The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More (21 page)

It was slowly beginning to dawn upon Henry that nothing is any fun if you can
get as much of it as you want.
Especially money.

Another thing.
Was it not possible that the process he
had gone through in order to acquire yoga powers had completely changed his
outlook on life?

Certainly it was possible.

Henry drove home and went straight to bed.

The next morning he woke up late. But he didn't feel any more cheerful now than
he had the night before. And when he got out of bed and saw the enormous bundle
of money still lying on his dressing-table, he felt a sudden and very acute
revulsion towards it. He didn't want it. For the life of him, he couldn't
explain why this was so, but the fact remained that he simply did not want any
part of it.

He picked up the bundle. It was all in twenty-pound notes, three hundred and
thirty of them to be exact. He walked on to the balcony of his flat, and there
he stood in his dark-red silk
pyjamas
looking down at
the street below him.

Henry's flat was in
Curzon
Street, which is right in
the middle of London's most fashionable and expensive district, known as
Mayfair. One end of
Curzon
Street runs into Berkeley
Square, the other into Park Lane. Henry lived three floors above street level,
and outside his bedroom there was a small balcony with iron railings that
overhung the street.

The month was June, the morning was full of sunshine, and the time was about
eleven o'clock. Although it was a Sunday, there were quite a few people
strolling about on the pavements.

Henry peeled off a single twenty-pound note from his wad and dropped it over
the balcony. A breeze took hold of it and blew it sideways in the direction of
Park Lane. Henry stood watching it. It fluttered and twisted in the air and
eventually came to rest on the opposite side of.
the
street, directly in front of an old man. The old man was wearing a long brown
shabby overcoat and a floppy hat.
and
he was walking
slowly, all by himself. He caught sight of the note as it fluttered past his
face, and he stopped and picked it up. He held it with both hands and stared at
it. He turned it over. He peered closer. Then he raised his head and looked up.

"Hey there!"
Henry shouted, cupping a hand
to his mouth. "That's for you! It's a present!"

The old man stood quite still, holding the note in front of him and gazing up
at the figure on the balcony above.

"Put it in your pocket!" Henry shouted. "Take it home!" His
voice carried far along the street, and many people stopped and looked up.

Henry peeled off another note and threw it down. The watchers below him didn't
move. They simply watched. They had no idea what was going on. A man was up
there on the balcony and he had shouted something, and now he had just thrown
down what looked like a piece of paper. Everyone followed the piece of paper as
it went fluttering down, and this one came to rest near a young couple who were
standing arm in arm on the pavement across the street. The man unlinked his arm
and tried to catch the paper as it went past him. He missed it but picked it up
from the ground. He examined it closely. The watchers on both sides of the
street all had their eyes on the young man.
To
many of
them, the paper had looked very much like a bank-note of some kind, and they
were waiting to find out.

"
It's
twenty pounds!" the man yelled,
jumping up and down. "It's a twenty-pound note!"

"Keep it!" Henry shouted at him. "It's yours!"

"You mean it?" the man called back, holding the note out at arm's
length. "Can I really keep it?"

Suddenly there was a rustle of excitement along both sides of the street and
everyone started moving at once. They ran out into the middle of the road and
clustered underneath the balcony. They lifted their arms above their heads and
started calling out, "Me! How about one for me! Drop us another one,
guv'nor
! Send down a few more!"

Henry peeled off
another five or six notes
and threw
them down.

There were screams and yells as the pieces of paper fanned out in the wind and floated
downward, and there was a good old-fashioned scrimmage in the streets as they
reached the hands of the crowd. But it was all very good-natured. People were
laughing. They thought it a fantastic joke. Here was a man standing three
floors up in his
pyjamas
, slinging these enormously
valuable notes into the air. Quite a few of those present had never seen a
twenty-pound note in their lives until now.

But now something else was beginning to happen.

The speed with which news will spread along the streets of a city is
phenomenal. The news of what Henry was doing flashed like lightning up and down
the length of
Curzon
Street and into the smaller and
larger streets beyond. From all sides, people came running. Within a few
minutes, about a thousand men and women and children were blocking the road
underneath Henry's balcony. Car-drivers who couldn't pass got out of their
vehicles and joined the crowd. And all of a sudden, there was chaos in
Curzon
Street.

At this point, Henry simply raised his arm and swung it out and flung the
entire bundle of notes into the air. More than six thousand pounds went
fluttering down towards the screaming crowd below.

The scramble that followed was really something to see. People were jumping up
to catch the notes before they reached the ground, and everyone was pushing and
jostling and yelling and falling over, and soon the whole place was a mass of
tangled, yelling,
fighting
human beings.

Above the noise and behind him in his own flat, Henry suddenly heard his
doorbell ringing long and loud. He left the balcony and opened the front door.
A large policeman with a black moustache stood outside with his hands on his
hips. "You!" he bellowed angrily. "You're the one! What the
devil
d'you
think
you're
doing?"

"Good morning, officer," Henry said. "I'm sorry about the crowd.
I didn't think it would turn out like that. I was just giving away some
money."

"You are causing a nuisance!" the policeman bellowed. "You are
creating an obstruction! You are inciting a riot and you are blocking the
en
-tire street!"

"I said I was sorry," Henry answered. "I won't do it again, I
promise. They'll soon go away."

The policeman took one hand off his hip and from the inside of his palm he
produced a twenty-pound note.

