Highbinders (9 page)

“How much did they pay you?”

The hiccups and snuffles died away. “My pension. They paid me a sum equal to my pension for a year. Five hundred pounds. That’s what I have to starve on. Isn’t that a princely sum?”

I took out my wallet again. He watched me. I counted out five ten-pound notes onto the arm of my lumpy chair. He watched that, too.

“Who were they?” I said.

He licked his lips as though he could taste the ten-pound notes. “You’re going to give me that money, if I tell you?”

“That’s right.”

“They swore me to secrecy.”

I sighed, took the wallet out again, and added another ten-pound note to the pile.

“Was the diamond in the pommel?” I said.

He nodded.

“Who were they?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. They were two men. They wouldn’t tell me their names.”

“Young or old?”

“Younger than I—but getting on. In their sixties, I’d say.

“Did they look alike?”

He nodded. “They could have been brothers. One was harder looking than the other.”

“And you got a good look at the sword?”

“I spent two hours on it. Two lovely hours. It was in surprisingly good condition. Much better than I’d have expected.”

“Anything else about it? Anything unusual?”

He shook his head. “No, not really. Except on the hilt just below the pommel. I didn’t see it until I used the glass. It looked as if somebody had scratched his initials into it—into the gold.”

“Were the initials NN?”

He looked surprised.
“Yes,
they were. Now may I have my money?”

I rose and handed it to him. “Thank you, Doctor Christenberry. You’ve been a lot of help. I’ll find my way out.”

I don’t think he really heard me. He was already counting the money. I went through the door into the foyer and closed it. Then I opened and closed the door that led to the street, but I went back and pressed my ear against the thin panel of the foyer door. I didn’t have to wait. He was already dialing the phone.

“This is Christenberry,” he said. “He only just left. I told him what you told me to tell him. Now may I have my money?”

I slipped out the front door and walked up to Elgin Avenue, caught a taxi, gave the driver an address on Harley Street, and thought about what I had heard and overheard in the house at 99 Ashworth Road. As I thought about it, I decided that it may have been what I was supposed to have overheard.

I
F YOU ARE GOOD
enough and, for all I know, smooth enough, you can join the Royal College of Surgeons, hang out your shingle on Harley Street, and call yourself Mister instead of Doctor, which is the same logic that the British fell back on when they started calling their private schools public.

I had met Daniel Defoe about a dozen years before, just after he had opened his office on Harley Street and started calling himself Mr and sending out his bills in nice round guinea figures. I had met him at an all-night poker game where he had informed me that yes, he was descended from the writer; that he was Defoe’s great-great-great nephew or something, and that no, he didn’t believe that I had filled my flush. He had been right and he had won nearly enough in that particular pot to furnish his reception room. He also had become our family doctor, if Harley Streeters can be considered such, and my former wife had gone to him several times for various mild complaints while I had gone to him once with an ingrown toenail, just to make sure that he didn’t lose the common touch.

We hadn’t seen each other for three or four years, not since the last time he had been in New York, and so we spent fifteen minutes catching up on whatever gossip we still had in common and in my admiring his newly decorated consultation room.

“I can see that a lot of thought as well as a few buckets of tonsils went into all this,” I said. “You driving a Rolls yet?”

He smiled. He could charge an extra five guineas for that smile alone. “Since last year, I call it my Vasectomy V-8.”

“You do a lot of those?”

“I’ve suddenly become the bloody authority. It’s a two-or three-quid operation, you know. But nobody wants that. There’s something about the family jewels that demands the expert’s touch. So I pop them into hospital overnight, in a private room, of course, snip away for five minutes, send them a bill for a hundred guineas, and they’re delighted. I did more than two hundred of the things last year. Quite a few chaps from Scotland Yard for some reason.”

“Cops get a lot of free ass,” I said.

“Do they really?”

“They say they do anyway.”

Mr Defoe looked at me. It was his diagnostic look, I thought. He had a handsome, strongboned face, the kind that women adore and men don’t mind. His eyes were a large dark brown with a hint of pain in their depths, which all fine doctors have, and even some bad ones. His hair was carefully tousled and getting just a little gray and I found myself wishing that I had something wrong with me that he could take a look at. A bad hangnail would do.

