“Shall we shake on it?”
He laughed uneasily and held out his hand.
“Why not? I like you, Doyle.”
His deerskin face tilted back for a moment and the laugh was dry. The rich never believe it when one compliments them or expresses any affection for them. They know all the things about themselves that we don’t. And I suddenly thought: I made eleven million tonight.
“Come to the club, Doyle. Have you ever eaten pangolin?”
He leaned forward again and his breath was edged with Dow’s.
“It tastes like penguin and it keeps your hard-on hard. It’s the one thing I indulge in that my wife approves of. We can have it fried or boiled with plum sauce. You can have it any way you like. You can have it battered if you like.”
Seven suitcases of cash were sent up to my room in the morning, just as I had requested. I didn’t have a bank account and everything I earned had to be converted into cash. Instinctively, however, the Chinese sympathized with this. Like many Asians, they feel more comfortable with cash than with abstractions. The notes were bundled into units of five thousand and packed into genuine leather cases with handsome locks. When Mr. Souza had left, after expressing his congratulations, I emptied them onto the bed and counted the packets carefully before putting them back into the cases exactly as they had been.
I now had eleven suitcases of hard cash stored in my room, and I no longer thought of leaving them with the management for safekeeping. The balance of power and trust between us had changed and I now thought that they were spying on me, keeping tabs on my winnings and — why not? — my movements. A casino never gives up its money willingly. But they were in a quandary. If they encouraged me to leave now, they stood no chance of ever recovering their losses. Under normal circumstances it would be in their interests to keep me there and to keep me playing. The theory would be that in the long term the odds would be stacked inexorably against me. But they had lost their nerve. They didn’t know what to do. If I stayed, I was also likely to be a big spender in the food outlets and elsewhere. I would at least be profitable for them in some way. And so a note came from Souza later that day: Please feel free to accept our offer of an upgrade to a suite on one of the higher floors. I accepted and the suitcases, along with my belongings, were transferred to a suite six floors above me. There was a kind of silence around me, and I no longer played music when I was by myself. It was enough to be alone with myself without interference, to sink like a stone into a mineshaft. I went through the casinos after midnight in my new suits as I had always done, and as I did so I felt the weight of the hotel’s security surveillance system pressing upon me from all sides. It was, of course, the ban that was in effect against me, and the hapless floor managers in every room had to make sure that I didn’t so much as sit at a table. They followed me around with an obsequiously firm hand, and whenever I stopped to watch the play they hovered around me without saying a word.
You can’t open the windows at the Lisboa, perhaps because they are afraid of suicides, with so many desperate bankrupts checked in every night — so I slept with the fan and the heating on, with the curtains drawn like a death chamber. Then when I had recovered a little from my strange and slowly aggravating feeling of illness, I went to war again. I took a bath and ate a light breakfast from room service, eggs and toast and tea. It was a little before six and I ordered a bottle of champagne to go with the eggs. I downed half the bottle, then dressed for the fray, though it would not be in the Lisboa. I felt a cold, stable hatred toward the world and toward myself as I went down the carpet-padded corridor with one of my cases filled with about five hundred thousand.
NINETEEN
I was calm as I sat at one of the tables at the Landmark, which here have yellow surfaces and Pharaonic heads. The theme is ancient Egypt and the bar outside the casino is shaped like a full-sized Middle Kingdom ship. The early-morning gamblers sat grimly and thirstily around the table’s yellow oval, where their fates were being decided without lifting their eyes. They were unusually rapt, perhaps because they were not the all-nighters but those who had risen bright and early for the game. They were the kind of players with which I was usually unfamiliar. The real fanatics, the guys who get up in the morning to play. The high-stakes table at which I sat had been witnessing some turbulent scenes just prior to my arrival and I had watched the whole thing with interest. Three men in sharkskin suits, smoking heavily, were playing to a small crowd who were goading them on with cries of desperate encouragement. The pallet turned the cards and there was a crushed silence as the banker swept up every single chip on the table. The sharkskins moved away with wounded pride, and for a moment the mood was ugly.
A massive seated figure copied from the Valley of the Kings and an overblown face of Tutankhamen did not mitigate it. I sat down quietly with the chips I had exchanged for the totality of the five hundred thousand I had brought with me and placed a fifth of it — a hundred thousand — on the yellow surface. No one paid me much attention even with such a large bet, and it must have been because the sharkskins had lost much more.
The table filled again. I felt no apprehension at all as I, the highest-betting player, turned my cards before everyone else. The inevitable nine. I raked in as much as I’d laid down and started again. The players sighed and there was a dreary scene. An old lady cried, “Now look here!” and stared at me. Same result. I scooped up my chips and moved to a different table, and the crowd followed me.
I put down a hundred twenty thousand this time and won again. The bankers shot each other unsubtle looks and I played two hands of fifty thousand each. Stiff hands that in normal times would have to be played fearlessly. But I had neither fear nor the lack of fear. I was strung out in between. The first fifty-thousand-dollar hand was matched by the others, who were wealthier than they looked. No one could believe that a player would turn three naturals in a row.
It was like those famous streaks of red that are known at roulette tables. The ball falls on red for eleven times in a row and the punters, confronted with a twelfth spin, must decide whether there is a statistical law that favors a twelfth red or a black. But ah, there is no such thing as a statistical law when it comes to chance. A pair of dice can fall as two sixes ten times in a row and no law has been broken. If they rolled as sixes a hundred times in a row we’d be astonished — dismayed, even — but no law will have been turned upside down. There is nothing that says the roulette ball cannot fall on red seventeen times in a row (as it does sometimes) or fifty-two times.
I believe a wheel at the Monte Carlo casino in 1897 rolled eighteen reds in a row and a German gambler made a small fortune on the eighteenth because nobody else around him dared bet on red. That man held his nerve. I had now played fourteen naturals in a row, and like that streak of reds my streak of nines was simply coasting along in its aberrant groove. It was one of those things, and the trick was to not succumb to any surprise. I didn’t. I played the hand as if it were the first I had ever played. I turned the cards and asked the banker to bag the chips I had won. There was nothing to it, and the spectators went silent in recognition of its inevitability.
Instead of playing the whole amount I’d taken out with me, I cashed in the chips I’d won and placed the united amount in my suitcase. I went upstairs to the lobby of the Landmark hotel and had a pot of tea, opening the case for a moment to look at the rows of banknotes wrapped in rubber bands. It was now about eight o’clock and I was still feeling feverish. Indeed, these attacks of fever were beginning to increase in frequency. I wondered if the Paiza was open at such an early hour. I walked there without any haste and was told that the pits were open twenty-four hours. Therefore, if I wanted to make some bets I could certainly do so, and for any amount I wanted. There was no question of their not remembering me from the previous time. I was shown to one of their private rooms and served another breakfast. I made four bets and an hour later I had won a few million more. The cash filled four cases and I walked out with them as casually as a wealthy housewife walking out of Bloomingdale’s with her shopping.