As I waited for the cards to be turned, the woman on the sofa watched me with great interest, and as she did so she occasionally turned away and powdered her face in a hand mirror. I was now emboldened by something — by the thought of a winning streak, by the woman watching me as if with sexual interest (but it couldn’t be) — and I could have withdrawn at that moment and saved myself, but all these other factors were weighing in and this is the way we are, we addicts. We can’t ignore signs. So I played on. I said to the croupier that for the fuck of it I’d place everything I’d won on the last hand on this one. Insanity, but that’s the whole point. The thrill is in the edge of the blade and sliding along it.
“It’s a bold move, sir.”
“It’s just a move.”
I cut open a cigar like a braggart and had it lit. The chips were laid down and there was a pause in the instruments of fate and I must admit I rather enjoyed it, because I didn’t know what was going to happen next, and that is the feeling that every player lives for. Centuries of players, of brothers in arms, have felt the same.
SIX
At that moment I looked up and past the crowd and saw a middle-aged woman playing at a full table at the far side of the room. She was wearing a bulging cocktail dress distorted by her mass and a black hat of some kind stuck through with an emerald feather like the plume from a giant extinct cockatoo. I recognized her at once. It was the bitch from that night at the Greek Mythology. She was chain-smoking and throwing down cash like nobody’s business. I caught the banker’s eye and asked him who it was. He shrugged scornfully. “That’s Grandma. She’s always in here on a Wednesday night. She cleans us out.”
“Grandma?”
“We call her Grandma. She’s the wife of a property developer. He’s Hong Kong money. He plays around with the women. She’s allowed to gamble away his money. We call it marriage. It’s a nice arrangement for us.”
He was unpretentious about it. Now there was complicity between us: the bank that always wins and the punter who has gotten lucky for a single night, both allied against the terror of Grandma.
“What’s her name?”
“We don’t speak her name. She’s just Grandma.”
He leaned down then.
“I wouldn’t play with her, sir. She’s an opportunist.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“Yes, sir. But she’s bad news.”
At that moment Grandma looked up from her hand and caught sight of me at the very moment that I was scrutinizing her myself.
“She doesn’t look so bad,” I said.
“She’s a terror, sir.”
She recognized me at once and there was a cruel avidity in her eyes as she cashed in her game, got up, and waddled over to our table. The punters seemed to know her and made way for her. As she came into the table’s harsher light her thickly painted and cratered face looked like an overripe peach, furred and uneven, and the eyes were worlds of private pain. She pushed her way to the far end of the table and a place was found for her. She laid a vulgar sequined bag on the table’s edge and took out a pair of reading glasses, which she placed on the end of her nose. Her lips looked as if they had been dipped in hibiscus juice. There are certain faces that appear to be caving in from the inside in slow motion, like cliffs dynamited by experts. Faces that remind you that life is not what you think it is, and that no one escapes scot-free.
But in this instance I also recognized the face, as one will recall an image from a long-ago dream that has remained in the mind for a reason. And the recognition was mutual.
“You,” she said to me. “I remember you. You are a bad gambler, as well as being a gwai lo. I have been hearing stories about you. I heard you won a natural downstairs.”
The table was all ears.
“Oh yeah,” she went on. “This guy scored two nines downstairs earlier this evening. I have it from reliable sources.”
The bankers looked at me sternly; the crowd muttered.
“Jinxed,” I heard a voice say.
“It’s true,” I said. “I’m having a run.”
Grandma huffed.
“You call it a run.”
My voice rose.
“I’m on a run. I have means.”
She smiled.
“Do you want to ask the boss if it’s okay to go on?”
“I don’t have to ask him.”
“You have to ask him.”
“I have the money. I have the chips. It’s all in three dimensions.”
Baccarat is virtually impossible to cheat at. Grandma opened her horror bag and took out a huge roll of cash. The crowd stirred.
“I’m not afraid of this foreigner,” she spat at me. “If I lose it I don’t care.”
“Would madam like a glass of champagne?” I asked.
She lightened up and we exchanged a smile. I am a famous charmer. Grandma didn’t go for niceties, even though she liked a bit of male attention.
“Make it cold, boys. I’m going to play this genius.”
I looked over at the clock: 12:04. I was now more conscious of the time, the exact times that games were being played. As if time itself now were more carefully partitioned and hoarded. It was even possible that I was becoming superstitious about it.
The champagne came. Pol Roger bucketed in mounds of crudely cut ice. Not the best, not the worst.
“That’s the way I like it,” Grandma cried.
“Xie xie,” she said after a sip.
Soon the cards were dealt to seven players surrounded by a large group of onlookers. They began to mutter the words that Macau baccarat players always mutter when they are given their cards, tsui tsui tsui, or blow blow blow. This is to blow away one point on a card, as when a player draws a jack and knows that if the second is a nine he will win and if it is a ten he will lose. Peeping at the second card from the side, he cannot tell a nine from a ten and so will blow on it as it turns. There is in fact a whole slang connected to peeping at the cards before they are turned and counting the number of points visible along their edge. The ten card, for example, has four points along its edge and the Chinese call it say bin, after the word for edge, bin. An eight card has three points on its edge, and is called sam bin.
I let the others turn their hands first and waited until Grandma had pulled a seven. She looked pleased with herself, as well she might have. It was going to be the winning hand and she knew it. I turned mine: a three and a two. At first, no one said anything. I looked again at the clock. It was 12:25. For a moment the crowd stirred slightly and resettled like a patch of grass stirred by a breeze. Their faces betrayed a premonition that had no real shape, and I thought that some reassurance was called for, some verification from a higher source that all this was not going to end in tears, but what would it be? “That makes five,” Grandma said as she collected the chips. She actually laughed at it, just as the other players abruptly rose and left the table.
“My husband would love this,” she went on. “He would bet against the Englishman on the next hand. He’d say no one can lose against an Englishman.”
“Shall we?” I said icily.
“I’m not afraid of you, and I’ve already said it. You may have money, but not as much as my husband.”
“I’d like to know who he is.”
“It’s none of your business who he is. He could buy all these casinos out if he wanted, and they know it.”
“Why isn’t he here?”
“Play?” the banker tried.
“Shut up, we’re talking. It’s not every day I talk to an American.”