The Ballad of a Small Player Read online

  ALSO BY LAWRENCE OSBORNE

  The Wet and the Dry

  The Forgiven

  Bangkok Days

  The Naked Tourist

  The Accidental Connoisseur

  American Normal

  The Poisoned Embrace

  Paris Dreambook

  Ania Malina

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Lawrence Osborne

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  HOGARTH is a trademark of the Random House Group Limited, and the H colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Osborne, Lawrence, 1958–

  The ballad of a small player / Lawrence Osborne. — First edition.

  pages cm

  1. British—China—Hong Kong—Fiction. 2. Gambling—China—Hong Kong—Fiction. 3. Casinos—China—Hong Kong—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PR6065.S23B36 2014

  823′.914—dc23 2013035201

  ISBN 978-0-8041-3797-3

  eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-3798-0

  Jacket design by Anna Kochman

  Jacket photograph by Yiu Yu Hoi

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  FAUSTUS:

  How comes it then that

  thou art out of hell?

  MEPHISTOPHELES:

  Why this is hell,

  nor am I out of it.

  —CHRISTOPHER

  MARLOWE

  ONE

  At midnight on Mondays, or a little after, I arrive at the Greek Mythology in Taipa, where I play on those nights when I have nowhere else to go, when I am tired of Fernando’s and the Clube Militar and the little brothel hotels on Repubblica. I like it there because there are no Chinese TV stars and because they know me by sight. It is one of the older casinos, archaic and run-down. Its woodwork reeks of smoke, and its carpets have a sweet rancid sponginess that my English shoes like. I go there every other weekend night or so, losing a thousand a week from my Inexhaustible Fund. I go there to scatter my yuan, my dollars, my kwai, and losing there is easier than winning, more gratifying. It’s more like winning than winning itself, and everyone knows you are not a real player until you secretly prefer losing.

  I like the bars stocked with Great Wall and Dragon Seal wine, which you can mix with Dr Pepper. I like the Greeks themselves. Zeus at the top of the gold staircase and the friezes of centaurs. I like the receptionists in cherry hats who sleep with you if you pay them enough. I even like the deserted traffic circle at the end of the street where I can go to catch my breath during a losing streak. The air in Macau is always sharp and clean, somehow, except when it’s foul and humid. We are surrounded by stormy seas.

  The crowd is mainlander at New Year: an outpouring of the nearby cities of Guangzhou and Shenzen and their choking suburbs. They look like crows, like swarms of birds. I wonder what they make of the murals of happy nymphs. Among them one can spot the safety-pin millionaires, the managers of the Pearl River factories, the mom-and-pop owners of manufacturing units specializing in computer keyboard buttons and toy cogs and gears for lawn mowers. All here to blow their hard-earned wads on the I Ching. The doors are of that bright gold that the Chinese love, the carpets that deep red that they also love and that is said to be the color of Luck. Droplet chandeliers plunge from ceilings painted with scenes from Tiepolo, with the zephyrs given Asian canthi. Corridor flowing into corridor, an endless system of corridors, like every Macau casino.

  I pass into a vestibule. Red vases, where the glass screens are frosted with images of Confucius and naked girls. In a private room, briefly glimpsed, two Chinese players are laying down $100 HK bets every minute, but with a show of macho lethargy and indifference. One of them smokes an enormous cigar from the open box of complimentary Havanas on the table, flicking the ash into a metal conch shell intended to echo the cheap reproductions of Botticelli cut into the blue walls. My hands begin to sweat beneath the gloves I always wear inside the gaming houses. The smell that curls into my nose is that of humans concentrating on their bad luck, perspiring like me because of the broken fans.

  The game here is punto banco baccarat. It involves no skill, and that is why the Chinese like it. Each table has a vertical electronic board upon which the patterns of Luck are displayed as mathematical trends in columns of numerals. The crowds gather around these boards to decide which tables are lucky and which are not. They scrutinize the lines of numbers, which change minutely with every hand that is played at the table. It is a way of computing the winds of change, the patterns of Luck, and I daresay the Western eye cannot read them at all. But then, they are not intended for our eyes.

  I sit and take out my crocodile wallet. I play in yellow kid gloves and everyone there thinks I am a lord of some kind, a lord on the run with a unlucky streak that can be mitigated by the forces of the I Ching. The waiter asks me if I would like another drink, a bottle of champagne, perhaps? I order a bottle of something or other and I think, I’ll drink it all anyway, sooner or later, I always do. I never seem to get drunk either way. There is a middle-aged woman at the table and no one else. She looks over her spectacles toward me and there is the usual xenophobic hatred in her eye, and yet she is coquettish, she is a pro at the tables, she is dolled up in clothes from the malls in Tsim Sha Shui. She is playing with a mixture of mainland kwai and Hong Kong dollars, with a few tourist tokens thrown in. Easy pickings, she is thinking, looking at this plump gwai lo in his gloves and bow tie, with his look of a New England literature professor out on the town without permission from his wife. She looks me over, this bitch, and I enjoy the thought of skinning her alive with a few good hands. This encourages me to settle in.

