The Ballad of a Small Player

FOUR

The following night at eight exactly, I put on my darkest suit and took the elevator down from the seventh floor of the Hotel Lisboa. It was the hour of the “second shift” in the world’s most profitable casino, and the revolving doors turned like turbines as crowds poured through them and hurled themselves toward the labyrinth of casinos scattered throughout the hotel. Seven million dollars a day in revenues and a pall of smoke that never moved, that hovered near the tops of the tangerine trees from which hung a thousand red New Year envelopes like venomous fruit. Smoke that hit the throat like sawdust mixed with powdered metal.

I went down to the hotel’s main mass-market casino, the Mona Lisa, where the games are endless in their diversity: pai kao, fanton, cussec, Q, and stud poker, and of course punto banco baccarat, that slutty dirty queen of casino card games. The boys brought me a cognac and sausage rolls, and I ordered a buttonhole from the street. Cut a figure, O my brothers, and have them believe that you really are a lord. But I lost again. I played fish-prawn-crab dice for an hour, forgetting myself completely, then moved off down the elevators to the Crystal Palace, which is like descending into an ice grotto. Waves of glass shards fall from the ceilings in shades of green and orange. A place where the rational mind comes apart. From there I navigated in total solitude to the Club Triumph and the Lisboa Hou Kat, a place that has a secretive feel to it, like a buried palace in Crete from the time of Linear B, with a circular room of leather sofas and tangerine trees with New Year envelopes. How can such places exist?

The hours passed. The money slipped away. A bead of sweat at the base of the spine, and my sweet vertigo. After a long losing spree I went back to my room to freshen up, then took the elevator down to the casinos for a second try. It was eleven and the night shift was just in. Brutal, cynical men with red faces and cheap suits, smoking continuously, their eyes little lusty slits that sucked everything in and spat it out again. On the ground floor they stood by the Throne of Pharaoh, a reproduction chair from Tutankhamen’s tomb, and a large vertical oil painting with its title provided: La Mère Abandonnée. A woman with a lyre sighing over a baby sleeping in a wheeled carriage. This scene of rural misery from nineteenth-century France did not arouse their curiosity at all, and they turned their backs to it as they waited for the elevators. They carried bags of gaming chips and cans of winter melon tea. Their breath smelled of oyster sauce. I bought a cigar in the underground mall and went back up to the VIP rooms, where Renoirs loomed on the walls. Here in the four innermost rooms the bets were a minimum of ten thousand up to a maximum of two million. Three plays at a time, usually. There was a separate entrance leading into the hotel to encourage the high rollers to roll right out of bed and into the VIP rooms with sleep in their eyes. Bright red armchairs had dropped out of the surrounding Alma-Tadema paintings of ancient Rome. Laughing maidens gamboling down flowery slopes. Air and light and lust. Scenes from the second century, or the first century, or the fourth century, or the never-never century. So many centuries reduced to a mural. So many centuries of pointless pleasure. And here the factory managers who had never read a book about Rome, much less visited, sat and lounged and tensed their minds as they threw themselves like disoriented moths against Luck’s candle flame. They didn’t know where they were. Eastwest.

I played side baccarat for a while, and I was impressed by the way the staff brought me my supply of chips, like men stoking an engine fire in a train. I cheered up as my luck improved; I won three hands out of six. Four hundred back in. The myth paintings grew pinker as the hours went by. I became jolly again and won two hands more. I felt a stab of sadistic vitality.

With a modest profit I retired to the armchairs, in the décor of Paris 1900, and marveled at the gold mosaic floors of the elevators, which shone for a moment as the doors opened. I had made about $600 HK — it was nothing to brag about, but it wasn’t a loss. Peanuts add up.

An hour later I migrated back to the Crystal Palace, where the air was sweet and heavy with female perfumes. Teenage girls aplenty. Hong Kong men in blue suits. I lost it all and then some. It’s the way it goes, and I didn’t care. It was well after midnight by the time I got down to the new Sands and strode through that monumental hall whose din makes you feel mad and happy at the same time — not exactly the same time, but close.

I was feeling more reckless than I usually do, and the losses that I sustained on the slot machines did not serve to deter me from getting into deeper water. When did losses ever do that? I went to the first-floor buffet restaurant and sat there calculating my losses and my remaining reserves. The math was simple, but sliding. The fact was that after several months of playing the tables almost nonstop every night I had burned through the greater part of the money I had saved up over the years and had brought to Macau. A small fortune that had been supposed to last me a fair while, assuming that on average I would win almost as much as I lost, or maybe even more. But it had not worked out that way. It never does.

