The man who broke the bank
by Bill Broady
Horses for the final race were being led into the paddock but we did not want to see them. It was starting to rain so we ducked behind the grandstand where, in near silence, thousands of bodies were already milling about.
No-one could be bothered even to get a drink. We propped ourselves against one of the raised round plastic tables under a sign that read ‘BET RESPONSIBLY – WHEN THE FUN STOPS, YOU STOP!’ As if losing or winning could ever be just ‘fun’! As if gambling was not a profound mystery beyond love, life, death or eternity itself!
Nobody had won – or even placed. Today had seen an auto-da-fé of the favourites – and also of the naps, the hot tips and the sure things. Even my inspired hunches had come to naught. Unbacked – unbackable! – outsiders were going through the card.
‘It’s not fair,’ said Zara at last.
‘Nothing is ever fair,’ I said but I didn’t really mean it. Even the tiny screens dotted around the concourse were bringing no relief: all over the country no-hopers were winning by ever-widening margins. As for the jumps, across the sea in Thurles, in three successive races odds-on favourites had fallen at the last.
Zara headed off to The Ladies’. I hoped that she was thinking that if we could throw money away like this then we must have plenty left.
I had encountered her – a shimmering vision of platinum and silver – three hours ago in The Champagne Bar.
‘Sssszaaara’ – She had breathed when I asked her name, ending on an interrogative note as if amazed that I had not known it already. It was undeniable that from the moment our eyes met we had understood each other all too well.
‘I don’t want to be sexist,’ said Dave, dolefully. ‘But that woman’s arse is unbelievable.’
In the previous race Dave’s Morgenstern had never left its stall, Tom’s Cocky Ollie had boxed itself in, while my Green Ruby was a hold-up horse that held and held until its trademark late surge down the wide outside took it from twenty-first to seventeenth. The oldest in the field had won, of course – from a bad draw and inexplicably high in the weights – at 66–1.
‘It’s a pity we can’t bet on what comes last,’ I had observed as it went past us going to post, blinkered and tongue-tied, frothing at the mouth and flashing its tail with a white-faced apprentice clinging to its back. ‘What sane person would back a horse called Dislocation?’
Ignoring the glares of the failing blondes around her, Zara had joined a queue that was coiling like an intestine round the concourse. Earlier, we had agreed that for a woman to turn blonde and for a man to grow a beard they should first have ticked all the boxes for beauty or for brains.
I knew exactly what she was going to do next. She checked her face in her pocket mirror, lightly slapped her cheeks, pulled down her skirt hem, then broke out of the ranks and shouldered her way into the Gents’ Toilet.
As she entered, a huge, bald-headed man was coming out. He was wearing a shin-length grey plastic poncho with the hood halfway up as if it had snagged on something sharp projecting from the back of his head. As he advanced – singing – his large feet in their over-buffed Veldskoens were splayed at ten to two.
‘As I walk along the Bois du Boulogne with a h’independent h’air
You can hear the girls declare “He must be a millionaire” . . .’
The distorting voice, veering from bass to counter-tenor, bounced off the metal-strutted roof and echoed along the concrete corridors and stairwells down to infinity.
We knew him. We went back a long way. He was the last person you would want to see under these – or indeed any – circumstances: an old drug buddy who had abandoned opiates and even friendship in his ruthless pursuit of knowledge and power.
His name had been Quentin – or ‘Q’ or even ‘The Winged Serpent’ after his – and our – favourite film but these days they mainly called him Quiz Kid.
He had always had a quick and enquiring mind and a nigh-photographic memory: one day it had dawned on him that he could make a living out of these. Competitions and feats of General Knowledge: ‘You don’t pay no tax on prizes,’ he had explained. He had a genius for sloganeering and captioning. Five years ago I had come across him in the Central Library, filling in the TLS crossword at lightning speed. I had heard that he had set himself to learn two hundred new facts every day. How they hated him in the pubs! On Quiz Nights he would loom out of the darkness, order a half of mild, then leave it untouched on his table until he had – as usual – carried off the pot. He had even made it on to TV and radio, coming third in Brain of Britain, winning £5000 on Pointless, £9000 on The Chaser and even giving ‘The H’egg ’Eads’ – as he insisted on calling them – a good run for their money.
‘You can see them sigh and wish to die
You can see them wink the other eye . . .’
