The Ballad of a Small Player

by Lawrence Osborne

  I stopped and swung myself around and through the doors that were opened for me, and into a cool imitation of some Hans Christian Andersen fairy palace imagined by a small child with a high fever who has seen many a picture of Cinderella. I passed under an imposing but strangely sympathetic portrait of Queen Liz and another of the Duke of Cumberland, a bad-looking dude if I may say, and as I went I fingered the very thousand-dollar note I was going to use. The Emperor was not as crowded as the Lisboa, and there was elbow room. I calmed down. Even an alcoholic can be calm at the bar.

  I took the escalators up through floor after floor decorated in a European aristocracy theme. Passing the British floor (horses and pale women), I settled for the Venetian level, with myriad images of the age of Casanova, which is to say scenes with swooning inhabitants of boudoirs, weeping over handkerchiefs, and of candlelit gallantries around baccarat tables. A memory of another secretive gambling city, intricate and comfortable as a large salon. But here in this particular casino I knew no one at all, since I rarely came there. I passed myself in mirror after mirror, and as I checked out the distorted face that was, surprisingly, my own, I inspected the space around me to see if any ghosts were there. In that rush of overdone opulence, it would have been less surprising. I walked through rooms defined by ebony figurine lamps, silk sashes, and gold frames, where men in windowpane jackets and out-sized rings loafed about on Louis XV sofas, and soon I came to a table that looked quite active and charged, with youngsters having a ball. It looked like a party. The cards here were dispensed by a traditional shoe, and the chips were pearled and multicolored. A pall of smoke hung above the table. I sat and said in Cantonese that I’d like to play a hand, and the youth looked up with distasteful surprise at my command of their slang and the social subtexts that go with it. They appeared weary at the idea of having to accommodate me, let alone lose to me at the table.

  “Okay, welcome,” the dealers said, and passed the shoe toward me for the beginning of the next hand. I didn’t have my gloves with me, and I felt a little out of place touching the backs of the cards without the usual intervening material. But it didn’t matter. I kept the ink numbers well hidden.

  I was only laying down a thousand by way of an experiment, and it was really to see what would happen with the hand that I was dealt. I was brimming with this curiosity, which was more than curiosity. I was proving something to myself—namely, that I was not haunted by the spirit world. That my luck was my own and not the gift of ghosts. Because if it was the latter I would be a candidate for the psychiatric hospital. The shoe passed down the table and the players sat back for a moment and flexed their fingers and minds. The kids looked me over. I was still rain-specked and semielegant but a tad worse for wear. There must have been something about me that suggested an overeagerness. They could not, however, know the real heat rising inside me. My feet tapped. It was caused by happiness at being back at a table. I looked across the room and saw Casanova staring back at me from behind a white mask. The pallet flipped. I looked at my watch. “So,” the banker said quickly. “The gentleman has drawn a natural. Nine! Nine!”

  Glasses of naughty lemonade with straws appeared on waitered trays to make them forget their momentary misfortune. I raked in the chips. It was a modest haul, and I said I wouldn’t play on.

  The banker said, “Very well,” and motioned to a staff member to take me to the cashier’s window. I got up and straightened my jacket and walked behind the man to the window, causing the mantle of smoke above me to oscillate and divide. The room was deathly quiet now as I counted my money and pocketed it. I took the escalator back to the lobby. The Beefeaters with Chinese eyes saluted as I walked to the doors. When I got there I was out of breath, burning with thirst. As I made my way out into the street I had to hold my throat. In the soft, insidious rain a woman walked past the gates, a secretary on her way home perhaps. She wore a raincoat with water stains and a strictly tightened belt. Without thinking, I stepped toward her, holding out the money I had won, the notes crushed inside my fist like a handful of trash. We stopped as we almost collided and her face changed from blankness to alarm, her eyes widening into soft black holes. I begged her to take the money. She stammered, perhaps considered whether it might be lucky or unlucky money, and then shook her head, walking on with a quick “Thank you, but no,” in English. For a moment I was sure that she, too, had glimpsed a ghost standing behind me. I turned and my heart was beating quickly. So here was a city where you couldn’t even hand out free money. You couldn’t even make a gift of it to a stranger.

