The Ballad of a Small Player

by Lawrence Osborne

  “Really,” I insisted, but still drew my gloves back on.

  I didn’t want him to see the number because these boys have photographic memories. It must have seemed to him a cheap way for a lord to store what was in all probability a woman’s phone number. Scrawled on the hand, as a teenager would have done it. He attended to the Shuffle Master and I was surprised to see a few high rollers seat themselves at the table.

  “May we?” one of them asked.

  “I am playing one more hand,” I said.

  I heard the murmur go up: English bastard—playing one more hand—lucky tonight—

  “Very well, sir. How much are you betting?”

  “Everything.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely sure.”

  “Everything?”

  I repeated the word in English.

  It was those words that made me famous that night in Macau. Lord Doyle says absolutely sure!

  “Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen.”

  All my life I had been dreaming of a moment like this. Absolutely sure and filled with a creamy terror. The others were no doubt pressured by the same emotion. They closed in and their greed and fear reached a fever pitch in their faces. How many naturals can the luckiest Englishman ever pull off in a single night? Ah, do the math! Not six, not seven. The laws were against it.

  In that moment I thought of myself walking by a tow-path near Newhaven when I was a child. A path by the river Ouse, my father egging me on to swim across the narrow river to a rusted abandoned tanker on the far side and pick off a barnacle. Memories from elsewhere. I swam to the tanker and as I latched onto the weeds growing on the metal I began to sink, to drown, and the weeds came off in my hands and I couldn’t stay afloat except by hugging the rusted steel and I heard my father shouting to me from the bank, “No cowards in this family,” and there was a merry music of church bells from Piddinghoe nearby. “Fear no man,” my grandfather used to say in Latin. “No cowards in this family and no losers either: recall the regimental flags, old son.”

  A breeze of summer rot and sea salt and a life yet to begin, and I swam back with a barnacle in my fist. The cards were turned.

  “Natural.”

  “Nine wins, nine wins.”

  “Fuck!”

  The player nearest me exploded in heartfelt grief.

  “It’s the way it is,” I said coolly.

  The dealer stiffened like a napkin being tugged at both ends, his bow tie slightly askew, and while everyone else was consumed in the negative passion of the moment he made a slight gesture to me, depressing a thumb into the palm of his opposing hand, a smile of wan hatred spreading over his face.

  Five hundred ten thousand dollars richer, I made my way back to reception and gave over my bags after having the contents counted out for me. The bellhops eavesdropped and rubbed their hands with a mysterious gesture as they offered unnecessarily to show me to the elevators. The night managers couldn’t resist a few admiring remarks. The decrepit gwai lo they had known only a few hours ago had been replaced by the human equivalent of a phoenix. It was the power of Luck, and since it was what their palace had been built on, they were inclined to submit to its diktat.

  I summoned the receptionist who had pestered me before and with some ceremony apologized for it being a few minutes after midnight.

  “I was detained,” I said, “by a friend. I am sorry to have kept you waiting for a few minutes.”

  She, too, looked at her watch, and her face was all consternation and regret. Had she earlier managed to insult what was now a formidable client, and would her superiors notice the awkwardness of the gaffe? People were fired for less, for much less.

  “It’s quite all right, Lord Doyle. Thank you for remembering.”

  “Oh, I don’t forget a thing like that. I pay my debts.”

  “Yes, Lord Doyle.”

  I took out an imposing wad of dough and slapped it down on the counter.

  “Counted it out myself.”

  “Well, I don’t know what to say, Lord Doyle.”

  “Just call me Lord if you like. It’s my pleasure.”

  She hesitated. Was it a gwai lo joke?

  The cash was grubby but it was cash. It was their cash.

  “I’m sorry if I was impertinent before,” she said. “It was management’s orders.”

  “Quite understood. I’ve decided to ask for a larger room. A suite perhaps. Do you have any suites?”

  “Of course we do, Lord Doyle.”

  “Then get me a suite if you can.”

