His voice was bitter and unstable.
“That’s a mad scheme, Adrian. Downright insolent. But you know what? I’m going to accept.”
“You are?”
His face lit up with satisfaction.
“Yes, I’m going to accept because it’s just so humiliating to you that I can’t resist. But if I lose the hand you have to pay me the ten percent of whatever we lose.”
“Balls,” he spluttered.
“Take it or leave it.”
He chewed it over while laboring through a second drink, then said, reluctantly, “All right, I’ll do it. I’ll do it as a favor to you.”
“A favor?”
“Yes. Since you’ve been a gentleman about it, I don’t mind doing it just this once. I’m showing confidence in you, don’t you see? I’m accepting it as a way of saying thank you.”
“It’s sweet of you, Adrian.”
“Can we make it five percent, though?”
“Ten. But you know I’ll win.”
He licked his lips uncertainly. When money is the only thing that bonds two men together, this is what happens. Everything becomes symbolic. Human relations boil down to their rotten core.
“You don’t say anything about it to Yo Yo, understand?”
“I have one question, Adrian. If you play everything and I lose it, what will you pay the ten percent with?”
“Ah, bastard of you. So I have to keep a bit back?”
“It would be prudent or you’ll lose a comrade.”
“I could pay you back next week.”
“Adrian, we don’t say things like that. You have what you have now. You don’t have a pot to piss in otherwise.”
His pride was stung and he swore, stepping back and bumping inadvertently into the bar.
“Got me by the balls, have you? I have the wedding ring. It’s worth two thousand U.S.”
I clicked my fingers to the barman.
“Two more, boss. No ice. How pissed shall we get, Adrian?”
“Bloody pissed.”
“All right, one more down the hatch and then we’ll go play.”
“Bastards,” he said broodily, shaking his head. But to whom was he referring? “I got a ring from Cartier and she threw it in my face. Those were the days. The little bitch. But I have the ring. I can pawn it. I’m not down and out with a ring like that in my pocket.”
“No one stays with anyone forever,” I said to comfort him.
“Yeah, but that bitch was one of a kind. She took every penny I had.”
“She left you the ring.”
“It’s a good ring, but I’m saving it for a rainy day.”
Isn’t this a rainy day? I thought. A day of downpours.
We set off into the wilderness of a thousand tables. I was feeling wild myself, and I wanted to do something fine for this declining man who had so little to cling to in his life outside his addiction. We came to a table in the center of the floor where a group of Hong Kong girls were losing their money with good humor and Adrian, attracted by the energy of the opposite sex, sat himself down emphatically among them, though with a melancholy invisibility. He then got up and gave the seat to me, remembering our arrangement.
“It feels lucky to me,” he whispered. “I can feel the vibe.”
The bankers didn’t recognize me, nor I them. Adrian stood behind me as a spectator and we both felt like a team of some kind. I split his money into three bets, much against his will, and played the first hand with a calm that transmitted itself to the girls. They calmed down as well and began to play more seriously. It was a quick hand with the highest wagers turning the cards first, according to tradition. Adrian craned over my shoulder to see what was happening, and when I turned a baccarat, a zero, he gave a start and muttered a quiet “Fuck!” I leaned back and felt ecstatic. So it was over at last. My run had run out — and never had that curious phrase seemed more appropriate. Luck indeed was like something that runs and then grows a little tired, and then falls down from exhaustion.
I turned to Adrian and shrugged, and he had to yield the ten percent we had agreed on.
“Shall we go on?” I asked.
It was a dilemma for him, I could see, and not one that he wanted to find himself in. It’s me, he was thinking, it’s me and my filthy luck. I can’t get away from it.
“One more by you,” he said at last. It was worth a try.
“Fine,” I said coolly.
He gripped the back of the chair. I turned a two and a three, and was beaten handily by a girl at the far end of the table.
“What?” Adrian snorted.
After handing over the second ten percent cut, he demanded angrily to play the last hand himself.
I watched the whole thing impassively.
“The least I can do,” he muttered, “is lose it myself.”
And he did so, turning a terrible hand. It happened in a split second, and Adrian’s brief moment of revived hope expired. The girls laughed out loud, experimental winners for a moment.
I put a hand on his shoulder and called it a night. He rose slowly and gave me the last of the chump change as my cut, but I refused it.
“Keep it for drinks with Yo Yo. Get laid, at least.”
“Cheers, old man. But I can’t get laid now. I feel suicidal.”
“Written in the stars,” I said.
We walked slowly in defeat back to the Florian, though of course for me it was not entirely a defeat. I never thought I’d celebrate the end of a lucky streak as anything but a misfortune, but I did and it felt unexpectedly sweet. We went upstairs to the mall and walked around for a while to cool off, and Adrian bitterly lamented his bad luck, his lack of sau hei. There was nothing for it, he complained, but to go back to Nottingham and ask his mother for a loan. It was a lamentable plan, I said, and one that was bound to fail. One’s mother was always the worst person to turn to in a scrape.
“I just don’t know if I can go on,” he said. “I’m down to the last of my savings from my bank days, and I thought that would last forever. What the hell have I done with it?”
“Don’t you ever win? Not ever?”
He shook his head.
“Not in three months. Losses every night. It can’t be, it just can’t be. I ruin everything I touch.”
“It’s not the case, Adrian. We’re playing punto banco — it’s a game of pure luck. You’re talking like the Chinese.”
“Don’t we all?”
“But we don’t think like them. Surely?”
“I don’t know anymore. Maybe I do think like the Chinese. Why shouldn’t I?”
As we lingered there trying to forget our misfortune, Yo Yo came up with the look of someone who has been searching for her sugar daddy and been unable to find him. She covered Adrian with kisses and we went downstairs, back into the din and musk and percussive voices. A place where the old are not allowed to be old, where the chandeliers look like model zeppelins chained to the ceilings and where their fairy light is a gold that makes the skin itself look metallic. A mix of human voices and the string music of Europe, and actors dressed as characters from the operas of Puccini wandering about in their costumes breaking out into arias or ringing bells and turning cartwheels among the Taiwanese tourists who are so anxious to capture them on film. Look, a Pulcinello. A Bohemian. Flesh turned to metal and air and pedigree. Adrian turned to me while Yo Yo went to the bathroom, and he had grasped the poisoned nettle of his situation with a shocking clairvoyance.
“Doyle, lend me another four thousand for the rest of the week. I won’t play it, I swear. I’ll use it to entertain Yo Yo. You don’t know how demanding she is. She eats money like a badger eats grass. She’s insatiable. She sucks everything up and then demands more. She’s like a housewife cleaning up and I’m the dog poop in the corner. She’s a money vacuum cleaner. You can afford it, it’s nothing to you now. I couldn’t have known that your luck had run out. Quick, while she’s in the bathroom!”