The Ballad of a Small Player

THIRTEEN

“Lord Doyle?” the young receptionist said, getting off her chair, circling the marble desk, and coming into the open space of the lobby to intercept me. She was in their regulation sexy-authoritarian uniform, tailored skirt, chignon, tight waistcoat, and name badge. They are dressed like the corporate officers of the future, like the staff of inexpressible hotels, and they are as quiet as machines, they glide and purr and rotate and murmur. They are frictionless but powerful, for inside their realms they are omnipotent, they are the soft arm of the law. Who can resist them?

“Is it you, Lord Doyle?”

“That’s me.”

“I thought it was,” she went on.

“I went on a trip,” I said.

“We thought so.”

Are you back? her look asked.

“I am back now.”

“Yes, I was sure it was you.”

There was only one other permanent gwai lo guest at the Lisboa, the decrepit Frenchman Lionel, some sort of disgraced journalist whom I sometimes saw creeping about with plastic bags of food and chips as he sailed from casino to casino in the middle of the night. I could not be him, so it was a process of simple deduction given that all foreign ghosts look the same.

Life is a game, I thought, or as the Qur’an has it, a sport and a pastime. It’s a sport and a pastime and therefore we have to play it as such. Here, the casino is our temple of life.

The tangerine trees shone around the monumental staircase and the jade galleons shone with them, and all of it added luster to the bristling, wet mouth and perfect powder of the receptionist as she intercepted me and asked me a delicate question, namely if I had settled or intended to settle my bill before too long, as she put it.

“The manager asked me to ask you,” she said, bowing in the Asian way to excuse herself.

“Yes,” I said, “I had been thinking about that.”

“He asked me to ask if you’d pay it before midnight tonight, if that’s possible.”

Theatrically I glanced down at my watch.

“Oh, midnight tonight?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, I could, I don’t see why not. What time is it now? Nine. Well, let me just go up to my room and get some money and I’ll be down before midnight.”

“Now, sir?”

“Well, before midnight. I want to have a shower and some dinner.”

“I think the manager said it was quite urgent.”

“No doubt it is, yes.”

“He says he would rather if you paid straight away.”

“Yes, well, the thing is I never carry my wallet around with me.”

“But you have just returned from a trip.”

“Yes, true, but I always take cash with me on trips and I make a point of spending it all. It’s the way I was brought up.”

She blinked.

“I think you’ll agree,” I went on, “that I am one of your more loyal long-term clients.”

“There’s an outstanding balance of thirty thousand dollars Hong Kong.”

“It adds up, doesn’t it?”

But she didn’t laugh as I’d hoped.

“I see your point,” I amended quickly. “I won’t forget.”

I decided to put her in an impossible position by actually moving physically toward the elevators and the Throne of Tutankhamen. She would have to obstruct me, which she could not and would not do, or she would have to insist in some other equally primeval way and I knew she couldn’t and wouldn’t. Instead, she followed me with an anxious disappointment at her own indecisiveness. I was a debtor, but I was also indefinably valuable to the establishment. I couldn’t be enraged or made desperate, and because I was Lord Doyle and not just some commoner I couldn’t be made to lose face or subjected to any kind of humiliation. I was momentarily invulnerable as I hurled myself toward the elevators with many a soothing promise (they had heard them all before). The girl hung back respectfully as I pushed the button and politely reiterated her hope, her insistence, that I should be down promptly to settle the thirty thousand. It would be better for everyone, she implied, and in this she was no doubt correct.

“I quite agree,” I said, bowing obsequiously.

The upper floors were deserted and I felt I was being watched as I opened my door and even as I pushed into my room and quickly surveyed the contents to be sure they had not been rummaging around there. But everything was as it had been. I felt a twinge of glee.

I laid the money out on the bed and ran a bath. Before I dipped into the water I shaved, but I looked away from the face in the mirror. I held my head underwater and counted to thirty and in the space of those thirty seconds I came out of my funk and came back to life. But I then saw that the number written on my palm had not washed off. I scrubbed my hands again, dried them, and still the numerals remained. She must have used an unusually strong ink that would not fade for weeks. Forgetting them, I did the usual, dressing up with care, going back to my old self, dabbing a bit of musk and oiling down the locks. The charmer reemerged from the ruins and I packed my cash and walked out again into the night, wild with opportunity and risk. The only problem was that I had to bypass reception without them seeing me. This was done with a few dashes and sleights of hand and using squadrons of Chinese matrons as cover (they move like buffalo en masse, ruminating their way across hotel lobbies). And so to Neptune VIP, garish navel of my desires.