Lawrence Osborne - The Ballad of a Small Player

“Money,” he sighed. “What a wonderful thing. When it starts flowing into you. What a wonderful feeling. It’s like drinking vat after vat of the best wine in the world and still feeling thirsty. That’s the secret, Doyle. To keep feeling thirsty. Once you stop feeling thirsty you no longer want to keep drinking the wine, and then you’re a monk, or dead. Which is worse? I’d rather be dead than a monk. My mother always wanted me to be a monk. When I made my first million she went to the temple and prayed for me. But I never found out what she prayed for .”

“For your soul, Mr. Cheng.”

“What a word! You are probably right, though. But I kept my soul. It’s my bloody wife who is losing it for me.”

“By the way,” he added after we had smoked our cigars in silence, “are you calling it a night? After your coup I suppose you must be. Always quit while you are ahead. But you know that already. That’s what Patsy can never remember.”

“I am quitting for the night.”

“Excellent idea. May I ask if you intend going back to your room?”

“I have no plans.”

He grew visibly apprehensive.

“Do you have a club you go to?”

I confessed I didn’t, because the Clube Militar wasn’t a club. It was now a restaurant.

“Well, I have a very nice club called the Toga Room. One of these nights — I assume you are tired now — you should come by and meet some of my friends.”

He handed me a card with the club’s details on it.

“The telephone numbers are strictly private and should not be given out to others. When you call, give them the password I’ve written on the back.”

I turned the card over: the word invidia .

“Jealousy,” I murmured.

“It’s a club for men, so you won’t find my wife there. And one word of advice, Doyle. If you meet my wife anywhere in the VIP rooms, do not under any circumstances agree to play with or against her. If you play with her she’ll steal everything one way or another; if you play against her she’ll lose, and it’s my money. Can I count on you?”

“Shall we shake on it?”

He laughed uneasily and held out his hand.

“Why not? I like you, Doyle.”

His deerskin face tilted back for a moment and the laugh was dry. The rich never believe it when one compliments them or expresses any affection for them. They know all the things about themselves that we don’t. And I suddenly thought: I made eleven million tonight .

“Come to the club, Doyle. Have you ever eaten pangolin?”

He leaned forward again and his breath was edged with Dow’s.

“It tastes like penguin and it keeps your hard-on hard. It’s the one thing I indulge in that my wife approves of. We can have it fried or boiled with plum sauce. You can have it any way you like. You can have it battered if you like.”

Seven suitcases of cash were sent up to my room in the morning, just as I had requested. I didn’t have a bank account and everything I earned had to be converted into cash. Instinctively, however, the Chinese sympathized with this. Like many Asians, they feel more comfortable with cash than with abstractions. The notes were bundled into units of five thousand and packed into genuine leather cases with handsome locks. When Mr. Souza had left, after expressing his congratulations, I emptied them onto the bed and counted the packets carefully before putting them back into the cases exactly as they had been.

I now had eleven suitcases of hard cash stored in my room, and I no longer thought of leaving them with the management for safekeeping. The balance of power and trust between us had changed and I now thought that they were spying on me, keeping tabs on my winnings and — why not? — my movements. A casino never gives up its money willingly. But they were in a quandary. If they encouraged me to leave now, they stood no chance of ever recovering their losses. Under normal circumstances it would be in their interests to keep me there and to keep me playing. The theory would be that in the long term the odds would be stacked inexorably against me. But they had lost their nerve. They didn’t know what to do. If I stayed, I was also likely to be a big spender in the food outlets and elsewhere. I would at least be profitable for them in some way. And so a note came from Souza later that day: Please feel free to accept our offer of an upgrade to a suite on one of the higher floors . I accepted and the suitcases, along with my belongings, were transferred to a suite six floors above me. There was a kind of silence around me, and I no longer played music when I was by myself. It was enough to be alone with myself without interference, to sink like a stone into a mineshaft. I went through the casinos after midnight in my new suits as I had always done, and as I did so I felt the weight of the hotel’s security surveillance system pressing upon me from all sides. It was, of course, the ban that was in effect against me, and the hapless floor managers in every room had to make sure that I didn’t so much as sit at a table. They followed me around with an obsequiously firm hand, and whenever I stopped to watch the play they hovered around me without saying a word.

You can’t open the windows at the Lisboa, perhaps because they are afraid of suicides, with so many desperate bankrupts checked in every night — so I slept with the fan and the heating on, with the curtains drawn like a death chamber. Then when I had recovered a little from my strange and slowly aggravating feeling of illness, I went to war again. I took a bath and ate a light breakfast from room service, eggs and toast and tea. It was a little before six and I ordered a bottle of champagne to go with the eggs. I downed half the bottle, then dressed for the fray, though it would not be in the Lisboa. I felt a cold, stable hatred toward the world and toward myself as I went down the carpet-padded corridor with one of my cases filled with about five hundred thousand.

Iwas calm as I sat at one of the tables at the Landmark, which here have yellow surfaces and Pharaonic heads. The theme is ancient Egypt and the bar outside the casino is shaped like a full-sized Middle Kingdom ship. The early-morning gamblers sat grimly and thirstily around the table’s yellow oval, where their fates were being decided without lifting their eyes. They were unusually rapt, perhaps because they were not the all-nighters but those who had risen bright and early for the game. They were the kind of players with which I was usually unfamiliar. The real fanatics, the guys who get up in the morning to play. The high-stakes table at which I sat had been witnessing some turbulent scenes just prior to my arrival and I had watched the whole thing with interest. Three men in sharkskin suits, smoking heavily, were playing to a small crowd who were goading them on with cries of desperate encouragement. The pallet turned the cards and there was a crushed silence as the banker swept up every single chip on the table. The sharkskins moved away with wounded pride, and for a moment the mood was ugly.

A massive seated figure copied from the Valley of the Kings and an overblown face of Tutankhamen did not mitigate it. I sat down quietly with the chips I had exchanged for the totality of the five hundred thousand I had brought with me and placed a fifth of it — a hundred thousand — on the yellow surface. No one paid me much attention even with such a large bet, and it must have been because the sharkskins had lost much more.

The table filled again. I felt no apprehension at all as I, the highest-betting player, turned my cards before everyone else. The inevitable nine. I raked in as much as I’d laid down and started again. The players sighed and there was a dreary scene. An old lady cried, “Now look here!” and stared at me. Same result. I scooped up my chips and moved to a different table, and the crowd followed me.