Highbinders (10 page)

The Texan bet first because he had the only pair showing, queens. He bet thirty pounds and everybody called, but when it got around to me I raised him a hundred. Although I had absolutely nothing showing, from the look in the eyes of the man from Dallas, I could see that he had felt the sandbag fall. A superb professional gambler would simply have yawned and folded his full house. A gifted amateur probably would have called and let it go at that. A good Saturday night player, riding his luck, would have raised me a hundred pounds and that’s what the Dallasonian did. I suppose you call the citizens of Dallas Dallasonians. Or Dallasites. I’ve never really thought about it.

The German, who had been a cool player up until now, fidgeted in his seat, said shit in French, and folded. Robin Styles, who may have been one of the ten worst poker players I’ve ever seen, raised the Texan’s bet by another hundred pounds. This time I dumped the whole truckload of sand on them. I had a little more than five hundred pounds in chips sitting in front of me so I counted them methodically into the pot.

“I’ll see the two hundred raise and raise three hundred,” I said.

The Texan stared at me. After a while he said, “If you were from London, Mr. St. Ives, I just might believe you and cut and run. But since you’re from New York, and everybody knows that folks from New York’ll lie like snakes, well, I’m just obliged to call.” He shoved in his chips.

I looked at Robin Styles. “I’m afraid I really don’t believe you either, Mr. St. Ives,” he said and counted his chips into the pot. It wiped him out, which was what I had been waiting for.

“No raises?” I said.

“No raises,” said the man from Dallas.

I flipped over my hole cards. “Four fours.”

“Mighty fine hand,” the Texan said and tossed his cards to the dealer.

“Jolly good,” Styles said. As I’ve mentioned, he sometimes seemed to talk like a twit.

I estimated that there was close to three thousand pounds in the pot. I shoved it toward the dealer and said, “Have these cashed in for me, will you, please? And take twenty pounds for your trouble.”

“Thank you very much,” he said.

“I always like to quit a little ahead,” I said.

The Texan yawned and stretched, which is what he should have done before, instead of calling me. “It’s the best time,” he said.

Robin Styles sat frowning at the green baize as if trying to decide whether he should exhaust the rest of his credit that night or wait until the following evening.

“Why don’t you join me for some breakfast, Mr. Styles?” I said.

He looked up. “Breakfast?” He said it the way he might have said a strange and difficult foreign word. “Well, yes, I suppose I really should eat, shouldn’t I? I mean the condemned man, the hearty breakfast, and all that.”

“I’ll treat,” I said.

“Oh, thank you very much. I could rather do with a drink though.”

“I think that can be arranged.”

He brightened. “Really? How nice.”

Robin Styles was blond and fair-skinned and tall and thin to the point of either emaciation or elegance. His movements were languid and his speech was drawled to the point of affectation and interspersed with frequent “mmm’s” which could be taken, I assumed, to mean anything from “right on” to “how terribly nice.” I decided that their use must have saved him much time and thought.

After playing six or seven hours of poker, he rose, gave his dark, striped tie a tug, smiled brilliantly, and managed to look as if he had just finished getting all spruced up for a big night out. I suspected that I must have looked as though I should have been buried a few days.

We moved into the lobby where Wes Cagle was leaning against the bar which had been closed since eleven-thirty in accordance with the strange native customs. I had joined the poker game at ten past eleven and between then and the time that the bar closed, Robin Styles had managed to down four very large whiskies. As I said, he drank the same way that he played poker. Like a twit.

Cagle looked up from a sheet of paper that he was studying. Like Styles, he looked no worse for the wear. Or it may have been that he had put on a fresh shirt. He grinned at us and said, “Well, I see that you two have met.”

“Mr. St. Ives is going to give me breakfast. I think breakfast is a perfectly splendid idea, don’t you, Wes?”

“You took another bath, I hear,” Cagle said.

“Indeed I did.”

“And you got lucky,” he said to me.

“You call it luck; I call it skill.”

“We haven’t played poker in a long time, have we, Phil?”

“A long time,” I agreed.

“It was up in your place on Thirty-fourth Street in that apartment-hotel where all the fags and the high class whores live. And you.”

“The Adelphi,” I said.

“Yeah. The Adelphi. It was you, me, an actor, that fat millionaire friend of yours, and a couple of boys from the vice squad. I came out of there with close to two thousand bucks.”