  I dove into the night having forgotten my umbrella, and soon after I went to a bar at the Venetian for a nightcap. It seemed to me then that I was doing something entirely automatic, and that the night itself was merely a joke, a pretext for being endlessly alive and unreal and lucky.

  SIXTEEN

  As I was sitting there with my mai tai, oblivious to the gondolas and the wedding parties and the slabs of venison glistening under halogens some distance away, I ran into (after all our near misses) the lugubrious Adrian Lipett, who was there gambling with his latest conquest. As I have said, I knew Adrian quite well. We borrowed money from each other and compared notes on our lucky and unlucky casinos. Like McClaskey, I saw him sometimes at the Canidrome throwing irrational bets at dogs with names like Lucky Bride and Purple Streak. He was a born loser, but he managed to survive and he always had a girl on his arm. He usually told them that he was a baronet and it worked well for a week or so, which was enough, and then when they were disillusioned he would move on to the next, for there are thousands and unlike us they do not compare notes.

  He wore a tacky Singapore suit spattered with rain like mine and a wilted buttonhole peering out like a puffed and beaten eye. For that matter, his whole face looked like a puffed and beaten eye. If he’d had a nickname it would have been the Eye. He was always on the lookout for scams. He had his Chinese girl on his arm, indistinguishable from the last one, and he was on yet another predictably tragic losing streak in the grand confines of the Venetian, which flattered both his vanity and his senses without giving anything back. He came sidling up with the girl—unsteady after a few vodkas, I imagine—and clapped a hand on my shoulder as he pulled a look of friendship grievously wounded and betrayed.

  “You’ve been hiding, Doyle. No one has seen you anywhere. This is Yo Yo. Yo Yo, this is Lord Doyle.”

  “Oh, Lor Doy?”

  I bowed for her.

  “At your service, ma’am.”

  It immediately crossed Yo Yo’s infernally calculating mind that I might be a better long-term bet than the sodden Englishman she was so temporarily attached to, and I noticed a sudden detachment from his arm in my favor.

  “Lord Doyle,” Lipett said, “I have been at the tables for three hours and I thought Yo Yo was going to bring me luck tonight. No such thing. She has been a disaster all along.”

  Not understanding, she smiled sweetly.

  “I have gone from catastrophe to catastrophe. Who can understand it? Last night it was all going so well. I walked away from the Landmark with three thousand in pocket.”

  “Yeah, it’s a bitchy world.”

  “Yo Yo here made us both pray to the Goddess of Luck, but it only made it worse. The thing is, you know they enrich the air with oxygen? I feel high in here. I feel like a million quid. I can’t stop.”

  “You seem to have the cash for it, Adrian.”

  “Why, that’s just the problem, old man. I can feel that there’s a change of luck just around the corner. I can practically taste it with my tongue. You know that feeling. You of all people, Doyle.”

  “I can’t lend you what you need. I shouldn’t be lending anything, it’s my retirement money.”

  His eyes lit up.

  “Retirement? You’re out? But nobody gets out unless they go broke and are deported. And that’s the funny thing. None of us goes entirely broke. We always have just enough to hang on.”

  Life as perpetual debt, I t
hought. Until we hit it big. Then we’re out.

  The look of despair that crossed his face was priceless.

  “Have you hit it that big,” he whispered out of hearing of his blinking date. “Is it all true? Millions at the Fortuna VIP?”

  “I can’t disclose all the details—but yeah, you cunt, my luck changed at long last and say what you will but I deserved it.”

  “Shit, shit. Did you pray to that damn goddess of theirs that they all swear by?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Superstitious peasants. I knew it.”

  His fists clenched, his knuckles white with envy.

  “Doyle, you were the biggest loser of all. I can’t understand it.”

  “That’s why it’s called luck.”

  “What?”

  “Luck, it’s luck.”

  “No, no. There’s no such thing as luck. You turned a corner. Look, we have to stick together. We’re all ghosts as far as they’re concerned. We don’t even exist. Even my own girlfriend calls me a ghost to her friends. Can you imagine? On the phone to her friends she says, ‘I can’t talk right now, I have a ghost here.’ We represent nothing to them whatsoever, except evil ghosts. Scavengers, opium traders, and the like. Look around you. They love all this crap, they can’t stay away from it. But they still hate us in some way.”

