Highbinders

by Ross Thomas

  “English Eddie Apex,” Cagle said.

  “Good old Eddie.”

  “Eddie said to give you the run of the place.”

  “Did he say anything about credit?”

  “He said you could use your own money. He also said that there’s somebody here that you might want to meet. Robin Styles.”

  I nodded. “Is he here?”

  “He’s always here,” Cagle said.

  “Does he win or lose?”

  Cagle made his big hand go palm up then palm down a few times, indicating that Robin Styles, the man who owned what might turn out to be a three-million-pound sword, did a little of both. But mostly lost.

  “How much is he into you?” I said.

  “We don’t give credit.”

  I sighed. “Why do you still try to lie to me, Wes, when you know that I know better?”

  “It’s privileged information.”

  “Funny, but I just happened to remember something,” I said. “I remember a story about what happened between you and Meyer in the Bahamas. It’s a hell of a funny story. I don’t think too many people know it. I wonder if the guys who own this place have heard it?”

  Wes Cagle looked around the bar. “They don’t know about the Bahamas. All they know about is Vegas. I was strictly kosher in Vegas.”

  “They don’t have to know about the Bahamas then, do they?”

  Cagle let me look at his new teeth again, but he wasn’t feeling smilish. “Styles’s into us for forty-three thousand pounds. His cutoff is fifty and from the way he’s going he might get there tonight.”

  “What’s his game?”

  “Seven-card. Nothing else.”

  “Why’re you so lavish with the credit?”

  “We’re betting on the come,” Cagle said, staring at me. “That’s what you’re betting on, isn’t it?”

  “Sure,” I said. “We go-betweens are just like gambling hells. All heart. You’ve got a guarantor, Wes, or you wouldn’t let Styles bet a dime. Who it is, Eddie Apex?”

  “Eddie might have mentioned something about it. That the kid would be okay for up to fifty thou. He also mentioned that you’d want to meet him.”

  “I’d rather watch him play poker for a while first.”

  “Uh-huh. Eddie said you’d want to do that, too.”

  “What kind of game is it?”

  “Table stakes.”

  “Five hundred get me in?”

  “Five hundred what?”

  “Dollars.”

  “No, but you could get in for a thousand bucks maybe, if you still play that same tight-assed poker of yours.”

  “You take a check?”

  “Sure, Phil,” he said, smiling for the first time as though he meant it. “Traveler’s checks.”

  I took out my book of American Express fifties and started signing away. When I had signed enough, I tore them out and handed them to Wes Cagle. “The table will give you your chips,” he said. “I’ll point Styles out to you.”

  “Okay.”

  “One more thing, Phil.”

  “What?”

  He smiled again, another happy one. “I hope you lose every fucking cent.”

  Chapter Twelve

  I HAD STAYED IN my room at the Hilton until ten forty-five that night waiting for somebody to call and tell me where I should bring £100,000. When they didn’t, I had walked down to Shields on Curzon Street to take a look at Robin Styles, the young man who owned an old sword that might turn out to be worth a few million pounds.

  I had been looking at him for almost five hours now across the green baize of the horseshoe-shaped table. I had decided that since he talked like a twit, drank like a twit, and played poker like a twit, he must be a twit. It was an opinion I was not to change until it was almost too late.

  We were playing seven-card stud and the house dealt. There were six of us playing: Styles, a German from Düsseldorf, another Englishman, an American from Dallas, me, and a London type whom I took to be a shill because he looked bored out of his mind and at the stakes we were playing for, it’s hard to be bored if it’s your very own money that’s being won and lost.

  “Mr. St. Ives,” the man from Dallas said. “I do believe you’re tryin’ to run another shitty on us, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

  “No need to apologize,” I said. “Just bet.”

  I had been running shitties for the past hour, betting extravagantly on nothing and getting caught at it and betting the same on kings full, which is a pretty fair hand even in seven-card stud, and suckering them all in. I was better than even, and now that I had done my advertising, I was ready to play some mean poker, which is the only way to play it, especially seven-card stud, a game that I had always detested.

  I had paired fours on the first two down cards, hit another four on the third up card, and caught the final four buried on the last card down. The German I figured for a high straight, Styles for a flush, and the Texan for a full house. The shill had folded as had the other player who, apropos of nothing, had suddenly announced that he was from Manchester. We had all congratulated him.

