A Long Line of Dead Men (3 page)

Anyway, what the hell would I want with a beer with no kick to it?

We talked about his work- he was a partner in a small public-relations firm- and about the pleasures of living in the city again after a stretch in the suburbs. If I'd met him at his office we'd have gotten right down to business, but instead we were following the traditional rules of a business lunch, holding the business portion until we'd finished with the food.

When the coffee came he patted his breast pocket and gave a snort of ironic amusement. "Now that's funny," he said. "Did you see what I just did?"

"You were reaching for a cigarette."

"That's exactly what I was doing, and I quit the goddamn things more than twelve years ago. Were you ever a smoker?"

"Not really."

"Not really?"

"I never had the habit," I explained. "Maybe once a year I would buy a pack of cigarettes and smoke five or six of them one right after the other. Then I would throw the pack away and not have another cigarette for another year."

"My God," he said. "I never heard of anyone who could smoke tobacco without getting hooked on it. I guess you just don't have an addictive personality." I let that one pass. "Quitting was the hardest thing I ever did in my life. Sometimes I think it's the only hard thing I ever did. I still have dreams where I've taken up the habit again. Do you still do that? Have yourself a little cigarette binge once a year?"

"Oh, no. It's been more than ten years since I had a cigarette."

"Well, all I can say is I'm glad there's not an open pack on the table. Matt"- we were Matt and Lew by now- "let me ask you something. Have you ever heard of a club of thirty-one?"

"A club of thirty-one," I said. "I don't suppose that would have anything to do with this club."

"No."

"I've heard of the restaurant, of course. 'Twenty-one.' I don't think-"

"It's not a specific club, like the Harvard Club or the Addison. Or a restaurant like 'Twenty-one.' It's a particular kind of club. Oh, let me explain."

The explanation was lengthy and thorough. Once he got started, he reported on that evening in 1961 in detail. He was a good storyteller; he let me see the private dining room, the four round tables (eight men each at three of them, six plus Champney at the fourth). And I could see and hear the old man, could feel the passion that animated him and caught hold of his audience.

I said I'd never heard of an organization anything like what he'd described.

"I guess you didn't hang out much with Mozart and Ben Franklin," he said, with a quick grin. "Or with the Essenes and the Babylonians. I was thinking about that the other night, trying to decide how much of it I believe. I've never really researched the subject beyond an occasional desultory hour in a library. And I never came across an organization anything like ours."

"And no one you've mentioned it to has been familiar with anything similar?"

He frowned. "I haven't mentioned it much," he said. "To tell you the truth, this is the first detailed conversation I've ever had on the subject with someone who wasn't a member himself. There are any number of people who know I get together with a group of fellows once a year for dinner and drinks, but I've never talked about the group's links to the past. Or the death-watch aspect of the whole thing." He looked at me. "I've never told my wife or my children. My best friend, we've been close for over twenty years, and he has no idea what the club is about. He thinks it's like a fraternity reunion."

"Did the old man tell everybody to keep it a secret?"

"Not in so many words. It's hardly a secret society, if that's what you mean. But I left Cunningham's that night with the distinct feeling that this thing I'd become a part of ought to be kept private. And that conviction deepened over the years, incidentally. It was understood early on that you could say anything in that room with the certain knowledge that it would not be repeated. I've told those fellows things I haven't mentioned to anyone else in the world. Not that I'm a man with a lot of secrets to tell or not to tell, but I would say I'm an essentially private person and I guess I withhold a good deal of myself from the people in my life. For Christ's sake, I'm fifty-seven years old. You must be close to that yourself, aren't you?"

"I'm fifty-five."

"Then you know what I'm talking about. Guys our age grew up knowing we were supposed to keep our innermost thoughts to ourselves. All the pop psychology in the world doesn't change that. But once a year I sit around a couple of tables with a bunch of men who are still virtual strangers to me, and more often than not I wind up opening up about something I hadn't planned on mentioning." He lowered his eyes, picked up the saltcellar, turned it in his hands. "I had an affair a few years back. Not a quick jump on a business trip, there have been a few of those over the years, but a real love affair. It went on for almost three years."

