Loser Takes All (8 page)

‘Who?'

‘That girl.'

‘I don't know what you mean,' I said, and tried to convey in my tone of voice that I was still guarding the honour of another. Cary said furiously, ‘I must be off. I can't keep Philippe waiting. He's so sensitive.'

My system was working: I was losing exactly what I had anticipated losing, but all the exhilaration had gone out of my calculations. I thought: suppose this isn't what they call a lovers' quarrel; suppose she's really interested in this man; suppose this is the end. What do I do? What's left for me? Fifteen thousand pounds was an inadequate answer.

I was not the only one who was losing regularly. Mr Bowles sat in his wheeled chair, directing his nurse who put the tokens on the cloth for him, leaning over his shoulder, pushing with her private rake. He too had a system, but I suspected that his system was not working out. He sent her back twice to the desk for more money, and the second time I saw that his pocket-book was empty except for a few thousand-franc notes. He rapped out his directions and she laid out his remaining tokens – a hundred and fifty thousand francs' worth of them – the ball rolled and he lost the lot. Wheeling from the table he caught sight of me. ‘You,' he said, ‘what's your name?'

‘Bertram.'

‘I've cashed too little. Don't want to go back to the hotel. Lend me five million.'

‘I'm sorry,' I said.

‘You know who I am. You know what I'm worth.'

‘The hotel . . .' I began.

‘They can't let me have that amount till the banks open. I want it tonight. You've been winning plenty. I've watched you. I'll pay you back before the evening's out.'

‘People have been known to lose.'

‘I can't hear what you say,' he said, shifting his earpiece.

‘I'm sorry, Mr Other,' I said.

‘My name's not Other. You know me. I'm A. N. Bowles.'

‘We call you A. N. Other in the office. Why don't you go to the bank here and cash a cheque? There's someone always on duty.'

‘I haven't got a French account, young man. Haven't you heard of currency regulations?'

‘They don't seem to be troubling either of us much,' I said.

‘You'd better come and have a cup of coffee and discuss the matter.'

‘I'm busy just now.'

‘Young man,' the Other said, ‘I'm your employer.'

‘I don't recognize anybody but the Gom.'

‘Who on earth is the Gom?'

‘Mr Dreuther.'

‘The Gom. A.N. Other. There seems to be a curious lack of respect for the heads of your firm. Sir Walter Blixon – has he a name?'

‘I believe the junior staff know him as the Blister.'

A thin smile momentarily touched the grey powdery features. ‘At least that name is expressive,' A. N. Other remarked. ‘Nurse, you can take a walk for half an hour. You can go as far as the harbour and back. You've always told me you like boats.'

When I turned the chair and began to push Bowles into the bar, a slight sweat had formed on my forehead and hands. An idea had come to me so fantastic that it drove away the thought of Cary and her hungry squire. I couldn't even wait till I got to the bar. I said, ‘I've got fifteen million francs in my safe deposit box at the hotel. You can have them tonight in return for your shares.'

‘Don't be a fool. They are worth twenty million at par, and Dreuther or Blixon would give me fifty million for them. A glass of Perrier water, please.'

I got him his water. He said, ‘Now fetch me that five million.'

‘No.'

‘Young man,' he said, ‘I have an infallible system. I have promised myself for twenty years to break the bank. I will not be foiled by a mere five million. Go and fetch them. Unless you do I shall order your dismissal.'

‘Do you think that threat means anything to a man with fifteen million in the safe? And tomorrow I shall have twenty million.'

‘You've been losing all tonight. I've watched you.'

‘I had expected to lose. It proves my system's right.'

‘There can't be two fallible systems.'

‘Yours, I'm afraid, will prove only too fallible.'

‘Tell me how yours works.'

‘No. But I'll advise you on what is wrong with yours.'

‘My system is my own.'

‘How much have you won by it?'

‘I have not yet begun to win. I am only at the first stage. Tonight I begin to win. Damn you, young man, fetch me that five million.'

‘My system has won over fifteen million.'

