The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More (22 page)

When he had finished, John Winston said, "Have you tried walking on
fire?"

"No," Henry said. "And I'm not going to."

"What makes you think you'll be able to do this thing with the cards in a
casino?"

Henry then told him about his visit to Lord's House the night before.

"Six thousand, six hundred pounds!"
John
Winston cried. "Did you honestly win that much in real money?"

"Listen," Henry said. "I just won thirty-four thousand from you
in less than an hour!"

"So you did."

"Six thousand was the very least I could win," Henry said. "It
was a terrific effort not to win more."

"You will be the richest man on earth."

"I don't want to be the richest man on earth," Henry said. "Not
any more." He then told him about his plan for orphanages.

When he had finished, he said, "Will you join me, John? Will you be my
money man, my banker, my administrator and everything else? There will be
millions coming in every year."

John Winston, a cautious and prudent accountant, would not agree to anything at
all on the spur of the moment. "I want to see you in action first,"
he said.

So that night, they went together to the Ritz Club on
Curzon
Street. "Can't go to Lord's House again now for some time," Henry
said.

On the first spin of the roulette wheel, Henry staked £100 on number
twenty-seven. It came up. The second time he put it on number four; that came
up too.
A total of £7,500 profit.

An Arab standing next to Henry said. "I have just lost fifty-five thousand
pounds. How do you do it?"

"Luck," Henry said. "Just luck."

They moved into the Blackjack Room and there, in half an hour, Henry won a
further £10,000. Then he stopped.

Outside in the street, John Winston said, "I believe you now. I'll come in
with you."

"We start tomorrow," Henry said.

"Do you really intend to do this every single night?"

"Yes," Henry said. "I shall move very fast from place to place,
from country to country. And every day I shall send the profits back to you
through the banks."

"Do you realize how much it will add up to in a year?"

"Millions," Henry said cheerfully.
"About
seven million a year."

"In that case, I can't operate in this country," John Winston said.
"The taxman will have it all."

"Go anywhere you like," Henry said. "It makes
nO
difference to me. I trust you completely."

"I shall go to Switzerland," John Winston said.
"But
not tomorrow.
I can't just pull up and fly away. I'm not an unattached
bachelor like you with
no
responsibilities. I must
talk to my wife and children. I must give notice to my partners in the firm. I
must sell my house. I must find another house in Switzerland. I must take the
kids out of school. My dear man, these things take time!"

Henry drew from his pocket the £17,500 he had just won and handed them to the other
man. "Here's some petty cash to tide you over until you get settled,"
he said. "But do hurry up. I want to get cracking."

Within a week, John Winston was in Lausanne, with an office high up on the
lovely hillside above Lake Geneva. His family would follow him as soon as
possible.

And Henry went to work in the casinos.

One year later, he had sent a little over eight million pounds to John Winston
in Lausanne. The money was sent five days a week to a Swiss company called
ORPHANAGES S.A. Nobody except John Winston and Henry knew where the money came
from or what was going to happen to it. As for the Swiss authorities, they
never want to know where money comes from. Henry sent the money through the
banks. The Monday remittance was always the biggest because it included Henry's
take for Friday, Saturday and Sunday, when the banks were closed. He moved with
astonishing speed, and often the only clue that John Winston had to his
whereabouts was the address of the bank which had sent the money on a
particular day. One day it would come perhaps from a bank in Manila.
The next day from Bangkok.
It came from Las Vegas, from
Curacao, from Freeport, from Grand Cayman, from San Juan, from Nassau, from
London, from Biarritz. It came from anywhere and everywhere so long as there
was a big casino in the city.

For seven years, all went well. Nearly fifty million pounds had arrived in
Lausanne, and had been safely banked away. Already John Winston had got three
orphanages established, one in France, one in England, and one in the United
States. Five more were on the way.

Then came a bit of trouble.
There is a grapevine among
casino owners, and although Henry was always extraordinarily careful not to
take too much from any one place on any one night, the news was bound to spread
in the end.

They got wise to him one night in Las Vegas when Henry rather imprudently took
one hundred thousand dollars from each of three separate casinos that all happened
to be owned by the same mob.

What happened was this. The morning after, when Henry was in his hotel room
packing to leave for the airport, there was a knock on his door. A bell-hop
came in and whispered to Henry that two men were waiting for him in the lobby.
Other men, the bell-hop said, were guarding the rear exit. These were very hard
men, the bell-hop said, and he did not give much for Henry's chances of
survival if he were to go downstairs at this moment.

"Why do you come and tell me?" Henry asked him. "Why are you on
my side?"

"I'm not on anyone's side," the bell-hop said. "But we all know
you won a lot of money last night and I figured you might give me a nice
present for tipping you off."

"Thanks," Henry said. "But how do I get away? I'll give you a
thousand dollars if you can get me out of here."

"That's easy," the bell-hop said. "Take your own clothes off and
put on my uniform. Then walk out through the lobby with your suitcase. But tie
me up before you leave. I've
gotta
be lying here on
the floor tied up hand and foot so they won't think I helped you. I'll say you
had a gun and I couldn't do
nothing
."

"Where's the cord to tie you up with?" Henry asked.

"Right here in my pocket," the bell-hop said, grinning.

Henry put on the bell-hop's gold and green uniform, which wasn't too bad a fit.
Then he tied the man up good and proper with the cord and stuffed a
handkerchief in his mouth. Finally, he pushed ten one-hundred dollar bills
under the carpet for the bell-hop to collect later.

