“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.”