The Ballad of a Small Player

by Lawrence Osborne

  NINETEEN

  I was 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.

  I put down a hundred twenty thousand this time and won again. The bankers shot each other unsubtle looks and I played two hands of fifty thousand each. Stiff hands that in normal times would have to be played fearlessly. But I had neither fear nor the lack of fear. I was strung out in between. The first fifty-thousand-dollar hand was matched by the others, who were wealthier than they looked. No one could believe that a player would turn three naturals in a row.

  It was like those famous streaks of red that are known at roulette tables. The ball falls on red for eleven times in a row and the punters, confronted with a twelfth spin, must decide whether there is a statistical law that favors a twelfth red or a black. But ah, there is no such thing as a statistical law when it comes to chance. A pair of dice can fall as two sixes ten times in a row and no law has been broken. If they rolled as sixes a hundred times in a row we’d be astonished—dismayed, even—but no law will have been turned upside down. There is nothing that says the roulette ball cannot fall on red seventeen times in a row (as it does sometimes) or fifty-two times.

  I believe a wheel at the Monte Carlo casino in 1897 rolled eighteen reds in a row and a German gambler made a small fortune on the eighteenth because nobody else around him dared bet on red. That man held his nerve. I had now played fourteen naturals in a row, and like that streak of reds my streak of nines was simply coasting along in its aberrant groove. It was one of those things, and the trick was to not succumb to any surprise. I didn’t. I played the hand as if it were the first I had ever played. I turned the cards and asked the banker to bag the chips I had won. There was nothing to it, and the spectators went silent in recognition of its inevitability.

  Instead of playing the whole amount I’d taken out with me, I cashed in the chips I’d won and placed the united amount in my suitcase. I went upstairs to the lobby of the Landmark hotel and had a pot of tea, opening the case for a moment to look at the rows of banknotes wrapped in rubber bands. It was now about eight o’clock and I was still feeling feverish. Indeed, these attacks of fever were beginning to increase in frequency. I wondered if the Paiza was open at such an early hour. I walked there without any haste and was told that the pits were open twenty-four hours. Therefore, if I wanted to make some bets I could certainly do so, and for any amount I wanted. There was no question of their not remembering me from the previous time. I was shown to one of their private rooms and served another breakfast. I made four bets and an hour later I had won a few million more. The cash filled four cases and I walked out with them as casually as a wealthy housewife walking out of Bloomingdale’s with her shopping.

  A car was waiting for me at the doors and they wished me a hasty return with at least some show of genuine hospitality. I went back to the Lisboa and stashed the cases next to the others.

  It was now obvious to me that my sport and pastime was going through cyclical patterns that were deeper than the usual ups and downs that a player must expect to endure. Bouts of indulgence and triumph were followed by periods of satiation, self-disgust, a determination to desist that had nothing to do with the feelings one experiences during losses. These latter periods of abeyance were getting longer, so that I didn’t at all mind cruising from day to day without any visit to the tables at all, and while I lay in my pompous Lisboa bed surrounded by scarlet and gold I read the financial papers with an eye to investing the millions of kwai I had earned.

  Investing, however, is a big word. I had never had any ideas about that before. I had fully expected to go to seed, and decline in the way that men going to seed decline, day by day, a slow declension marked by ever-diminishing wealth. Winning over and over had seemed like a realistic prospect, and when I won or lost before I had savored both in different ways. Now, of course, everything had changed. The winnings had piled up and they were rapidly approaching the point at which they would render the whole exercise pointless, if the point of it was to win money. Moreover, my health was clearly going into a decline that I could not explain. Fevers, chills, insatiable hunger, none of which had any obvious cause. I reasoned to myself that these were purely psychological, but even if they were psychological, that did not make them any less real. I was sure that I was entering a mental breakdown of some kind, but no two mental breakdowns are ever the same. To the person suffering one, the breakdown always seems slightly unreal. It feels inexplicable.

  I speculated on what I could do now if I decided to give up the baccarat lifestyle (for that is what it is) and devote myself to deep-sea fishing, Ming antiques, or Chinese-style ballroom dancing, not to mention real estate and travel. I wondered if I could haul the entire stash of cash across the border using a paid smuggling service, the existence of which was taken as certain in gaming circles. Could I get to Shenzen or even Kunming and disappear all over again, this time loaded with a considerable fortune? Could I stage my own disappearance with enough subtlety that it would ensure that I was left alone to start a new life? But where would I go?

  There was Dao-Ming, of course. It had begun to occur to me that I was happiest with her on her island and that I could go back to it and to her. It would not matter if we did nothing for the rest of our lives, just lived in that small house and ate clams every night and made do. It would not be bad; it would be better than anything else. It was possible that I would become like her, a ghost with a place to haunt.

