Billiards at Half-Past Nine Read online

  “Good heavens, good heavens, what a weed that must have been, what a weed!” The old man snuffed along the walls, poked his nose down close to the desk, put on his hat and a couple of minutes later was back with the tobacconist whose customer he’d been for the past fifty years. The two of them stood for a bit in the doorway sniffing, then dashed about the office like agitated dogs. The tobacconist crawled under the desk where a whole cloud of cigar smoke had lingered intact. He clapped his hands, gave a triumphant laugh and said, “Yes, Your Excellency, it was a Partagas Eminentes.”

  “And you can get them for me?”

  “Absolutely. I keep them in stock.”

  “God help you if the aroma isn’t exactly the same!”

  Once more the tobacconist sniffed and said, “Partagas Eminentes, I’ll bet my neck on it, Excellency. Four marks apiece. Would you like some?”

  “One, my dear Kolbe, just one. My grandfather earned four marks a week, and I respect the dead. I have my sentimentalities, as you know. Good Lord, my son has smoked twenty thousand cigarettes in here, and that weed knocks them all for a loop!”

  She felt highly honored, having the old fellow smoke his cigar in her company, leaning back in his son’s easy chair. The chair was too big for him, and so she eased a cushion behind his back, then listened, while she went on with that most impeccable of occupations, sticking on stamps. Slowly she drew the backs of a green, red, blue Heuss across the sponge, and stuck them neatly on at the upper right-hand corner of envelopes that would travel to Schilgenauel, Gludum and Blessenfeld. Just so, while the old boy gave himself up to a pleasure it seemed he must have been vainly seeking for the past fifty years.

  “Good heavens,” he said, “at last I know what a good cigar is. Had to wait all this time for it, dear child, until my eightieth birthday. No, no, don’t make any fuss, don’t get excited. Of course I’m eighty today! Wasn’t it you who ordered flowers for me from my son? Beautiful, thank you. We’ll get to my birthday later, all right? You have a cordial invitation to my party tonight at the Cafe Kroner. But tell me something, my dear Leonore, why in all the fifty years—fifty-one, to be precise—I’ve been a customer there didn’t anyone try to sell me a cigar like this? Am I stingy, perhaps? Never have been. You know I haven’t. Used to smoke ten-cent cigars when I was young, then twenty-centers when I was earning a little more money, and then sixty-centers, year after year. Tell me, dear girl, what do you suppose they’re like, people who walk around with a dollar corona stuck in their mouth? Fellows who pop in and out of offices with it as if it were a nickel stogey? I wonder what they’re like, people who smoke up three times my grandfather’s weekly wage between breakfast and lunch. Mmm, making an old codger like me go dry in the mouth and crawl round his son’s office like a beagle in a hedge. How’s that? One of Robert’s schoolmates? Ministerial councillor, you say, director, manager? Even a cabinet minister! Then I must certainly know the chap. Defense department? Weapons?”

  Suddenly mist came into his eyes. A trap door slammed shut. The old man was drifting back in time, sinking back into the first, the third, the sixth decade of his life. He was burying one of his children again. Which one could it be? Johanna? Heinrich? Over whose white coffin was he scattering a handful of earth, strewing flowers? Were the tears in his eyes the tears of 1942, when he got the news of Otto’s death? Was he weeping at the asylum door behind which his wife had vanished? The tears, while his cigar, forgotten on the ash tray, went up in delicate wreaths of smoke, were from 1902. He was burying his sister Charlotte, for whom he had saved and saved, gold coin by coin, so that things might go better for her. The coffin slid down, held by creaking ropes, while the school-children sang, ‘Watchman, whither has the swallow flown?’ Chirpy children’s voices intruded into the perfectly appointed office; the aged voice sang back over half a century. Now only that October morning in 1902 was real. Fog on the Lower Rhine. Damp fog, coiling in sarabande across the wet beet-fields, the crows in the willow trees scrawking like Mardi Gras noisemakers. While Leonore drew a red Heuss over the damp sponge. Thirty years before she was born peasant children had sung, ‘Watchman, whither has the swallow flown?’ Now a green Heuss, drawn across the little sponge. Careful. Letters to Hochbret went at local rates.

