I looked up at the numbers board and saw new digits slip into place, changing its complexion. My table was now announced as highly fortunate. A slightly larger crowd developed around it. Onlookers pressed in, smoking with wild intensity until the table was thickly shrouded with smoke. I heard their guttural oaths and expressions of disbelief in their crude Putonghua, their imprecations against the dirty foreigner and his goddamned luck. I could understand every word and they didn’t know it, but I let it go. I won and won. Chips rolled in, waves of them.
At ten thirty I got up and bagged the lot, taking them over to the cashier’s window followed by dozens of stares. I bundled the cash into my attaché case and rolled out of there, moving on to the Hong Fak, certain that I had scored at least a half million, which I probably had. It was a decent day’s work.
FIVE
The prince of card games was introduced into France from Italy during the reign of Charles VIII and is similar in some ways to systems like faro and basset. It is the simplest of the card games and also the most honest from the point of view of the punter. It’s hard for the house to cheat at baccarat, and there is a satisfying instant gratification to its simplicity and relative speed. It kills you quickly.
There are three variations played in different parts of the world: chemin-de-fer, banque, and the North American version, punto banco. This last is the kind played in China and it is a pure game of chance, with no skill involved. The player’s moves are forced by the cards, whereas in the two other versions the player can make choices, which allows skill to play a part in the outcomes. The rules are as follows.
The game is played with eight decks of cards, which are dealt by three bankers. Each player is given two cards, traditionally by a shoe that moves up and down the table. It couldn’t be more simple. Whoever turns the highest-scoring hand wins the round. Cards two to nine are worth face value, tens and face cards — jack, queen, or king — are worth nothing, and an ace is valued at one. Players calculate their hands by adding up the values, then subtracting the ten digit if that total is higher than ten. This is known as modulo ten.
For example, a hand of six and eight is worth four: six plus eight equals fourteen modulo ten. If the hand is a four and five, however, then it stands at nine. And nine is the highest value a baccarat hand can be. It is called a natural and conquers all other hands.
There are three options for betting: the banker (banco), the player (punto), and what is known as tie. These do not necessarily correspond to the actual banker or player; they are merely betting options. The cards are dealt facedown, first to the player and then to the banker, and are turned by the banker. He establishes what is called the tableau, the state of play. If a natural is turned, then the game is over and the lucky holder of the perfect nine is the winner. If not, a player has the right to a third card if he has drawn five or less.
It is usual for the player to be paid even money while the banker collects ninety-five percent, with five percent to the house. Some casinos pay even money to both player and banker except where the banker wins by a six; he is then paid fifty percent of the bet. If the player and banker hands are equal, then a tie is called and both are paid at odds of eight to one.
It’s difficult to explain what makes baccarat so compelling. Because it is such a high-stakes game, sometimes played at ten thousand dollars a hand, gaming corporations may see their entire quarterly profits or losses affected by a single night’s play. You can win or lose millions in a short space of time, and so can the house. It has danger, a steel edge to it; it is a game of ecstasy and doom. There is nothing like it in the gambling universe. It was the game of kings and nobles, a game of tycoons, and now it is the game of the Chinese masses. But it is still the game of the reckless rich.
Punto banco baccarat is a struggle with the pure laws of chance. When you play it you are alone with your fate, and one is not often alone with one’s fate. When you play it your heart is in your mouth. Your pulse quickens to an unbearable pace. You feel that you are walking along the edge of the volcanic precipice made of sharp, hot rock cut as fine as a razor and capable of breaking with all the drama of glass. It is a game surrounded by threatening possibilities: instant death, which comes even quicker than it does with poker or roulette. That’s what I like about it. There’s no lingering illusion. Death by guillotine.
I spent that day in bed with the curtains drawn. Nothing kept me conscious, not even the rain pounding against the windows or the construction crews below. I dreamed without noise or commotion or imagery, but with a dread that was like being tied up on a chair and sensing the approach of someone behind you armed with a meat cleaver. Ants massing on a tiled floor, the flap of linen curtains at a window somewhere in the tropics. At one point it was just raging sea. I was dreaming of a raging sea and the rage was in slow motion, extended to hours of repetitive wave formations.
Then I woke, and it was night. The sky was lit with neon and signs for massage girls. SUZIE, BABYLON GIRLS, MEGA. One read YUMMY. My wrists, the sides of my throat were damp. I took a hot bath. I then lay there trying to empty my mind completely as it prepared for a long night of noisy solitude and concentration. A night of combat with Lady Luck, a night of seesaws. I had no plan of action other than to trust for a second night in the I Ching, which was working its effects through my unconscious. I must have cottoned on to something unconsciously, I thought, without any rational effort, and all I had to do was continue as I was doing and it might turn out all right. The less I thought, the better. Always the best plan, non-thought. And it was paradoxical, but I was sure I would win if I continued just trusting in my own unconscious. The unconscious is merely misunderstood. It’s not a trickster.
I dressed up that night. Tuxedo and tie. New laces, and a dab of Romeo. One has to be reckless sometimes, to spend what one doesn’t have. I went down to Galera, the Robuchon restaurant on the third floor.
The elevator opens directly into its atrium, in which a glass display of old wine stands, rows of Petrus ’61 and Cheval Blanc ’66, Sauternes from the fifties and the odd bottle of La Tâche. The Lisboa’s owner, Stanley Ho, is China’s greatest wine connoisseur and he can stock his Robuchon outlet with whatever wines he wants. It’s the food and wine temple of Macau, the millionaire’s crux.
I asked if I could put everything on my account.
“If you insist, sir.”
“I do insist.”
I sat by the windows. The smell of pricy tarts rose high, tarts like chocolate boxes, but unwrapped and opened up to the consumer. I ordered a bottle of Kweichow Moutai from 1927, a liquor made from sorghum that people say is the most expensive Chinese beverage ever made. It was $47,500 HK on the list: perfumed, slightly desiccated. I drank it with some yellow and green crab cakes, then avocado and mango mixed in with the crab. I knew they would put even this on my tab and they wouldn’t reel me in until it was too late. Then, as if being punctual, I read the South China Post through my reading glasses, not really taking anything in. At length a mushroom soup appeared. It combined almonds, berries, purple gorse flowers, and pieces of blossoming thyme. On the ceiling, stars came on, flickering on and off like a night sky, and I drank lightly, then mulled over a long coffee and petits fours. It reminded me of a French restaurant that used to stand at the center of Haywards Heath that my parents would frequent once a month, on the day my father got his paycheck. It was fronted by heavy curtains and a menu was posted on the glass pane. Vol-au-vents and chicken estragon, steak Rossini with foie gras and Dauphinois potatoes. Here Mum and Dad sat in a window seat and shared a bottle of unpronounceable wine, hands entwined, over a pink lampshade with golden tassels, and reviewed their tax receipts as they cracked open the frozen snails served in their shells. Frugal and broke to the end, but able to eat steak Rossini once a month at the Auberge du Soleil on Twickenham Drive.