After a glass of Lello Douro, I made my way past the floor show and the Jade Monkey slot machines to the entrances of the separate private gaming rooms. I was guided by staff dressed in the yellow uniforms of the witch’s guards in The Wizard of Oz, who took me right to the door, assuming, I suppose, that I was a high roller. I was certainly tempted by the nearby roulette tables, with names like Lucky Seals and Fairy’s Fortune, but since I was now resolved upon risking a much bigger sum of money, I let myself be escorted upstairs to the Paiza Club, at that time the most exclusive private gaming room in Macau. Besides, everyone knows that roulette lends a 2.7 advantage to the house, no matter what you do. For baccarat it’s a mere 0.9.

The staff upstairs were in black and gold uniforms with gold buttons. I was surprised to hear that they already knew my name.

“Lord Doyle,” they said, swinging a welcoming hand toward the rooms called pits, which were arranged around a circular structure only half revealed by a luxurious dimness.

The atrium was cavernous, with a huge tasseled lantern suspended at its center. The style was very Chinese. Terra-cottas in niches and dragons everywhere. The world’s biggest chandelier, my escort said, indicating it with her hand. I was then given a choice of private rooms, some of them with fires in grates, bloodred panels, and gray tables. I chose a room where I could play against the bank alone with $10,000 HK hands.

I sat myself down there and waited for a bottle of wine to be brought up from the cellar. I took off my gloves and the banker bowed to me and announced his name, which was unusual. We relaxed into some anticipatory banter and then I was given my chips.

It was by now nearing dawn and the other rooms had their occupants, wealthy punters from the Territories in sleek suits, with briefcases of money laid at their feet like waiting dogs.

I settled down with a cigar courtesy of management and played a few hands at a more relaxed pace than I am used to. I had to admit to myself that the game was much more enjoyable played like this, without the hustle and bustle of a Chinese mob around me, at my own pace and without the internal tension that usually drove me forward. I thought a little more carefully about what I was doing. These are the ideal conditions for gaming if the individual doesn’t want to lose a lot of money quickly on a series of small, fast bets. The game is the same, but the ambience is not.

It was now that I felt the compulsion that always drives me from within as I see the pallet turn the cards and I feel them slipping like skin under my finger pads. A sensual moment, empty but charged with anticipation. The mind emptying out like a drain, or else scurrying like a small, wingless bug.

There are a few moments of this total calm before I start to move, like the moments that I imagine precede jumping off a cliff. Even in these exclusive rooms the dealer will tell you the table’s “luck numbers” if you ask him, and there will be a place in your mind that wrestles with the superstition.

The gambler is a man finely tuned to the supernatural. He is superstitious, wary of portents and omens. He is on edge for this reason. I wear kid gloves at the table, a habit in which I had indulged those past two years, and this was also a superstition. I put them on at the last moment after I have felt the cards, and through their supple material I feel the laminated surfaces all over again. I feel ready to win or lose.

Lose, in this case. It didn’t matter so much this time because I had written off any losses that night in advance. I did not sweat it as the first ten grand hit the dust. I poured myself another glass of wine. The dealer rolled back on his heels and asked me if I felt confident enough to go up to fifteen thousand, and perhaps provoked by the undertow of his tone, I said that I would.

“Good for you, sir. Courage often wins.”

Does it? I thought. Does it really play a part in outcomes?

“It’s a superstition,” I replied.

A manager came in then and shook my hand. He was beautifully dressed and he asked me if everything was to my satisfaction.

“Lord Doyle, isn’t it?”

“Well, if you say so.”

He laughed.

“I do say so.”

The dealer then bowed.

“Do you like the cards? Special from Germany,” the manager said. “Binokel with Württemberg artwork.”

I glanced down; they were indeed unusual.

“They are fine.”

“Mr. Hui here will look after you. He is one of our best bankers. We can bring you some light dishes if you need them. Do you?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“As you prefer.”

