They Thought I Was Dead: Sandy’s Story

27 22 July 2007 — Looking back

‘A drug dealer?’ I said, unsure for a moment whether he was joking. But he just sat staring back at me and gave me a smile. I hoped he was joking.

I should have been instantly disappointed in him, but I wasn’t. My rebellious streak liked the idea of me, the wife of a detective, sitting at the roulette table with a drug dealer. Kind of reminded me of that TV series I loved — Roy had liked it too — The Sopranos. Watching it had been something we’d enjoyed together in recent times. Thinking about that made me feel guilty for a moment.

Nicos looked me directly in the eyes. He knew, as well as I did, that we both felt some attraction to each other. He asked, smiling, ‘Does that put you off me?’

‘Why are you a drug dealer?’

‘Why are you a gambler?’ he shot back.

‘There you go again,’ I said. ‘Just like my husband, answering a question with a question.’

He raised his thick, dark eyebrows, smiling again. ‘We’ve barely met and we’re already bickering like an old married couple.’

He said it with such charm and such good humour that I laughed. ‘Maybe if all couples got their bickering out of the way within the first five minutes of meeting, there would be a lot more marriages that lasted.’

He gave me a kind of wistful smile that seemed to contain so many secrets, then turned his attention back to the table and the wheel, which was already spinning, the ball rolling at speed around the rim. He spread chips across some of the grid of numbers, with careful precision, then looked at me. ‘No bets?’

‘I thought I might see what I could learn from you.’

The ball rattled around the frets.

‘No more bets,’ the croupier said.

This was the moment in the game that I always found the most exciting. The final seconds as the wheel slowed down, the rattling continuing as the ball, almost with a mind of its own, dropped first into one slot and then another before popping out back onto the rim, and finally coming to rest in yet another slot. But Nicos wasn’t even looking at the wheel, he was looking hard into my eyes.

Then he picked up one of his chips from his stash. A purple one with the same black-and-white chequered edge as all the others. He held it up between his finger and thumb.

‘Seventeen,’ the croupier intoned. He followed it, as if imagining he was in Monte Carlo, by adding, ‘Dix-sept, noir.’

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Nicos had laid a whole stack of purple chips on 17, but he didn’t even glance away to acknowledge the croupier, as his substantial winnings were pushed towards him. He just continued to hold that purple chip in front of my face. ‘You want to see what you can learn from me, Sandy? This is what you can learn. What do you see?’

‘A purple chip.’

‘Take it,’ he urged.

‘Take it?’

He held it out. ‘Take it. Hold it. Tell me what this chip means to you.’

He put it in my hand. Was he gifting it to me? As I closed my fingers around it I was puzzled, unsure what he was getting at. ‘The fact that it’s purple means it is worth one hundred pounds?’

‘You’re heading in the right direction.’

The wheel was spinning again.

‘I guess — I could put it on a number, or red or black, or a group of numbers on the table and maybe win a lot of money, or lose it all. Or I could take it to the cashier and walk away with one hundred pounds in cash.’

‘Exactly.’

‘No more bets,’ the croupier announced. He might as well have been talking to himself.

‘I’m not with you, Nicos.’

He looked straight back at me. ‘You are, you’ve told me exactly what the chip means to you. You can have a flutter on the gaming table and maybe turn it into several more chips, or you can take it to the cashier and walk away with £100. What you are holding in your palm is currency. Money. Money is the only thing in life you can really trust to be what it is.’

‘Unless it’s a forgery?’ I quizzed.

He shrugged dismissively. ‘When was the last time you were denied anything because the coin or banknote in your hand was a forgery?’

‘So far, never.’

‘Well, the chip you’re holding, you know the cashier here will give you one hundred pounds in cash for it. You know what that money will buy you — in a supermarket or a garage or nail studio or a London theatre. It’s a certainty. You have a one-hundred-pound chip, the cashier isn’t going to tell you it’s only worth ninety pounds. You go to the checkout at Tesco and the person there is not going to tell you that your one hundred pounds in cash is only going to buy you eighty-five pounds of stuff. Money is the one thing in life you can trust. The only thing.’

‘The only thing?’

‘Sure. People lie — spouses, business partners, friends, siblings. Money is dumb, money never lies. It’s binary — everything or nothing. You have it or you don’t.’

I tried hard to think of something that would contradict him, but I was distracted by the wheel spinning again. I tried to hand him back the purple chip, but he dismissed it with a wave of his hand. ‘Put it on a number. Or any combination. If you win, you can pay it back; if you lose, it’s gone, it was nothing. Have you ever been on a winning streak — like a real winning streak, where you just could not lose?’

