The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More (20 page)

Should he do that?

It was a great temptation.

But it would be the end of everything. He would become famous and would never
be allowed into a casino again anywhere in the world. He mustn't do it. He must
be very careful not to draw attention to himself.

Henry moved casually out of the roulette room and passed into the room where
they were playing blackjack. He stood in the doorway watching the action. There
were four tables. They were oddly shaped, these blackjack tables, each one
curved like a crescent moon, with the players sitting on high stools around the
outside of the half-circle and the dealers standing inside.

The packs of cards (at Lord's House they used four packs shuffled together) lay
in an open-ended box known as a shoe, and the dealer pulled the cards out of
the shoe one by one with his fingers. . . The reverse side of the card in the
shoe was always visible, but no others.

Blackjack, as the casinos call it, is a very simple game. You and I know it by
one of three other names, pontoon, twenty-one or
vingt
-et-un.
The player tries to get his cards to add up to as near twenty-one as possible,
but if he goes over twenty-one, he's bust and the dealer takes the money. In
nearly every hand, the player is faced with the problem of whether to draw
another card and risk being bust, or whether to stick with what he's got. But
Henry would not have that problem. In four seconds, he would have "seen
through" the card the dealer was offering him, and he would know whether
to say yes or no. Henry could turn blackjack into a farce.

In all casinos, they have an awkward rule about blackjack betting which we do
not have at home. At home, we look at our first card before we make a bet, and
if it's a good one we bet high. The casinos don't allow you to do this. They insist
that everyone at the table makes his bet
before
the first card of the hand is dealt. What's more; you are not allowed to
increase your bet later on by buying a card.

None of this would disturb Henry either. So long as he sat on the dealer's
immediate left, then he would always receive the first card in the shoe at the
beginning of each deal. The reverse side of the card would be clearly visible
to him, and he would "read through" it before he made his bet.

Now, standing quietly just inside the doorway, Henry waited for a place to
become vacant on the dealer's left at any of the four tables. He had to wait
twenty minutes for this to happen, but he got what he wanted in the end.

He perched himself on the high stool and handed the dealer one of the £1,000
plaques he had won at roulette. "All in twenty-
fives,
please," he said.

The dealer was a youngish man with black eyes and grey skin. He never smiled
and he spoke only when necessary. His hands were exceptionally slim and there
was arithmetic in his fingers. He took Henry's plaque and dropped it in a slot
in the table. Rows of different
coloured
circular
chips lay neatly in a wooden tray in front of him, chips for £25, £10 and £5,
maybe a hundred of each. With his thumb and forefinger, the dealer picked up a
wedge of £25 chips and placed them in a tall pile on the table. He didn't have
to count them. He knew there were exactly twenty chips in the pile. Those
nimble fingers could pick up with absolute accuracy any number of chips from
one to twenty and never be wrong. The dealer picked up a second lot of chips,
making forty in all. He slid them over the table to Henry.

Henry stacked the chips in front of him, and as he did so, he glanced at the
top card in the shoe. He switched on his concentration and in four seconds he
read it as a ten. He pushed out eight of his chips, £200. This was the maximum
stake allowed for blackjack at Lord's House.

He was dealt the ten, and for his second card he got a nine, nineteen
altogether.

Everyone sticks on nineteen. You sit tight and hope the dealer won't get twenty
or twenty-one.

So when the dealer came round again to Henry, he said, "Nineteen,"
and passed on to the next player.

"Wait," Henry said.

The dealer paused and came back to Henry. He raised his brows and looked at him
with those cool black eyes. "You wish to draw to nineteen?" he asked
somewhat sarcastically. He spoke with an Italian accent and there was scorn as
well as sarcasm in his voice. There were only two cards in the pack that would
not bust a nineteen, the ace (counting as a one) and the two. Only an idiot
would risk drawing to nineteen, especially with £200 on the table.

The next card to be dealt lay clearly visible in the front of the shoe. At
least, the reverse side of it was clearly visible. The dealer hadn't yet
touched it.

"Yes," Henry said. "I think I'll have another card."

The dealer shrugged and flipped the card out of the shoe. The two of clubs
landed neatly in front of Henry, alongside the ten and the nine.

"Thank you," Henry said. "That will do nicely."

"Twenty-one," the dealer said. His black eyes glanced up again into
Henry's face, and they rested there, silent, watchful, puzzled. Henry had
unbalanced him. He had never in his life seen anyone draw on nineteen. This
fellow had drawn on nineteen with
a calmness
and a
certainty that was quite staggering. And he had won.

Henry caught the look in the dealer's eyes, and he realized at once that he had
made a silly mistake. He had been too clever. He had drawn attention to
himself. He must never do that again. He must be very careful in future how he
used his powers. He must even make himself lose occasionally, and every now and
again he must do something a bit stupid.

The game went on. Henry's advantage was so
enormous,
he had difficulty keeping his winnings down to a reasonable sum. Every now and
again, he would ask for a third card when he already knew it was going to bust
him. And once, when he saw that his first card was going to be an ace, he put
out his smallest stake,
then
made a great show of
cursing himself aloud for not having made a bigger bet in the first place.

In an hour, he had won exactly three thousand pounds, and there he stopped. He
pocketed his chips and made his way back to the cashier's office to turn them
in for real money.

He had made £3,000 from blackjack and £3,600 from roulette, £6,600 in all. It
could just as easily have been £660,000. As a matter of fact, he told himself
he was now almost certainly able to make money faster than any other man in the
entire world.