I felt the sweat now moving slowly down my back, clinging to the spine, an area of moistness developing between my eyes. When the manager had retired, I asked Mr. Hui if I might have some iced water with some lemon juice. While waiting for it, I looked over the English equestrian paintings on the walls and the iron dogs of the fireplace. It reminded me of an actual room I had seen in England, a room in a large country house that I had been in once upon a time, perhaps a famous country house. I tried to think if I knew those long, aquiline faces of long-dead noblemen, their Caucasian faces subtly distorted by copiers not familiar with them. One of them might have been the real Lord Doyle for all I knew. I wondered if indeed there was one, or whether I had chosen my Macau name with inspired good luck all those years ago. I half-remembered, in fact, reading the name in a newspaper somewhere and it must have stuck in my unconscious. Alternatively, perhaps, I had been to a house where Lord Doyle was mentioned or represented. I could no longer remember.

Yet the past, at that particular moment, was suddenly vividly present. I became distracted and lost my focus. Memories that I had long repressed must have been aroused in me by the cold sweat running in a trickle down my back, but why would a trickle of sweat make me think of my long-lost days in Cuckfield, I wondered. Though then again perhaps I had heard of a Lord Doyle in that Sussex village where I had lived for years as a lawyer, and it was possible he might even have been one of our firm’s clients. It was unlikely, however. I looked again at the Binokel cards and I felt myself lost in time, and I was sure that it must have been because of this intensely English and nostalgic décor in which I was now immersed. The cartoon lords were staring down at me as if I owed them money. No one in China knew why I was there, why I was sitting there at that very moment looking down at some Binokel cards after almost a decade in exile. They never asked why I never went home, or even if I had a home. They were never indiscreet enough to ask, and even if they had asked I would not have been able to tell them. It was not a pretty story I could recount over dinner.

I had been accused of an embezzlement with regard to one of my elderly clients, and I had not departed in a way that reflected well upon me. It had been a flight under cover of dark, a sudden sauve qui peut. I had not even told my sisters. The money was gone from the lady’s account and it was I who was in charge of that account, and worse than that I had spent everything and could not restore it. The directors of the firm had discovered the matter on a Thursday; by Friday night I was out of the country with a suitcase of money that I took with me and did not declare. The bulk of the money had already been wired to Hong Kong.

The lady I had stolen it from was one of those elderly widows one sees everywhere holed up secretively in the suburban houses of Haywards Heath or Wivelsfield, in the timbered Tudor mansions of Hassocks or Cuckfield or Lindfield. Plump townlets and manicured villages filled with colonial and military retirees and outpastured bank managers, with their yew hedges and their grumbling lawns and their churches filled with tattered flags. This was the world into which I was born, having won (as Cecil Rhodes once had it) first draw in the lottery of life: born an Englishman.

Mrs. Butterworth was married to a copper mining executive and had inherited all his money. They had once lived in South America, and her house retained a strange and faint tropicality. She loved caged birds and dark yellow silks, and there was a sunroom at the back of the house that seemed to rise to the occasion even of a dull English summer. The husband had been dead a quarter century. It’s possible that I reminded her of him. A young man in a dark suit, with hesitant manners. But I must have been more insecure than her former husband. He had gone to Rugby and belonged to a decent London club — I think it was even White’s. It is possible that she was too senile already to notice these unfortunate aspects of her well-groomed visitor. Perhaps she didn’t care to look too closely. I was able to fake the accent and the easy charm, and it is likely that she took these at surface value and didn’t look further.

We were soon having tea together every week. She was obsessed with her savings and her investments, and being a creature of intuition and habit she refused to discuss these with anyone else at the firm. Every Thursday morning I walked from the firm’s offices to her timbered mock-Tudor on Summerhill Lane and pulled the iron bell chain set into the door and waited under a fringe of honeysuckle for her padded step. We took Earl Grey and sandwiches in the sunroom, and she talked about her husband. She called him “my glorious Teddy.”

“Oh, my glorious Teddy organized everything for me before he died,” she would say, forgetting that she had said the very same thing the week before. “But now I seem to have got into a tizzy about it all. He always told me to move my money around and keep it fresh. Do you agree?”

“Your husband was perfectly correct.”

“But there’s no one I trust, you see.” Her eyes shone with a kind of crazy flinty gullibility. “Except you, of course. Perhaps you could take some of my funds out of Rio Tinto and put them somewhere else? I am going to authorize Mr. Ashburton at Lloyd’s to give you access. Now, why don’t you try one of my chutney sandwiches? I make the chutney myself with Mr. Porter’s raisins from Sunte Avenue. Go on.”