"Ah-ha!"
Henry cried. "You got one
yourself! I'm so glad! I'm so happy for you!"

"Now you just stop that larking about!" the policeman said.
"Because I have a few serious questions to ask you about these
here twenty-pound notes."
He took a notebook from his breast
pocket. "In the first place," he went on, "where exactly did you
get them from?"

"I won them," Henry said. "I had a lucky night." He went on
to give the name of the club where he had won the money and the policeman wrote
it down in his little book. "Check it up," Henry added. "They'll
tell you it's true."

The policeman lowered the notebook, and looked Henry in the eye. "As a
matter of fact," he said, "I believe your story. I think you're
telling the truth. But that doesn't excuse what you did one little bit."

"I didn't do anything wrong," Henry said.

"You're a blithering young idiot!" the policeman shouted, beginning
to work himself up all over again. "You're an ass and an imbecile! If
you've been lucky enough to win yourself a tremendous big sum of money like
that and you want to give it away, you don't throw it out the window!"

"Why not?"
Henry asked, grinning. "It's
as good a way of getting rid of it as any."

"It's a damned stupid silly way of getting rid of it!" the policeman
cried. "Why didn't you give it where it would do some good?
To a hospital, for instance?
Or an
orphanage?
There's
orphanages all over the
country that hardly have enough money to buy the kids a present even for
Christmas! And then along comes a little twit like you who's never even known
what it's like to be hard up and you throw the stuff out into the street! It
makes me mad, it really does!"

"An orphanage?"
Henry said.

"Yes, an
orphanage!"
the
policeman cried. "I was brought up in one so I ought to know what it's like!"
With that, the policeman turned away and went quickly down the stairs towards
the street.

Henry didn't move. The policeman's words, and more especially the genuine fury
with which they had been spoken, smacked our hero right between the eyes.

"An orphanage?" he said aloud. "That's quite a thought.
But why only one orphanage?
Why not lots of them?" And
now, very quickly, there began to come to him the great and
marvellous
idea that was to change everything.

Henry shut the front door and went back into his flat. All at once, he felt a
powerful excitement stirring in his belly. He started pacing up and down,
ticking off the points that would make his
marvellous
idea possible.

"One," he said, "I can get hold of a very large sum of money
each day of my life.

"Two. I must not go to the same casino more than once every twelve months.

"Three. I must not win too much from any one casino or somebody will get
suspicious. I suggest I keep it down to twenty thousand pounds a night.

"Four. Twenty thousand pounds a night for three hundred and sixty-five
days in the year comes to how much?"

Henry took a pencil and paper and worked this one out.

"It comes to seven million, three hundred thousand pounds," he said
aloud.

"Very well.
Point number five.
I shall have to keep moving. No more than two or three nights at a stretch in
any one city or the word will get around. Go from London to Monte Carlo.
Then to Cannes.
To Biarritz.
To
Deauville
.
To
Las Vegas.
To Mexico City.
To
Buenos Aires.
To Nassau.
And so on.

"Six. With the money I make, I will set up an absolutely first-class
orphanage in every country I visit. I will become a Robin Hood. I will take
money from the bookmakers and the gambling proprietors and give it to the
children. Does that sound corny and sentimental? As a dream, it does. But as a
reality, if I can really make it work, it wouldn't be corny at all, or
sentimental. It would be rather tremendous.

"Seven. I will need somebody to help me, a man who will sit at home and
take care of all that money and buy the houses and organize the whole thing.
A money man.
Someone I can trust. What about John
Winston?"

John Winston was Henry's accountant. He handled his income-tax affairs, his
investments and all other problems that had to do with money. Henry had known
him for eighteen years and a friendship had developed between the two men. Remember,
though, that up until now, John Winston had known Henry only as the wealthy
idle playboy who had never done a day's work in his life.

"You must be mad," John Winston said when Henry told him his plan.
"Nobody has ever devised a system for beating the casinos."

From his pocket, Henry produced a brand-new unopened pack of cards. "Come
on," he said. "We'll play a little blackjack. You're the dealer. And
don't tell me those cards are marked. It's a new pack."

Solemnly, for nearly an hour, sitting in Winston's office whose windows looked
out over Berkeley Square, the two men played blackjack. They used matchsticks
as counters, each match being worth twenty-five pounds. After fifty minutes,
Henry was no less than thirty-four thousand pounds up!

John Winston couldn't believe it. "How do you do it?" he said.

"Put the pack on the table," Henry said. "Face down."

Winston obeyed.

Henry concentrated on the top card for four seconds. "That's a knave of
hearts," he said. It was.

"The next one
is.
. . a three of hearts." It
was. He went right through the entire pack, naming every card.

"Go on," John Winston said. "Tell me how you do it." This
usually calm and mathematical man was leaning forward over his desk, staring at
Henry with eyes as big and bright as two stars. "You do realize you are
doing something completely impossible?" he said.

"It's not impossible," Henry said. "It is only very difficult. I
am the one man in the world who can do it."

The telephone rang on John Winston's desk. He lifted the receiver and said to
his secretary, "No more calls please, Susan, until I tell you. Not even my
wife." He looked up, waiting for Henry to go on.

Henry then proceeded to explain to John Winston exactly how he had acquired the
power. He told him how he had found the notebook and about
Imhrat
Khan and then he described how he had been working non-stop for the past three
years, training his mind to concentrate.