I had got a false impression that the Other was a calm man. It is easy to appear calm when your movements are so confined. But when his fingers moved an inch on his knee he was exhibiting an uncontrollable emotion: his head swayed a minute degree and set the cord of his ear-appliance flapping. It was like the tiny stir of air clinking a shutter that is yet the sign of a tornado's approach.

He said, ‘Suppose we have hit on the same system.'

‘We haven't. I've been watching yours. I know it well. You can buy it in a paper packet at the stationer's for a thousand francs.'

‘That's false. I thought it out myself, over the years, young man, in this chair. Twenty years of years.'

‘It's not only
great
minds that think alike. But the bank will never be broken by a thousand-franc system marked on the envelope Infallible.'

‘I'll prove you wrong. I'll make you eat that packet. Fetch me the five million.'

‘I've told you my terms.'

Backward and forward and sideways moved the hands in that space to which illness confined him. They ran like mice in a cage – I could imagine them nibbling at the intolerable bars. ‘You don't know what you are asking. Don't you realize you'd control the company if you chose to side with Blixon?'

‘At least I would know something about the company controlled.'

‘Listen. If you let me have the five million tonight, I will repay it in the morning and give you half my winnings.'

‘There won't be any winnings with your system.'

‘You seem very sure of yours.'

‘Yes.'

‘I might consider selling the shares for twenty million plus your system.'

‘I haven't got twenty million.'

‘Listen, if you are so sure of yourself you can take an option on the shares for fifteen million now. You pay the balance in twenty-four hours – 9 p.m. tomorrow – or you forfeit your fifteen million. In addition you give me your system.'

‘It's a crazy proposal.'

‘This is a crazy place.'

‘If I don't win five million tomorrow, I don't have a single share?'

‘Not a single share.' The fingers had stopped moving.

I laughed. ‘Doesn't it occur to you that I've only got to phone the office tomorrow, and Blixon would advance me the money on the option? He wants the shares.'

‘Tomorrow is Sunday and the agreement is for cash.'

‘I don't give you my system till the final payment,' I said.

‘I shan't want it if you've lost.'

‘But I need money to play with.'

He took that carefully in. I said, ‘You can't run a system on a few thousand francs.'

‘You can pay ten million now,' he said, ‘on account of fifteen. If you lose, you'll owe me five million.'

‘How would you get it?'

He gave me a malign grin. ‘I'll have your wages docked five hundred a year for ten years.'

I believe he meant it. In the world of Dreuther and Blixon he and his small packet of shares had survived only by the hardness, the meanness and the implacability of his character.

‘I shall have to win ten million with five million.'

‘You said you had the perfect system.'

‘I thought I had.'

The old man was bitten by his own gamble: he jeered at me. ‘Better just lend me the five million and forget the option.'

I thought of the Gom at sea in his yacht with his headline guests and the two of us forgotten – what did he care about his assistant accountant? I remembered the way he had turned to Miss Bullen and said, ‘Arrange for Mr Bertrand (he couldn't bother to get my name right) to be married.' Would he arrange through Miss Bullen for our children to be born and our parents to be buried? I thought, with these shares at Blixon's call I shall have him fixed – he'll be powerless, I'll be employing him for just as long as I want him to feel the sting: then no more room on the eighth floor, no more yacht, no more of his
‘luxe, calme et volupté
'. He had taken me in with his culture and his courtesy and his phoney kindness until I had nearly accepted him for the great man he believed himself to be. Now, I thought with a sadness for which I couldn't account, he will be small enough to be in my hands, and I looked at my ink-stained fingers with disrelish.

‘You see,' the Other said, ‘you don't believe any longer.'

‘Oh, yes, I do,' I said, ‘I'll take your bet. I was just thinking of something else – that's all.'

