On my way back along the Avenida de Almeida Ribeiro I wondered what would happen if I stopped at one of the large casinos and made a single bet with $1,000 HK. I had not considered doing this because I had resolved to have the day off. But the more I thought about it, the more I found the idea irresistible. Yes, I thought, I could leave off for twenty hours, but then again I could just go in right now and get my fix, and what of it? Just one bet. Just one bet before bed, for after all, life is short and much shorter than you think. To think it over I stopped in Senado Square, where the dampened teenagers milled around the stores, and went into an establiemento de bebidas for a quick oolong. It was about eleven o’clock by then and the lights were looking spectral, the balls of white glass burning with bright futility in that drizzle and social emptiness, and I sat by the window with my tea and saw that my hand was still emblazoned with Dao-Ming’s number, which had still not worn off. I suppose an abnormal amount of time had gone by without my thinking about this anomaly, but now that I considered it again I was stumped by the ink’s intransigence inside my skin. I looked at it more closely and rubbed at it with a dampened napkin, which made no effect upon it. It was like a tattoo.
The numbers were 6890 0899. I had not even thought about calling this number, because the thief doesn’t call the person he’s abused. I’d never use it. What would I say if I did? How would I apologize? I spat on the skin and rubbed the numerals yet again, but the saliva remained uncolored. I wondered how long I had been asleep in her bed. Days perhaps.
I gulped back my tea and fought the unrest that seemed to be rushing into me, and under my tattered umbrella I walked quickly past the Metropole toward the Avenida Doutor Mario Soares, telling myself that the dumbest thing I could do was call that number. She had burned it into my skin so that I would not forget her, and I didn’t know she had done it, but it was a woman’s ideal revenge, wasn’t it? She had used magic ink and her number was ineradicable on a vital and visible part of my body, from where it apparently could not be removed.
Halfway down Soares I came to the Grand Emperor, with a gilded replica of the British royal state carriage outside it and Beefeaters in fur hats filling a vestibule of cretinous gilt. It’s the kitschiest of the gaming palaces on the island, and there is something in its kitsch that reminds you that there is more to being alive than being alive. But what?
I stopped and swung myself around and through the doors that were opened for me, and into a cool imitation of some Hans Christian Andersen fairy palace imagined by a small child with a high fever who has seen many a picture of Cinderella. I passed under an imposing but strangely sympathetic portrait of Queen Liz and another of the Duke of Cumberland, a bad-looking dude if I may say, and as I went I fingered the very thousand-dollar note I was going to use. The Emperor was not as crowded as the Lisboa, and there was elbow room. I calmed down. Even an alcoholic can be calm at the bar.
I took the escalators up through floor after floor decorated in a European aristocracy theme. Passing the British floor (horses and pale women), I settled for the Venetian level, with myriad images of the age of Casanova, which is to say scenes with swooning inhabitants of boudoirs, weeping over handkerchiefs, and of candlelit gallantries around baccarat tables. A memory of another secretive gambling city, intricate and comfortable as a large salon. But here in this particular casino I knew no one at all, since I rarely came there. I passed myself in mirror after mirror, and as I checked out the distorted face that was, surprisingly, my own, I inspected the space around me to see if any ghosts were there. In that rush of overdone opulence, it would have been less surprising. I walked through rooms defined by ebony figurine lamps, silk sashes, and gold frames, where men in windowpane jackets and out-sized rings loafed about on Louis XV sofas, and soon I came to a table that looked quite active and charged, with youngsters having a ball. It looked like a party. The cards here were dispensed by a traditional shoe, and the chips were pearled and multicolored. A pall of smoke hung above the table. I sat and said in Cantonese that I’d like to play a hand, and the youth looked up with distasteful surprise at my command of their slang and the social subtexts that go with it. They appeared weary at the idea of having to accommodate me, let alone lose to me at the table.
“Okay, welcome,” the dealers said, and passed the shoe toward me for the beginning of the next hand. I didn’t have my gloves with me, and I felt a little out of place touching the backs of the cards without the usual intervening material. But it didn’t matter. I kept the ink numbers well hidden.
I was only laying down a thousand by way of an experiment, and it was really to see what would happen with the hand that I was dealt. I was brimming with this curiosity, which was more than curiosity. I was proving something to myself — namely, that I was not haunted by the spirit world. That my luck was my own and not the gift of ghosts. Because if it was the latter I would be a candidate for the psychiatric hospital. The shoe passed down the table and the players sat back for a moment and flexed their fingers and minds. The kids looked me over. I was still rain-specked and semielegant but a tad worse for wear. There must have been something about me that suggested an overeagerness. They could not, however, know the real heat rising inside me. My feet tapped. It was caused by happiness at being back at a table. I looked across the room and saw Casanova staring back at me from behind a white mask. The pallet flipped. I looked at my watch. “So,” the banker said quickly. “The gentleman has drawn a natural. Nine! Nine!”
Glasses of naughty lemonade with straws appeared on waitered trays to make them forget their momentary misfortune. I raked in the chips. It was a modest haul, and I said I wouldn’t play on.
The banker said, “Very well,” and motioned to a staff member to take me to the cashier’s window. I got up and straightened my jacket and walked behind the man to the window, causing the mantle of smoke above me to oscillate and divide. The room was deathly quiet now as I counted my money and pocketed it. I took the escalator back to the lobby. The Beefeaters with Chinese eyes saluted as I walked to the doors. When I got there I was out of breath, burning with thirst. As I made my way out into the street I had to hold my throat. In the soft, insidious rain a woman walked past the gates, a secretary on her way home perhaps. She wore a raincoat with water stains and a strictly tightened belt. Without thinking, I stepped toward her, holding out the money I had won, the notes crushed inside my fist like a handful of trash. We stopped as we almost collided and her face changed from blankness to alarm, her eyes widening into soft black holes. I begged her to take the money. She stammered, perhaps considered whether it might be lucky or unlucky money, and then shook her head, walking on with a quick “Thank you, but no,” in English. For a moment I was sure that she, too, had glimpsed a ghost standing behind me. I turned and my heart was beating quickly. So here was a city where you couldn’t even hand out free money. You couldn’t even make a gift of it to a stranger.
I dove into the night having forgotten my umbrella, and soon after I went to a bar at the Venetian for a nightcap. It seemed to me then that I was doing something entirely automatic, and that the night itself was merely a joke, a pretext for being endlessly alive and unreal and lucky.
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.