  When this mood came over him, the old man had a blind look. She would have liked then and there to rush off to the florist’s and buy him a lovely bouquet. But she was afraid to leave him alone. He stretched out his hands; cautiously she pushed the ash tray toward him. He took up his cigar, put it in his mouth, looked at Leonore, and gently said, “You mustn’t think I’m crazy, child.”

  Yes, she was fond of him. Regularly, on her afternoons off, he came to the office to pick her up, so she could take pity on his carelessly kept books, over there on the other side of the street, high above the printing works, where he lived in a “studio” dating back to his salad days. There he kept documents checked and approved by income tax officials whose modest gravestones had already toppled over before she had learned to write. Credits in English pounds, dollar holdings, plantation shares in El Salvador. Up there she rummaged through account settlements, deciphered handwritten statements from banks long since failed, read old wills bequeathing legacies to children by now outlived forty years. ‘And to my son Heinrich exclusively I leave the two estates of Stehlinger’s Grotto and Goerlinger’s Lodge, having noted in his nature that air of repose, I may even say that delight in seeing things grow, which I take to be the prerequisite of a farmer’s life.…’

  “Here,” the old man cried, brandishing his cigar, “right here in this very office, I dictated a will to my father-in-law the night before I had to leave for the army. While I was dictating it the youngster was sleeping up there. Next morning he came with me to the station, kissed me on the cheek with his soft child’s lips. He was only seven then. But none of them, Leonore, not one ever got what I gave. It all came back to me, properties and bank accounts, dividends and rents. I was never able to give anything away. It took my wife to do that. People actually got what she gave away. And nights, when I lay beside her, I often used to hear her muttering—long and soft, hours on end, like water purling from her mouth—‘whywhywhy?’ ”

  Again the old man wept. He was in uniform this time, a captain in the Engineer Reserves, Privy Councillor Heinrich Faehmel, home on compassionate leave to bury his son, age seven. The Kilbian vault closed round the white coffin. Damp, gloomy masonry, yet bright as the sun’s rays the golden figures marking the year of his death. 1917. Robert, dressed in black velvet, waited out in the carriage.

  Leonore let the stamp fall, a violet one, not trusting herself to stick it on Schrit’s letter. The carriage horses were snorting outside the cemetery gate, while Robert Faehmel, age two, was allowed to hold the reins. Black leather cracked at the edges and the figures, 1917, freshly gilt, shining brighter than sunshine.…

  “What’s he up to? What does he do with himself, my son, the only one I have left, Leonore? What does he do in the Prince Heinrich Hotel every morning from nine-thirty to eleven? I remember how we used to let him watch the way they tied the nosebags onto the horses. What’s he up to? Can you tell me that, Leonore?”

  Hesitantly she picked up the violet stamp and softly said, “I don’t know what he does there, I really don’t.”

  The old fellow put the cigar in his mouth and leaned back in the armchair, smiling—as if nothing at all had passed between them. “What do you say, Leonore, to working for me regularly afternoons? I’ll come and pick you up. We can have lunch together at noon, then from two to four or five, if you want, you can help get me straightened out up there. What do you say to that, my dear?”

  She nodded, said “Yes.” She still didn’t trust herself to draw the violet Heuss across the sponge and stick it on Schrit’s letter. Someone in the post office would take the letter out of the box and the machine would stamp “Sept. 6, 1958, 1 P.M.” on it. And there sat the old man, come to the end of his seventies, starting his eighties. />
  “Yes, yes,” she said.

  “Then it’s a date?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked into his thin face, the face in which for years she had vainly sought a likeness to his son. Politeness, it seemed, was the only trait common to the Faehmels. But with the old man it was more ceremonious, decorative, the courtesy of the old school, almost a grandezza. Nothing mathematical in it like the politeness of his son, who made a point of dryness and only by the glimmer in his gray eyes indicated he might be capable of more warmth.