“I think it was nearer to fifteen hundred.”

“Uh-huh. If you’re going to be in town a while, why don’t you and I play a little head-to-head? No limit. Personal checks accepted.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“I say, could I play, too?” Styles said.

Cagle looked at him. “You can watch. We might even let you go out for sandwiches. You can watch and you might learn something.”

Robin Styles smiled. I thought I could detect a measure of pain in that smile, the kind of pain that comes from self-knowledge that has been purchased at a stiff price. For some reason, he no longer looked nearly so much like a twit. “I suppose I could take a few pointers,” he said.

“Yeah,” Cagle said. “A few.”

“Let’s go,” I said to Styles.

As we left, Cagle called after me. “Just tell ’em where you won it, Phil.” It was the old Las Vegas call and for some reason it didn’t seem to go over too well in London.

Styles and I walked up Curzon Street toward Park Lane. “Where do you think we should go for breakfast?” he said. “There’s a Golden Egg open on Edgware Road, if you can abide them.”

“I think we’d better go to my hotel, if you want that drink,” I said.

“I don’t wish to disappoint you, but I really should tell you. I’m not queer.”

“You’re not, huh?”

“No.”

“You don’t disappoint me.”

“That’s not to say that I’ve never tried it, you understand. It’s simply that I just didn’t care for it. Very much.”

“You sure you’ve got my name right?” I said.

“I’m really dreadful with names. St. Ives, isn’t it? Philip St. Ives?”

“Eddie Apex didn’t mention me to you?”

“Oh, you’re
that,
Philip St. Ives. I don’t mean that, of course. I mean that you’re the American that Eddie told me about. I don’t think he ever mentioned your name.”

“Yeah. Well, I’m the American he told you about.”

“The go-between, so to speak.”

“So to speak.”

“Well, I say, that is jolly good, isn’t it?”

I sighed. “I was kind of hoping you’d find it so.”

Of all the myths that continue to flourish in England in the face of modern scientific investigation, no myth remains quite so healthy as the one that envelops the English breakfast. This myth cunningly acknowledges that while lunch in England might be a failure and dinner a disaster, the typical English breakfast is fit for, if not a king, at least a fairly solvent duke.

I have eaten English breakfasts in quaint country inns, in sleek hotels, on once crack trains, and in hearty restaurants from Land’s End to John O’Groats. In the interest of science, I have always ordered the same breakfast, a high cholesterol number consisting of two fried eggs, bacon, toast, and coffee.

Although price and ambience might vary, the quality has remained steadfastly the same. Awful. The eggs are all fried in an inch or two of old grease. The bacon is underdone. The toast is stone cold. The coffee is unspeakable. But the myth of the English breakfast endures, indeed flourishes, and I have reluctantly concluded that it will long outlive Arthur and his round table. On second thought, I really shouldn’t say anything about the toast. It’s supposed to be cold. The natives like it that way. If it’s hot, it might soak up the butter. And the butter isn’t bad.

It had taken a healthy bribe to have the Hilton deliver two breakfasts up to my room at five in the morning, but they eventually arrived and I sat there looking at mine and making another mental footnote for the exposé that I would write some day. Robin Styles was happily chewing away on his and washing it down with large swallows of straight Scotch.

“Nothing quite like an English breakfast, is there?” he said.

“Nothing.”

“The Hilton does it quite well, for an American hotel, I mean.”

“They haven’t missed a trick,” I said.

He forked the last morsel of a hard-fried egg into his mouth and took another swallow of Scotch. “You’re in a rather curious sort of business, aren’t you?”

“Sort of,” I said and began eating my own breakfast on the theory that it might possibly be good for me.

“You don’t limit yourself to purloined swords, I take it?”

“No. I’m available for almost anything that can be ransomed. People, jewels, incriminating documents, rare artifacts, missing evidence, old love letters.”

“How fascinating. What’s the strangest item that you had to do whatever it is that you do to get back?”

I thought about it. “A ferris wheel, I guess.”

“You’re joking.”

“No. A guy once stole a ferris wheel just outside of Baltimore. He couldn’t sell it so he offered to ransom it back for a few thousand. There wasn’t much money in it for me, but then it didn’t take much time.”

“You could play poker for a living.”

I shook my head. “Poker’s hard work, if you want to make a living at it. I don’t much care for hard work.”