"And no one knew?"

"You see what I'm getting at, don't you? No, nobody ever knew. I didn't get caught and I never told anybody. If she confided in anyone, and I assume she must have, well, we didn't have friends in common so it's not material. The point is that I talked about that affair on the first Thursday in May. More than once, too." He set the saltcellar down forcefully. "I told her about the club. She thought it was morbid, she hated the whole idea of it. What she did like, though, was the fact that she was the only person I'd ever told. She liked that part a lot."

He fell silent, and I sipped my coffee and waited him out. At length he said, "I haven't seen her in five years. Well, hell, I haven't had a cigarette in twelve, and I damn well wanted one for a minute there, didn't I? Sometimes I don't think anybody ever gets over anything."

"Sometimes I think you're right."

"Matt, would it bother you if I had a brandy?"

"Why should it bother me?"

"Well, it's none of my business, but it's hard not to draw an inference. It was Irwin Meisner who recommended you. I've known Irwin for years. I knew him when he drank and I know how he stopped. When I asked him how he happened to know you he said something vague, and on the basis of that I wasn't surprised when you didn't order a drink. So- "

"It would bother me if I had a brandy," I told him. "It won't bother me if you have one."

"Then I think I will," he said, and caught the waiter's eye. After the man had taken the order and gone off to fill it, Hildebrand picked up the saltcellar again, put it down again, and drew a quick breath. "The club of thirty-one," he said. "I think somebody's trying to rush things."

"To rush things?"

"To kill the members. All of us. One by one."

"We got together last month," he said. "At Keens Chophouse onWest Thirty-sixth Street. That's where we've been holding our dinners ever since Cunningham's closed in the early seventies. They give us the same room every year. It's on the second floor, and it looks like a private library. The walls are lined with bookshelves and portraits of somebody's ancestors. There's a fireplace, and they lay a fire for us, not that that's what you necessarily want in May. It's nice for atmosphere, though.

"We've been going there for twenty years. Keens almost went under, you know, just when we were beginning to settle in there. That would have been tragic, the place is aNew York institution. But they survived. They're still there, and, well, so are we." He paused, considered. "Some of us," he said.

His glass of Courvoisier was on the table in front of him. He still hadn't taken a sip. From time to time he would reach for the small snifter, letting his hand cup the bowl, taking the stem between his thumb and forefingers, moving the glass a few inches this way or that.

He said, "At last month's dinner, it was announced that two of our members had died in the preceding twelve months. Frank DiGiulio had suffered a fatal heart attack in September, and then in February Alan Watson was stabbed to death on his way home from work. So we've had two deaths in the past year. Does that seem significant to you?"

"Well..."

"Of course not. We're of an age when death happens. What significance could one possibly attach to two deaths within a twelve-month period?" He took the glass by its stem, gave it a quarter-turn clockwise. "Consider this, then. In the past seven years, nine of us have died."

"That seems a little high."

"And that's in the past seven years. Earlier, we'd already lost eight men. Matt, there are only fourteen of us left."

Homer Champney had told them he'd probably be the first to go. "And that's as it should be, boys. That's the natural order of things. But I hope I'll be with you for a little while, at least. To get to know you, and to see you all off to a good start."

As it turned out, the old man lasted well into his ninety-fourth year. He never missed the annual dinner, remaining physically fit and mentally alert to the very end.

Nor was he the first of their number to die. The group's first two anniversaries were unmarked by death, but in 1964 they spoke the name and marked the passing of Philip Kalish, killed with his wife and infant daughter three months earlier in a car crash on the Long Island Expressway.