  “We can move you tomorrow if that is satisfactory.”

  “I suppose it’ll have to be.”

  “I can move you at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  “I want gold taps on the bath.”

  We laughed; it is such a well-known Chinese vice, the gold taps.

  “No problem,” she assured me.

  I wondered what other petty revenge I could exact upon her at this point, but none came to mind so I wished her a good night and went to the basement mall and bought a cigar. The relojerias were open and I went into a few to try on some Piaget watches. It was, to say the least, a novel experience. I couldn’t quite afford them just yet, but I had to savor the way the salesmen came tumbling over to fawn upon me. I said I wanted diamonds in there somewhere, perhaps around the face but certainly not on the band. “Try them on,” they cried, “try them on!” In the end, however, I couldn’t make up my mind and went watchless for my Horlicks and chocolate cake. I sat at an outer table so the high-class Mongolians could see me and lit my Havana. It was, in our humble terms, the kind of moment for which we addicts live but which I had never experienced before with such fullness. Nine times nine was a cosmic run if I had ever heard of one, and it could not be repeated, I was sure of that. By the same token I was also sure that it had never happened before. And perhaps I would never have to play the tables ever again. I could retire.

  Just at that moment, though, I wondered to myself what would have happened if I had played a tenth hand. Would I have won with a tenth nine?

  I even thought of going up to the Mona Lisa and trying it, just to remove the nagging doubt. I thought about it, but in the end I controlled the urge. It was too much, and sometimes one has to not know. And when all was said and done I was fine as I was. At one o’clock in the morning I was a Midas in the Noite e Dia, and everyone knew of my nines. Men stopped at my table and congratulated me in Chinese. They asked me what my secret was and who I was praying to. When I said no one, they didn’t believe me but they were too polite to object. It seemed as if I was concealing a secret, and some of them merely passed the table and held up a signing hand and said gao, nine, as if that were enough to establish an understanding. And at length I took off my gloves.

  FIFTEEN

  The following day I decided not to gamble for a few hours. After moving to the suite with the gold taps, I assembled my winnings in my room and counted them out note by note, with a relish bordering on miserly precision. I then packed it all in a single Adidas bag bought for the purpose and put it under my bed. Why I did this I was not sure, but I was convinced that the attitude of the Lisboa toward me had now changed as a result of my brief run of luck and the reputation it had generated for me. Sure, they had moved me to a suite with gold taps, but good luck for me was bad luck for them, and I was certain that management had instructed the staff to be a little less friendly and helpful to me than they had been before.

  When I went to the Galera for lunch there was a frost in the air. The waiters eyed me coldly and their politeness was formulaic. In the lobby the staff gave me a similar treatment, though I daresay it was preferable to being hunted like a rat in debt. Of course, one can too easily become paranoid, and I was perhaps too sensitive after the strange events of the preceding night, which could be chalked up to the fluctuations of chance and nothing more. But the Chinese, I knew, wouldn’t see it that way.

  I walked that afternoon afte
r lunch to the Se Cathedral. Around the little square, the wet palms, the yellow bishop’s villa with its green shutters, and the mosaic pavements with a monochrome solar disk. There was usually no one in the church but a few elderly Chinese ladies kneeling in the pews, and it was no different now. I sat there with my dripping umbrella trying to clear my head between the pale green apse and the blue glass windows, and I knew that I needed to be in a Christian place like the churches of my childhood, and to listen to the voice that always emerged inside me whenever I was before an altar. I was developing the somber idea that I was not in command of events in the normal way, and that this flow that I have already described was something I could not steer in any particular direction. What attracted me to this idea was that it relieved me of any responsibility for defying the laws of mathematics. Any explanation for my winning streak was magical and therefore oppressive. Either it had to be explained rationally at some point, and could not be, or it could never be explained at all, in which case I was stepping into an unknown land inhabited by centaurs, hunchbacks, and drooling elves.