  The bets are $50 HK a hand. I begin to smoke, as I always do—Red Pagoda Hill and Zongnanha, the stuff that kills. The dealer gives me a little look. He, too, recognizes me; there are only a handful of gwai lo players in the whole city. “The wind,” he says kindly, “is blowing the wrong way tonight.” Bail out? But, I think, the bitch is making money. She is sucking my money out of me. No, no. “Keep at it,” I say.

  “Sure?”

  “Sure.”

  I double my bets. I put down hundred-dollar bills on the three card plays and watch them disappear to the other side of the table. “One fifty,” the woman says in Mandarin, tossing a green chip into the middle of an even greener table.

  “Two hundred,” I say in Cantonese.

  “Two fifty.”

  “Three fifty!”

  “All right,” she si
ghs.

  We play for four hands, and I lose three. A plate of baccalau appears on the table and the woman picks up a plastic fork with undisguised relish. The I Ching is with her.

  I now see how much gold she is wearing. I get up unsteadily and decide to backtrack to the men’s room and cool off. The dealer hesitates and says, “Sir?” but I wave him down. “I’ll be back,” I say.

  I never give up on the night until I am ready to fall down. I walk off, as if it doesn’t matter to me at all. As if I really will come back from the men’s room and skin her alive, and I am sure I will.

  TWO

  When I came back the older woman had disappeared. She had pulled her loot while ahead and was even now hauling a velvet bag of chips to the cashier. In her place another woman had sat down, but much more nervously and with a different weight to her hands. At a table, it is always the hands that I notice first. There are rapacious hands and expert ones, experienced hands and naïve ones, killer hands and victim hands. She was much younger, too. She perched at the far end of the table with a vulgar little handbag of the kind you can buy in the markets in Shenzen, badly made Fendi with gilt metal that flakes away after a week, and her left hand rested protectively on a small pile of lower-denomination red chips. She hoarded them in this way while her eyes scanned the surface of the table as if it were something she had never seen before. So she had sat at what she thought was an empty table. The bottle of champagne was still in its bucket, however. The waiter came up—he knew me—and said, in the heavy irony which the boys used with me in those days, “More champagne, Lord Doyle?”

  As he said this, the girl’s eyes rose for a moment. They shifted sideways to the electric number board behind me. The rows of yellow numbers had suddenly altered and I could hear them click, as if the luck force field were flicking them over like cards.

  “Is that a change of luck?”

  “It must be, your lordship.”

  We laughed. I was the jolliest loser. I turned in my seat and motioned to the girl.

  “Why not ask the señorita if she’d like a glass of champagne?”

  He leaned down to my ear.

  “Are you sure, sir?”

  “Sure.”

  I pulled away from his whisper and gripped the neck of the bottle, extracting it from a rustle of ice.

  “Why not?”

  The waiter spoke to her in Mandarin. She said, “That’s nice” in Cantonese. I spoke to her in the same language.

  “It’s vintage, you know, it’s not just any old bubbly.”

  In the white noise of the sixty baccarat tables, where a crowd of munitions workers were hurling down their company-secured chips with curses and hoorahs, I thought for a moment that I had gone deaf, and when my hearing returned the girl was talking to me across a pall of smoke. She was saying thank you or some such thing, and her lips moved like two parallel fingers playing a game of rock-paper-scissors. They were overpainted, as was the style there. She wore a small crocus-white dress, and that was all I cared to notice. Not especially pretty, as the boy had been quick to observe. Not especially pretty but not especially unattractive either. She drank the champagne awkwardly, holding the glass with two fingers so that it almost fell, and I half wished I hadn’t bothered.

  We played for a while.

  “Is it your first time?” I asked her between hands, as the machine shuffled the cards and the dealer twirled his pallet; her nod made him wonder as well.

  “Over from Hong Kong for the night?”

  “From Aberdeen.”

  “Aberdeen,” I said. “I know Aberdeen.”

  Everyone does.

  “I go there for Jumbo’s.”

  “Ah,” she said. “I go there on Sunday.”

  “There’s a better place on Lamma,” I went on. “Rainbow.”

  “Yes, I know it.”

  The Shuffle Master ejected three cards apiece. She handled them in the way that a buyer in a market will handle small fish before buying them. I wondered if she knew what she was doing, but one doesn’t advise the enemy. She looked over the tops of the cards, and there was the crooked, up-country smile, the overapplied paints and creams. I won the next hand. It cheered me after a long hiatus, and the long ebbing of my chips was checked. I drank off the glass of Krug and ordered another bottle. There were two of us drinking now.