“Are you over here on holiday or are you on one of those odd jobs that you do now and again?” he said.

“I’m working.”

He smiled once more. “Does it hurt?”

“Only in the mornings when I have to get up.”

“I suppose I should envy you, Philip, but I still like what I’m doing so marvelously well that I don’t have time.”

“I don’t want to take up any more of it,” I said. “Although I thought we might have dinner before I go back.”

“Or a game,” he said.

“If you can round up some fish.”

“No trouble. What else is on your mind?”

“Somebody slipped something into my drink the other day.”

“What happened?”

“Cramps. Then nausea followed by a terrific high. Euphoria, really. Then I blacked out.”

“You weren’t drinking a great deal, were you?”

“It was my only drink all day.”

“What was it, Scotch?”

“Yes.”

“Did you notice any taste?”

I thought back. “It might have tasted a little bitter, but I’m not sure.”

“How much do you smoke now?”

I shrugged. “Three packs a day.”

“Dear God! What
can
you taste?”

“Salt. I can taste salt.”

“Well, I can tell you what it could have been, although I can’t be certain.”

“Of course.”

“Morphine.”

“Would that do it?”

He nodded. “I think thirty milligrams—a half-grain—might do it and you might not notice it if the Scotch were bad and the taste buds ruined, as yours seem to be. You wouldn’t have built up any tolerance for it either and that could have produced the symptoms you described.”

“I was just curious.”

“Did you like it?”

“What?”

“The euphoria.”

“Sure,” I said. “I was crazy about it.”

Mr. Daniel Defoe nodded gloomily. “I was afraid you might be,” he said.

At eleven o’clock that night the deep voice behind me said, “Well, well, well, well,
well.
If it isn’t Philip St. Ives, the honest messenger boy.” He made me sound like an Horatio Alger novel. The worst one.

I turned. He was still as tall as he had always been, around six-foot-seven, but a lot heavier, at least 250 or 275 pounds. It’s hard to guess accurately when it gets up that high.

His name was Wesley Cagle and his chief claim to fame was that he had once played football for Princeton and later the St. Louis Cardinals. Tight end, I think, but he hadn’t been much good as a pro and had lasted only two seasons. Years back, I had done a column on him when he had gone to work for Meyer Lansky as a “public relations consultant.” He hadn’t liked the column much, which was probably because I hadn’t liked him much, and it had showed.

“You’re fat, Wes,” I said because it was the first nasty thing that came to mind.

He slapped his gut which bulged against the studs of his dress shirt. He wore his dinner jacket well, which is something that few really big men can do without looking like an extra waiter. Only a few pounds,” he said. “They give me a touch of dignity, which is something this joint can use.”

I looked around. Shields Gambling Emporium was a gaudy, glittering place with rows of heavy chandeliers, lots of red plush, dark mahogany, brass spittoons, and anything else that would make it look as though it had begun operation in 1894. In the background I could hear the gambling sounds: the slap of cards, the croupiers’ drone, the spinning balls, and the clicking chips.

“What do you do here, Wes, shave the dice?”

“I’m what is known as the deputy managing director.” He made a small bow. “Welcome to Shields, Mr. St. Ives, and I hope you lose your teeth. Drink?”

“Why not?”

We went over to a bar where a well-dressed gray-haired man stood, a drink in his hand, and tears streaming down his cheeks. I moved farther on down the bar and Cagle followed.

We ordered drinks and Cagle nodded toward the gray-haired man at the bar. “He dropped a thousand that he doesn’t have or can’t afford so I bought him a drink.”

“Well, that’s what you get for going to Princeton. Decent instincts.”

The fat hadn’t yet reached Cagle’s face. It was still mostly planes and angles and handsome enough if you don’t mind a thrice-broken nose. When he smiled, I saw that he had either had his teeth capped or had got some brand new ones.

“I got a call about you today,” he said. “From an old friend.”

“It must have been one of mine then. You don’t have any friends. Not old ones anyhow.” I don’t know why I needled him. He seemed to be trying to be nice and if he got tired of that, he could always hammer me into the rug with one hand.

