For the Win

  “And they’d try it—and it would work! The mark could put a few dollars down and walk away with a few hundred. It was an eye-popping experience, a real thrill. The mark’s imagination would start to work on him. If he could turn a few dollars into hundreds, imagine what he could do if he could put down all his money, along with what ever money he could steal from his business, his family, his friends—everyone. It wouldn’t even be stealing, because he’d be able to pay everyone back once he won big. And he’d go and get all the money he could lay hands on, and he’d lay his bet and he’d lose!

  “And it would be his fault. The inside man wouldn’t be able to believe it, he’d said, ‘Bet on this horse in the first race,’ not ‘Bet on this horse for first place’ or some similar misunderstanding. The mark’s bad hearing had cost them everything, all of them. There is a giant scene, and before you know it, the police are there, ready to arrest everyone. Someone shoots the policeman, there’s blood and screaming, the place empties out, and the mark counts himself lucky to have escaped with his life. Of course, all the blood and shooting are fakes, too—so is the policeman. He’s got a little blood in a bag in his mouth; they called it a ‘cackle-bladder’: a fine word, no?

  “Now, at this stage, it may be that the mark is completely, totally broke, not one paisa to his name. If that’s the case, he gets away and never hears from the roper or the inside man again. He spends the rest of his life broke and broken, hating himself for having misheard the instruction at the critical moment. And he never, ever tells anyone, because if he did, it would expose this great man for a fool.

  “But if there’s any chance he can get more money—a friend he hasn’t cleaned out, a company bank account he can access—they may contact him again and offer him the chance to ‘get even’. You can bet he will—after all, he’s a king among men, destined to rule, who made his fortune because he’s better than everyone else. Why wouldn’t he play again, since the only reason he lost last time was that he misheard an instruction. Surely that won’t happen again!”

  “But it does,” she said. Her eyes were shining.

  “Oh yes, indeed. And again, and again—”

  “And again, until he’s been bled dry.”

  “You’ve learned the first lesson,” Ashok said. “Now, onto advanced subjects. You know how a pyramid scheme works, yes?”

  She waved dismissively. “Of course.”

  “Now, the pyramid scheme is just a kind of skeleton, and like a skeleton, you can hang a lot of different bodies off of it. It can look like a plan to sell soap, or a plan to sell vitamins, or something else altogether. But the important thing is, what ever it’s selling, it has to seem like a good deal. Think back on The Big Store—how do you make something seem like a good deal?”

  Mala thought carefully. Ashok could practically see the gears spinning in her head. Wah! She was smart, this Dharavi girl!

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay—it should be something the mark doesn’t know much about.”

  “Got it in one!” Ashok said. “If the mark is smart and accomplished, she’ll assume that she knows everything about everything. Dangle some bait for her that she doesn’t really understand and she’ll come along. But there’s a way to make even familiar subjects unfamiliar. Here, look at this.” He typed at the disused computer on a corner of his desk, googled an image of a craps table at a casino.

  “This is a gambling game, craps. They play it with dice.”

  “I’ve seen men playing it in the street,” Mala said.

  “This is the casino version. See all the lines and markings?”

  She nodded.

  “These marks represent different bets—double if it comes up this way, triple if it comes up that way. The bets can get very, very complicated.

  “Now, dice aren’t that complicated. There are only thirty-six ways that a roll can come up: one-one, one-two, one-three, and so on, all that way up to six-six. It should be easy to tell whether a bet is any good: take the chance of rolling two sixes, twice in a row: the odds are thirty-six times thirty-six to one. If the bet pays less than those odds, then you will eventually lose money. If the bet pays more than those odds, then you will eventually win money.”

  Mala shook her head. “I don’t really understand.”

  “Imagine flipping a coin.” He took out his wallet and opened a flap and pulled out an old brass Chinese coin, pierced in the center with a square. “One side is heads, one side is tails. Assuming the coin is ‘fair’—that is, assuming that both sides of the coin weigh the same and have the same wind resistance, then the chances of a coin landing with either face showing are fifty-fifty, or one-in-one, or just ‘even.’