  “They don’t hate us.”

  “Look at it, it’s just Vegas redux. Literally. They love it and we are suffering in it because we are ill.”

  “Come on, have a drink. I’ll lend you.”

  “You will? Bastard of truest joy! I knew you were a soft touch deep down, your lordship. Gotcha.”

  “I am. I’m sentimental.”

  I turned to the barman.

  “Two Johnnie Walkers, no ice.”

  We leaned on the bar and Yo Yo went off to dance somewhere. We were the unhealthiest-looking people there, because to Chinese punters the Venetian is the last word in swanky American glamour and respectability. Yes, respectability. It is smoke-free, orderly, spacious, and clean. They don’t fine you for spitting here, they throw you out. These Vegas establishments are the very opposite of their Chinese counterparts, which at least have retained the louche tolerance of ages past. The Vegas casinos are clean and overblown, with palatial dimensions and vacuumed carpets. They are as family-clean and bright as their originals in the Nevada desert, and in them the insalubrious aspects of gambling are put to the back of one’s mind. The gambler here is a child in a playground diverted by toys and games. The Venetian is the world’s largest casino, and its baccarat tables are set in columned halls with fountains and frescoed ceilings and cypress trees. Parts of it are like a Baroque church, with glasslike marble floors. Painted cupolas, awed crowds, floodlit capitals. Adrian liked to come here because it impressed his dates, and because he could walk them around the real-sized campanile. A place where dreams are realized, the executives have always said, and Adrian seemed to take them at their word. He liked the Bellini and the bar we were in now, the Florian, under the escalators leading up to the Grand Canal Shoppes, and I imagine that he spent hours here sipping Chivas Regal and mulling the disasters that awaited him at the innumerable tables nearby. One’s demise is always a spectacle. He looked slightly flustered now as he drained his Black Label and eyed the human glow of the tables, where a crowd worthy of the Colosseum was assembled. He was defeated for the night and yet his animal spirits had been revived by the promise of a sudden gift from my pocket.

  “Look here,” he said, in his grubby private-school way, the locutions of the past revived in the East without fear of mockery, “how much can you make it tonight? The lads say you made three million at the Hou Kat Club. Very handy. You can be philosophical.”

  “It’s not true, but I can spare you three thousand.”

  “Three thousand Hong Kong? That’s barely three hundred fifty U.S. You can do better than that.”

  “It’s what I have on me. Besides it’s for your own good. You’ll lose it in thirty minutes.”

  “Will I? Says who?”

  “I know.”

  “Yes, you’re quite the bloody expert now, aren’t you? But it’s just luck, Doyle. There’s nothing mystical about it.”

  “I could make it four thousand.”

  He squinted and bit his lower lip.

  “I have another idea,” he said quietly. “What if you lend me the money and then play it for me?”

  “What?”

  “You heard. What if you play the hand for me and then give me the winnings. Okay, I’ll give you a ten percent cut. That’s fair.”

  I laughed in his face.

  “No need to laugh, old man.”

  His voice was bitter and unstable.

  “That’s a mad scheme, Adrian. Downright insolent. But you know what? I’m going to accept.”

  “You are?”

  His face lit up with satisfaction.

  “Yes, I’m going to accept because it’s just so humiliating to you that I can’t resist. But if I lose the hand you have to pay me the ten percent of whatever we lose.”

  “Balls,” he spluttered.

  “Take it or leave it.”

  He chewed it over while laboring through a second drink, then said, reluctantly, “All right, I’ll do it. I’ll do it as a favor to you.”

  “A favor?”

  “Yes. Since you’ve been a gentleman about it, I don’t mind doing it just this once. I’m showing confidence in you, don’t you see? I’m accepting it as a way of saying thank you.”

  “It’s sweet of you, Adrian.”

  “Can we make it five percent, though?”

  “Ten. But you know I’ll win.”

  He licked his lips uncertainly. When money is the only thing that bonds two men together, this is what happens. Everything becomes symbolic. Human relations boil down to their rotten core.