She barely recognized me in the later days, when I came by to chat with her and hold her hand and assess the value of her moldering but well-stocked property. She sometimes thought I was her nephew, or the doctor, or who knows who else. While she dozed in her armchair in the front room, I wandered through her mansion and pocketed, for fun, the occasional trinket. She never noticed. And so I began to steal from her very gradually, a hundred pounds here, a hundred pounds there, and when I progressed to higher sums I saw that it made no difference. No one was watching over her affairs but me, and no one had access to her bank account but me. There must have come a point, I reflected as I sat there looking at the Binokel card, when I realized that I could get away if not with murder then with the second best thing.

I must have passed the better part of two years laboring at this secret game. I became, gradually, much richer than anyone around me, and much richer than I myself had ever been before — because I had never been even well off, let alone seriously affluent. Quite the contrary. I came from the loins of a vacuum cleaner salesman. I had never had anything. In fact I had noticed, hitherto, a certain snobbery toward me on the part of the other lawyers at our firm, and certainly a distinct snobbery coming from the partners. They could tell by a sixth sense that I was not one of them. I had not gone to a public school, not even Ardingly, down the road, where most of them had spent their miserable boyhoods loafing around willowed ponds. I had been to the local state schools. To Scrayes Bridge Comprehensive and then Haywards Heath Grammar, where I had picked up my A levels. I was an orphan in the Hindu-style English caste system, a “ghost” indeed. To them I was therefore faintly detestable, comically inferior, and they were a little surprised, I imagine, that I had even made it that far. Nottingham was not a bad university but it didn’t exactly ring any bells; it had no meaning to the boys who had come down from Oxford and King’s. The only thing that confused them was my accent.

As I say, I had studied their accent and reproduced it. As the country as a whole went more and more prole in its accents, I went the other way and I did it on purpose, because of course now I was at war with it all and I wanted to win at parody while siphoning off as much of Mrs. Butterworth’s money as I could. I stashed it away in various accounts and soon I had an account in Hong Kong, which I was able to open with the help of a friend. It proved to be invaluable. Into Hong Kong I poured all my secrets and hopes. It seemed then like the land of freedom and invisibility.

China. A police state would not seem the ideal place for escape. But what if it was a police state that didn’t like our police? My enemy’s enemy is my friend. No one would go looking for me in a place like Macau, because Macau wasn’t Hong Kong; it was one of the most secretive places on earth. I thought about it a great deal as I paced around Haywards Heath at night, that empty and tomblike place in which only the railway line is a source of life after midnight. It could not be any worse, I thought, than the prison I was already living in. Lodging in a private flat with Mrs. Eaglin on Denman’s Lane, riding to work on a bicycle when it wasn’t raining. A company car, otherwise, a Vauxhall Astra perfect for country lanes but terminally undistinguished. The only thing that redeemed this unworthy existence was the idea that I could get away with the Butterworth dosh. It was a strange thought that I was acquiring all the wealth of that long-dead mining executive. Anglo-American Copper and its tributaries, a vile company in all likelihood, and its treasures had ended up in my secret bank account in Hong Kong. Why would it be immoral to gamble that money away? Would that be worse than the way it had been gained? I remembered how guiltless I had felt, the first time I spent a week in Hong Kong on holiday. Within days I knew the Macau casinos back to front.

It seemed to me that unlike the snobbish and closed world from which I came, this place had a violent democracy about it. I compared it to Haywards Heath and I was charmed. I formed the idea of eloping there with my spoils. A foolish idea, no doubt, childish and naïve. But I was sure that sooner or later the directors would smoke me out, as indeed they eventually did. I didn’t want to go back to the unworthy existence, let alone face psychiatric evaluation and possibly prison, and wanted to keep Mrs. Butterworth’s money, which otherwise would have been sent to the International Society for the Humane Treatment of Marine Mammals.

It was a tense wire to be balanced upon, and I was a poor tightrope walker. One afternoon the senior partner of our firm, Mr. Strick, invited me into his office at the top of the building and frostily asked me to take a seat. He was a very old-school character, much like Mr. Butterworth, I imagine, and he believed in the sterling value of “man-to-man” chats.