Down in the lobby, two short, thick, black-haired thugs were watching the
people as they came out of the elevators. But they hardly glanced at the man in
the green and gold bellhop's uniform who came out carrying a suitcase and who
walked smartly across the lobby and out through the swing-doors that led to the
street.

At the airport, Henry changed his flight and took the next plane to Los
Angeles. Things were not going to be quite so easy from now on, he told
himself. But that bell-hop had given him an idea.

In Los Angeles, and in nearby Hollywood and Beverly Hills, where the film
people live, Henry sought out the very best make-up man in the business. This
was Max
Engelman
. Henry called on him. He liked him
immediately.

"How much do you earn?" Henry asked him.

"Oh, about forty thousand dollars a year," Max told him.

"I'll give you a hundred thousand," Henry said, "if you will
come with me and be my make-up artist."

"What's the big idea?" Max asked him.

"I'll tell you," Henry said. And he did.

Max was only the second person Henry had told. John Winston was the first. And
when Henry showed Max how he could read the cards, Max was flabbergasted.

"Great heavens, man!" he cried. "You could make a fortune!"

"I already have," Henry told him. "I've made ten fortunes. But I
want to make ten more." He told Max about the orphanages. With John
Winston's help, he had already set up three of them, with more on the way.

Max was a small dark-skinned man who had escaped from Vienna when the Nazis
went in. He had never married. He had no ties. He became wildly enthusiastic.
"It's crazy!" he cried. "It's the craziest thing I've ever heard
in my life! I'll join you, man! Let's go!"

From then on, Max
Engelman
travelled
everywhere with Henry and he carried with him in a trunk such an assortment of
wigs, false beards, sideburns, moustaches and make-up materials as you have
never seen. He could turn his master into any one of thirty or forty
unrecognizable people, and the casino managers, who were all watching for Henry
now, never once saw him again as
Mr
Henry Sugar. As a
matter of fact, only a year after the Las Vegas episode, Henry and Max actually
went back to that dangerous city, and on a warm starry night Henry took a cool
eighty thousand dollars from the first of the big casinos he had visited
before. He went disguised as an elderly Brazilian diplomat, and they never knew
what had hit them.

Now that Henry no longer appeared as himself in the casinos, there were, of
course, a number of other details that had to be taken care of, such as false
identity cards and passports. In Monte Carlo, for example, a visitor must
always show his passport before being allowed to enter the casino. Henry
visited Monte Carlo eleven more times with Max's assistance, every time with a
different passport and in a different disguise.

Max adored the work. He loved creating new characters for Henry. "I have
an entirely fresh one for you today!" he would announce. "Just wait
till you see it! Today you will be an Arab sheikh from Kuwait!"

"Do we have an Arab passport?" Henry would ask.
"And
Arab papers?"

"We have everything," Max would answer. "John Winston has sent
me a lovely passport in the name of His Royal Highness Sheikh Abu Bin
Bey
!"

And so it went on. Over the years, Max and Henry became as close as brothers.
They were crusading brothers, two men who moved swiftly through the skies,
milking the casinos of the world and sending the money straight back to John
Winston in Switzerland, where the company known as ORPHANAGES S.A. grew richer
and richer.

Henry died last year, at the age of sixty-three; his work was completed. He had
been at it for just on twenty years.

His personal reference book listed three hundred and seventy-one major casinos
in twenty-one different countries or islands. He had visited them all many
times and he had never lost.

According to John Winston's accounts, he had made altogether one hundred and
forty-four million pounds.

He left twenty-one well-established well-run orphanages scattered about the
world, one in each country he visited. All these were administered and financed
from Lausanne by John and his staff.

But how do I, who am neither Max
Engelman
nor John
Winston, happen to know all this? And how did I come to write the story in the
first place?

I will tell you.

Soon after Henry's death, John Winston telephoned me from Switzerland. He
introduced himself simply as the head of a company calling itself ORPHANAGES
S.A., and asked me if I would come out to Lausanne to see him with a view to
writing a brief history of the organization. I don't know how he got hold of my
name. He probably had a list of writers and stuck a pin into it. He would pay
me well, he said. And he added. "A remarkable man has died recently. His
name was Henry Sugar. I think people ought to know a bit about what he has
done."

In my ignorance, I asked whether the story was really interesting enough to
merit being put on paper.

"All right," said the man who now controlled one hundred and
forty-four million pounds. "Forget it. I'll ask someone else. There are
plenty of writers around."

That needled me. "No," I said. "Wait. Could you at least tell me
who this Henry Sugar was and what he did? I've never even heard of him."

In five minutes on the phone, John Winston told me something about Henry
Sugar's secret career. It was secret no longer. Henry was dead and would never
gamble again. I listened, enthralled.

"I'll be on the next plane," I said.

"Thank you," John Winston said. "I would appreciate that."

In Lausanne, I met John Winston, now over seventy, and also Max
Engelman
, who was about the same age. They were both still
shattered by Henry's death.
Max even more so than John
Winston, for Max had been beside him constantly for over thirteen years.
"I loved him," Max said, a shadow falling over his face. "He was
a great man. He never thought about himself. He never kept a penny of the money
he won, except what he needed to travel and to eat. Listen, once we were in
Biarritz and he had just been to the bank and given them half a million francs
to send home to John. It was lunchtime. We went to a place and had a simple
lunch, an
omelette
and a bottle of wine, and when the
bill came, Henry hadn't got anything to pay it with. I hadn't either. He was a
lovely man."