  After two more winning hands I went to the cashier and bought more chips. The night was turning soft and bitter at the edges, and I wanted to be at the center of it for another hour. The boys winked at me because I was being picked up by a secretary, but even if I was I didn’t particularly mind. Any man can be picked up by a woman half his age and he won’t protest, he won’t go kicking and screaming. He’ll go along with it for a while, just to see what happens. I returned to my seat and as I brushed past the girl from Aberdeen I saw the gold chain resting around the back of her neck and the blue edge of a tattoo covered by her dress strap. The ink looked pretty against her olive skin. She looked up for a second as my gaze swept across her neck—a woman never lets this go—and she turned her cards against this same gaze, as if I might be cheating. The idea that I might made me smile. It would be like fleecing a lamb with a pair of nail scissors. I suppose it was because I had been coming there so long without talking to a fellow player that I felt inclined to be careful with her. I gradually detached myself from the hands I played, although I was winning again, and enjoyed the second bottle, which had been deposited in the ice bucket. The floor manager came by and wished me luck. His Sino-Portuguese eyes filled with cheerful malice and I said I was happy either way, winning or losing. The girl looked up. I could tell that she understood English well. She watched me pick up my cards, shift them, glance down at them without any outward sign of emotion, and I felt, for some reason, that we understood each other.

  I walked out with her into the casino lobby, and there was the lilt in our walk, the agreement deep down at the level of the body.

  “It’s not my favorite place,” I said grandly. “Have you been to the Venetian?” I hate that, too, my tone implied. She tried to smile back, but I could see that she was seesawing internally, weighing it up and down, this venture into a specific form of corruption. We walked out past the statue of Pegasus in the courtyard, and its wings were flapping, smoke blowing out of its nose, and the whores standing about in the parking lot were laughing at us.

  I’m too old for you to worry about attraction, I wanted to say. And I am sorry for that. It mortifies me, but I cannot change it.

  It was so crowded in this overblown courtyard that there was no room even to exchange a few words. She looked at her watch and said something about the hydrofoil back to Hong Kong, even though the last one didn’t leave for a few hours, and in my experience with Chinese girls, when they are interested in you there is a very obvious slowing of their usual quickness of movement. She didn’t slow. I let the comment melt away and then touched her hand for a moment and she turned to look at me and, in that flashing way, we had agreed upon it.

  She spoke very quietly.

  “Where can we go?”

  “We can go anywhere. Not my room.”

  The light around us was a little brighter. Her bracelet was one of those multicolored childish objects from the Piper collection that are endorsed by Paris Hilton. She must have seen it in a magazine and let herself be persuaded into a mistake—the small circles of enamel didn’t suit her at all. At least she wasn’t wearing one of the hideous blue rings from the same maker. In the cab she would not touch me, aware perhaps of the prying eye of the Chinese cabbie fixed upon us in the rearview mirror (a gwai lo is always checked out), and I suggested an older, colonial place near the An-Ma temple where I had not been before and where—for some reason it mattered—I would not be recognized.

  THREE

  It rained along the shore. Along the embankments stand twisted fig trees planted by the Europeans, and they were still faintly visible in that darkness. Opposite, on the far side of the Van Nam Lake, r
ises a vision of China modern enough to chill the blood: the expressways, the towers, the garbled instruments of rising power. A terrible thing called the Cybernetic Fountain. But on the shore the old villas stand behind their sand-colored walls and the trees drip in the monsoon. There is a memory of ease, of the necessity of grace, white and lemon arches glimpsed between the fig trees. We passed near the temple as a soft thunder rolled in from the open sea. There are goddesses here who protect sailors and fishermen, and who protect the gambler, too.

  The hotel lay at the top of a series of steep steps that wound around terrace garden patios with wizened trees and wet tables.

  As I closed the door behind us, she said, “I am not the usual prostitute. You think I am. But you may have made a mistake.”

  “Mistake?”

  “I’m not a whore.”

  In the room we sat on the bed. There was the sound of the rain and the smell of flowerpots. I poured her a glass of wine from the mini-bar, but she didn’t take it. Quite the contrary. There was no opening up. She held her legs closely together as her hands lay curled upward in her lap in an attitude of refusal, and perhaps, I thought, darkness was required. It was a venal thought, a crass thought. I went to the bathroom and turned on that light, then brought the bathroom door to within an inch of the jamb. That would be enough light for us, enough darkness to unlock her curious inhibitions. She brushed the water drops from her jacket and shivered. She asked for a towel to rub her hair. I took off my own jacket and then my shoes—it felt impudent, but there was nothing for it. She remarked on the rolling-off of the shoes and there was a disdain in her eyes, a sadness at the lack of imagination. Perhaps she really wasn’t what I had thought.

  She threw down the towel and decided to laugh her way out of this oncoming horror, because after all she could sense that I was not the usual customer. I wanted to apologize, and a woman can sense the imminence of a male apology. It’s like a storm cloud on its way to hose you down.