  “Now we play a fair game. I toss the coin, you call out which side you think it’ll land on. If you guess right, you double your bet; if not, I take your money. If we play this game long enough, we’ll both have the same amount of money as we started with—it’s a boring game.

  “But what if instead I paid you triple if it landed on heads, provided you took the heads-bet? All you need to do is keep putting money on heads, and eventually you’ll end up with all my money: when it comes up tails, I win a little; when it comes up heads, you win a lot. Over time, you’ll take it all. So if I offered you this proposition, you should take it.”

  “All right,” Mala said.

  “But what if it was a very complicated bet? What if there were two coins, and the payout depended on a long list of factors; I’ll pay you triple for any double-head or double-tails, provided that it isn’t the same outcome as the last time, unless it is the third duplicate outcome. Is that a good bet or a bad one?”

  Mala shrugged.

  “I don’t know either—I’d have to calculate the odds with pen and paper. But what about this: what if I’ll pay you three hundred to one if you win according to the rules I just set up. You lay down ten rupees and win, I’ll give you three thousand back?”

  Mala cocked her head. “I’d probably take the bet.”

  “Most people would. It’s a fantastic cocktail: mix one part confusing rules and one part high odds, and people will lay down their money all day. Now, tell me this: would you bet ten rupees on rolling the dice double-sixes, thirty times in a row?”

  “No!” Mala said. “That’s practically impossible.”

  Ashok spread his hands. “And now you have the second lesson: everyone has some intuition about odds, even if they are, excuse me, a girl who has never studied statistics.” Mala colored, but she held her tongue. It was true, after all. “Most people won’t bet on nearly impossible things, not even if you give brilliant odds. But you can disguise the nearly impossible by making it do a lot of acrobatics—making the rules of the game very complicated—and then lots of people, even smart people, will place bets on propositions that are every bit as unlikely as thirty double-sixes in a row. In fact, smart people are especially likely to place those bets—”

  Mala held up her hand. “Because they’re so smart they think they know everything.”

  Ashok clapped. “Star pupil! You should have been a con-artist or an economist, if only you weren’t such a fine general, General.” She grinned. Ashok knew that she loved to hear how good a general she was. He didn’t blame her: if he was a Dharavi girl who’d outsmarted the slum and made a life, he’d be a little insecure, too. It was just one more thing to like about Mala and her scowling, hard brilliance. “Now, my star pupil, put it all together for me.”

  She began to recite, counting off on her fingers, like a school-girl recounting a lesson. “To make a Ponzi scheme that works, that really works, you need to have smart people who are surrounded by con-artists who are given a chance to bet on something complicated in a way that they’re not good at understanding.”

  Ashok clapped and Mala gave a small, ironic bow from her seat.

  “So that is what I am doing back here. Devising the scheme that will take the economies of four entire worlds hostage, make them ours to smash as we see fit. In order to do that, I
need to do some very fine work.”

  Mala pointed at a chart that was dense with scribbled equations and notations. “Explain,” she commanded.

  “That is an entirely different sort of lesson,” Ashok said. “For a different day. Or perhaps a year.”

  Mala’s eyes narrowed.

  “My dear general,” Ashok said, laying it on so thick that they both knew he was doing it, and he saw the corners of Mala’s lips tremble as they tried to hold back her smile, “If I asked you to explain the order of battle to me, you could do two things: either you could confer some useful, philosophical principles for commanding a force, or you could vomit up a lifetime’s statistics and specifics about every weapon, every character class, every technique and tip. The chances are that I’d never memorize a tenth of what you had to tell me. I don’t have the background for it. And, having memorized it, I would never be able to put it to use because I wouldn’t have had the hard labor that you’ve put in—jai ho!—and so I won’t have the skeleton in my mind on which I might lay the flesh of your teaching, my guru.” He checked to see if he’d laid it on too thickly, decided he hadn’t, grinned and namaste’d to her, just to ice the biscuit.

