A car was waiting for me at the doors and they wished me a hasty return with at least some show of genuine hospitality. I went back to the Lisboa and stashed the cases next to the others.
It was now obvious to me that my sport and pastime was going through cyclical patterns that were deeper than the usual ups and downs that a player must expect to endure. Bouts of indulgence and triumph were followed by periods of satiation, self-disgust, a determination to desist that had nothing to do with the feelings one experiences during losses. These latter periods of abeyance were getting longer, so that I didn’t at all mind cruising from day to day without any visit to the tables at all, and while I lay in my pompous Lisboa bed surrounded by scarlet and gold I read the financial papers with an eye to investing the millions of kwai I had earned.
Investing, however, is a big word. I had never had any ideas about that before. I had fully expected to go to seed, and decline in the way that men going to seed decline, day by day, a slow declension marked by ever-diminishing wealth. Winning over and over had seemed like a realistic prospect, and when I won or lost before I had savored both in different ways. Now, of course, everything had changed. The winnings had piled up and they were rapidly approaching the point at which they would render the whole exercise pointless, if the point of it was to win money. Moreover, my health was clearly going into a decline that I could not explain. Fevers, chills, insatiable hunger, none of which had any obvious cause. I reasoned to myself that these were purely psychological, but even if they were psychological, that did not make them any less real. I was sure that I was entering a mental breakdown of some kind, but no two mental breakdowns are ever the same. To the person suffering one, the breakdown always seems slightly unreal. It feels inexplicable.
I speculated on what I could do now if I decided to give up the baccarat lifestyle (for that is what it is) and devote myself to deep-sea fishing, Ming antiques, or Chinese-style ballroom dancing, not to mention real estate and travel. I wondered if I could haul the entire stash of cash across the border using a paid smuggling service, the existence of which was taken as certain in gaming circles. Could I get to Shenzen or even Kunming and disappear all over again, this time loaded with a considerable fortune? Could I stage my own disappearance with enough subtlety that it would ensure that I was left alone to start a new life? But where would I go?
There was Dao-Ming, of course. It had begun to occur to me that I was happiest with her on her island and that I could go back to it and to her. It would not matter if we did nothing for the rest of our lives, just lived in that small house and ate clams every night and made do. It would not be bad; it would be better than anything else. It was possible that I would become like her, a ghost with a place to haunt.
But I knew that it would not happen. I had to turn to other ideas. I thought, in all seriousness, of buying a hotel in Sichuan and becoming one of those absent owners who rake in the profits from a mini golf course while living in a villa by the coast staffed with teenage girls. But it would never happen. And then there was the idea of moving on to another Asian fleshpot. These are the places where Western men come to die. They are our fleshy death-pots. But first there was the here and now. One morning there was a commotion outside my door and when I went out to investigate I was immediately surrounded by a crowd of local journalists, one of whom had a camera and a boom. They had obviously been waiting there all night, perhaps with their ears pressed to my door.
“Lord Doyle!” they cried, scrambling to their feet and following me down the corridor toward the elevators.
“Lord Doyle,” a young woman cried in particular. Attractive, Chinese, bangs, high heels, notepad.
“I am not Lord Doyle.”
“Oh, Lord Doyle, can we—”
They blocked the elevators and the cameras rolled.
Lord Doyle, an English gentleman of means, yesterday won seventeen million Hong Kong dollars at the Macau casinos. Gamblers from all over the city clamored to meet him. What is his secret? How does he play? Is he calm or passionate? He speaks Chinese!
“How old are you, Lord Doyle? Can you do math?”
I held a hand up to block the lens.
“You’re potty,” I said. “I’m not Lord Doyle. There is no Lord Doyle.”
“Lord Doyle, are you a Sagittarius?”
“Who told you I was a Sagittarius?”
“So you are Lord Doyle!”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I am Mr. Doyle.”
They all laughed uproariously.
“Lord Doyle, are you a lucky man? Do you pray? Do you eat chicken? Is your mother a Protestant?”
“You can’t film me!”
And indeed that was a dangerous thing.
“Are you superstitious? Tell us about the number nine. Do you organize your life around the number nine?”
We crammed into the elevator and I had not even intended to use the elevator. I was being carried along by the momentum and I wanted to escape. So down we went, with the camera rolling and the journalists jammering. I gave up telling them that I was not a lord. They wanted a lord and I was the lord. Word had gotten around so insistently that I was the lord that in the end I simply had to be the lord. As the lord I had to behave in a certain way, and it was a great deal more hassle to not behave in that way. So I saw now (as we came down into the lobby and a small crowd of curious onlookers pressed forward to get a glimpse of me) that sooner or later I would just get on with being the lord and that would be easier. The onlookers were gamers who had gotten the word, and since every big winner is a fifteen-minute celebrity in Casinoworld they had to see what the fuss was all about. They pressed around me and asked for autographs or tips or words of encouragement and advice and soon I was brought to a standstill as they formed a closed circle around the news crew.
“Lord Doyle,” the reporter continued to press, “are you planning to play tonight at one of the casinos? We’ve heard that you’ve been banned from playing at the Lisboa. Is that true?”
“No comment.”
“Lord Doyle, how does it feel to be an English millionaire in a Chinese city?”
“I am glad there are still English millionaires.”
I said it in Chinese, and the whole room laughed.
“Are you planning to leave Macau?”
“I’m a private citizen, and I am just as surprised by my good fortune as you are.”
“Lord Doyle,” a voice asked from the back of the crowd, “is it true the casinos are robbing us?”
“How would I know?”
“Because,” the reporter interjected, “your success seems to suggest it.”
A few voices rose up: “Yes! They’re robbing us!”
The crowd bubbled with an incoherent ill will toward the bosses who took all their money, and the epicenter of this ill will was a goodwill toward me. They practically cheered me as I pushed out onto the street, and the crew followed me with the foam boom hovering above my head. “Look,” I heard a voice cry behind us, “Lord Doyle is headed toward the Fortuna!” This was incorrect, and in fact as soon as I was in the street I hailed a cab and went to Coloane for lunch at Fernando’s on the windswept little beach across from the Hyatt. There I stayed all day eating asado and drinking gin and tonics and when dusk fell I staggered across the beach, through the tangled volleyball nets, to the imposing hotel, where I got myself a room for the night and spent half of it watching the English Premier League. I was sure that sooner or later my face would appear on TV as well, on one of the local channels, and as soon as it did it would be well nigh certain that Interpol would take an interest. At that moment, ironically, I would have to run.