  The Texan bet first because he had the only pair showing, queens. He bet thirty pounds and everybody called, but when it got around to me I raised him a hundred. Although I had absolutely nothing showing, from the look in the eyes of the man from Dallas, I could see that he had felt the sandbag fall. A superb professional gambler would simply have yawned and folded his full house. A gifted amateur probably would have called and let it go at that. A good Saturday night player, riding his luck, would have raised me a hundred pounds and that’s what the Dallasonian did. I suppose you call the citizens of Dallas Dallasonians. Or Dallasites. I’ve never really thought about it.

  The German, who had been a cool player up until now, fidgeted in his seat, said shit in French, and folded. Robin Styles, who may have been one of the ten worst poker players I’ve ever seen, raised the Texan’s bet by another hundred pounds. This time I dumped the whole truckload of sand on them. I had a little more than five hundred pounds in chips sitting in front of me so I counted them methodically into the pot.

  “I’ll see the two hundred raise and raise three hundred,” I said.

  The Texan stared at me. After a while he said, “If you were from London, Mr. St. Ives, I just might believe you and cut and run. But since you’re from New York, and everybody knows that folks from New York’ll lie like snakes, well, I’m just obliged to call.” He shoved in his chips.

  I looked at Robin Styles. “I’m afraid I really don’t believe you either, Mr. St. Ives,” he said and counted his chips into the pot. It wiped him out, which was what I had been waiting for.

  “No raises?” I said.

  “No raises,” said the man from Dallas.

  I flipped over my hole cards. “Four fours.”

  “Mighty fine hand,” the Texan said and tossed his cards to the dealer.

  “Jolly good,” Styles said. As I’ve mentioned, he sometimes seemed to talk like a twit.

  I estimated that there was close to three thousand pounds in the pot. I shoved it toward the dealer and said, “Have these cashed in for me, will you, please? And take twenty pounds for your trouble.”

  “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.”

  “You could play poker for a living.”

  I shook my head. “Poker’s hard work, if you want to make a living at it. I don’t much care for hard work.”

  “I don’t play very well, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “You think I could learn?”

  I studied him for a moment. “If you learned how to play well, you probably wouldn’t like it, and you’d quit.”

  He took another swallow of Scotch. “I’ve tried to quit.”

  “Couldn’t?”

  He shook his head. “Compulsion, I suppose.” He shrugged. “Perhaps I should take your advice and learn how to play well so I could quit.”

  “It’s hard work, as I said. You have to learn the odds, learn to memorize what cards have been played, read the other players, and wait. Waiting is what makes it dull.”

  “You make the cure sound worse than the disease.�
�

  “It might be in your case. There aren’t any halfway houses for compulsive gamblers. There’s no tapering off. You either quit cold or you keep on gambling until it’s all gone and you take something that doesn’t belong to you so that you can gamble one last game and then they catch you and put you away where it’s not so easy to gamble anymore. I’ve never heard of any compulsive gamblers dying either rich or old.”

  Robin Styles poured another two ounces of Scotch into his glass. “I saw a doctor about it a few times. A psychiatrist. He was a Jungian, I believe.”

  “He’d be supportive anyway.”

  “We didn’t get anywhere.”

  “Well, when they sell that sword of yours you should have enough to keep you in chips for a year or two.”

  “It’s such an awful lot of money, isn’t it?”

  “What did you do for money before?”

  “I was in advertising for a while,” he said. “I was really rather good at it. It was an American firm.” He mentioned the name of a large New York-based agency.

  “That’s a Wellington tie you’re wearing, isn’t it?” I said.

  He looked surprised. “However did you know?”

  “I once did a couple of columns on old school ties. After Wellington, it was Oxford, wasn’t it? Balliol, I’ll bet.”

  “I say, does it show?”

  I shook my head. “No, it’s just that that agency that you used to work for liked Balliol men to handle some of their stuffier accounts. The clients found them soothing.”

  “It was a rather good job.”

  “Why’d you quit?”

  “The usual gambler’s reasons. I got lucky and won as much in a week as I made in a year. So I quit.”

  “How’d you meet Eddie Apex?”

  “Through Wes Cagle at Shields. I was stony. My father had left me this sword collection plus just enough to get through school so I thought I might sell the collection. I’d heard somewhere that such things could be sold on the quiet without the tax people looking over your shoulder. So I asked Cagle if he knew anyone who could help. He said he would see. A few days later I got a call from Eddie Apex. He asked me to meet him at his place and to bring along a representative piece from the collection. So I brought along my father’s favorite. Have you ever been to Eddie’s house?”