  Mala nodded regally, keeping her straight face on for as long as she could, but as she left the room, hobbling on her cane, he was sure he heard a girlish peal of giggles from her.

  Matthew’s first plate of dumplings tasted so good he almost choked on the saliva that flooded his mouth. After two months in the labor camp, eating chicken’s feet and rice and never enough of either, freezing at night and broiling during the day, he thought that he had perfectly reconstructed the taste of dumplings in his mind. On days when he was digging, each bite of the shovel’s tip into the earth was like the moment that his teeth pierced a dumpling’s skin, letting the steam and oil escape, the meat inside releasing an aroma that wafted up into his nostrils. On days when he was hammering, the round stones were the tender dumplings in a mountain, the worn ground was the squeaking styrofoam tray. Dumplings danced in his thoughts as he lay on the floor between two other prisoners; they were in his mind when he rose in the morning. The only time he didn’t think about dumplings was when he was eating chicken’s feet and rice, because they were so awful that they alone had the power to drive the ghost of dumplings from his imagination.

  Those were the times he thought about what he was going to do when he got out of jail. What he was going to do in the game. What the Webblies were planning, and how he would play his part in that plan.

  The prison official that released him assumed that he was one of the millions of illegal workers with forged papers who’d gone to Canton, to the Pearl River Delta, to seek his fortune. He was half-way through a stern, barked lecture about staying out of trouble and going back to his village in Gui-Zhou or Sichuan or what ever impoverished backwater he hailed from, before the man actually looked down at his records and saw that Matthew was, indeed, Cantonese—and that he would shortly be transported, at government expense, back to Shenzhen. The man had fallen silent, and Matthew, overcome with the comedy of the moment, couldn’t help but thank him profusely—in Cantonese.

  There were dumplings on the train, sold by grim men and women with deep lines cut into their faces by years and worry and hunger and misery. This was the provinces, the outer territories, the mysterious China that had sent millions of girls and boys to Canton to earn their fortunes in the Pearl River Delta. Matthew knew all their strange accents, he spoke their strange Mandarin language, but he was Cantonese, and these were not his people.

  Those were not his dumplings.

  It wasn’t until he debarked at the outskirts of Shenzhen and transferred to a metro that he started to feel at home. It wasn’t until then that he started to think about dumplings. The girls on the metro were as he remembered them, beautiful and polished and laughing and well fed. Skulking in the doorway of the train, watching his reflection in the dark glass, he saw what an awful skeleton-person he’d become. He had been a young man when he went in, a boy, really. Now he looked five years older, and he was shifty and sunken, and there was a scrub of wispy beard on his cheeks, accentuating their hollowness. He looked like one of the mass of criminals and grifters and scumbags who hung around the train station and the street corners—tough and desperate as a sewer rat. Unpredictable.

  Why not? Sewer rats got lots of dumplings. They had sharp teeth and sharp wits. They were fast. Matthew grinned at his reflection and the girls on the train gave him a wide berth when they pulled into the next station.

  Lu met him at Guo Mao station, up on the street level, where the men and women in brisk suits with brisk walks came and went from the stock exchange, a perfect crowd of people to get lost in. Lu took both of his hands in a long, soulful, silent shake and led them away toward the stock exchange, where the identity counterfeiters were.

  These people kept Shenzhen and all of Guangdong province running. They could make you any papers you needed: working permits allowing a farm girl to move from Xi’an to Shenzhen and make iPods; papers saying you were a lawyer, a doctor, an engineer; driver’s licenses, vendor’s licenses—even pilot’s licenses, according to the card one of them gave him. They were old ladies, the friendly face of criminal empires run by hard men with perpetual cigarettes and dandruff on the shoulders of their dark suits.