“Look here, Doyle,” he said, taking off his glasses and inserting one of the grips into the corner of his mouth, “I’ve always thought you were a rather decent chap, even if you do keep yourself to yourself a bit too much. Some of the others were wondering if a chap like you might feel a tad uncomfortable with chaps like them. I said, he’s a funny old chap and that’s all there is to it. What do you say, Doyle? No after-work pints for you?”

“I’m not much of a drinker, sir.”

“Ah, so that’s it, eh, you’re not a chap who likes to drink too much?”

“No, sir.”

How could I forget that office, with its paperweights filled with pieces of Pacific coral and the golf clubs in glass cases? That smell of shag and woodland mud and stale PG Tips?

“Well, look here, old chap, I’ve noticed that you’ve been eating every lunch at Tiffany’s French place across the roundabout. Rather dear for you, isn’t it?”

“I’ve developed a taste for it, sir.”

“Yes, yes. But what I mean is, Doyle, you seem to have a bit of money to knock around. I’m not aware we gave you a raise.”

We laughed, and for the first time I had an inkling of his suspicion, of the close eye that he was keeping on me. “Everything all right with the Butterworth account? You and Mrs. Butterworth seem awfully tight. You are going there every week? It must be a frightful bore.”

“Not at all. We talk about old films.”

“Do you now? She seems like a frisky old bird. I knew her husband, you know. We played golf together at Ardingly. Spiffing chap and all that, but a bit morose for my taste. They say he made a lot of money in precious metals. But I suppose you’d know all about that.”

I said that I did, and that I took great interest in the account.

“Good show,” he concluded, putting his glasses back on. “But, Doyle — we do have to keep an eye on Mrs. Butterworth. She is not quite in her right mind. I wouldn’t want any irregularities to occur.”

At that moment, in Macau, I looked up from the elaborately designed cards and into the eyes of the English seigneurs on their thoroughbreds. I hated nothing more than them. I saw the puffed face of Mrs. Butterworth laid back against an antimacassar. She had been sweet and arrogant in equal measure. A woman who looked down on me when she had had her wits about her. I had taken her hand when I entered the room and spoken to her close to, stooped to the ear. Yes, Mrs. Butterworth; no, Mrs. Butterworth.

“Are you the lawyer chap?” she had asked over and again. “My husband says never trust a lawyer. He says you’re all cheerful scum.”

When I returned to business I was revived by the cold water. I played two hands of fifteen each, losing one and winning one. I was emboldened to ratchet it up to twenty, at which point I had to unseal the second of the padded envelopes of cash I had brought with me.

I laid the money out and got my cards. I was sure, in that moment, that someone was watching me from behind one of the paintings (I assumed they had observation windows built into them) and when I turned my hand to reveal a four and a six, I was sure that someone somewhere had smiled. A four and a six is a baccarat, a zero hand worth nothing, or to be technical, a ten modulo ten: the worst hand you can draw. It was as crushing a losing hand as I could have pulled, and the dealer himself shook his head empathetically before awarding me a commiseration of sorts. He wished me better fortune for the next play.

“I drew a baccarat yesterday,” I said. “Two in two days.”

“Tut tut.”

“I am not smelling the winds.”

I paused and dabbed my forehead with a cocktail napkin, because a moment before everything had seemed so clear — even if only for a few seconds — and now I no longer knew if I should play another hand or go home with half my envelope intact.

“You want a pause, sir?”

“I can’t lose twice with a baccarat.”

As the table was prepared, the sound of the erhar rose up from somewhere, and I thought it must be dawn outside, or close. I waited for my mind to calm and clear and then laid my twenty thousand on the table.

“Are you sure this time?” the dealer asked politely.

I flipped the first card and noted the five. The dealer looked at me suavely, and I think he was genuinely curious.

The coal fire crackled behind us, and his back must have been warm. I turned a four and won the hand with a natural. Surprised, he stepped back for a moment. He raised a moist hand towel to his mouth and nodded a mute congratulation. I sat back and watched the chips pushed my way, a great salacious pile of them, and I paused to smoke for a few minutes. I may have imagined it, but I thought I heard a bell ringing somewhere deep inside the complex of pits. What kind of bell, I had no idea. Perhaps a bell went off whenever a punter made a large winning.

The dealer shuffled the cards again and we took our ease, bantering about the trade. He then asked me if I felt inclined to take on another hand. I was now feeling roused, aggressive. A sudden win will do that to you. It will lift you out of months of depression and self-doubt, days of quiet dread. A surge of animal arrogance of the kind that one needs to feel in order to remember that you are alive. Doomed to be alive.