  But I knew that it would not happen. I had to turn to other ideas. I thought, in all seriousness, of buying a hotel in Sichuan and becoming one of those absent owners who rake in the profits from a mini golf course while living in a villa by the coast staffed with teenage girls. But it would never happen. And then there was the idea of moving on to another Asian fleshpot. These are the places where Western men come to die. They are our fleshy death-pots. But first there was the here and now. One morning there was a commotion outside my door and when I went out to investigate I was immediately surrounded by a crowd of local journalists, one of whom had a camera and a boom. They had obviously been waiting there all night, perhaps with their ears pressed to my door.

  “Lord Doyle!” they cried, scrambling to their feet and following me down the corridor toward the elevators.

  “Lord
Doyle,” a young woman cried in particular. Attractive, Chinese, bangs, high heels, notepad.

  “I am not Lord Doyle.”

  “Oh, Lord Doyle, can we—”

  They blocked the elevators and the cameras rolled.

  Lord Doyle, an English gentleman of means, yesterday won seventeen million Hong Kong dollars at the Macau casinos. Gamblers from all over the city clamored to meet him. What is his secret? How does he play? Is he calm or passionate? He speaks Chinese!

  “How old are you, Lord Doyle? Can you do math?”

  I held a hand up to block the lens.

  “You’re potty,” I said. “I’m not Lord Doyle. There is no Lord Doyle.”

  “Lord Doyle, are you a Sagittarius?”

  “Who told you I was a Sagittarius?”

  “So you are Lord Doyle!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I am Mr. Doyle.”

  They all laughed uproariously.

  “Lord Doyle, are you a lucky man? Do you pray? Do you eat chicken? Is your mother a Protestant?”

  “You can’t film me!”

  And indeed that was a dangerous thing.

  “Are you superstitious? Tell us about the number nine. Do you organize your life around the number nine?”

  We crammed into the elevator and I had not even intended to use the elevator. I was being carried along by the momentum and I wanted to escape. So down we went, with the camera rolling and the journalists jammering. I gave up telling them that I was not a lord. They wanted a lord and I was the lord. Word had gotten around so insistently that I was the lord that in the end I simply had to be the lord. As the lord I had to behave in a certain way, and it was a great deal more hassle to not behave in that way. So I saw now (as we came down into the lobby and a small crowd of curious onlookers pressed forward to get a glimpse of me) that sooner or later I would just get on with being the lord and that would be easier. The onlookers were gamers who had gotten the word, and since every big winner is a fifteen-minute celebrity in Casinoworld they had to see what the fuss was all about. They pressed around me and asked for autographs or tips or words of encouragement and advice and soon I was brought to a standstill as they formed a closed circle around the news crew.

  “Lord Doyle,” the reporter continued to press, “are you planning to play tonight at one of the casinos? We’ve heard that you’ve been banned from playing at the Lisboa. Is that true?”

  “No comment.”

  “Lord Doyle, how does it feel to be an English millionaire in a Chinese city?”

  “I am glad there are still English millionaires.”

  I said it in Chinese, and the whole room laughed.

  “Are you planning to leave Macau?”

  “I’m a private citizen, and I am just as surprised by my good fortune as you are.”

  “Lord Doyle,” a voice asked from the back of the crowd, “is it true the casinos are robbing us?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Because,” the reporter interjected, “your success seems to suggest it.”

  A few voices rose up: “Yes! They’re robbing us!”

  The crowd bubbled with an incoherent ill will toward the bosses who took all their money, and the epicenter of this ill will was a goodwill toward me. They practically cheered me as I pushed out onto the street, and the crew followed me with the foam boom hovering above my head. “Look,” I heard a voice cry behind us, “Lord Doyle is headed toward the Fortuna!” This was incorrect, and in fact as soon as I was in the street I hailed a cab and went to Coloane for lunch at Fernando’s on the windswept little beach across from the Hyatt. There I stayed all day eating asado and drinking gin and tonics and when dusk fell I staggered across the beach, through the tangled volleyball nets, to the imposing hotel, where I got myself a room for the night and spent half of it watching the English Premier League. I was sure that sooner or later my face would appear on TV as well, on one of the local channels, and as soon as it did it would be well nigh certain that Interpol would take an interest. At that moment, ironically, I would have to run.

  The intricate cycles of the monsoons, which I have never understood, blew a storm across the bay that night and the cedars and pines shuddered under a veiled moon. I lay in bed burning hundred-dollar notes with a cigarette lighter to see if it would make me feel ill. The hotel was empty, funereal, and I walked through empty halls and empty restaurants where the usual Japanese and Hong Kongers were absent. Paranoia is often like this, and in an empty place we are sure that we are being watched. The waiters, the despondent staff, the idle cooks, they all follow one with their eyes. I sat in the bar upstairs, the one with a sea-view balcony, and I tried to construct a plan for myself. The reality was that the more money I made, the more trapped I felt. Should I play on and on until doomsday, until I started losing again and balance was restored? This is how a hardened gambler would think. It doesn’t matter to him, because what matters is the roller coaster, the wind in his hair, the thrill. He plays until he runs out of money.

