The Ballad of a Small Player

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 thought. 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.

“I just don’t know if I can go on,” he said. “I’m down to the last of my savings from my bank days, and I thought that would last forever. What the hell have I done with it?”

“Don’t you ever win? Not ever?”

He shook his head.

“Not in three months. Losses every night. It can’t be, it just can’t be. I ruin everything I touch.”

“It’s not the case, Adrian. We’re playing punto banco — it’s a game of pure luck. You’re talking like the Chinese.”

“Don’t we all?”

“But we don’t think like them. Surely?”

“I don’t know anymore. Maybe I do think like the Chinese. Why shouldn’t I?”

As we lingered there trying to forget our misfortune, Yo Yo came up with the look of someone who has been searching for her sugar daddy and been unable to find him. She covered Adrian with kisses and we went downstairs, back into the din and musk and percussive voices. A place where the old are not allowed to be old, where the chandeliers look like model zeppelins chained to the ceilings and where their fairy light is a gold that makes the skin itself look metallic. A mix of human voices and the string music of Europe, and actors dressed as characters from the operas of Puccini wandering about in their costumes breaking out into arias or ringing bells and turning cartwheels among the Taiwanese tourists who are so anxious to capture them on film. Look, a Pulcinello. A Bohemian. Flesh turned to metal and air and pedigree. Adrian turned to me while Yo Yo went to the bathroom, and he had grasped the poisoned nettle of his situation with a shocking clairvoyance.

“Doyle, lend me another four thousand for the rest of the week. I won’t play it, I swear. I’ll use it to entertain Yo Yo. You don’t know how demanding she is. She eats money like a badger eats grass. She’s insatiable. She sucks everything up and then demands more. She’s like a housewife cleaning up and I’m the dog poop in the corner. She’s a money vacuum cleaner. You can afford it, it’s nothing to you now. I couldn’t have known that your luck had run out. Quick, while she’s in the bathroom!”

There’s no explaining why I gave it to him, and I didn’t even intend to tot up what he owed me because I knew I would never get it back.

“You’re a sport,” he gushed, pocketing the notes with lightning speed. “You’re a sport and the Goddess of Luck will reward you.”

“Repayment?”

“Next week, next week. I have a scheme.”

We all had a scheme, and the pity of it was that none of us knew what the scheme was. It was there somewhere in the back of our minds, but it was perpetually obscure to us.

When Yo Yo returned, we went out to the canal and rode for a while in a gondola under a honeyed moon. It was just like Venice, as it is intended to be, with the water slapping the stones and the moon above gilding insignias and crenellations and gothic devices. Adrian said nothing and Yo Yo and I talked in Chinese, and as we spoke I knew that it was Adrian’s luck that had failed to deliver the natural and not mine. I had no idea why I was so sure of this. Eventually we went our separate ways and after a snack at the Florian I walked off back to the Lisboa, and as I was passing through the main doors I caught sight of Adrian sitting at one of the baccarat tables with Yo Yo behind him, his face distorted and blushing, losing with the alacrity and lack of style with which he always lost. So there it was. One loses and one wins, and one submits to the law of sports and pastimes, but I, on this occasion, was off the hook.