“Lady Luck is with me,” I said in English.

He dealt my two cards and I turned a three and a two. He therefore dealt me a third card. It was a four.

“Natural,” he said, raising his eyebrows for a moment and then stepping back from the table with a slight twitch of the head.

I looked at my watch and saw that it was five thirty-five a.m. I could feel the wind of fortune switching direction around me like something physical, a real breeze admitted by a door suddenly opened. I stood and bagged the mound of chips as the manager came in a second time and congratulated me, bowing and hoping that I would return to the Paiza soon.

“We welcome you anytime, Lord Doyle.”

I was given a small attaché case for the cash and escorted politely to the main doors, where a tour bus from Shenzen had just arrived, offloading fresh crowds for the main floors of the Sands. I went through to get to the main road, shrugging off their overdoses of scent, and soon I was walking into Avenida da Amizade. I didn’t even know exactly how much it was: hundreds and hundreds of thousands. Kenny Rogers had it right. You never count your money when you’re sittin’ at the table.

I walked back to the Lisboa in the dawn, past the yawning molls of the Rua de Pequim and the Fortuna casino, passing by that strange fragment of the Rue de Rivoli. Inside the Lisboa lobby I gave my case to reception so that they could entrust it to the house safe, and then I wandered around the galleries, staring at those antique ink stones and Chinese seismographs that seem to be permanently on sale there. There was a jade galleon, too, and farther down a gilded peacock from Garrard’s of London displayed with a glass of blue wine next to it. The luxury goods that I passed every day without much noticing them. And finally I came to a spinach-green jade figure of Guan Yin herself standing next to a pendulum clock of the same material.

Properly, it is Guashi’yin. They shorten it to Guan Yin. She is a bodhisattva. Her name means listening to the sounds of the world. Or, one could put it, listening to the cries of the world. Because she is also the goddess of mercy and compassion. For the Taoists she is an immortal. She is the female form, in East Asia, of the Indian male bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara.

I stood there for some time, mentally lost inside that lustrous greenness, the face and eloquent hands of a jade bodhisattva, and something within me began to revolve, to change direction, and I felt how impossible it would be to just go upstairs and go to sleep. My victory had crystallized and now it fragmented again like a glass ball dropped from a great height. I turned and walked calmly back to reception.

“Give me the case back,” I said. “Yes, all of it.”

Their looks were questioning, but after all they didn’t care.

I walked back to the Paiza, where the doormen greeted me without surprise. Over the next hour I proceeded to lose most of what I had with me, but thereafter my fortune revived a little and I swung between light and dark, between surplus and deficit. It was almost midday before I got to bed. I had left neither worse off nor better, and the next night (for there was always a next night; my life was a series of next nights) I went down more confidently in my smoking jacket with the velvet lapels and sat at the larger fourteen-person baccarat tables between nine and ten.

Perhaps it was the sleep. I was now loaded with betting power, though of the negative kind, and I was feeling belligerent, aggressive, so unsure of myself that I was sure of myself. I was the only gwai lo there that night, and the regulars who knew me glanced at me with their usual contempt.

No matter. I had their measure, the little scum. If I lost again I’d do it with an exceptional indifference that would show them who was who in the pecking order of life. I took the case with me and when I opened it to pull out an enormous sum to place my first bet, the other players paled and bit their lips. These were small-timers, or medium-timers, and they weren’t used to heavy bets. I was discreetly advised to perhaps split my bets into smaller sums. As a matter of fact I was happy to oblige. I didn’t need to win on one big killing. I split my treasure into $500 HK shots and played them one by one, eleven in a row. Complete success.

I looked up at the numbers board and saw new digits slip into place, changing its complexion. My table was now announced as highly fortunate. A slightly larger crowd developed around it. Onlookers pressed in, smoking with wild intensity until the table was thickly shrouded with smoke. I heard their guttural oaths and expressions of disbelief in their crude Putonghua, their imprecations against the dirty foreigner and his goddamned luck. I could understand every word and they didn’t know it, but I let it go. I won and won. Chips rolled in, waves of them.

At ten thirty I got up and bagged the lot, taking them over to the cashier’s window followed by dozens of stares. I bundled the cash into my attaché case and rolled out of there, moving on to the Hong Fak, certain that I had scored at least a half million, which I probably had. It was a decent day’s work.