp on the loose.”

“Not at all,” I objected.

But he laughed; he liked the idea. A lord on the loose. A rogue of the baccarat tables, winging his way around the globe on Bruno Magli slippers. What could be more fine?

For the deskbound managers who actually ran the casinos, such a figure was bound to be irresistibly mysterious. One saw such figures painted on all the walls of the casinos, proud and erect on their Arabian horses, and so when one saw the real thing it was a pleasant surprise. Mr. Souza was one of these sedate managers. For him the world divided into the humdrum — factories, offices, work, labor, sweat salt mines, and mortgages — and the magical sphere of privileges.

He was quite bright with curiosity at this point. His eyes sharpened like needles that will prick their way under skin.

“I’ve never been anywhere,” I said, “except the casinos of Pailin. They were not to my taste.”

“No indeed. Khmer Rouge, eh?”

“I was once in Las Vegas. I lost everything.”

“They are crooks in Las Vegas, too, I have heard. Terrible, terrible people. But I imagine,” he said tentatively, “that you played privately at Oxford, or some such?”

“Yes, privately. Poker.”

He sat back and held his teacup between two slender fingers.

“I’ve always imagined Oxford gentlemen playing poker. Before I was posted here I was running a casino in Jordan for Steve Wynn. A casino frequented by Palestinians.”

“Palestinians?”

“Yes. They shot it up in the end.”

“Did they?”

“It was against their religion.”

“Ah.”

“It was a hard experience for me and my family. We were happy to come back to China. Here, as you know, everything is more reasonable. You can pay for anything and get it. Everything is for sale on some level. Do you know what I mean?”

“It’s a real talent.”

“I think so — sometimes. They call us the Jews of the East. Except that there are one point four billion of us. Imagine one point four billion Jews.”

I threw up a hand, and he sensed that he had said enough.

He poured my tea.

“Miss Silva ran a background check on you. She found nothing at all. It is quite puzzling. It’s as if you stepped one day out of nowhere, out of a different dimension, and into our little town and brought nothing with you. They tell me there is a code of secrecy among you gamblers, and perhaps you want to keep it that way.”

Souza then put down his cup and adjusted his glasses. I had not, as he had hoped, offered any background information about myself, and he had to proceed anyway. I said that he understood my position. Being a foreigner in a strange land, even so denatured and cosmopolitan a place as Macau. He comprehended it to the fullest degree. There was nowhere to turn. One had to be secretive, and he understood it.

He twirled his pen in his hand and looked at me frankly. What did I think I would do with my winnings? I could leave Macau for the mainland and live a lot better for less. I could fly off to Bangkok and live well for a while. The East was my oyster.

“I may stay here,” I said.

“I’ll come to the point. Some of our Chinese executives are very superstitious. One of them was watching your surveillance videos last night and she swore she saw a figure standing behind you. She swore she saw it, and many of our colleagues believe it. They say that your nine nines cannot be a fluke or a piece of luck. Think of us as superstitious if you like. It’s the way it is. My bosses are asking me to ask you not to play again at the casino. It is not even that they are afraid of incurring further losses. They are afraid of the spirit world and they say, pardon me, that you have a ghost attached to you.”

“I’d like to see that video.”

“There’s nothing on it. My boss, I should add, is a very superstitious woman. Her name is Helen. She offered me a rather odd proposition. She said you could play one more hand in this casino. I thought it was an original idea. One hand. You can play it any time you want. Night or day. And then, if you win, you have to leave the Lisboa tables for good. If you lose, we’ll rethink. It will prove the ghost is no longer there.”

I couldn’t help laughing.

“You have to be kidding me, Souza.”

“No, all too serious. If you are harboring a ghost, we cannot have you in the casinos. That is her position. Morale among our employees would collapse. It is unthinkable.”

“Harboring?”

“I don’t know what other word to use. We are not saying it is your fault. Something may have happened — you may have attracted some presence that you are not aware of. It has been known to happen.”

“You are telling me a ghost story.”

He opened his hands and smiled. You know how we are .

I sat very still for a while and digested this change in my situation. I listened attentively to the shuddering hum of the air-conditioning unit, the muted clank of cranes and cement mixers and the sibilance of the computer itself, where my image was no doubt frozen by the pause button. Sounds from a parallel world that did not have my interests at heart. He was not going to tell me what he had really seen on that screen, or what his female colleague had seen, and so from now on we were just wasting time. I wanted to be gone, and yet I wanted to know what the casino would do if I actually won that last hand they had permitted me. I asked.

“You keep it, of course. You keep everything.”

From his tone it was suggested that he didn’t believe this would happen.

“All of it?”

“It’s a casino — of course you keep it. We have a reputation to uphold. We aim to create a true experience for the customer, remember. It’s like a journey, a voyage. We’ve built everything around that concept of an experience. So your own journey will come to a satisfying end, no? We want you to have a beautiful experience.”

“You do?”

“Don’t look so skeptical.”

But I changed the subject.

“Mr. Souza, do you yourself think that I am haunted?”

He steadied himself and blinked, because now he had to tell the truth. He said that was exactly what he thought, though “haunted” was not the word he would have used. Blessed? At the door, he shook my hand, using that curious mixture of Cantonese and English that people here often break into.

“Gum lei take care la.”

Darkness and gold, and the sound of water from afar: the ghosts alive and drinking, tortured by their thirst just like me. I drank heavily in my room. Vodka and cranberry, and gin with lemon twists. I didn’t notice the days and nights and the interludes in between where nothing happened. The distant clatter of the casinos, that white noise of the Lisboa, had almost passed out of consciousness altogether. There was a hush to the heavily carpeted corridors, where the staff passed on leather soles with their trays balanced on one hand. The smell of passing waffles and dim sum and bok choy cooked in sauce. The smell of eggs and toast and the clock clock of knuckles rapping on doors where men lay half unconscious on their beds in their long black socks waiting for change. I had not had the itch for baccarat for some time. Mr. Souza was correct when he pointed out that worried money never wins.

Two nights later I put on my gloves and placed the totality of my winnings in the Adidas bag. I wore a tuxedo with a white carnation and, in a touch of sad panache, a pair of two-tone shoes. Greased down, pomaded, brushed, and polished, I looked like a cartoon as I left the room with a quiet click and heaved my bag into a gold-plated elevator filled with smoking trolls. The mirror made me think of those incomparable words of Joseph Roth commenting upon a picture someone had done of him: Yeah, that’s me all right, nasty, drunk but clever . I adjusted the buttonhole and listened to the fools dissing me in their dialects, thinking I didn’t understand. And so to the Fortuna VIP room, temple of my baccaratic fate.