Bank notes? Surely, Ross reasoned, not even from the besotted ranks of dog-lovers would this villainous old sailorman manage to extort so extravagant a tribute. And those who produced the folded slips of paper certainly did not look wealthy.
There came a spell when the stream of passers-by slackened. The one-legged man hitched up his jersey, consulted a watch extracted from the region of his stomach, peered up and down the street, and wheeled on his crutch to face the small door. With a sudden lurch he barged it open and disappeared.
Ross left the car and walked up the steps.
Closing the club door behind him, he stood listening and adjusting his eyes to the gloom of what had been the foyer of the Moorish Electric. The only illumination came from a grime-encrusted bulb, fashioned like a flame, that sprouted from a torch held aloft by a gilded plaster slave-girl. Ross fleetingly felt old memories stir at the sight of the statue’s ingenious mutilations, unhurriedly executed, he supposed, by cruel young men with enormous snooker handicaps.
The air carried a ghost of disinfectant perfume and aisle carpeting but it was heavily overlaid with the brackish smell of damp masonry. Two ascending staircases at right and left, only the first few steps of which could be discerned in what little light reached them, had been blocked off with crossed planks. Flakes of tarnished gilt lay on the bare floor, but whatever mock-Moorish conceits had shed them mouldered invisible in the upper darkness.
Ross saw at once which way the flagseller had passed. One of a pair of cut glass and mahogany doors still swung gently beneath the sign ‘Stalls’. He pushed his way through them to the gently inclined corridor beyond. Two similar doors, admitting a greenish twilight, were at the further end. He walked to them and peered cautiously through the glass.
What had been the ground floor of the cinema was now stripped of seats. Ross saw rows of dark slabs, each surmounted with its pyramidal cowling, stretching away into the gloom. Only the three nearest billiard tables were in use. Scattered snooker balls shone like multi-coloured globular flowers on their bright baize lawns. Here and there a face blossomed yellowly among them, squinting along a cue.
Watchers of the play—Ross guessed their number to be about two dozen—were invested with a sinister anonymity: the light from the tables fell only upon their trunks and arms. When comments were made, and they were terse and infrequent, it was quite impossible to judge who had spoken.
Ross squeezed into the hall and moved to one side of the doorway. His arrival, if it had been heeded, went unchallenged. Looking to his left, he saw that a long counter had been built against perhaps half the length of the rear wall. Two small shaded bulbs, in conformity with the general scheme of dimness, showed rows of cues, a clock and a table-booking board. Standing behind the counter was a man with thin, sandy hair who was scrutinizing, apparently with difficulty, a newspaper that he had folded to the area of a prayer book.
Ross edged casually along the counter. When he was quite near, the man looked up sharply.
“You a member, sir?”
The question was unnecessarily loud. The headless spectators around the tables undulated slightly as if moved by a sudden current through the waist-deep darkness in which they stood. And Ross glimpsed, at the far end of the counter, another movement. The old sailorman, quick as a lizard, had taken off and replaced his jaunty cap.
Ignoring, for the moment, the steward, Ross gazed full at the flag-seller and was treated to a wink that threatened to expel the old man’s eye like a black pip. Before Ross turned away, he had seen that the collecting tin standing beside the tray of flags on the counter now lacked its slotted lid.
“A member of the club? No, I’m not, as it happens.”
“If you’re looking for someone, perhaps I could...” The steward’s voice had resumed normal pitch.
Ross looked back over his shoulder. “I don’t think he’s here at the moment. The light’s not terribly good, though.” He stole another glance at the sailorman. The top was back on his tin.
“Well, tell me his name; you’ve only to tell me his name.” The voice was tired, querulous. Small fry, thought Ross: the easily exasperated are never allowed deeply in. He said: “There’s nothing against my hanging on for a bit, is there?”
The steward looked dubious. Ross felt that he wanted to consult with a look the one-legged man but dared not. Finally he shrugged and returned to his newspaper. “Just as you like...”
The atmosphere in the hall, though cold and stale, had something of a soporific quality, deepened by the gentle rumble of the balls and the constant clicks of impact. Ross, his eyes half closed, drowsily contemplated the silent perambulation of the players and amused himself by judging from isolated jackets and ties and hands the characters of the faceless watchers. Among them were a few, a couple, one only perhaps, of the painfully, carefully cultivated contacts of Hopjoy, little studs of sensitivity along the line of F.7. But which? And by what sign would he divine them?
“P’raps you fancy a game, sir?”
Beside him was the bellows face of the mariner. The old man bore a smell compounded of raspberry jam and oil stove.
“A game?” Ross had been unprepared for an approach quite in this manner. “I’m not a member, you know.”
The other waved a hand disdainfully. “What’s that matter?” It sounded like ‘wozzard-madder’. Twelve miles south-west of King’s Lynn, calculated Ross. He took his hand from his pocket. “All right, then.”
The Norfolkman gave two light taps with his crutch against the counter. Without looking up, the steward reached behind him and flicked a switch. “Number five”, he muttered. “There’s a set on.”
Ross reached across the counter and selected a cue from the rack. The steward offered him no assistance but instead, still without taking his eyes from his paper, stooped for a black japanned cue case evidently kept in custody for the sailor’s personal use.
“I can’t play, mind,” asserted Ross’s opponent, unlocking his case and withdrawing the cue with the relish of a fencing master challenged by a splenetic woodcutter.
“In that case,” said Ross, “we’ll just play for the table, shall we?”
The sailorman looked shocked. “Oh, I don’t say I mind losing a little. Just to make it interesting.”
“A pound?” Ross sounded as though injecting interest into the encounter were beyond his power or concern. “Five? Anything you like—within reason, you know.” He bent and blew a flake of ash from the cloth.
“A quid, then. I’m not much to beat. I told you.”
Ross smiled inwardly at the man’s predictable mendacity. He would prove, undoubtedly, formidable by small town poolroom standards. But mere shilling-catching competence was of no avail against the expertise acquired at a guinea a point in the basement of Harding’s in Rangoon, or at Billiards-Bee, behind Rue-des-Ecoles, where Charpentier had had the slate beds of his tables faced with leaves of topaz.