The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More Read online

  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.

  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 PS100 on number twenty-seven. It came up. The second time he put it on number four; that came up too. A total of PS7,500 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 PS10,000. 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 PS17,500 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 dol
lars 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 bellhop came in and whispered to Henry that two men were waiting for him in the lobby. Other men, the bellhop said, were guarding the rear exit. These were very hard men, the bellhop 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 bellhop 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 bellhop 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 bellhop said, grinning.

  Henry put on the bellhop'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 bellhop 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 bellhop 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.