  “You don’t say anything about it to Yo Yo, understand?”

  “I have one question, Adrian. If you play everything and I lose it, what will you pay the ten percent with?”

  “Ah, bastard of you. So I have to keep a bit back?”

  “It would be prudent or you’ll lose a comrade.”

  “I could pay you back next week.”

  “Adrian, we don’t say things like that. You have what you have now. You don’t have a pot to piss in otherwise.”

  His pride was stung and he swore, stepping back and bumping inadvertently into the bar.

  “Got me by the balls, have you? I have the wedding ring. It’s worth two thousand U.S.”

  I clicked my fingers to the barman.

  “Two more, boss. No ice. How pissed shall we get, Adrian?”

  “Bloody pissed.”

  “All right, one more down the hatch and then we’ll go play.”

  “Bastards,” he said broodily, shaking his head. But to whom was he referring? “I got a ring from Cartier and she threw it in my face. Those were the days. The little bitch. But I have the ring. I can pawn it. I’m not down and out with a ring like that in my pocket.”

  “No one stays with anyone forever,” I said to comfort him.

  “Yeah, but that bitch was one of a kind. She took every penny I had.”

  “She left you the ring.”

  “It’s a good ring, but I’m saving it for a rainy day.”

  Isn’t this a rainy day? I thought. A day of downpours.

  We set off into the wilderness of a thousand tables. I was feeling wild myself, and I wanted to do something fine for this declining man who had so little to cling to in his life outside his addiction. We came to a table in the center of the floor where a group of Hong Kong girls were losing their money with good humor and Adrian, attracted by the energy of the opposite sex, sat himself down emphatically among them, though with a melancholy invisibility. He then got up and gave the seat to me, remembering our arrangement.

  “It feels lucky to me,” he whispered. “I can feel the vibe.”

  The bankers didn’t recognize me
, nor I them. Adrian stood behind me as a spectator and we both felt like a team of some kind. I split his money into three bets, much against his will, and played the first hand with a calm that transmitted itself to the girls. They calmed down as well and began to play more seriously. It was a quick hand with the highest wagers turning the cards first, according to tradition. Adrian craned over my shoulder to see what was happening, and when I turned a baccarat, a zero, he gave a start and muttered a quiet “Fuck!” I leaned back and felt ecstatic. So it was over at last. My run had run out—and never had that curious phrase seemed more appropriate. Luck indeed was like something that runs and then grows a little tired, and then falls down from exhaustion.

  I turned to Adrian and shrugged, and he had to yield the ten percent we had agreed on.

  “Shall we go on?” I asked.

  It was a dilemma for him, I could see, and not one that he wanted to find himself in. It’s me, he was thinking, it’s me and my filthy luck. I can’t get away from it.

  “One more by you,” he said at last. It was worth a try.

  “Fine,” I said coolly.

  He gripped the back of the chair. I turned a two and a three, and was beaten handily by a girl at the far end of the table.

  “What?” Adrian snorted.

  After handing over the second ten percent cut, he demanded angrily to play the last hand himself.

  I watched the whole thing impassively.

  “The least I can do,” he muttered, “is lose it myself.”

  And he did so, turning a terrible hand. It happened in a split second, and Adrian’s brief moment of revived hope expired. The girls laughed out loud, experimental winners for a moment.

  I put a hand on his shoulder and called it a night. He rose slowly and gave me the last of the chump change as my cut, but I refused it.

  “Keep it for drinks with Yo Yo. Get laid, at least.”

  “Cheers, old man. But I can’t get laid now. I feel suicidal.”

  “Written in the stars,” I said.

  We walked slowly in defeat back to the Florian, though of course for me it was not entirely a defeat. I never thought I’d celebrate the end of a lucky streak as anything but a misfortune, but I did and it felt unexpectedly sweet. We went upstairs to the mall and walked around for a while to cool off, and Adrian bitterly lamented his bad luck, his lack of sau hei. There was nothing for it, he complained, but to go back to Nottingham and ask his mother for a loan. It was a lamentable plan, I said, and one that was bound to fail. One’s mother was always the worst person to turn to in a scrape.