“I don’t play very well, you know.”

“I know.”

“You think I could learn?”

I studied him for a moment. “If you learned how to play well, you probably wouldn’t like it, and you’d quit.”

He took another swallow of Scotch. “I’ve tried to quit.”

“Couldn’t?”

He shook his head. “Compulsion, I suppose.” He shrugged. “Perhaps I should take your advice and learn how to play well so I could quit.”

“It’s hard work, as I said. You have to learn the odds, learn to memorize what cards have been played, read the other players, and wait. Waiting is what makes it dull.”

“You make the cure sound worse than the disease.”

“It might be in your case. There aren’t any halfway houses for compulsive gamblers. There’s no tapering off. You either quit cold or you keep on gambling until it’s all gone and you take something that doesn’t belong to you so that you can gamble one last game and then they catch you and put you away where it’s not so easy to gamble anymore. I’ve never heard of any compulsive gamblers dying either rich or old.”

Robin Styles poured another two ounces of Scotch into his glass. “I saw a doctor about it a few times. A psychiatrist. He was a Jungian, I believe.”

“He’d be supportive anyway.”

“We didn’t get anywhere.”

“Well, when they sell that sword of yours you should have enough to keep you in chips for a year or two.”

“It’s such an awful lot of money, isn’t it?”

“What did you do for money before?”

“I was in advertising for a while,” he said. “I was really rather good at it. It was an American firm.” He mentioned the name of a large New York-based agency.

“That’s a Wellington tie you’re wearing, isn’t it?” I said.

He looked surprised. “However did you know?”

“I once did a couple of columns on old school ties. After Wellington, it was Oxford, wasn’t it? Balliol, I’ll bet.”

“I say, does it show?”

I shook my head. “No, it’s just that that agency that you used to work for liked Balliol men to handle some of their stuffier accounts. The clients found them soothing.”

“It was a rather good job.”

“Why’d you quit?”

“The usual gambler’s reasons. I got lucky and won as much in a week as I made in a year. So I quit.”

“How’d you meet Eddie Apex?”

“Through Wes Cagle at Shields. I was stony. My father had left me this sword collection plus just enough to get through school so I thought I might sell the collection. I’d heard somewhere that such things could be sold on the quiet without the tax people looking over your shoulder. So I asked Cagle if he knew anyone who could help. He said he would see. A few days later I got a call from Eddie Apex. He asked me to meet him at his place and to bring along a representative piece from the collection. So I brought along my father’s favorite. Have you ever been to Eddie’s house?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t it weird?”

“Yes,” I said, “isn’t it. What happened then?”

“Well, not much, really. Eddie just looked at the sword for a long time. I mean he simply held it and looked at it without saying a word. Then he asked if he could keep it for a couple of days. I said of course and he wrote me out a receipt. Three days later he called and asked if he could give me lunch, that he had some rather important and exciting news. Well, we met at his club and after he had got a couple of whiskies into me he told me what the sword actually was and that it might be worth anywhere from one million to three million pounds.”

“How did you feel?”

Robin Styles leaned back in his chair and stared at Mr. Hilton’s ceiling. “You know,” he said in a thoughtful tone, “I remember exactly. I think I had about three bob in my pocket and a hundred pound overdraft at my bank. I remember getting this feeling of tremendous sexual excitement. I simply had to have a woman. I didn’t care what she looked like or who she was as long as she would fuck. And then I wanted a game. A real game. I wanted to get into bed with a woman and then I wanted to play poker. In that order.” He looked at me. “Do you find that strange?”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “But then nobody ever told me that I was suddenly worth a million or so pounds.”

“Well, I decided to see if Eddie Apex were really serious. So I explained my financial condition and asked whether he could advance me some money. He said does this mean that you agree to let me and my colleagues handle the sword and I said of course. Well, he said, would five thousand pounds be enough and would it be all right if he sent it around later that afternoon in cash, because under the circumstances, cash would be better than a check. I nearly fell off my chair, of course. I was expecting something like three hundred pounds. But still that didn’t satisfy my immediate needs. Sexual needs, I mean. So I said that would be fine, but could he spare fifty or a hundred quid now and he smiled and said, of course, and handed me over a hundred pounds. I went out that afternoon and got fucked most delightfully and does my crude way of speaking offend you?”