  That’s how it is. You enter the dreamland of nutters and you get to like it and you find it convincing and soon enough you stay. You become magical, which is a terrible thing to be. All of Western civ is against you. You give Western civ the middle finger and before you know it you’ve become an oriental faun. You’ve grown a tail and snout and you pray to goddesses. You smell like a box of camphor.

  Fragmentation, slow and silent. The old women kneeling before their Portuguese god who is no longer there. I sat in the aisles to the left side of the nave and looking up I saw a bas-relief panel showing Christ Falling for the Second Time. Jesus Cai Pela Secunda Vez. I lit a candle and prayed for a tenth nine, a coup de grâce. I swore I would stake everything on it.

  For dinner I went to the Clube Militar near the Lisboa. It’s the former Portuguese officers’ mess now converted into one of the few genuinely European restaurants on the territory. Around its pale pink walls lies a garden of terraces and palms and fountains, where I often used to pass my empty afternoons. To one side rises the Calcada Dos Quarteis, at the top of which is a square surrounded by more of the pink military buildings. Giant ficus trees burst through the walls of the Jardim de S. Francisco. Inside, the Clube’s wainscoting and fans and dusty bottles of Quinta dos Roques were what I wanted. The staff put a screen around me while I ate their dim sum with clams and their baccalau asada, and among those white columns and faded mirrors I felt as alone as I had always aspired to be but had never managed to be. It was the solitude of the leper, the success.

  As I sat there with all the pomp and circumstance of a coffee plantation owner, I was changing hour by hour into something I had always wanted to be but never had been. I could see it when I looked down at my own fingers grasping the edge of a napkin or the stem of a glass. My fingers looked white and elongated, smooth and refined, and the little hairs on their backs seemed to have vanished as if they had been waxed. I was growing more sensitive to my surroundings, my senses becoming more acute. I was sure of it. The wine tasted like the best wine I had ever drunk. The rolls were the best rolls. Everyone smiled at me. The doll-like waiters in their aprons, the girls wheeling the dessert trolleys, the government officials eating urchins with their mistresses. I had been turned inside out, from failure to Lucky Man, and the conversion made me supernatural, especially to myself.

  I walked down the Patio do Gil with banknotes crushed in my pockets. Down Felicidade, or Happiness, where the whorehouses used to be but which is now filled with tea shops and windows of sticky buns. Misted banyans with dripping trailers, faces like disappointed dough, the dim sum plates salty with clams as small as keyholes. I resolved to get myself some new suits made, dandy affairs with waistcoats and satin linings that matched the stripes—more lordly if you like—and some Church’s shoes in Hong Kong. The prospect of money about to materialize in the very near future has this effect upon the mind, making it soft and dreamy and forward-looking, and this was what happened as I went down Felicidade. I walked forward into the future, where I felt I belonged, and indeed I stepped quietly into it in my slippers.

