Kiss Me, Hadley: A Novel

by Nick Macfie

  Lift-off. The pit boss was still shouting “Noooooo” as the ball hit the stud and left the wheel at five times its land speed. Would I hear it whistle past my ear, I wondered. Would it whistle as it hit my ear? No on both counts, as it happened. It took a direct route down the table, retracting its landing gear soon after takeoff. It had passed all the punters before they realised what had happened and the pit boss’s slow-motion “Noooooo” had turned into a simple, but very loud, “NO SPIN”, the call that went up any time a dealer fucked up. Sometimes the wheel was spinning too slowly, sometimes the ball left the wheel before even getting started. My “no spin” was much more spectacular. Why hadn’t they told me to slow down the wheel?

  The ball was beyond the table and the potential stitch-the-new-boy-up chavs and was headed for the first blackjack table and the back of one of the third-rung royals who at that very second turned on his heel and somehow caught it. It wasn’t a brilliant catch. It just hit him in the chest and plopped into his hand.

  About fifteen punters and I were staring at him with our mouths open as he tossed the ball playfully in his hands, looking almost as surprised as we were. The look on his face said: where on earth did this come from and how did I catch it so easily and instinctively? Is it my superior heritage? He popped it in his pocket and headed for the door.

  “Mister,” I called. “Can we have our ball back?”

  It fell on deaf ears. The man was stopped at the door by two security guards who had a quiet word which did not do any good. They pinned him up against the wall and one reached into his suit jacket pocket and retrieved the ball. He was then taken outside into Archer Street, one man holding his arm behind his back.

  The pit boss gave me a new ball and I tried it again. Everything went well from then on. No one stitched me up.

  There was nothing about the game I didn’t like. The shiny green baize, replaced every couple of weeks, and the way it stuck behind your fingernails as you pushed out two or three stacks. One stack you lifted. Four, five or six stacks were pushed out with the fingernails facing down. The newer the baize, the more likely the stacks were to tip over as you pushed them out too fast. The lint that came away easily and got stuck under the nails was gone from the tables within a few hours. That’s how well used the tables were. That’s how desperate people were for something for nothing.

  I got to know how to feel twenty chips in my hand without counting. Bang down on the table the stack went, shunted up against the wheel with the other columns. You want to pay out ten chips? Pick up the column, slap down the bottom five without even having to look where you cut with your forefinger, then do the same again, lining up another five alongside. All done in an instant. You want to pay out seventeen? Take a column and “wipe” off three on the baize, again without having to look, and slap the remainder down in front of the punter. It was all sexy, suggestive stuff. There was a dealer and chipper at each table. The chipper acted as a backup, watching for dodgy customers stitching you up. He also picked up the chips after the dealer had swished them round the corner and off the baize at the end of each bet, stacking them in the piles of twenty. There was the chef monitoring them and the pit boss, on a tennis umpire’s chair, monitoring the chef, the dealers and the chippers. It was like prison officers watching a chain gang. Pockets in black trousers were sown up to prevent sleight of hand. The dealer wore a black, felt apron to stop his trousers from going all shiny where he leant against the table. He clapped and wiped his hands in front of him at the end of each twenty-five-minute shift. The third-rung royalty were tall, stooped and whispering poisonous gossip into one another’s ear, turning away smiling to sip their gin and tonics and look sardonic. In the late hours, before midnight, there were also West End old timers, TV cop show stars, private detectives and the curvy, long-legged party girls with exotic accents.

  “After we’ve done with the thingee here, let’s quaff till dawn,” I heard one decadent prick say to his chum.

  “Oh, rather.”

  Come three in the morning, the punters were mostly taxi drivers coming off shift and solemn-looking Chinese restaurant workers with cigarettes clenched between their teeth, banging cards down noisily at the blackjack tables and twirling chips round their fingers at the roulette tables like rings. I took it all in with a big, beaming smile. I was still on the lookout for the two jokers on Tottenham Court Road, but they didn’t worry me. Pulling strokes, indeed. Within days, I was doing the tricks I had seen veteran dealers do, shuffling stacks of five chips like cards with my right hand as I surveyed the table. I went out for a drink after work with a girl from Shrubs, another old Asia hand. The first thing she asked was about my green nails.

  What did worry me a bit was that I had never been an undercover reporter. I hadn’t done a hell of a lot of any kind of reporting recently, for that matter, stuck on the Asia-Pacific editing desk in Hong Kong. But the joy of the wire agency business was that anything could happen and you could be on a flight anywhere at any time - an uprising in Yemen, floods in Bangkok, a Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Sydney (CHOGM, for short. Rhymes with fokk ‘em.) And now this. The Silver Star in Archer Street in the throbbing heart of Theatreland, a backstreet where frowning men stood smoking in doorways and stared at the road surface as it rained. The training took just two weeks. It was all about procedure: how to stack chips, how to push out stacks with either hand, how to use picture bets, which bets to pay out first, how to clear the table without disturbing chips on and around the winning numbers. And there were the tricks you learnt to stop getting cheated - like keeping your eye on the table when some pervert calls you a nob.

