Lawrence Osborne: The Ballad of a Small Player

“Are you the lawyer chap?” she had asked over and again. “My husband says never trust a lawyer. He says you’re all cheerful scum.”

When I returned to business I was revived by the cold water. I played two hands of fifteen each, losing one and winning one. I was emboldened to ratchet it up to twenty, at which point I had to unseal the second of the padded envelopes of cash I had brought with me.

I laid the money out and got my cards. I was sure, in that moment, that someone was watching me from behind one of the paintings (I assumed they had observation windows built into them) and when I turned my hand to reveal a four and a six, I was sure that someone somewhere had smiled. A four and a six is a baccarat, a zero hand worth nothing, or to be technical, a ten modulo ten: the worst hand you can draw. It was as crushing a losing hand as I could have pulled, and the dealer himself shook his head empathetically before awarding me a commiseration of sorts. He wished me better fortune for the next play.

“I drew a baccarat yesterday,” I said. “Two in two days.”

“Tut tut.”

“I am not smelling the winds.”

I paused and dabbed my forehead with a cocktail napkin, because a moment before everything had seemed so clear — even if only for a few seconds — and now I no longer knew if I should play another hand or go home with half my envelope intact.

“You want a pause, sir?”

“I can’t lose twice with a baccarat.”

As the table was prepared, the sound of the erhar rose up from somewhere, and I thought it must be dawn outside, or close. I waited for my mind to calm and clear and then laid my twenty thousand on the table.

“Are you sure this time?” the dealer asked politely.

I flipped the first card and noted the five. The dealer looked at me suavely, and I think he was genuinely curious.

The coal fire crackled behind us, and his back must have been warm. I turned a four and won the hand with a natural. Surprised, he stepped back for a moment. He raised a moist hand towel to his mouth and nodded a mute congratulation. I sat back and watched the chips pushed my way, a great salacious pile of them, and I paused to smoke for a few minutes. I may have imagined it, but I thought I heard a bell ringing somewhere deep inside the complex of pits. What kind of bell, I had no idea. Perhaps a bell went off whenever a punter made a large winning.

The dealer shuffled the cards again and we took our ease, bantering about the trade. He then asked me if I felt inclined to take on another hand. I was now feeling roused, aggressive. A sudden win will do that to you. It will lift you out of months of depression and self-doubt, days of quiet dread. A surge of animal arrogance of the kind that one needs to feel in order to remember that you are alive. Doomed to be alive.

“Lady Luck is with me,” I said in English.

He dealt my two cards and I turned a three and a two. He therefore dealt me a third card. It was a four.

“Natural,” he said, raising his eyebrows for a moment and then stepping back from the table with a slight twitch of the head.

Ilooked at my watch and saw that it was five thirty-five a.m. I could feel the wind of fortune switching direction around me like something physical, a real breeze admitted by a door suddenly opened. I stood and bagged the mound of chips as the manager came in a second time and congratulated me, bowing and hoping that I would return to the Paiza soon.

“We welcome you anytime, Lord Doyle.”

I was given a small attaché case for the cash and escorted politely to the main doors, where a tour bus from Shenzen had just arrived, offloading fresh crowds for the main floors of the Sands. I went through to get to the main road, shrugging off their overdoses of scent, and soon I was walking into Avenida da Amizade. I didn’t even know exactly how much it was: hundreds and hundreds of thousands. Kenny Rogers had it right. You never count your money when you’re sittin’ at the table.

I walked back to the Lisboa in the dawn, past the yawning molls of the Rua de Pequim and the Fortuna casino, passing by that strange fragment of the Rue de Rivoli. Inside the Lisboa lobby I gave my case to reception so that they could entrust it to the house safe, and then I wandered around the galleries, staring at those antique ink stones and Chinese seismographs that seem to be permanently on sale there. There was a jade galleon, too, and farther down a gilded peacock from Garrard’s of London displayed with a glass of blue wine next to it. The luxury goods that I passed every day without much noticing them. And finally I came to a spinach-green jade figure of Guan Yin herself standing next to a pendulum clock of the same material.

Properly, it is Guashi’yin. They shorten it to Guan Yin. She is a bodhisattva. Her name means listening to the sounds of the world . Or, one could put it, listening to the cries of the world. Because she is also the goddess of mercy and compassion. For the Taoists she is an immortal. She is the female form, in East Asia, of the Indian male bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara.

I stood there for some time, mentally lost inside that lustrous greenness, the face and eloquent hands of a jade bodhisattva, and something within me began to revolve, to change direction, and I felt how impossible it would be to just go upstairs and go to sleep. My victory had crystallized and now it fragmented again like a glass ball dropped from a great height. I turned and walked calmly back to reception.

“Give me the case back,” I said. “Yes, all of it.”

Their looks were questioning, but after all they didn’t care.

I walked back to the Paiza, where the doormen greeted me without surprise. Over the next hour I proceeded to lose most of what I had with me, but thereafter my fortune revived a little and I swung between light and dark, between surplus and deficit. It was almost midday before I got to bed. I had left neither worse off nor better, and the next night (for there was always a next night; my life was a series of next nights) I went down more confidently in my smoking jacket with the velvet lapels and sat at the larger fourteen-person baccarat tables between nine and ten.

Perhaps it was the sleep. I was now loaded with betting power, though of the negative kind, and I was feeling belligerent, aggressive, so unsure of myself that I was sure of myself. I was the only gwai lo there that night, and the regulars who knew me glanced at me with their usual contempt.

No matter. I had their measure, the little scum. If I lost again I’d do it with an exceptional indifference that would show them who was who in the pecking order of life. I took the case with me and when I opened it to pull out an enormous sum to place my first bet, the other players paled and bit their lips. These were small-timers, or medium-timers, and they weren’t used to heavy bets. I was discreetly advised to perhaps split my bets into smaller sums. As a matter of fact I was happy to oblige. I didn’t need to win on one big killing. I split my treasure into $500 HK shots and played them one by one, eleven in a row. Complete success.

I looked up at the numbers board and saw new digits slip into place, changing its complexion. My table was now announced as highly fortunate. A slightly larger crowd developed around it. Onlookers pressed in, smoking with wild intensity until the table was thickly shrouded with smoke. I heard their guttural oaths and expressions of disbelief in their crude Putonghua, their imprecations against the dirty foreigner and his goddamned luck. I could understand every word and they didn’t know it, but I let it go. I won and won. Chips rolled in, waves of them.

At ten thirty I got up and bagged the lot, taking them over to the cashier’s window followed by dozens of stares. I bundled the cash into my attaché case and rolled out of there, moving on to the Hong Fak, certain that I had scored at least a half million, which I probably had. It was a decent day’s work.