Eddie listened for the sound of the bugle, then the noise of the horses running, which came a minute later, and with it the shouting and a few frenzied screams, the half-hourly orgasm. Then he finished his drink.
Bert came in, found him, and sat down.
Eddie stretched, and lit a cigarette. “How’s it going?”
“Fair.”
“You win on that one?”
“Yes.”
Eddie shook his head. “You always win, don’t you?”
Bert looked thoughtful. “As a general rule, yes.” He glanced toward the bar. Immediately his eyebrows rose. “Well,” he said, softly, “look who’s coming!”
It was the thin man whom Eddie had been watching. He walked up to their table and sat down, lazily. Then he smiled at Bert. “Well, hello,” he said, his voice soft, unctuous. “Haven’t seen you in a long time.”
“Hello,” Bert said, pursing his lips in a faint smile. “I haven’t been around here for a long time.” And then, “I’d like you to meet Eddie Felson. James Findlay.”
Eddie kept his face from showing anything. “Glad to meet you,” he said.
“And I you.” He set his camera on the table, and said, “I think I’ve heard about you, Mr. Felson. You play pocket billiards, don’t you?”
Eddie grinned. “That’s right,” he said. “Here and there. Do you?”
“A little.” He laughed. “Although I’m afraid I generally lose.”
“So does Eddie,” Bert said.
“Oh, I win sometimes,” Eddie said, looking at Findlay. He noticed that the youthful look he had seen in the man’s face was like a mask, or like the face of a middle-aged woman who is wearing too much make-up, as if something were holding the skin taut, preventing it from collapse, or from decay.
There was something supercilious, smug, in Findlay’s voice, and in his almost blank, pale eyes. “I’ll bet you do, Mr. Felson. I’ll bet you do.”
Eddie remained grinning. “How much?”
Findlay’s eyebrows rose in mock astonishment. He turned to Bert. “Bert,” he said, “I believe Mr. Felson is making a… proposition.”
“That could be,” Bert said.
Findlay looked back at him and smiled, and for a moment Eddie was amused at the situation—for it was obvious that Findlay knew the purpose of this visit, that Bert and Eddie would not be talking with him if there was not a hustle being planned. Findlay was playing it all out, and it occurred to Eddie that the man was an instinctive phony, a ham. “Well, Mr. Felson,” he was saying, “maybe you would like to come out to my place some evening. We could play a few games of billiards.”
Eddie did not like the word “billiards” when it was used to mean pool. But he smiled at the other man. “When?” he said.
Findlay smiled coldly. “You’re very direct, Mr. Felson.”
“That’s right,” Eddie said, grinning. “When?”
“Well,” Findlay withdrew a cork-tipped cigarette from a black case and tapped it gently on the back of one hand. “Would you like to come out tonight? Eight o’clock?”
Eddie turned to Bert. “What do you think?”
Bert stood up, and then placed his chair back under the edge of the table. “We’ll be there,” he said….
19
Findlay’s house on the outside was like an Old Fitzgerald advertisement—the kind of a quasi-mansion that the word “aristocrat” means to some people. You had to drive a long way from the road before you could get to it, a big, dark brick box, with giant white columns in front supporting nothing, and shrubbery all over the place. By the black-top drive was a small, quaint metal statue of a Negro, in jockey uniform, holding out an iron ring toward a pair of white iron benches, fashioned to appear light and lacy and fooling no one, all very suggestive of the Old South, to which Kentucky had never belonged. The quaint metal statue was an ornament.
Inside, the place was more like an advertisement for Calvert’s Reserve, the kind where a man who is graying at the temples sits in a leather chair and holds a glass of whiskey preparatory to swilling it. Going through toward the back, Eddie could see into a room filled with books and paintings, with several leather armchairs that would easily have made Findlay a man of distinction in any company. He began to wonder how his host would look bending over a pool table. It was an interesting thought.
The basement was veneered with mahogany on the walls, which struck Eddie as looking terrible, even worse than the shiny knotty pine that was the badge of something or other these days. In the back of the room was an ill-concealed furnace—it looked like a huge mahogany squid with metal arms—and next to this was a bar. In front of the bar sat the pool table, its green hidden by a gray dust cover. Over the table hung a row of shaded lamps, but these were not turned on yet.
They sat at the bar and Findlay fixed them all Scotches with soda. On Eddie’s end of the bar was a wooden statue, about two feet high, of a man and woman engaged in one of the favorite indoor sports. Eddie looked at this with some interest, wondering briefly if it could really be accomplished that way. He decided that it would be possible, but fatiguing. Over the bar there hung a picture, also obscene, but not as imaginative. This was framed in white and appeared to be Japanese. The Scotch was very good, the best. Which figured.
Findlay had been keeping up a light patter of conversation, most of it aimless. He became quiet now, absorbed for the moment in his drink, and Eddie began to open his leather case. He took the cue out and screwed it together, checking it for tightness. Then he felt of the tip, which seemed to be a little too hard and slick, the leather battered down by innumerable tappings. He looked at Findlay. “You got any sandpaper? Or a file?”
Findlay smiled, almost eager to be of assistance. “Certainly. Which?”
“A file.”
Obligingly, the other man went to a cabinet that was built into the wall, opened it, and withdrew a jointed cue of his own and a file, which he handed to Eddie.
Eddie took it and began carefully tapping the side of it against the tip of his cue, roughing it up a little to restore its springiness and to permit it to take chalk better. He glanced at his host, busily checking his own cue for tightness and straightness, sighting down it carefully. It seemed amusing, the two of them. Like a couple of gentlemen politely preparing their weapons for a duel. Which, in a sense, was what was happening.
When Findlay had finished performing his rites, Eddie said, “Let’s play,” and he stood up.
“By all means.”
The minute they threw one corner of the dust cover back Eddie saw something that shook him. There were no pockets. It was a billiard table. He looked immediately at Bert. Bert had seen it too; he was pursing his lips.
Eddie looked at Findlay. “I thought you played pool.”
Findlay raised his eyebrows with amusement. “I do. But not here, I’m afraid.”
Eddie did not answer that but went on with him, folding up the cover and then putting it away on a shelf that had been built in for it, on the near wall. He weighed what was happening rapidly. He knew how to play billiards; and the game overlapped with pool anyway: both of them required a good stroke more than anything else, and a knowledge of what a ball would do. But the differences were great: the balls were slightly bigger and heavier; playing safe had an entirely different strategy to it; and most important, it was mainly a cue ball game—you did not concern yourself very much with where the ball you shot at went but with precisely what your cue ball did afterward. It was not easy for a pool player to get used to. And it was a tight game, a chesslike game, depending on brains and nerve and on knowing the tricks.
He looked at Findlay again. “What kind of billiards do you play?”