  There were the right-hand tables - you spun the ball with your right hand and pushed out the stacks of winnings with your right hand. Every now and then I would be called upstairs to the twenty pound left-handed table, which drew the big spenders because they knew right-handed dealers had to do everything with their left hand and didn’t like it. They were more likely to make mistakes. Not only could they play at twenty pounds a chip, they could nominate a colour and their own value. They could be playing chips worth a hundred pounds each, meaning payoffs running into the thousands. Into the tens of thousands.

  I got to know when customers would arrive, which table they would go to, how much they would bet and where they would place their bets. I got to know the sort who covered segments as they appeared on the wheel, random numbers, hoping a design fault in the brass mechanism or a bump in the wood favoured one set of thirty degrees over another. Then there were those who covered segments as they appeared in chronological order on the table - zero-three and surrounding numbers were always popular. I found myself greeting punters with complete respect.

  “Good evening, Madam. I hope you’re feeling lucky.”

  What I was really saying was: I am very pleased to see you because this is a very cool world with lots of interesting rich people (and you are one of them and I can see your cleavage) and you and the nonchalant gangsters have turned my head.

  The table was full of these regulars when I came back from a break - a Swiss couple who I was told tried to pick up the younger dealers for their own fun and games back home, a thin man with the shakes who needed help placing his bets, an old Irish guy with a boozy face. He could have been Irish, anyway. He could also have been Swedish. Or Finnish. (A man asks Karen Carpenter: Are you Finnish? Karen Carpenter sings: We’ve only just begun.)

  There was a Russian drug dealer with a couple of his girls, assorted punters from the taxi rank and a New Orleans crook, while in the middle sat a new customer: a jowly, plump, well-to-do Chinese man with high, polished cheekbones, large sunglasses, a purple shirt and swept-back, dyed, jet-black hair. Sixty at least. At his side was a gorgeous Chinese girl with big eyes and wearing a cheongsam.

  The Chinese man, whose cheeks were so shiny they looked embalmed, was playing red marked up at 50 pounds a chip and he had five stacks in front of him. He was playing by chronological segment, covering all numbers
around zero-three. He was winning big, prompting oohs and ahs from the crowd and steady attention from the chef and pit boss.

  “Big action for hotshot gambler,” the girl said to me with a wink. “He has the runs.”

  I smiled weakly. Either she meant he was on a run, or we were in for a totally different kind of action any second now. The man, whose horn-rimmed sunglasses covered the top half of his face, was glum and didn’t say a word. He looked like a general retired from an army which didn’t make human rights a top priority, except for the baggy, bright purple shirt with an even brighter purple floral motif thing going on at the top. Hence the sunglasses, I guessed. The girl, on the other hand, had large, glistening oval eyes and was full of life. She kept turning towards me, clutching her little leather handbag to her chest, and smiling broadly. At me. What was she doing with the old man? Silly question, really. But this contact was progress, in the bigger scheme of things, for the “undercover reporter”.

  The general turned his head a fraction in the girl’s direction and nodded. It was a signal to leave. He just turned half an inch, raised his chin and didn’t say a word.

  “We end it now,” the girl said.

  “I’m sorry to see you go,” I said. I knew when and how to turn on the charm. “We’d be happy for you to stay.”

  I said this to her. Not to him. We’d be happy for you to stay. Not the old man with his non-stop quick-fire jokes and natural razzle-dazzle.

  “Ha, I bet you would,” the girl said. “We stay and lose the clothes off our backs.” A new picture bet came into my head. “Long time, no money. Ha, ha, ha.”

  The general got unsteadily to his feet, the Chinese girl holding his arm. He picked up his winnings and turned away, throwing a few chips on to the table as he left. There were five of them. Two hundred and fifty pounds in all.

  “I am afraid we are not allowed to take tips, sir,” I said.

  I looked at the chef who nodded in agreement for me and the punter. The man didn’t turn.

  “We want to be warm and generous,” the girl said. “Rules spoil all the fun.”

  “There is nothing I’d like more, but it is out of my hands.”

  The girl took back the chips, pouting ridiculously. She was totally gorgeous. “I try to be warm and generous and no one takes me up.”

  I would take you up, but this was neither the time nor the place. The general walked slowly to the door with a polished brass handle and left, the girl in tow, a departure that disturbed no one from his or her game. He had not spoken a word or uttered a sound the entire evening. Before stepping outside, the girl turned and winked at me again. I wasn’t imagining it. Wow.

  CHAPTER TWO

  AS PART OF MY INVESTIGATION, I arranged to meet up with one of the dealers, a wide boy called George who knew all the angles, at a pub in Cambridge Circus at the other end of Shafts-bury Avenue. I ordered a pint of Old Speckled Boiler and sat at a wooden table outside, watching the crowds gather for a huge, brash, camp show at the Palace Theatre over the road. They were mostly middle-aged women wearing pink boas which every few seconds they would unravel just to throw back around their necks, lifting their heads in the process. The women were spilling out of the pub door next to me, falling over one another to cross the street and giggling loudly.