Two years later James Severance was killed inVietnam. He'd missed the previous year's dinner, his reserve unit having been recalled to active duty, and members had joked that an Asian war was a pretty lame excuse for breaking such a solemn commitment. The following May, when they read his name along with Phil Kalish's, you could almost hear last year's jokes echoing hollowly against the paneled walls.

In March of '69, less than two months before the annual dinner, Homer Champney died in his sleep. "If there comes a day when you don't see me by nine in the morning," he'd instructed the staff at his residential hotel, "ring my suite, and if I don't pick up then come check on me." The desk clerk made the call and had a bellman take over the desk while he went up to Champney's rooms himself. When he found what he'd feared, he called the old man's nephew.

That nephew in turn made the calls his uncle had instructed him to make. On the list were the twenty-eight surviving members of the club of thirty-one. Champney was leaving nothing to chance. He wanted to make sure everyone knew he was gone.

The funeral was atCampbell 's, and it was the first club funeral Lewis Hildebrand had attended. The overall turnout was small. Champney had outlived his contemporaries, and his nephew- a great-nephew, actually, some fifty years Champney's junior- was his only surviving relative in theNew York area. Besides Hildebrand, the contingent of mourners included half a dozen other members of the thirty-one.

Afterward, he joined several of them for a drink. Bill Ludgate, a printing salesman, said, "Well, this is the first of these I've been to, and it's going to be the last. In a couple of weeks we'll be all together at Cunningham's, and Homer'll have his name read with the others, and I guess we'll talk about him. And that's enough. I don't think we should go to members' funerals. I don't think it's our place."

"I felt I wanted to be here today," someone said.

"We all did or we wouldn't be here. But I talked to Frank DiGiulio the other day and he said he wasn't coming, that he didn't think it was appropriate. And now I've decided I agree with him. You know, back when this thing first got rolling, there were a few members I used to see socially. A lunch now and then, or drinks after work, or even getting together with the wives for dinner and a movie. But I stopped doing that, and when I spoke to Frank I realized it was the first conversation I'd had with any of the group since dinner last May."

"Don't you like us anymore, Bill?"

"I like you all just fine," he said, "but I find myself inclined to keep things separate. Hell, I haven't even been to Cunningham's since the last get-together. I don't know how many times someone'll suggest it for lunch or dinner, and I always make sure we wind up someplace else instead. 'Oh, I'd rather not,' I told a fellow just last week. 'I had a bad meal last time I was there. The place isn't what it used to be.' "

"Jesus, Billy," somebody said, "have a heart, huh? You're gonna put them out of business."

"Well, I'd hate to see that happen," he said, "but do you see what I mean? Once a year's enough for me. I like having thirty guys that I only see once a year, in a place I only go to once a year."

"That's twenty-seven guys now, twenty-eight including yourself."

"So it is," he said gravely. "So it is. But you see my point, don't you? I'm not telling the rest of you what to do, and I love you one and all, but I'm not coming to your funerals."

"That's okay, Billy," Bob Ripley said. "We'll come to yours."

"Thirty men in 1961, ranging in age from twenty-two to thirty-two with a median age of twenty-six. Thirty-two years later, how many would you expect to find alive?"

"I don't know."

"Neither did I," Hildebrand said. "After the dinner last month I went home with a headache and tossed and turned all night. I woke up knowing something was very wrong. You've got a group of men in their late fifties and early sixties, you're going to have some losses. Death is going to start making in-roads.

"But it seemed to me we were way over the probabilities. My mind kept coming up with different explanations, and I decided the first thing to do was find out if my sense of things was accurate. So I called up a fellow I know who's always trying to sell me more life insurance and told him I had an actuarial problem for him. I ran the numbers for him and asked him what percentage of deaths you'd expect over that span of time in a group like that. He said he'd make a couple of calls and get back to me. Take a guess, Matt. How many deaths would you expect in a group of thirty?"

"I don't know. Eight or ten?"

"Four or five. There ought to be twenty-five of us left and instead we're down to fourteen. What does that say to you?"