He stared down the Long Gallery at his work for the day. On his stretcher a painting was beginning to take shape, a painting that bore a remarkable similarity to a Gainsborough.
Orlando looked out at the dark clouds swirling across a stormy sky. He thought about Imogen, the great love of his life, now hundreds of miles away. No, he would not think about Imogen. His mind went off, entirely of its own accord, to the French Riviera five months before. He saw again the mesmerizing turn of the roulette wheel, he heard the tiny click as the ball dropped into its slot. He heard again the measured voice of the croupier, rien ne va plus, no more bets, the gamblers waiting, watching for the little ball to fall into its slot once more. He remembered five days of triumph at the tables. Even now, he still shook slightly as he thought of the sixth day when everything went wrong and his world changed for ever.
The colours. Maybe it was his training that made him remember things so vividly, the dark grey, almost black, of the sea as he walked the mile and a half from the casino in Monte Carlo back to his cheap lodgings along the coast at three or four o’clock in the morning. The first faint lines of yellow on the horizon as the sun came up to bring in a new dawn, the pale blue water that had deepened to azure by the time he woke up, the delicate pinks of the setting sun as he set out once more for the gambling tables. The green of the roulette table. The bright red on which he staked so much. The shiny polished black that eventually claimed his fortune.
Orlando remembered the private language of the roulette wheel, spoken in the soft but authoritative voice of the croupier. Pair meant betting on an even number, impair on an odd one. Passe for a winning number between nineteen and thirty-six, impasse for one between nought and eighteen. Rouge for red, noir for black, le rouge et le noir that had dominated all his thoughts during his sojourn at the wheel. Nought for the casino, the one factor that gave the proprietors a slight mathematical edge over the gamblers who had come to break the bank.
He had been playing on a system all his own. On his very first visit to the casino, Orlando had merely watched. A very fat Frenchman had won a great deal of money. A slim blond Englishman had lost a great deal. A beautifully dressed Italian had made a small amount. For three nights Orlando watched one table. He placed the odd bet to pay his rent at the casino. He noted the fall of every ball in a red notebook. He saw one of the supervisors whispering something to one of his companions – here was a man developing a system all his own. The casinos loved people with systems. They welcomed them with open arms and vintage champagne once they were established players. Generous credit was offered to those with the right connections. For the casinos knew that all systems were doomed to fail. Even with the one European zero as against the American two or even three, Orlando had heard, in the wilder gambling saloons of the Midwest, the odds were always stacked in favour of the bank.
Orlando Blane had gone to Monte Carlo to seek financial salvation, to make a fortune. He had no money of his own, only debts. He was wildly, hopelessly in love with Imogen Jeffries, only daughter of a rich London lawyer. Orlando would see her in his daytime dreams in his little cot in the back room of his auberge, looking out over the train tracks and the wild countryside behind the sea. She was tall and dark, with teasing grey-blue eyes. She moved with a sinuous grace that took his breath away and she held him very close in her arms when she kissed him goodbye at the railway station on his journey to the south of France. Imogen’s father, a man obsessed with his property, its size, its prospects, its ability to support generations of unborn Jeffries far into the future, absolutely refused to agree to his daughter marrying a penniless man. Most girls, Orlando thought, would have tried to deter their beloved from staking their joint futures on the spin of a small wheel in Monte Carlo. Imogen had been entranced. Danger called her like a drug.
‘Come back rich, my darling,’ she had said to him. ‘Then I can hold you in my arms all night long. Come back ever so rich.’
As he studied his red book Orlando came to an interesting conclusion. The table he had watched showed a very slight tendency to produce reds rather than blacks. Many people, he remembered, played a variety of a system called Martingale, made famous by Sir Francis Clavering in Thackeray’s Pendennis, who lost enormous sums through his blind belief in its efficiency. The system depended on waiting for a run of five successive blacks. Then, on the sixth spin, a bet was placed on red. If the winning number was black again, the bet was doubled. And so on through a vast variety of permutations. But Orlando knew there was a fault at the heart of the Martingale system. Its adherents believed that after five blacks in a row the odds must be in favour of a red next time. They were not. They were exactly the same each time. The wheel has no memory of where the ball landed last time round. Each time there was a fifty-fifty chance of red or black turning up. He resolved to bet in moderate amounts on red. Red after all was Imogen’s favourite colour. Nothing else. No almighty chance on a single number with odds of thirty-six to one against. No combinations of numbers, no pair, no impair, no passe. Just red. Mesdames et messieurs, je vous en prie. Faites vos jeux.
Orlando remembered being very nervous the first night he gambled seriously. The minimum stake was one thousand francs, just under ten pounds in English money. Orlando had one thousand pounds working capital, handed over to him out of Imogen’s bank accounts. He gambled the minimum stake which paid out the same amount if you won. One thousand francs would bring you another thousand. He brought a sketchbook with him. Sometimes while he watched he would dash off lightning drawings, character sketches of the croupiers or his fellow gamblers. He backed red eighteen times in all. If the law of averages had been perfect he would have won nine and lost nine. The law of averages was not perfect that first night. He won twelve times and lost six. The croupiers smiled at him as he left to collect his winnings. Gambling with such small stakes was never going to be a problem for the Societe des Jeux de Monte Carlo. On his trial run Orlando had made sixty pounds.
On the following two nights he increased his stakes very gradually. By day three he was five thousand pounds ahead. Five thousand pounds, he said sadly to himself, would never satisfy Imogen’s father. Twenty-five would do. Better thirty. Forty would be perfect.
On days four and five the casino had increased the size of the maximum permitted bet to one hundred thousand francs, roughly one thousand pounds in English money. Orlando’s system held. Behind his chair each night a small clean-shaven Frenchman with black eyes was watching. He was not watching the progress of the game. He watched the lightning sketches that Orlando threw off in his notebook.
‘Forgive me. Your drawings, monsieur,’ the Frenchman had said, ‘tonight they are in the style of Toulouse Lautrec, so good they could pass for the real thing. Can you draw in anybody else’s style, monsieur?’