This was exactly like Szegeti. He had been arrested in Burma when I was six for claiming to be a delegate from the United Nations, and in Brazil when I was seven he had passed himself off as an American commercial attaché, and he had been self-appointed deputy director of the World Bank in Uganda and Bhutanese ambassador extraordinary to Mozambique. He had helped large numbers of people to escape death and torture and flee to reluctant asylums with imaginative documentation.
That was obviously not the way he made his living.
Szegeti had learned bridge as a boy from his parents, both avid players. His mother was Egyptian, his father Hungarian. They were wealthy, but compulsive gamblers, and had lived in constant uncertainty and excitement.
They had lived in magnificent hotels when they could afford it and often when they could not. On arriving they always insisted on having a grand piano installed in the suite so that his mother could play Brahms when she was not playing roulette. They ordered lavishly from room service. Sometimes Szegeti had not seen his parents for days at a time; sometimes they had not gone outside for a week, getting up to gamble and leaving the gambling to go to bed.
His mother wore only designer clothes. Once when she had pawned all her jewellery she pawned the clothes too. Men had to wear evening dress to the casino; women were not allowed to wear trousers. She put on her husband’s black tie. She did not even have the money to buy a false beard. She cut off her hair, and she glued a few wisps to her upper lip, and she went to the casino with the money raised from the clothes. She was gone for two days.
She came at last to the room. Instead of a two days’ growth of beard she had only wisps of black hair coming loose from the glue. Her black hair stood in spikes. She came to the room—they had not dared to call room service for two weeks, they had been living on half-finished boxes of chocolates and leftover breadsticks—and she threw one chip on the bed.
Then you lost? said Szegeti, and the boy, too, thought that she had lost.
I lost, she said. She went to the mirror and began to pull off the moustache.
I lost, and I lost, and I lost. And then I won.
From the pockets of the suit she took sheaf after sheaf of notes, and stacked them on the dressing table. Numéro vingthuit, she said, il ne m’a pas tout à fait oubliée. They were sheafs of 500 franc notes.
I must go to bed, she said. I have nothing to wear.
I thought: It’s not just the money.
I thought: I can always sell the heart another time.
I thought: I can’t wait to see the look on his face!
Being deported sounds rather traumatic but Szegeti had been through it so many times before I thought he would probably not let it interfere with his normal pursuits. I knew he played bridge a lot at the Portland Club, so I got off the Circle Line at Baker Street and went to the Marylebone Library to look up the Portland Club in the phone book. One should never despise the obvious, so I tried the residential directory first, but of course a man who wanted to avoid nuisance calls from the type of head of state who typically gets 99.9% of the vote from an adoring populace, not to mention the Bhutanese, American, French, German, Danish and now Belgian embassies, and not mentioning last but not least the World Bank, UN and WHO, was not listed. The Portland Club was at 42 Half Moon Street.
I took the Jubilee Line to Green Park and walked to Half Moon Street. It was about 1:30. I sat on the curb across the street from the Portland Club and began to peruse The Solid State by H. M. Rosenberg.
I thought: Who knows WHAT will happen?
Szegeti was not only a chronic diplomat and cardplayer, he had had dozens, hundreds or thousands of affairs depending on your source (Szegeti/The Sun/Sadaam Hussein). He couldn’t keep track of them all; for all he knew one of his exes might have had a child. He might accept me as his son! Perhaps I would be able to tell the story of the moustache as a story about my grandmother.
People went in and out of the Portland Club, but none looked like Szegeti. At about 4:00 a taxi drew up in front of the club and a man in a white suit stepped out. It was Szegeti.
Six hours went by. I was starving. I forced myself to read H. M. Rosenberg, The Solid State. I tried not to think about food.
At about 11:00 Szegeti came out. He was with another man. The other man was saying: I just thought if I led the king it would open up the diamonds.
Diamonds?
It was the only suit they hadn’t bid.
Neither they had, said Szegeti with a sigh. One would not like to think the spirit of adventure had wholly died out in the modern game, but when one considers the unaccountable, indeed the apparently insuperable reluctance of the average player to bid a suit on a void or singleton! Not to mention the pusillanimity of the partnership de nos jours which meanly settles for a suit where it has found a fit rather than moving on to explore uncharted waters. We live in a degenerate age.
Last time you said I should obviously have led the king.
Did I? Then I take it all back. You must certainly lead the king every chance you get. No need to mull over your lead if you’ve a king in your hand. If anyone looks surprised you may say that you have it on my authority that to lead the king is the quintessence of sound play. But here is my taxi.
He got into the taxi, and it drove off.
I had no idea where it was going.
The man left behind was staring after it. I ran up behind him and said breathlessly:
Excuse me! I was told to deliver something urgently to Mr. Szegeti at his club and now I’ve just missed him—do you know where he’s going?
Haven’t a clue. He’s gone off Caprice; you could try Quaglino’s. Do you play bridge?
No. Where’s Quaglino’s?
Oh good Lord, you can’t—that is, he’s in a filthy mood about something or other and if he’s meeting someone he won’t want you barging in. Why don’t you leave it at the club?
Where’s Quaglino’s?
Isn’t it rather late for you to be out?
Where’s Quaglino’s?
He probably isn’t there anyway.
Then it doesn’t matter if you tell me where it is, does it?
No, well, Bury Street, if you must know.
Where’s that?
Miles away.
I went back to Green Park. The Tube would close in an hour. He would probably go off in a taxi again and I would not be able to follow because I only had my Travelcard and a pound. Still, maybe something would turn up.
I asked at the assistance window where Bury Street was and the man said it was just around the corner. I looked at the local area map and sure enough it was just around the corner, about a ten-minute walk from Half Moon Street. Would anyone take a taxi for that kind of distance? But it was my only lead so I walked up Piccadilly and down St. James’s Street and over to Bury Street, and I looked at Quaglino’s but you couldn’t see much from the outside. I couldn’t tell whether anyone in a white suit was inside or not.
I sat on a doorstep across the street from Quaglino’s and tried to read The Solid State, but the light was too bad. So I started reciting Iliad 1. I am planning to learn the whole thing in case I am thrown in jail some day.
People went in and out of Quaglino’s. I finished Iliad 1; it was still only 12:30. A couple of people stopped and asked if I was all right. I said I was. I started going through weak Arabic verbs. My favourites are the double and triple weak verbs because they practically shut down in the imperative, but I made myself start with initial hamza and work through.
It was a good thing I did. An hour went by; I thought he must have gone somewhere else. I might as well go home. But I’d reached my favourite verb in the whole language & I thought I would go through that first and give it just a little longer. The strange thing about