He had seen me without looking – an old trick of his – and was now ploughing towards us in a torpedo-straight line.
I was surprised to find him here. He had never been much cop at the horses. Although he sedulously conned the form and knew everything about breeding and bloodlines he would always revert – disastrously – to portents and coincidences, names and jockeys’ colours. He could never resist a grey and would sell the clothes he stood up in for anything wearing red blinkers.
‘I’m the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo!’
As we covered our ears he upended his travel-stained rucksack in front of us. Roll upon roll of banded red fifties cascaded across the table, to be followed by a bottle of spring water refilled with what looked like red antifreeze, a creased copy of Compers’ News Monthly and a shrink-wrapped Oxford Companion to Music – evidently he had won the BBC Crossword yet again.
‘Dislocation,’ he chuckled.
‘How much did you put on it?’
‘A hundred – but I took the Tote odds: £72.63 to the pound. I’ve won on every race so far.’
‘How did you pick it out?’
‘Oh, I just asked myself which horse you lads were least likely to back.’
He had always been a bad loser but now he was evidently an even worse winner.
‘What was that horrible song you were singing?’
‘Don’t you know it? Written for the great Charles Coborn by Frederick Gilbert – the biggest hit of 1893. That was the year when Yorkshire first won the County Championship, New Zealand granted female suffrage, Nansen went for the North Pole, the Independent Labour Party was founded and Tchaikovsky breathed his last.
‘There are different opinions regarding the song’s inspiration. Charles Deville Wells had managed to break the bank in 1891, but Joseph Hobson Jagger had got there first, eighteen years before.’
‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘Here we go.’
‘I must say that personally I favour Jagger – and not just because he was a local man, born in Thornton and buried in Shelf. Either Wells had lucked out on the Martingale doubling-up system or he had bribed members of the casino staff, whereas our man had employed worthier and more imaginative methods.’
Zara came sashaying towards us. Although she was behind him, Q’s whole body stiffened. His face grew even paler and his nostrils quivered as they tried to get her scent. Those dark eyes seemed to shrink deeper into their sockets as if they might refocus through the back of his head.
‘A man in there just asked me to hold it for him.’ Zara raised her right hand, setting the scarlet and black nails click-clacking like the claws of a crab. ‘So I obliged.’ Her eyelashes – were there three sets or four? – were batting faster than the wings of the hummingbird.
‘Jagger was not a toff,’ Q continued. ‘Nor was he a master criminal. He had started out as an apprentice at Bottomley’s Clough Spinning Mills and worked his way up until he was Chief Engineer. There was nothing about spindles – their types and conditions, their speed and rotation rates – that he did not know.
‘Had he been planning his great coup all along or did someone or something suddenly put it into his head? If a spindle on a roulette wheel was anything less than perfect, he had realized, the numbers generated would not be random. All you had to do was to watch the tables until any bias became apparent then place your bets accordingly.’
‘He knows it all, he does.’ Dave was whispering to Zara. ‘You can ask him anything about anything.’
‘What’s the point?’ Those daggered fingers were rattling at her mobile phone. ‘When we’ve got Wikipedia?’
‘And just who do you think it is that writes your Wikipedia?’ Tom enquired.
‘For five years Jagger and his six chosen collaborators led a Spartan existence. Everyone thought that they had got religion but although they went about singing hymns, they were never seen to enter any church. They lived off weak tea and bread-and-scrape while their yards and patches were bursting with vegetable plants and berry bushes: although they kept hens, they never cracked a single egg for themselves. They had forsworn tobacco and alcohol: their clothes were threadbare, their shoes full of holes. Taking no holidays, working all the overtime that God sent – they were gradually building up their stake.’
Zara was circling, coming closer, examining him as if he might have been some curious exhibit in a dusty vitrine. Whenever she appeared in his field of vision, his eyes rolled upwards in an alarming fashion, like those of an El Greco saint. This, of course, only encouraged her: women know that when a man is ignoring you it can only mean that you’ve knocked him for six.
‘At last, one summer morning in 1873, the seven men emerged from their homes in immaculate suits and ties. Jagger was even twirling a silver-topped cane. After giving in their notices, they decamped – laden with trunks and suitcases – for Monte Carlo. The ticket clerk at Bradford Exchange station claimed that they were no longer speaking with Yorkshire accents, displaying instead the unmistakable airs, manners and bearing of the English upper class.’