3

I
WENT
and fetched the money and we drew up the option right away on a sheet of notepaper and the nurse – who had returned by then – and the barman witnessed it. The option was to be taken up at 9 p.m. prompt in the same spot next day: the Other didn't want his gambling to be interrupted before his dinner-hour whether by good or bad news. Then I made him buy me a glass of whisky, though Moses had less trouble in extracting his drink from a rock in Sinai, and I watched him being pushed back to the
Salle Privée
. To all intents and purposes, for the next twenty-four hours, I was the owner of Sitra. Neither Dreuther nor Blixon in their endless war could make a move without the consent of their assistant accountant. It was strange to think that neither was aware of how the control of the business had changed – from a friend of Dreuther to an enemy of Dreuther. Blixon would be down in Hampshire reading up tomorrow's lessons, polishing up his pronunciation of the names in Judges – he would feel no exhilaration. And Dreuther – Dreuther was at sea, out of reach, playing bridge probably with his social lions – he would not be touched by the sense of insecurity. I ordered another whisky: I no longer doubted my system and I had no sense of regret. Blixon would be the first to hear: I would telephone to the office on Monday morning. It would be tactful to inform him of the new position through my chief, Arnold. There must be no temporary
rapprochement
between Dreuther and Blixon against the intruder: I would have Arnold explain to Blixon that for the time being he could count on me. Dreuther would not even hear of the matter unless he rang up his office from some port of call. Even that I could prevent: I could tell Arnold that the secret must be kept till Dreuther's return, for then I would have the pleasure of giving him the information in person.

I went out to tell Cary the news, forgetting about our engagements: I wanted to see her face when I told her she was the wife of the man who controlled the company. You've hated my system, I wanted to say to her, and the hours I have spent at the Casino, but there was no vulgar cause – it wasn't money I was after, and I quite forgot that until that evening I had no other motive than money. I began to believe that I had planned this from the first two-hundred-franc bet in the
cuisine
.

But of course there was no Cary to be found – ‘Madame went out with a gentleman,' the porter needlessly told me, and I remembered the date at the simple students' café. Well, there had been a time in my life when I had found little difficulty in picking up a woman and I went back to the Casino to fulfil my word. But the beautiful woman had got a man with her now: their fingers nuzzled over their communal tokens, and I soon realized that single women who came to the Casino to gamble were seldom either beautiful or interested in men. The ball and not the bed was the focal point. I thought of Cary's questions and my own lies – and there wasn't a lie she wouldn't see through.

I watched Bird's Nest circling among the tables, making a quick pounce here and there, out of the croupier's eye. She had a masterly technique: when a pile was large enough she would lay her fingers on a single piece and give a tender ogle at the owner as much as to say, ‘You are so generous and I am all yours for the taking.' She was so certain of her own appeal that no one had the heart to expose her error. Tonight she was wearing long amber ear-rings and a purple evening dress that exposed her best feature – her shoulders. Her shoulders were magnificent, wide and animal, but then, like a revolving light, her face inevitably came round, the untidy false blonde hair tangled up with the ear-rings (I am sure she thought of her wisps and strands as ‘wanton locks'), and that smile fixed like a fossil. Watching her revolve I began to revolve too: I was caught into her orbit, and I became aware that here alone was the answer. I had to dine with a woman and in the whole Casino this was the only woman who would dine with me. As she swerved away from an attendant with a sweep of drapery and a slight clank, clank from her evening bag where I supposed she had stowed her hundred-franc tokens, I touched her hand, ‘Dear lady,' I said – the phrase astonished me: it was as though it had been placed on my tongue, and certainly it seemed to belong to the same period as the mauve evening dress, the magnificent shoulders. ‘Dear lady,' I repeated with increasing astonishment (I almost expected a small white moustache to burgeon on my upper lip), ‘you will I trust excuse a stranger . . .'

I think she must have gone in constant fear of the attendants because her instinctive ogle expanded with her relief at seeing me into a positive blaze of light: it flapped across the waste of her face like sheet lightning. ‘Oh, not a stranger,' she said, and I was relieved to find that she was English and that at least I would not have to talk bad French throughout the evening. ‘I have been watching with such admiration your great good fortune.' (She had indeed profited from it on several occasions.)