The intricate cycles of the monsoons, which I have never understood, blew a storm across the bay that night and the cedars and pines shuddered under a veiled moon. I lay in bed burning hundred-dollar notes with a cigarette lighter to see if it would make me feel ill. The hotel was empty, funereal, and I walked through empty halls and empty restaurants where the usual Japanese and Hong Kongers were absent. Paranoia is often like this, and in an empty place we are sure that we are being watched. The waiters, the despondent staff, the idle cooks, they all follow one with their eyes. I sat in the bar upstairs, the one with a sea-view balcony, and I tried to construct a plan for myself. The reality was that the more money I made, the more trapped I felt. Should I play on and on until doomsday, until I started losing again and balance was restored? This is how a hardened gambler would think. It doesn’t matter to him, because what matters is the roller coaster, the wind in his hair, the thrill. He plays until he runs out of money.
When I got back to the Lisboa in the morning there was a bouquet of flowers for me in the room and a note from the management. They hoped I would stay on even if I could not play the tables. They had some nerve, but as it happened I had nowhere else to go and my suite was as good as I would get. They apologized for the intrusion from the press. From then on, they assured me, security would deal with it.
Why not, then? The suite was now full of money; bales of it, cases of it, dressers crammed with it. I kept some in the bathroom, some in the cupboards, and the big bills in the digital safe. I stored two cases in the overhead compartments of the armoire and another in the TV cabinet. The air smelled of it, that soft stale scent of human hand sweat and ATM rollers. Cash, the blood of life.
Eventually, having calmed myself with a vat of Kahlúa, my mind turned back to the prospect of the tables and I felt the subtle tug of my pleasure exerting itself once again. I was aware, of course, that the executives thought they were obeying mathematical laws when they permitted me to play on, whereas in fact they were succumbing to a classic case of gambler’s fallacy — that is, the fallacy that if deviations from expected behavior are observed in the short term, they must be balanced out by a different outcome in the long term.
This involves an assertion of negative correlation between trials of the random process. Take the example of tossing coins. The outcomes of each toss of a coin are statistically independent and the chances of getting heads, for example, on each toss is always ½. The probability of getting two heads in two tosses is ¼, and so on. If a player tossed five heads in a row, the probability of which is only 1/32, the other player might assume, according to the fallacy, that a tails is “due” pretty soon. This is incorrect. The probability of flipping twenty-one heads in a row is, in fact, 1 in 2,097,152, but the probability of flipping a head having already flipped twenty times is, surprise surprise, still only ½. That’s what the Chinese don’t understand, and now the bosses were thinking the same way. It was crass and understandable at the same time, because deep down they were sure that something unusual was on their doorstep, that the spirit world was speaking to them. They were thinking like locals, which is what human beings always do. They had simply put aside things that they knew perfectly well, that every rational person who studies gambling knows back to front. They knew that this was the theorem of Christiaan Huygens, well known to every amateur math geek and card sharp and casino operator worth his salt. Just as they knew that if two players start out with different amounts of money — say five cents and eight cents — the guy with five cents will always, in the long run, lose everything, all things being equal. But this they had not forgotten.
I was now fully aware that whichever casino I went into, I would be watched with maximum attentiveness. But at the same time I knew that they could not believe in my luck continuing because it struck them as irrational — whereas, as I have explained, it was neither rational nor irrational. Accordingly, once powdered and dried the following night — a Thursday, if I remember correctly — I assembled three hundred thousand in envelopes and prepared for battle. The boys from the front desk brought me up a white carnation for the buttonhole, wrapped not in foil but in sheet silver. It was a nice touch, but they needn’t have bothered, because in the end something more extraordinary happened.
TWENTY
Since I could wait no longer, feeling starved of my dirty baccarat, I decided to go to the Greek Mythology that evening and throw myself off a dirty little cliff and die. I didn’t give a damn, I was mou bian bei, as we say in the language, and I wanted if anything to commit baccarat suicide and flame out to the amazement and great concern of all present. What a death!
I went to the Militar and ate some steamed clams. Then I read the papers in the bar, hoping to run into one of my friends. However, no one was there. The evening had the rhythm of an ancient pendulum clock. So much the better, I thought. One is better off alone in these dangerous moments. One is better off forlorn and isolated inside one’s gravest compulsion.
I took a cab to Taipa and entered the casino through its overbearing gates. The pits were relatively calm on a Thursday night and I was able to play at a full table without commotion or distractions. I played at table six as fast as I could. Nine all the way, regular as something machinelike. A hundred thousand in fifteen minutes and without breaking even a bead of sweat. All right, I thought, let’s attack the system outright. I laid everything down on five bets and won them all. The chip bags looked like Viking loot, but I did not walk out with them. I kept them by my side and played another three hands, with the same results. At length, the table cleared out and a lanky Chinese man in a windowpane shirt came up to me and whispered in my ear to ask if I’d like some cocaine. It was a done deal and I spent the rest of the hour in the nightclub snorting it off the back of a menu, indifferent to the effects. It was good stuff and, as usual, it made me incredibly sleepy. I never get high. I become sleepy, but I get curiously excited at the same time, as if my pulse has been slowed down while my senses have been speeded up. In this state I rolled through the various floors of the Greek Mythology unnoticed by the press and feeling as if I would like to piss all this money out of all ten fingers simultaneously. I slipped five-hundred-Hong-Kong-dollar notes into the hands of the staff, the shills who wait by the tables to lure new customers in — usually attractive young girls — or the Greeks lumbering around in their plastic armor. The look of amazement on their faces was not something that I thought I would ever see again, so I went around again and handed out thousand-dollar notes, and they still didn’t know what to say. They took the money and crammed it into their pockets until they had no more room for the next round, and it went on like this for a while, with no one knowing how to stop it. I gave away half of my earnings, then went back to the tables.