It was curious that during this narration Q himself had lost all trace of his accent: not once had he chuckled, nor had he dropped or added a single ‘h’.
Now Zara, hands on hips, had planted herself right in front of him while Dave, as if working in tandem, approached from behind. After a day like this it was inevitable that he would have to start hitting someone.
Instead, much to my surprise, he bent at the knees to assume a weight-lifter’s crouch. Then his hands in their black fingerless gloves came creeping round Q’s waist until the fingers met and locked above the belly button. With a triumphant cry he sprang upwards, as if launching himself and his burden into the unsuspecting stratosphere. For a long moment they hung together in the air. Q did not seem in the least nonplussed: he smiled – no, he simpered – as if this was a common and even welcome occurrence. Then the ground shook as those four massive feet landed together.
‘I knew it!’ Dave released his grasp. ‘He’s light as a fucking feather!’
‘That’s something I’ve realized,’ said Q. ‘The more you learn the less you weigh. Facts are food without calories: these days I hardly ever eat at all. If we ever get to know everything there is to be known – which is unlikely, I admit – maybe we’ll be able to fly.’
Zara gave a little hop, as if assessing the possibilities. Those six-inch heels would be giving her a head start.
‘For the first three weeks in the casino,’ Q continued. ‘They all stood and watched. To allay suspicions, one of them would periodically stake and lose a small amount. Apart from nodding in passing, they did not communicate until they were back in their rooms: they had trained themselves to hold each night’s sequence of numbers in their heads. During the days they would play tennis, fence or hire horses – somewhere along the way they had all learned how to ride.
‘Out of the dozen roulette tables, they finally established, Number Six favoured six adjacent slots on the wheel: 9, 22, 18, 29, 7, 28.
‘On 7 July Jagger began to play. He lost a little on Table Seven and then on Table Five before finding a seat at Table Six, right next to the croupier and the wheel.
‘They had decided not to press too hard on this first night. Jagger walked away with over 50,000 francs but then returned to fritter away a quarter of it on the columns at the far end of the table. On the next day, however, as soon as the doors opened, he returned to his original place and did not stir for eleven hours, hammering at the bank over and again.
‘Now the management did become suspicious. Overnight they switched the wheel with that of Table Twelve and assigned a new roster of experienced croupiers. On that initial evening, however, Jagger had employed a sharpened signet ring to make a tiny scratch on Number Six’s wooden mounting and so could easily track it to its new location. This time he did not stop until he had topped two million francs when the casino, its vaults now emptied, had been forced to close. By this time, Jagger claimed, he could tell every number before the croupier called it, purely by the sound of the ivory ball striking the metal diamonds embedded in the wood.
‘They did not re-open until long after the seven Yorkshiremen had returned home. All the wheels had been torn out and burnt, to be replaced by perfect models with spindles purchased – of course – from Bottomley’s Clough Mills.’
Q paused to take a fortifying slug of antifreeze.
‘Go on, Zara,’ said Dave. ‘You could lift him with one hand.’
She extended both her hands, fingers and thumbs pinching, as if about to take him by his prominent ears but then thought better of it. She shuddered – very slowly – from the top of her head all the way down to her toes, like a wet dog shaking itself dry.
‘Oh, all right then,’ said Tom. He half-knelt in front of Q, like a courtly knight pledging fealty, then – having gripped him round the knees – staggered in a tight circle as if about to caber-toss him in the direction of the children’s play area.
‘That was great.’ Tom carefully returned Q to his position. ‘I felt like Hercules wrestling with that Giant – the one he could only kill by lifting him off the ground.’
‘Antaeus.’ Q raised his right arm to resume his oratorical pose. ‘Fortunately, my own powers are not derived from this earth.’
‘On his return Jagger bought himself a palatial mansion in Heaton Village. From this eminence he could observe the distant chimneys of his former workplace. His friends had all sold their fine clothes, but he insisted on dressing in what he called “My Lucky Suit”. When the shoes wore thin, however, he resorted to clogs. The others started up their own businesses and prospered but he remained aloof. He was as quiet and polite as ever but folk now felt uncomfortable in his presence. He was thinner, paler and walked like a marionette with twisted or broken strings. Whenever he turned his head, his whole body would move along with it and his eyes – so wide and round – were never seen to blink. They said he was like a second Lazarus, returned from the dead.