  I walked around the city for an hour, and an hour takes you a long way in Old Macau. The sidewalks with their monochrome mosaics, like those of a Roman villa, and covered with black signs—shells, sea horses, lobsters, galleons, and stars. The dead leaves drifting across them like shoals of tiny fish. The center was emptied because of the weather and the Fujian temples were as solitary as the churches, the incense burners dampened and giving off an odor of flowers and earth. Down long Repubblica, which is like a boulevard in Lisbon or Madrid, and which has always seemed as rich in mysterious signs to me as any astrologer’s den. I always pause for a moment under the wonderfully named Banco Ultramarino, for example, or those wall signs that warn of the dangers of high tension cables with the grave words Perigo de Morte. These things seem to mean more to me than they should. Even on those hot summer days when I have lingered at the bottom of the grand staircase of the Colegio de Santa Rosa de Lima and watched as two lines of schoolgirls in white uniforms came pouring down them under a mass of matching white parasols—it seemed to me magical in some way, a portent of something to come that I could not yet divine. I would find out one day perhaps. On, then, to the Hong Kung temple, set behind a tiny square, with its boxed trees and dark red altars, and then to the Yeng Kee Bakery on Cinco de Outubro, where I used to eat for a few patacas a day. I remember living on the beef jerky of Pastelaria Koi Kei, on egg custard tarts and little else, and I certainly recalled those grim and grimy days as I walked on to the far side, where the ferries and cruise ships dock, and to the tail end of Felicidade and endless side streets arranged like a jigsaw puzzle that has no master plan to unlock it. Sometimes one needs to walk while eating biscuits and counting one’s own steps. I lingered by those strange small hotels where girls can be seen lounging on the lobby seats waiting for secretive clients. Places like the Pension Forson. You look through the window and you see an old Chinese man standing there with his waterproof coat and his briefcase inspecting the goods, impassive and matter-of-fact, while the goddesses fawn all over him. I would go in and be told politely that I was the wrong race. No ghosts here, thank you. But I could catch the girls’ eyes all the same, and sometimes I would be let in and I would spend an hour drinking jasmine tea from little bowls and a delicate pot painted with dragons and making love to a sly one from Guangdong, with that skin like compacted wax. How many down and out nights had I spent in those fleapits, the Hotel Hong Thai and the Man Va, whose sign still hung ominously above the street, and the Vila Universal and the East Asia Hotel, with its desolate fish tanks visible from the street, at the bottom of which lay dying perch in their gloom. The East Asia was on the Rua da Madeira, and the restaurant on its ground floor was alive with shabby and satanic red lanterns. Many nights were lost there. A sign on the window read WELCOME TO STAY WITH US, WE ALWAYS NIS YOU. And all the time I was thinking of the number nine.

  I thought about it as I trudged down Marques looking at the waters of the Inner Harbor. Eight is the lucky number in Chinese, not nine (though a natural can be an eight as well), and I could not think why nine had come to be my number. Was there something buried in my own mind that had risen to claim it? Or was it something that had come from me?

  On my way back along the Avenida de Almeida Ribeiro I wondered what would happen if I stopped at one of the large casinos and made a single bet with $1,000 HK. I had not considered doing this because I had resolved to have the day off. But the more I thought about it, the more I found the idea irresistible. Yes, I thought, I could leave off for twenty hours, but then again I could just go in right now and get my fix, and what of it? Just one bet. Just one bet before bed, for after all, life is short and much shorter than you think. To think it over I stopped in Senado Square, where the dampened teenagers milled around the stores, and went into an establiemento de bebidas for a quick oolong. It was about eleven o’clo
ck by then and the lights were looking spectral, the balls of white glass burning with bright futility in that drizzle and social emptiness, and I sat by the window with my tea and saw that my hand was still emblazoned with Dao-Ming’s number, which had still not worn off. I suppose an abnormal amount of time had gone by without my thinking about this anomaly, but now that I considered it again I was stumped by the ink’s intransigence inside my skin. I looked at it more closely and rubbed at it with a dampened napkin, which made no effect upon it. It was like a tattoo.

  The numbers were 6890 0899. I had not even thought about calling this number, because the thief doesn’t call the person he’s abused. I’d never use it. What would I say if I did? How would I apologize? I spat on the skin and rubbed the numerals yet again, but the saliva remained uncolored. I wondered how long I had been asleep in her bed. Days perhaps.

  I gulped back my tea and fought the unrest that seemed to be rushing into me, and under my tattered umbrella I walked quickly past the Metropole toward the Avenida Doutor Mario Soares, telling myself that the dumbest thing I could do was call that number. She had burned it into my skin so that I would not forget her, and I didn’t know she had done it, but it was a woman’s ideal revenge, wasn’t it? She had used magic ink and her number was ineradicable on a vital and visible part of my body, from where it apparently could not be removed.

  Halfway down Soares I came to the Grand Emperor, with a gilded replica of the British royal state carriage outside it and Beefeaters in fur hats filling a vestibule of cretinous gilt. It’s the kitschiest of the gaming palaces on the island, and there is something in its kitsch that reminds you that there is more to being alive than being alive. But what?