I sat at a crowded table where there seemed to be plenty of action. Chips swept across its surface like litter, were scooped up and then appeared again in grubby mounds. I could smell the cash being forked out from those malodorous pockets, banknotes as old as Mao with their disgusting scent of ink, paraffin, and sweat. The cash that now rules the planet, the cash that we are all now forced to eat like horse feed. Bitter hard-earned cash with a smell of blood on it, the sort of tender we in the West never see much of these days. I liked the swirl and lust around this table, the way the women screamed at every outcome and the way their eyes then went hard and snakelike. I liked its intensity. This was the right spot, right in the eye of the storm. After the days and nights in Lamma with Dao-Ming, after that glimpse of unaccomplished love, this was the return to hard facts.
I converted my cash in its totality because there was no point playing by half measures. It was all or nothing. The banker, covered with appalling acne, asked if I spoke Chinese and I nodded. The table bristled. Nothing worse than a foreign chimp who speaks the language.
I threw down five hundred. The cards came slithering out and I scored a natural, a perfect nine. The chips came my way, looking sulky and whorish. There was a collective sigh, a shaking of heads, and a few of the stragglers who had been hanging back waiting for the winds to alter wandered over to us to have a look.
“There’s a lucky gwai lo,” I heard someone say, and the girls came flocking also in their immodest way. I played in my yellow gloves and the toughs gave me the eye. A second nine, and there was a small sensation. A gwai lo with two nines in a row? Unheard of. I looked through the tussle of bodies and saw a superbly dressed woman on the far side of the room get up, adjust her necklace, and leave the room alone.
I raked in a hundred thousand and cashed the chips straight away. Suddenly the blood began to shoot through my system and, belying long-held prejudices, I wanted to dance. The whole room stared at me as I exited with my attaché case and made my way to the New Wing, where I had not been in a while — not since losing a hundred thousand, in fact, during a miserable evening in March. My reentry was therefore very different from my last exit, and I allowed myself a bit of puffery going in, snapping my fingers for my chips as I threw out a few bundles of fresh cash. The New Wing was a place I always feared a little because I seemed to have a tendency to lose there, but now I wanted to slap it in the face and prove to it, and to myself, that the I Ching was on my side after a long period of cosmic disloyalty. I lost no time, therefore, in sitting down and placing a daring bet of thirty-five hundred, unsure as yet how far I should test the waters of this treacherous place. They didn’t know me there yet so the bet was accepted indifferently, the staff barely looking at me until the natural was turned. A perfect nine, the four and the five flipped simultaneously and showering me with golden warmth. The bankers permitted themselves a few grimaces at this brutal result for the house, but they carefully controlled themselves and there was not the slightest ruffling of their feathers. I got up calmly and walked over to a different table. Some naughty lemonade was promptly brought (get the punters drunk and they’ll lose quicker), and I felt bold enough to knock it back without batting an eyelid. This corner of the room was emptier and I played with a couple of mainlander dotards who didn’t seem to be paying any attention, watched from afar by the group I had thrashed. My new companions played as if dreaming, as if sleepwalking, and I knew how they felt because at any given moment I feel like I am sleepwalking — sleep-playing, you could say — and no one knows who I am except a bunch of dead people on the far side of the world.
I laid down the chips and waited with an unprecedented inner coldness as the natural was turned. So I was rolling. I swept up the gains and laid them all down again immediately, winning a second time. Four naturals in a row. I already had far more than I had stolen from Dao-Ming and I suppose I could have walked out right then and made a deal with management with regard to settling the bill. I could get the rest from Adrian Lipett and limp on for a few more weeks. But then again, it would not be enough to retire on; and, besides, when you are on a roll you must roll and roll, so I threw everything down on the next hand. Nine!
The room stirred. The banker gave me an irritable look and pushed toward me a pile of chips such as I had never seen.
Their tone toward me altered. I tugged at my gloves and I was aware of how rigid and glassy my bearing had become and how much more I now conformed to the idea of an English lord living it up in the East. In the East, people always told me — or at least gamblers always told me — they believe in the significance of coincidences. In the idea of the supernatural ordering the natural. Jung comments on this somewhere; it is due, he says, to the Chinese having a different sense of time, which in his commentary on the I Ching he called synchronicity. The Chinese, he said, did not believe in causality. They believed that when a cluster of things happened at the same time there was a meaningful connection between them. The Chinese mind seems to be exclusively preoccupied with the chance aspect of events. What we call coincidence is the chief concern of this peculiar mind, and what we worship as causality passes almost unnoticed. Yes, that was how a scholar would make sense of it. Right then, as I staked that formidable pile of chips on a single hand, I knew that there was no causality behind what would happen next. In the East, as someone also remarked, one doesn’t die. At the same moment I felt myself flowing into a great river of Luck, and I also felt how endless and immortal this river must be. Dopamine flooded my body as I merged into the flow, and I felt invulnerable as the hand was turned and I saw a fifth nine.
I took off my gloves to let my hands breathe off their sweat. As soon as I laid my right hand out on the edge of the table I noticed that it was wide open with the telephone number scrawled across it, and I closed it at once, but not before the ink stains had been noticed.
Soon I was aware of a wildfire of gossip spreading around me, the word nine repeated under the breath as spectators formed an ever-tightening ring around the table, their hands lit by the glare of the overhead lamps. I was aware of the oysterized breath and the scent of gum and the precision of the gazes as this ring closed in upon me and the question arose — telepathically — whether I would risk it all on yet another hand. This, after all, is what these voyeurs are always waiting for, like people assembled under a bridge where a man in tattered underwear is threatening to throw himself off.
“Play?” the bank asked in a gentle tone.
I wasn’t sure. I could see that he had noticed the number on my palm and I felt that he was on the brink of asking me to open my hand and let him have a look. A crib could never help at a game like baccarat, but there is an elemental superstition and suspicion at work here, a collective paranoia, and a bank is always bound to be on the lookout for scams. His eyebrows did indeed rise and, to forestall a question, I said that it was a phone number and nothing more. He nodded, but with a clear absence of conviction.
“Really,” I insisted, but still drew my gloves back on.
I didn’t want him to see the number because these boys have photographic memories. It must have seemed to him a cheap way for a lord to store what was in all probability a woman’s phone number. Scrawled on the hand, as a teenager would have done it. He attended to the Shuffle Master and I was surprised to see a few high rollers seat themselves at the table.