He wore a tacky Singapore suit spattered with rain like mine and a wilted buttonhole peering out like a puffed and beaten eye. For that matter, his whole face looked like a puffed and beaten eye. If he’d had a nickname it would have been the Eye. He was always on the lookout for scams. He had his Chinese girl on his arm, indistinguishable from the last one, and he was on yet another predictably tragic losing streak in the grand confines of the Venetian, which flattered both his vanity and his senses without giving anything back. He came sidling up with the girl — unsteady after a few vodkas, I imagine — and clapped a hand on my shoulder as he pulled a look of friendship grievously wounded and betrayed.
“You’ve been hiding, Doyle. No one has seen you anywhere. This is Yo Yo. Yo Yo, this is Lord Doyle.”
“Oh, Lor Doy?”
I bowed for her.
“At your service, ma’am.”
It immediately crossed Yo Yo’s infernally calculating mind that I might be a better long-term bet than the sodden Englishman she was so temporarily attached to, and I noticed a sudden detachment from his arm in my favor.
“Lord Doyle,” Lipett said, “I have been at the tables for three hours and I thought Yo Yo was going to bring me luck tonight. No such thing. She has been a disaster all along.”
Not understanding, she smiled sweetly.
“I have gone from catastrophe to catastrophe. Who can understand it? Last night it was all going so well. I walked away from the Landmark with three thousand in pocket.”
“Yeah, it’s a bitchy world.”
“Yo Yo here made us both pray to the Goddess of Luck, but it only made it worse. The thing is, you know they enrich the air with oxygen? I feel high in here. I feel like a million quid. I can’t stop.”
“You seem to have the cash for it, Adrian.”
“Why, that’s just the problem, old man. I can feel that there’s a change of luck just around the corner. I can practically taste it with my tongue. You know that feeling. You of all people, Doyle.”
“I can’t lend you what you need. I shouldn’t be lending anything, it’s my retirement money.”
His eyes lit up.
“Retirement? You’re out? But nobody gets out unless they go broke and are deported. And that’s the funny thing. None of us goes entirely broke. We always have just enough to hang on.”
Life as perpetual debt, I thought. Until we hit it big. Then we’re out.
The look of despair that crossed his face was priceless.
“Have you hit it that big,” he whispered out of hearing of his blinking date. “Is it all true? Millions at the Fortuna VIP?”
“I can’t disclose all the details — but yeah, you cunt, my luck changed at long last and say what you will but I deserved it.”
“Shit, shit. Did you pray to that damn goddess of theirs that they all swear by?”
“Of course not.”
“Superstitious peasants. I knew it.”
His fists clenched, his knuckles white with envy.
“Doyle, you were the biggest loser of all. I can’t understand it.”
“That’s why it’s called luck.”
“What?”
“Luck, it’s luck.”
“No, no. There’s no such thing as luck. You turned a corner. Look, we have to stick together. We’re all ghosts as far as they’re concerned. We don’t even exist. Even my own girlfriend calls me a ghost to her friends. Can you imagine? On the phone to her friends she says, ‘I can’t talk right now, I have a ghost here.’ We represent nothing to them whatsoever, except evil ghosts. Scavengers, opium traders, and the like. Look around you. They love all this crap, they can’t stay away from it. But they still hate us in some way.”
“They don’t hate us.”
“Look at it, it’s just Vegas redux. Literally. They love it and we are suffering in it because we are ill.”
“Come on, have a drink. I’ll lend you.”
“You will? Bastard of truest joy! I knew you were a soft touch deep down, your lordship. Gotcha.”
“I am. I’m sentimental.”
I turned to the barman.
“Two Johnnie Walkers, no ice.”
We leaned on the bar and Yo Yo went off to dance somewhere. We were the unhealthiest-looking people there, because to Chinese punters the Venetian is the last word in swanky American glamour and respectability. Yes, respectability. It is smoke-free, orderly, spacious, and clean. They don’t fine you for spitting here, they throw you out. These Vegas establishments are the very opposite of their Chinese counterparts, which at least have retained the louche tolerance of ages past. The Vegas casinos are clean and overblown, with palatial dimensions and vacuumed carpets. They are as family-clean and bright as their originals in the Nevada desert, and in them the insalubrious aspects of gambling are put to the back of one’s mind. The gambler here is a child in a playground diverted by toys and games. The Venetian is the world’s largest casino, and its baccarat tables are set in columned halls with fountains and frescoed ceilings and cypress trees. Parts of it are like a Baroque church, with glasslike marble floors. Painted cupolas, awed crowds, floodlit capitals. Adrian liked to come here because it impressed his dates, and because he could walk them around the real-sized campanile. A place where dreams are realized, the executives have always said, and Adrian seemed to take them at their word. He liked the Bellini and the bar we were in now, the Florian, under the escalators leading up to the Grand Canal Shoppes, and I imagine that he spent hours here sipping Chivas Regal and mulling the disasters that awaited him at the innumerable tables nearby. One’s demise is always a spectacle. He looked slightly flustered now as he drained his Black Label and eyed the human glow of the tables, where a crowd worthy of the Colosseum was assembled. He was defeated for the night and yet his animal spirits had been revived by the promise of a sudden gift from my pocket.
“Look here,” he said, in his grubby private-school way, the locutions of the past revived in the East without fear of mockery, “how much can you make it tonight? The lads say you made three million at the Hou Kat Club. Very handy. You can be philosophical.”
“It’s not true, but I can spare you three thousand.”
“Three thousand Hong Kong? That’s barely three hundred fifty U.S. You can do better than that.”
“It’s what I have on me. Besides it’s for your own good. You’ll lose it in thirty minutes.”
“Will I? Says who?”
“I know.”
“Yes, you’re quite the bloody expert now, aren’t you? But it’s just luck, Doyle. There’s nothing mystical about it.”
“I could make it four thousand.”
He squinted and bit his lower lip.
“I have another idea,” he said quietly. “What if you lend me the money and then play it for me?”
“What?”
“You heard. What if you play the hand for me and then give me the winnings. Okay, I’ll give you a ten percent cut. That’s fair.”
I laughed in his face.
“No need to laugh, old man.”