“English Eddie Apex,” Cagle said.

“Good old Eddie.”

“Eddie said to give you the run of the place.”

“Did he say anything about credit?”

“He said you could use your own money. He also said that there’s somebody here that you might want to meet. Robin Styles.”

I nodded. “Is he here?”

“He’s always here,” Cagle said.

“Does he win or lose?”

Cagle made his big hand go palm up then palm down a few times, indicating that Robin Styles, the man who owned what might turn out to be a three-million-pound sword, did a little of both. But mostly lost.

“How much is he into you?” I said.

“We don’t give credit.”

I sighed. “Why do you still try to lie to me, Wes, when you know that I know better?”

“It’s privileged information.”

“Funny, but I just happened to remember something,” I said. “I remember a story about what happened between you and Meyer in the Bahamas. It’s a hell of a funny story. I don’t think too many people know it. I wonder if the guys who own this place have heard it?”

Wes Cagle looked around the bar. “They don’t know about the Bahamas. All they know about is Vegas. I was strictly kosher in Vegas.”

“They don’t have to know about the Bahamas then, do they?”

Cagle let me look at his new teeth again, but he wasn’t feeling smilish. “Styles’s into us for forty-three thousand pounds. His cutoff is fifty and from the way he’s going he might get there tonight.”

“What’s his game?”

“Seven-card. Nothing else.”

“Why’re you so lavish with the credit?”

“We’re betting on the come,” Cagle said, staring at me. “That’s what you’re betting on, isn’t it?”

“Sure,” I said. “We go-betweens are just like gambling hells. All heart. You’ve got a guarantor, Wes, or you wouldn’t let Styles bet a dime. Who it is, Eddie Apex?”

“Eddie might have mentioned something about it. That the kid would be okay for up to fifty thou. He also mentioned that you’d want to meet him.”

“I’d rather watch him play poker for a while first.”

“Uh-huh. Eddie said you’d want to do that, too.”

“What kind of game is it?”

“Table stakes.”

“Five hundred get me in?”

“Five hundred what?”

“Dollars.”

“No, but you could get in for a thousand bucks maybe, if you still play that same tight-assed poker of yours.”

“You take a check?”

“Sure, Phil,” he said, smiling for the first time as though he meant it. “Traveler’s checks.”

I took out my book of American Express fifties and started signing away. When I had signed enough, I tore them out and handed them to Wes Cagle. “The table will give you your chips,” he said. “I’ll point Styles out to you.”

“Okay.”

“One more thing, Phil.”

“What?”

He smiled again, another happy one. “I hope you lose every fucking cent.”

I
HAD STAYED IN
my room at the Hilton until ten forty-five that night waiting for somebody to call and tell me where I should bring £100,000. When they didn’t, I had walked down to Shields on Curzon Street to take a look at Robin Styles, the young man who owned an old sword that might turn out to be worth a few million pounds.

I had been looking at him for almost five hours now across the green baize of the horseshoe-shaped table. I had decided that since he talked like a twit, drank like a twit, and played poker like a twit, he must be a twit. It was an opinion I was not to change until it was almost too late.

We were playing seven-card stud and the house dealt. There were six of us playing: Styles, a German from Düsseldorf, another Englishman, an American from Dallas, me, and a London type whom I took to be a shill because he looked bored out of his mind and at the stakes we were playing for, it’s hard to be bored if it’s your very own money that’s being won and lost.

“Mr. St. Ives,” the man from Dallas said. “I do believe you’re tryin’ to run another shitty on us, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

“No need to apologize,” I said. “Just bet.”

I had been running shitties for the past hour, betting extravagantly on nothing and getting caught at it and betting the same on kings full, which is a pretty fair hand even in seven-card stud, and suckering them all in. I was better than even, and now that I had done my advertising, I was ready to play some mean poker, which is the only way to play it, especially seven-card stud, a game that I had always detested.

I had paired fours on the first two down cards, hit another four on the third up card, and caught the final four buried on the last card down. The German I figured for a high straight, Styles for a flush, and the Texan for a full house. The shill had folded as had the other player who, apropos of nothing, had suddenly announced that he was from Manchester. We had all congratulated him.