The cashier received Henry's pile of chips and plaques without twitching a
muscle. He wore steel spectacles, and the pale eyes behind the spectacles were
not interested in Henry. They looked only at the chips on the counter. This man
also had arithmetic in his fingers. But he had more than that. He had
arithmetic, trigonometry and calculus and algebra and Euclidean geometry in
every nerve of his body. He was a human calculating-machine with a hundred
thousand electric wires in his brain. It took him five seconds to count Henry's
one hundred and twenty chips.

"Would you like a
cheque
for this,
Mr
Sugar?" he asked. The cashier, like the man at the
desk downstairs, knew every member by name.

"No, thank you," Henry said. "I'll take it in cash."

"As you wish," said the voice behind the spectacles, and he turned
away and went to a safe at the back of the office that must have contained
millions.

By Lord's House standards, Henry's win was fairly small potatoes. The Arab oil
boys were in London now and they liked to gamble. So did the shady diplomats
from the Far East and the Japanese businessmen and the British tax-dodging
real-estate operators. Staggering sums of money were being won and lost, mostly
lost, in the large London casinos every day.

The cashier returned with Henry's money and dropped the bundle of notes on the
counter. Although there was enough here to buy a small house or a large
automobile, the chief cashier at Lord's House was not impressed. He might just
as well have been passing Henry a pack of chewing-gum for all the notice he
took of the money he was dishing out.

You wait, my friend, Henry thought to himself as he pocketed the money. You
just wait. He walked away.

"Your car, sir?" said the man at the door in the green uniform.

"Not yet," Henry told him. "I think I'll take a bit of fresh air
first."

He strolled away down the street. It was nearly midnight. The evening was cool
and pleasant. The great city was still wide awake. Henry could feel the bulge
in the inside pocket of his jacket where the big wad of money was lying. He touched
the bulge with one hand. He patted it gently. It was a lot of money for an
hour's work.

And what of the future?

What was the next move going to be?

He could make a million in a month.

He could make more if he wanted to.

There was no limit to what he could make.

Walking through the streets of London in the cool of the evening, Henry began
to think about the next move.

Now, had this been a made-up story instead of a true one, it would have been
necessary to invent some sort of a surprising and exciting end for it. It would
not be difficult to do that.
Something dramatic and unusual.
So before telling you what really
did
happen
to Henry in real life, let us pause here for a moment to see what a competent
fiction writer would have done to wrap this story up. His notes would read
something like this:

1
Henry
must die. Like
Imhrat
Khan before him, he had violated the code of the yogi and had used his powers
for personal gain.

2
It
will be best if he dies in some unusual and
interesting manner that will surprise the reader.

3
For
example, he could go home to his flat and
start counting his money and gloating over it. While doing this, he might
suddenly begin to feel unwell. He has a pain in his chest.

4
He
becomes frightened. He decides to go to bed
immediately and rest. He takes off his clothes. He walks naked to the cupboard
to get his
pyjamas
. He passes the full-length mirror
that stands against the wall. He stops. He stares at the reflection of his
naked self in the mirror. Automatically, from force of habit he begins to
concentrate. And then. . .

5
All
at once, he is "seeing through"
his own skin. He "sees through" it in the same way that he "saw
through" those playing-cards a while back. It is like an X-ray picture,
only far better. An X-ray can see only the bones and the very dense areas.
Henry can see everything. He sees his arteries and veins with the blood pumping
through him. He can see his liver, his kidneys, his intestines and he can see
his heart beating.

6
He
looks at the place in his chest where the
pain is coming from. . . and he sees. . . or thinks he sees. . . a small dark
lump inside the big vein leading into the heart on the right-hand side. What
could a small dark lump be doing inside the vein? It must be a blockage of some
kind. It must be a clot. A blood-clot!

7
At
first, the clot seems to be stationary.
Then it moves. The movement is very slight, no more than a
millimetre
or two. The blood inside the vein is pumping up behind the clot and pushing
past it and the clot moves again. It jerks forward about half an inch.
This time, up the vein, towards the heart.
Henry watches in
terror. He knows, as almost everyone else in the world knows, that a blood-clot
which has broken free and is
travelling
in a vein
will ultimately reach the heart. If the clot is a large one, it will stick in
the heart and you will probably die. . .

That wouldn't be such a bad ending for a work of fiction, but this story is not
fiction. It is true. The only untrue things about it are Henry's name and the
name of the gambling casino. Henry's name was not Henry Sugar. His name has to
be protected. It still must be protected. And for obvious reasons, one cannot
call the casino by its real name. Apart from that, it is a true story.

And because it is a
tiue
story, it must have the true
ending. The true one may not be quite so dramatic or spooky as a made-up one
could be, but it is nonetheless interesting. Here is what actually happened.

After walking the London streets for about an hour, Henry returned to Lord's
House and collected his car. Then he drove back to his flat. He was a puzzled
man. He couldn't understand why he felt so little excitement about his
tremendous success. If this sort of thing had happened to him three years ago,
before he'd started the yoga business, he'd have gone crazy with excitement.
He'd have been dancing in the streets and rushing off to the nearest nightclub
to celebrate with champagne.

The funny thing was that he didn't really feel excited at all. He felt
melancholy. It had somehow all been too easy. Every time he'd made a bet, he'd
been certain of winning. There was no thrill, no suspense,
no
danger of losing. He knew of course that from now on he could travel around the
world and make millions. But was it going to be any fun doing it?