To cover his apprehension, he examined his fingernails. He smoothed a sleeve of his white silk shirt. He weighed, and decided against having a drink. He slipped and reholstered the Smith & Wesson on his right hip and was conscious that his palm was damp and reflected on that. Jack Pulford had come to the Constantinople willingly. He had felt at first that his own, earlier statement, prompted by what to him was a justifiable vanity, had left him no alternative. "There was a man," he had said to a full faro table with reference to J. B. Books, "I could've beat." And when the Rogers kid had delivered the challenge from Books before another full table therefore, he was caught in a squeeze chute: put up or shut up, make good his mouth or go crawl. But last night, pondering Books's motive, trying to divine his hole card, he had finally sorted out the hand. What he had received was not a challenge but an invitation, a plea almost, for help. Books seemed to be saying, Look, I am cashing in, chip by chip, and I am squeamish about hurrying matters along by myself, so meet me tomorrow at four o'clock and do my killing for me. I have heard there is no better man in west Texas for the job. So meet me at four, Pulford, and write your name in the history books. No one will remember that I was on my last legs, no one will suspect. All they will remember is that J. B. Books was faced and killed in a saloon in El Paso in 1901 by one Jack Pulford. That was it, that was the reason, the gambler satisfied himself. What else could a dying man possibly desire beyond a dose of merciful lead?
So he had arrived as invited, ready to do business, and now this—a marked deck if he had ever seen one. If all Books wanted was an execution, why swell the guest list, why ask a drooling, double-gun idiot and low characters like Cross-eye and Derby Hat to the affair? They were obviously waiting for four o'clock, as he was. It made no damned sense.
He drew his watch. He would soon have an answer. It was three fifty-five.
Jack Pulford shot his cuffs. The Constantinople suited his taste to a t. In a day or two, he resolved, he would find out who had financed it and inquire what they would pay a faro dealer with his style.
He glanced at the other three again, with disdain. He would win anyone's money, that was his profession, but when it came to high stakes, to life or death, he favored the company of his peers.
The streetcar halted. The conductor pointed across the street. "Con-nee," he said.
"Thank you."
Books attempted to stand and lift the crimson pillow with him so that he would not have to stoop for it, but could not. When on his feet, he bent at the knees, picked it up, and took it to the forward platform, to the conductor.
"For you," he said.
The Mexican did not get his intention. Books gestured at the stool.
"Ah!" The conductor accepted the pillow, placed it on the stool, and sat down again, smiling. "Es muy grande! Gracias, señor!"
Books turned and moved back through the car, toward the exit platform. But rather than passing the lovely girl in lavender and white, he paused and removed his hat. He swayed.
"Will you rise, ma'am?" he asked.
She had been conscious of his admiration during the ride, had watched him as he presented the pillow to the conductor, but she looked at him bravely now for the first time, at his face, the face from which a child had fled, and drew breath. She rose. Her eyes filled.
She knew.
He took her in his arms and kissed her long and ardently. Men in their hosts, young and old, innocent and corrupt, had paid her for her favors, but she put her arms about him of her own free will as though to give him what she could in recompense for this, the last gift she guessed, of his manhood.
He let her go and walked drunkenly to the rear of the car, to the platform, and put on his hat, and stepped down, one and, two and, felt the ageless earth beneath his boots.
It was three fifty-eight.
He thought: I will make them wait on me a little. It is such a beautiful afternoon.
He leaned against a brick building, one of the largest in town, the recently constructed Myar Opera House. Beside him, a framed poster announced a concert that night by the El Paso Symphony Orchestra. The program would include, so he read, selections from Balfe's Bohemian Girl, Mascagni's Intermezzo Sinfonico, and Von Flotow's overture to Stradella.
He thought: When I walk in there, they will think there is a lot of me to kill. They will be wrong. Tarrant owns my horse and saddle. The barber has bought my hair. The secondhand man will have my watch and such, my guns will go to the boy. The photographer has my likeness. My cancer, and my corpse, belong to Beckum. That reporter did not get my reputation, though. Serepta cannot sell my name. And the reverend went away without my soul. So I have kept my valuables. They will not be wrong after all, then, the three of them. There is still a lot of me to kill.
Down the street, hiding in the doorway of a small cigar manufactory, Gillom Rogers waited, watched. Now and then he touched a trousers pocket as though to reassure himself that the money was there.
A bolt of pain sheered through Books from hip to hip. He was stricken by a paroxysm of such terrible intensity that his knees buckled, that he clawed at the brick behind him with his fingers to keep from falling, that he clenched his jaws to keep from screaming in the street. Counterpoint to the pain, all four lines played through his mind in perfect harmony and tempo: "Weave a circle round him thrice/And close your eyes with holy dread/For he on honey-dew hath fed/And drunk the milk of Paradise."
He thought: Well. I am fifty-one years old and I have finally learned some poetry.
He checked his watch again. It was four-two. He put his back to the brick and stood erect and brought both arms close in to his ribs, and closer, until he had the fellowship of the guns. Then, through the sunlight of his pride, under the shadow of his agony, J. B. Books crossed the street and entered the Constantinople.
He thought: Let them gawp. Let them conclude you do not give a good God damn.
It was the right place. The Constantinople had more class than any saloon he had ever seen, and would deserve its fame. The barroom was long, with a ceiling twenty feet high, and suspended from it were four three-bladed fans which revolved slowly, cooling the room on this warm day, and which were powered, probably, by electricity. The floor was a mosaic of green and white tiles. The woodwork—bar, tables, chairs, wine booths—was mahogany bleached to a reddish hue and carved with intricate Moorish designs. The bar was perhaps thirty feet long, and fronting the mirror behind it, on shelves, were tiers of sparkling glassware sized and shaped for every libation, for whiskey and beer, for champagne and wine and liqueurs. The cash register gleamed, as did the bar rail, as did the cuspidors, as did the light fixtures, which were grapes of glass. Each table top was inset with shell and beadwork in stars and crescent moons. Beyond the bar, this side of the archway, was a billiard table. Inside the doors, to the right, was a mahogany booth, with a door of frosted glass and gilt lettering: "Telephone."
It was the murals, however, the scope and subject matter of the murals, which stunned. They covered three walls, that over the bar, over the archway, and the full wall to the left. They depicted, in colors that whooped, in perspective that was fantastically out of whack, exotic scenes on the far side of exotic seas. There were domes and mosques and caravans of camels and pyramids and horsemen waving scimitars and minarets and palm trees and Sphinxes and tombs and dancing girls with navels as big as the tops of tin cans and boobs as pendant as hams hung on hooks and tents and oases on burning sands and dhows on rivers and dusty battles. The Constantinople had class, all right, but Books was in some doubt about the murals. They appeared to be the masterwork of a frontier genius who had been paid in alcohol or opium and who, by the time he had slap-dashed his visions and laid down his brush, had become either an addict or an irredeemable drunk. They spit in the rational eye. They kicked art in the ass.