“Right,” I said.
“Close to twenty thousand bucks. Not bad.”
“Not bad,” I agreed.
“We even give you a doggy-bag to take it all home in,” Cagle said and put the money into a shiny black plastic bag with a zipper opening. He handed it to me. “We’ll try it again sometime,” he said.
“Soon,” I said, lying as well as I could. I turned to Robin Styles. “Come on,” I said. “You can ride shotgun.”
“What? Oh, yes, I see. Of course.”
“I’ll get you a cab,” Cagle said.
“Thanks.”
I turned and headed for the door, Robin Styles close behind.
“One more thing, St. Ives,” Cagle called after me.
I didn’t stop. “What?” I said over my shoulder.
“Remember where you won it, and tell your friends. If you’ve got any.”
Chapter Twenty-One
The invitation to breakfast at Robin Styles’s was issued so politely and hesitantly and with such diffidence that I couldn’t bring myself to turn it down. But first I had the cab stop by the Hilton where I handed what I had won over to the desk for safekeeping.
It wasn’t far to Styles’s place. It was just north of Bayswater Road near Lancaster Gate. As I paid off the cab, Styles stood looking up at the three-story building. “A bed-sitter in Bayswater,” he said. “Some friends of mine knew a chap who killed himself because he was afraid he would end up like this.”
“When you get all that money you can move out to Hampstead where you belong,” I said.
We went up two flights of stairs to the bed-sitter that was home to Robin Styles. I couldn’t help comparing it to my own “deluxe” efficiency in the Adelphi. It was with a sense of shamed relief that I decided that mine was far better. But that was because along the way an architect had had something to do with its original design. And, too, I lived where I did out of a kind of perverse choice, while Styles lived where he did because he had to and because he was one of those persons who are just basically unlucky.
It had been a bedroom in a large townhouse at one time and even then it must have been small, good enough perhaps for the upstairs maid, but certainly not for nanny.
It was about nine by twelve feet and it had one window. There had been a closet, but it was now the bath although if you sat down on the toilet you had to sort of slide onto it and then the washbasin was in your lap. The kitchen was in one corner of the room and consisted of a wooden chest that held a two-burner gas stove that was not quite a hotplate. The refrigerator was a three-foot-high Frigidaire, the 1936 model, I thought, that might have brought a few dollars in New York as a campy sort of antique.
The furniture was not quite bad enough to be awful, but almost. There was a single bed that doubled as a sofa, a couple of straight-backed wooden chairs, an “easy” chair that looked anything but that, a bridge table that seemed to be serving as desk, dining table, and a place to practice poker hands, a gray rug, and a large old armoire that must have held Styles’s wardrobe.
Styles didn’t apologize. He only said, “It was about what you expected, wasn’t it?”
“You’re very neat, aren’t you?” I said, which was the only thing I could say that came close to being nice.
“Habit,” he said and opened the wooden chest that supported the two-burner stove, took out a bottle of Scotch, and poured two drinks into glasses that I suspected had once held jam. Or maybe marmalade. He ran some water from the bathroom basin tap into the glasses and handed me one. “Sorry, but I don’t bother with ice because the Fridge only makes six small blocks.”
“That’s okay,” I said.
Although I didn’t time him, I think it took no more than four minutes, and possibly less, for Robin Styles to serve up one of the best omelets I have ever had. He moved like a skilled chef in that corner that was his kitchen. He broke four eggs into a bowl, using only one hand to do it, a trick that I’ve never been able to master. While he was beating them, he had a large copper omelet pan, possibly the best piece of furniture in the place, heating on one of the burners. When the pan was hot, he dropped in a chunk of butter and went back to beating his eggs with a wire whisk, stopping only to dump in a pinch of this and a pinch of that from some containers that looked suspiciously like old cold cream jars.
The eggs and the butter were ready at the same time, something else I’ve never been able to arrange, and he poured the eggs in and then began moving the pan back and forth over the flame while using a rubber spatula to stir the top portion of the eggs so that they would cook properly. It was a little like rubbing your stomach and patting the top of your head at the same time — far harder to do than it looks.
In less than a minute, and probably closer to thirty seconds, he removed two plates that had been warming, set them on the card table, brought the pan over, gave it a sharp rap with a knife, and I watched the omelet fold over perfectly. Then we sat down and had Scotch and possibly the world’s best omelet for breakfast. Or late supper.
“You do a lot of things well, don’t you?” I said.
“Not really.”
“Do you ride?”
“I once did, but I had to give it up. Too expensive, you know. There was a little talk about my entering international competition, but it was only that. Talk. I also shoot and I once went in for a bit of amateur sports-car racing; I’ve sold a few paintings and even some rather stylish photographs. I’ve written a few reviews for The Observer. And I play the piano a little like Duchin and poker like a guppy.”
I leaned back in the wooden chair and lit a cigarette.“You could really enjoy it, couldn’t you?” I said. “Being rich, I mean.”
“Oh, yes. Definitely. There are any number of splendidly expensive things that I have done and could still do, if I had the money. Although I do all of these other things rather well, I just can’t gamble. I don’t know why, but the more badly I play, the more I must. Simply must.”
“I’ve known some who’ve quit,” I said. “Compulsive gamblers.”
“Not ahead?”
“No, not ahead. They’d lost it all.”
“How were they? After they’d quit, I mean.”
I thought about it. “Paler, I suppose. And quieter. Much quieter. It seemed as if they were listening for something.”
Styles was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I thought it was all going to be so simple. I mean after they told me what the sword really was. I thought I was going to be enormously rich and that I would put most of it away somewhere so that I couldn’t touch it and live off the income. Live jolly well, too.”
“Maybe you still can,” I said.
He shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s all grown so damned complicated. Tonight, for example.”
“Tonight was simple,” I said. “I won a lot of money. Wes Cagle lost a lot. You dealt.”
“Not that. It was when you showed him that half of a playing card. I didn’t think I should say anything then. I’m not sure why, but—” His voice trailed off.
“But what?” I said.
“Well, this,” he said. He brought out his wallet and flipped something onto the table. It was half of a playing card, half of a one-eyed jack of spades. He watched as I reached into my own wallet, took out the half I had, the half that I had lifted from the wallet of the dead Billy Curnutt, locksmith, and moved it across the table until its torn edge reached the other half. They fitted perfectly.