  They walked in silence through the shouting grabbing crowds, the flurries of cards advertising fake documents shoved in their hands by grannies on all sides of them. Lu stopped in front of one granny and bent and whispered in her ear. She nodded once and went back to waving her cards, but she must have signaled a confederate somehow, because a moment later, a young man got up off a bench and wandered into a gigantic electronics mall, and they followed him, threading their way through stall after stall of parts for mobile phones—keyboards, screens, dialpads, diodes—up an escalator to another floor of parts, up another escalator and another floor, and one more to a floor that was completely deserted. Even the electrical outlets were empty, bare wires dangling from the receptacles, waiting to be hooked up to plugs.

  The boy was 100 meters ahead of them, and they trailed after him, slipping into a hallway that led toward the emergency stairs. A little side door was slightly ajar and Lu pushed it open. The boy wasn’t there—he must have taken the stairs—but there was another boy, younger than Lu or Matthew, sitting in front of a computer, intently playing Mushroom Kingdom. Matthew smiled—it was always so strange to see a Chinese person playing a game just for the fun of it, rather than as a job. He looked up and nodded at the two of them. Wordlessly, Lu passed him a bundle that the boy counted carefully, mixed Hong Kong dollars and Chinese renminbi. He made the money disappear with a nimble-fingered gesture, then pointed at a stool in a corner of the room with a white screen behind it. Matthew sat—still without a word—and saw that there was a little webcam positioned on the boy’s desk, pointing at him. He composed his features in an expression of embarrassed seriousness, the kind of horrible facial expression that all ID carried, and the boy clicked his mouse and gestured at the door. “One hour,” he said.

  Lu held the door for Matthew and led him down the fire stairs, back into the mall, back onto the street, back among the counterfeiters, and a short way to a noodle stall that was thronged with people, and that’s when Matthew’s mouth began to generate so much saliva that he had to surreptitiously blot the corners of his lips on the sleeve of his cheap cotton jacket.

  Moment later, he was eating. And eating. And eating. The first bowl was pork. Then beef. Then prawn. Then some Shanghai dumplings, filled with duck. And still he ate. His stomach stretched and the waistband of his jeans pinched him, and he undid the top button and ate some more. Lu goggled at him all the while, fetching more bowls of dumplings as needed, bringing back chili sauce and napkins. He sent and received some texts, and Matthew looked up from his work of eating at those moments to watch Lu’s fierce concentration as he tapped on his phone’s keypad.

  “Who is she?” Matt
hew asked, as he leaned back and allowed the latest layer of dumplings to settle in his stomach.

  Lu ducked his head and blushed. “A friend. She’s great. She organized, you know—” He waved his chopsticks in the direction of the counterfeiters’ market. “She’s—I don’t know what I would have done without her. She’s why I’m not in jail.”

  Matthew smiled wryly. “You’d have gotten out by now.” He plucked at his loose shirt. “Though you might be a few sizes smaller.”

  Lu showed Matthew a picture of a South China girl on his phone. She looked like the perfect model of South China womanhood—fashionable clothes and hair, a carefully made-up double-eyelid, an expression of mischief and, what, power? That sense of being on top of her world and the world in general. Matthew nodded appreciatively. “Lucky Lu,” he said.

  Lu dropped his voice. “She’s amazing,” he whispered. “She got me papers, cancelled my phone, let the number go dead, then scooped it up again with a different identity, then forwarded it through a—” he looked around dramatically and pitched his voice even lower—“Falun Gong switchboard in Macau, then back to this phone. That’s why you were able to call me. It’s incredible—I’m still in touch with everyone, but it’s all through so many blinds that the zengfu have no idea where I am or how to trace me.”

  “How does she know all this?” Matthew asked, gently, the dumplings settling like rocks in his stomach. He was a dead man. “How do you know she isn’t police herself?”

  “She can’t be,” Lu said. “You’ll see why, once we meet up with her. This much I’m sure of.”