  When I got back to the Lisboa in the morning there was a bouquet of flowers for me in the room and a note from the management. They hoped I would stay on even if I could not play the tables. They had some nerve, but as it happened I had nowhere else to go and my suite was as good as I would get. They apologized for the intrusion from the press. From then on, they assured me, security would deal with it.

  Why not, then? The suite was now full of money; bales of it, cases of it, dressers crammed with it. I kept some in the bathroom, some in the cupboards, and the big bills in the digital safe. I stored two cases in the overhead compartments of the armoire and another in the TV cabinet. The air smelled of it, that soft stale scent of human hand sweat and ATM rollers. Cash, the blood of life.

  Eventually, having calmed myself with a vat of Kahlúa, my mind turned back to the prospect of the tables and I felt the subtle tug of my pleasure exerting itself once again. I was aware, of course, that the executives thought they were obeying mathematical laws when they permitted me to play on, whereas in fact they were succumbing to a classic case of gambler’s fallacy—that is, the fallacy that if deviations from expected behavior are observed in the short term, they must be balanced out by a different outcome in the long term.

  This involves an assertion of negative correlation between trials of the random process. Take the example of tossing coins. The outcomes of each toss of a coin are statistically independent and the chances of getting heads, for example, on each toss is always ½. The probability of getting two heads in two tosses is ¼, and so on. If a player tossed five heads in a row, the probability of which is only 1/32, the other player might assume, according to the fallacy, that a tails is “due” pretty soon. This is incorrect. The probability of flipping twenty-one heads in a row is, in fact, 1 in 2,097,152, but the probability of flipping a head having already flipped twenty times is, surprise surprise, still only ½. That’s what the Chinese don’t understand, and now the bosses were thinking the same way. It was crass and understandable at the same time, because deep down they were sure that something unusual was on their doorstep, that the spirit world was speaking to them. They were thinking like locals, which is what human beings always do. They had simply put aside things that they knew perfectly well, that every rational person who studies gambling knows back to front. They knew that this was the theorem of Christiaan Huygens, well known to every amateur math geek and card sharp and casino operator worth his salt. Just as they knew that if two players start out with different amounts of money—say five cents and eight cents—the guy with five cents will always, in the long run, lose everything, all things being equal. But this they had not forgotten.

  I was now fully aware that whichever casino I went into, I would be watched with maximum attentiveness. But at the same time I knew that they could not believe in my luck continuing because it struck them as irrational—whereas, as I have explained, it was neither rational nor irrational. Accordingly, once powdered and dried the following night—a Thurs
day, if I remember correctly—I assembled three hundred thousand in envelopes and prepared for battle. The boys from the front desk brought me up a white carnation for the buttonhole, wrapped not in foil but in sheet silver. It was a nice touch, but they needn’t have bothered, because in the end something more extraordinary happened.

  TWENTY

  Since I could wait no longer, feeling starved of my dirty baccarat, I decided to go to the Greek Mythology that evening and throw myself off a dirty little cliff and die. I didn’t give a damn, I was mou bian bei, as we say in the language, and I wanted if anything to commit baccarat suicide and flame out to the amazement and great concern of all present. What a death!

  I went to the Militar and ate some steamed clams. Then I read the papers in the bar, hoping to run into one of my friends. However, no one was there. The evening had the rhythm of an ancient pendulum clock. So much the better, I thought. One is better off alone in these dangerous moments. One is better off forlorn and isolated inside one’s gravest compulsion.

  I took a cab to Taipa and entered the casino through its overbearing gates. The pits were relatively calm on a Thursday night and I was able to play at a full table without commotion or distractions. I played at table six as fast as I could. Nine all the way, regular as something machinelike. A hundred thousand in fifteen minutes and without breaking even a bead of sweat. All right, I thought, let’s attack the system outright. I laid everything down on five bets and won them all. The chip bags looked like Viking loot, but I did not walk out with them. I kept them by my side and played another three hands, with the same results. At length, the table cleared out and a lanky Chinese man in a windowpane shirt came up to me and whispered in my ear to ask if I’d like some cocaine. It was a done deal and I spent the rest of the hour in the nightclub snorting it off the back of a menu, indifferent to the effects. It was good stuff and, as usual, it made me incredibly sleepy. I never get high. I become sleepy, but I get curiously excited at the same time, as if my pulse has been slowed down while my senses have been speeded up. In this state I rolled through the various floors of the Greek Mythology unnoticed by the press and feeling as if I would like to piss all this money out of all ten fingers simultaneously. I slipped five-hundred-Hong-Kong-dollar notes into the hands of the staff, the shills who wait by the tables to lure new customers in—usually attractive young girls—or the Greeks lumbering around in their plastic armor. The look of amazement on their faces was not something that I thought I would ever see again, so I went around again and handed out thousand-dollar notes, and they still didn’t know what to say. They took the money and crammed it into their pockets until they had no more room for the next round, and it went on like this for a while, with no one knowing how to stop it. I gave away half of my earnings, then went back to the tables.