‘Sometimes people would ask him about his famous adventure, but he would only mutter distractedly about vibration levels . . . torque rate probabilities . . . wheel-spin divergences . . . angles of deflection . . .’
‘After seven years he reapplied for his old job back at the mill, but the Bottomleys only laughed and named a wholly unreasonable sum for which he could buy them out.’
Q paused and looked at me expectantly. Everyone was looking at me expectantly.
I really did not want to touch him: there was definitely something funny going on. Many people had said that Q was sinister – even downright evil – but I always used to defend him, claiming that he merely acted as a focal point for any occult forces in the vicinity . . . which was, I had to admit, not much of a defence at all.
I had never lifted a man before – only women, in a sort of scooping motion with one arm under the crook of their knees, the other round their shoulders, rather like Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn unloading coal-sacks. I was terrified that I might get a hard-on – so my cock inevitably obliged. I told myself that this was solely attributable to Zara’s face peeping roguishly over Q’s right shoulder.
All in all, I did not care to emulate either Dave or Tom. Suppose my unruly member was to slip up between his arse cheeks or rub against his own while I was looking into his eyes? Instead, I stood next to him, then leaned down and across, my left knee under his right as if for some judo throw but instead I held him in balance at the point of my hip before sort of canting him and tucking him under my arm.
He was indeed almost weightless and curiously stiff – like flat-pack cardboard, as if I could refold him, again and again, until he was the size of a playing card. As I turned, his torso made a rustling sound, as if that poncho had been stuffed with crumpled newspapers. The Velcro had split to reveal a white shirt-collar and a ragged bowtie resembling a wall-brown butterfly. He still smelt faintly of Caporal tobacco, even though he had long ago quit smoking.
When I finally put him down, after our fourth stately revolution, he staggered as if we’d been on a lengthy dodgem ride. He might have fallen if Zara had not caught his arm.
‘Now Jagger started drinking,’ Q took another sip of antifreeze. ‘Drifting from pub to pub, having one drink in each until he collapsed and the landlords would have him carried home. The last time he was seen in public was shortly before his death – during the great wave of mill strikes and lockouts, when he kept trying to force his way through the pickets and police lines to reach his beloved spindles in the far corner of the second-floor weaving shed.
‘You can see his monument outside Bethel Independent Church in Shelf. Although it is the biggest in the graveyard the inscription merely records his dates – 1830 to 1892 – and makes no reference to the fact that here – right here, in this unremarkable spot – there lies the body of . . . The Man Who Broke The Bank At Monte Carlo.’
There was a smattering of applause from those passers-by who had stopped to watch and listen before mooching off for the final race.
‘What do you fancy in this one?’ asked Dave.
‘Why, the winner, of course!’ Q was shovelling the money back into his bag. ‘Blue Murder, number eight – but don’t waste your time. Whatever we do, it won’t make us h’any ’appier!’
He took off at top speed. The crowds parted before him: he might not have weighed much but he still had an intimidating air.
‘As I walk along the Bois du Boulogne . . .’
The great head tilted back as it resumed its song.
Zara smiled and then turned smartly to scurry away in his wake. She had not merely winked at me – I was pretty certain that – as in the song – she had winked . . . the OTHER eye.
We watched them go. I was amused to see that her feet – even in those heels – were also set at ten to two. She was still gaining on him when they disappeared.
‘I didn’t believe a word of that,’ said Tom.
‘No, no, it’s true! My gran used to live in Shelf: she knew the Jagger family.’
From out of the parade ring the bell was sounding very loudly for the jockeys to mount up for what might well have been the last race that would ever be run.
‘Not that it matters,’ I said, ‘But even if all that really happened it is most unlikely to have been quite the way he told it.’
❦
First published in Southfields, edited by Richard Price and Raymond Friel.
Bill Broady lives and works in Yorkshire. His first novel, Swimmer (2000), tells the story of a girl coached to become a successful international athlete. In This Block There Lives A Slag (2001), a collection of short stories set around a residential block in Yorkshire, won a Macmillan Silver Pen Award in 2002, and was followed by Eternity is Temporary (2006), set during the 1976 heatwave. Salt published The Night-Soil Men in 2024 and There's No 'F' in Wonderful in 2026.
