The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More Read online

  "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."

  John Winston told me everything he knew. He showed me the original dark-blue notebook written by Dr John Cartwright in Bombay in 1934, and I copied it out word for word.

  "Henry always carried it with him," John Winston said. "In the end, he knew the whole thing by heart."

  He showed me the accounts books of ORPHANAGES S.A. with Henry's winnings recorded in them day by day over twenty years, and a truly staggering sight they were.

  When he had finished, I said to him, "There's a big gap in this story, Mr Winston. You've told me almost nothing about Henry's travels and about his adventures in the casinos of the world."

  "That's Max's story," John Winston said. "Max knows all about that because he was with him. But he says he wants to have a shot at writing it himself. He's already started."

  "Then why not let Max write the whole thing?" I asked.

  "He doesn't want to," John Winston said. "He only wants to write about Henry and Max. It should be a fantastic story if he ever gets it finished. But he is old now, like me, and I doubt he will manage it."

  "One last question," I said. "You keep calling him Henry Sugar. And yet you tell me that wasn't his name. Don't you want me to say who he really was when I do the story?"

  "No," John Winston said. "Max and I promised never to reveal it. Oh, it'll probably leak out sooner or later. After all, he was from a fairly well-known English family. But I'd appreciate it if you don't try to find out. Just call him plain Mr Henry Sugar."

  And that is what I have done.

  Lucky Break

  How I became a writer

  A fiction writer is a person who invents stories.

  But how does one start out on a job like this? How does one become a full-time professional fiction writer?

  Charles Dickens found it easy. At the age of twenty-four, he simply sat down and wrote Pickwick Papers, which became an immediate best-seller. But Dickens was a genius, and geniuses are different from the rest of us.

  In this century (it was not always so in the last one), just about every single writer who has finally become successful in the world of fiction has started out in some other job -- a schoolteacher, perhaps, or a doctor or a journalist or a lawyer. (Alice in Wonderland was written by a mathematician, and The Wind in the Willows by a civil servant.) The first attempts at writing have therefore always had to be done in spare time, usually at night.

  The reason for this is obvious. When you are adult, it is necessary to earn a living. To earn a living, you must get a job. You must if possible