‘When I started gambling,’ I said. ‘That’s what got me hooked.’

He smiled, those hooded eyes opening wider and appraising me. ‘There is nothing on earth that can match the feeling of a winning streak. It’s better than any drug, any amount of booze, any orgasm, right?’

‘Any that I’ve had so far,’ I conceded.

He suppressed a smile.

A dangerous look. Dangerous for me. Because I fancied him. But I tried to play it cool — and to remember why the hell I was here in the first place, this afternoon. To try to convert my meagre inheritance of £30,000 into the £150,000 I owed Roel Albazi.

But I didn’t want to stop talking to Nicos, because he fascinated me.

Keeping my voice low, I asked, ‘What drugs do you deal in?’

‘Cannabis. Nothing else. I’m not a moralist, but I believe it should be legal — so I’m just doing my bit to help the process along.’

‘That’s your justification?’

He shook his head. ‘You have power over your mind, not over outside events. Realize this and you will find strength.’

‘Meaning?’ I asked.

As he replied, he placed a bunch of chips over more numbers and sections of the board. Not wanting to be left out, I put down a few randomly, including the purple one he had given me, barely looking at what I was doing. The wheel began to spin.

‘Do what you believe in, what you really believe in. Live your life doing that. If you do anything else, anything you don’t really believe in, then you are a failure. You want to know the best description of success I know?’

‘I’ve a feeling you are going to tell me.’

His eyes stayed deadpan. He shrugged and said, ‘Success is the person who wakes up in the morning, and goes to bed at night, and in between gets to do what they want to do.’

‘So you’re a success because you are a drug dealer and that’s what you want to be?’

He spoke flatly, without emotion. ‘A dealer in a drug that should be legal. A drug that helps people through illness, a drug that helps people realize their potential and their dreams.’

The ball rattled over the frets. I wasn’t even sure which colour and which combination of numbers on the board I had covered.

‘Twenty-two,’ the croupier announced, sounding even more bored, probably because he didn’t have our attention. ‘Vingt-deux, noir.’

All my chips were cleared away. It took only a quick glance at my stash to see that my original £5,000 was already halved.

‘Can I buy you a drink at the bar?’ Nicos asked suddenly.

I’d found before, on occasions when I was losing steadily, that stepping away from the table and returning later could change my luck. It was 2.30 p.m., a strange time to be having a drink, but what the hell, one drink might help.

‘Sure,’ I said, secretly justifying it to my baby bump. ‘A vodka Martini, Grey Goose — and an olive.’

He gave me an approving look, and five minutes later we were seated on bar stools, having given our orders. Nicos asked, in a very caring tone, ‘OK, so what’s really going on?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You are a very troubled lady, aren’t you?’

I stared hard back into his eyes. Those alert, nut-brown, all-seeing eyes. ‘What kind of detective were you, in the Greek police?’

‘I was in the army first, doing my military service. When I got my — discharge, I think you call it — I joined the police in Athens. After four years I got offered a promotion to detective, which I took. Then someone saw I was good at interviewing suspects and I was made an interrogator. I did it for six years, interviewing everyone from political asylum seekers to drug dealers — and I just got disillusioned. I thought to myself, here I am, Nicos Christoforou, on a shit salary, interrogating these arrogant drug dealer bastards with vast sums stashed away we’ll never find. Sure, they’ll get hefty jail sentences, but when they come out in ten years’ time — less for good behaviour — they’ll be multimillionaires, and in ten years’ time I will still be Nicos Christo-forou, still on a shit salary.’

‘And?’ I asked.

‘And now I’m here. Just as bad as all the shitbags I locked up, but a lot smarter and a lot richer than most. And while some are still in jail, I’m here, talking to a most beautiful woman, and I mean this, a truly beautiful woman.’

‘Really?’ I said, with a smile. ‘I thought you were talking to me?’

He gave me a strange look. He was humouring me, but there was a flash of something dark behind his smile, and in his eyes. As if he was someone who did not like being interrupted or wasn’t very good at taking a joke.

He went on. ‘A beautiful but a very troubled woman. You need help, don’t you — and I’m not talking about counselling. You are in a lot of trouble, I think. I’m only telling you all my background because I can see you are really facing some trauma now.’

I stared back at him for a long while, my mind whirring, my emotions in shreds. ‘What exactly do you know about me?’ I asked.

He gave a shrug. ‘I didn’t do any research, Sandy, if that’s what you are thinking. I can see it in your eyes.’

‘See what?’

‘Fear.’

Of course, he didn’t know it then, nor did I. But one day the fear would be in his eyes.