  The show was about men in drag, and the audience was all women. What was all that about? They were all plastered on sweet drinks as they gathered around a large, high-heeled shoe that advertised the lowest-common-denominator nonsense. Were they making some sort of statement? Did they find it a big turn-on? I looked up at the dark windows opposite the theatre. This was John le Carre’s fictional headquarters of “the Circus”, the rabbit warren of tiny, draughty offices that was home to British intelligence, where everyone was conspiring to bring down everyone else between cups of tea in front of one-bar electric fires. What would left-leaning Smiley’s People have made of all this fuss, standing in their long coats at the windows, looking down at the crowds, their hands in their pockets feeling for their pipes? The fact that half of them were closet homosexuals made this a tough one to call.

  George the dealer bounded up in the weird, bright light created by all the theatre razzmatazz, congratulating me on finding an outside table and desperate to spill all about his day at the tables. The image of Smiley’s People all leaning to the left in the windows was gone. George also ordered an Old Speckled Boiler.

  “You’ll never guess what happened today,” he began.

  “What’s that then?” I was getting into the banter. I enjoyed it too. What’s that then came out as a faux-Cockney wozzat ven.

  George looked puzzled. “Wozzat ven?”

  “What’s that then?”

  “Well, funny you should ask. I had a perfect picture bet on table three. That woman who used to be a newsreader on the telly. Big knockers.”

  “Go on.”

  “It looked a mess, but it was a piece of cake. Ten stacked up on all corners, splits, streets, six-lines, straight up. An easy one hundred and fifty-six times ten. She didn’t believe me. Doesn’t know about the picture bets. Insisted on a recount.”

  “Go on.”

  “Yeah, well, she insisted. So the chef did a recount. I was right. She couldn’t believe it.”

  I shuffled in my seat. I had my own story to tell. “You won’t believe this.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well some third-rung royal prick tried to stitch me up on the columns.”

  And so it went for an hour or more. I could have stayed all night, watching all the strange and wonderful people passing by. All the West End girls (gels, I called them), the wide-eyed tourists, the wide-boy touts trying to flog tickets to the camp show to people who were coming out at the interval.

  “So, Percival, is it true you’re leaving us for China?”

  I was lifting the Old Speckled Boiler to my mouth, my eyes on the half-inch mushroom-coloured head, thinking someone should develop a beer with a head the shape of a mushroom cloud. This beer wouldn’t make you fall over; it would make you fall out!

  “Percy?”

  Percival. Percy. Strange names, George was using. Good grief, he was talking to me. My nom de plume. Young Cockney George, who was being very restrained when it came to “Percy” jokes.

  “George, forgive me. Was thinking about that tricky picture bet.”

  “That’s okay, Perse. We’ve chosen a challenging and intellectual line of trade. Was just asking if you were really leaving us. After such a short time.”

  “All good things, George. Thought it time to get back to Asia.”

  “Back to Asia?”

  Stone, Rodney Baxter, my Hong Kong editor, and I had agreed on a cover story which had specifically not included me saying I worked in Asia. It also had not specifically said where I was from. Hadley, Stone and Baxter. Sounded like a dodgy law firm.

  “Actually, no.”

  “So where’re you from then, Perse?”

  So many questions from young George. I looked at him over his beer. About twenty-four, long blond hair, probably gay, living with his mum in Archway and listening to her Abba albums. Or was he a plant like me? A corporate spy? Looking for people who were looking for people who ran dodgy casinos in the Far East? All it would take would be a brief nod and a sniper, poised among the pigeons in the rooftops of Lower Charing Cross Road, could take me out.

  Anyway, where was I from? I could say anywhere, it wouldn’t matter. I wanted somewhere plausible, but not completely obvious. Somewhere that would shut him up.

  “Bratislava,” I said.

  “Say what?”

  “That is where I am from.” That would shut anyone up. No one had ever been to Bratislava.

  “Which part?” George asked.

  “Which part of what?”

  “Bratislava. That’s where I grew up.”

  The waitress delivered a third Old Speckled Boiler and I took a long pull. Let it work its magic. I knew nothing about Bratislava. I wouldn’t be abl
e to find it on a map. Right then, I wasn’t sure if it was a country or a city.

  I pressed on. “Originally we were from…”

  “Yes?”

  “Originally, I say, because we moved around quite a bit after that.”

  “Originally from where?”

  “You mean at first?”

  “Yes. Where are you from, Perse?”

  “Originally, we are from Brpt. Or were.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Brpt.”

  “Brpt? That’s a noise, that is. Not a place. That’s a burp.”

  “Brpt. It’s not a long ‘u’. In fact there isn’t a ‘u’. It’s spoken very abruptly.”

  “I’ve never heard of it.” George was getting a little agitated. “Where’s it near then?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Is it near anywhere I may have heard of?”

  “You mean as the crow flies?”

  “What?”

  “It’s quite near Prbt.”

  “Prbt? In Bratislava?”

  “In a straight line. Over the mountains and through fjords. The directions are a bit tricky by car. Again, there’s no ‘u’.”