  The old man, now, he actually blew his nose, chewed his cigar and sometimes complimented her on her hairdo, her complexion. His suit at least showed some sign of wear and tear, his tie was always a little crooked, on his fingers ink stains, on his lapels eraser rubbings. He carried pencils soft and hard in his vest pocket and occasionally he would take a sheet of paper from his son’s desk, sketch an angel on it, an Agnus Dei, a tree, the portrait of one of his contemporaries, hurrying by outside. And sometimes he gave her money to go and buy cake, asked her to make a second cup of coffee, making her happy that for once she could plug in the electric percolator for someone beside herself. That was the kind of office life she was used to, making coffee, buying cakes and being told stories with a proper beginning and end. Stories about the life lived back there in the apartment wing of the building, about the dead who had died there. Back there for centuries the Kilbs had tried their hand at vice and virtue, sin and salvation, had been city treasurers, notaries, mayors and cathedral canons. Back there in the air still lingered some intimation of the acrid prayers of would-be prelates, of the melancholy sins of Kilbian spinsters and the penances of pious Kilbian youths. All in that gloomy part of the house back there, where now, on quiet afternoons, a pale, dark-haired girl did her homework and waited for her father to come home. Or was he at home afternoons? Two hundred and ten bottles of wine emptied between the beginning of May and the last of August. Did he drink them all by himself? With his daughter? With ghosts? All of it unreal, less real than the ash-blond hair of the office girl who fifty years ago had sat there in her place, keeping watch over legal secrets.

  “Yes, she sat right there, my dear Leonore, on exactly the same spot where you’re sitting now. Her name was Josephine.” Had the old man said nice things about her hair, too, and her complexion?

  The old man laughed and pointed to the proverb hanging up on the wall above his son’s desk, solitary relic from times past, painted in white letters on mahogany. “Their right hand is full of bribes,” it said. A motto of Kilbian as well as Faehmel incorruptibility.

  “My two brothers-in-law, point of fact, didn’t go much for the law. Last male descendants of the line. One chose the Uhlans, with their lances and fancy uniforms, the other just liked to kill time. But both of them, the officer and the loafer, were in the same regiment, and fell in the same attack on the same day. They rode into machine-gun fire at Erby-le-Huette, and there went the name of Kilb. And took their vices with them into the grave, the void. Like so many scarlet flowers, at Erby-le-Huette.”

  The old man was happy when he got white mason’s mortar on his pants and could ask her to brush him off. Often he carried fat rolls of drawings under his arm, and whether he had taken them from the files or was actually working on an assignment, she never knew.

  He sipped at his coffee, said how nice it was, pushed the cake dish over to her, dragged on his cigar. The reverential look came back on his face. “One of Robert’s schoolmates? I really should know him. You’re sure his name wasn’t Schrella? Positive? No, no, ridiculous, he’d never smoke cigars like this. Never. And you sent him to the Prince Heinrich? That’ll make trouble, my dear Leonore, there’ll be a row. He doesn’t like it, my son Robert, when people upset his routine. He was like that even as a boy. Perfectly nice, intelligent, polite, everything just so. But if you overstepped a certain mark, he blew up. Quite capable of committing murder. I was always a little scared of him. You, too? Oh, he won’t do anything to you, girl, not for what you did. Be sensible. Come on, now, let’s go and eat. We’ll celebrate your new job and my birthday. Don’t do anything foolish. If he’s already raised the deuce over the phone, then it’s over and done with. Pity you can’t remember that fellow’s name. I had no idea he still kept up with his old school chums. Let’s go. Come on. Today’s Saturday, and he won’t mind if you close a bit early. Leave that to me.”

  St. Severin’s was striking twelve. She counted the envelopes quickly, twenty-three, gathered them up, got a good hold on them. Had the old man really been there only half an hour? The tenth chime of the twelve was ringing.

  “No, thank you,” she said. “I won’t bother to put on my coat. And please, not to The Lion.”

  Only half an hour. The presses had stopped their stamping. But the wild boar bled on.

  2

  By now it had become a habit with the desk clerk, almost a ritual, second nature, every morning at half-past nine sharp to take down the key from the board, to feel the light touch of the dry, well-kept hand as it took the key from his, to glance at the pale, severe face with the red scar on the bridge of the nose. And then, with a hint of a smile only his own wife might have noticed, to look thoughtfully after Faehmel as he ignored the elevator boy’s beckoned invitation, walked upstairs, lightly running the billiard room key across the brass balusters. Five, six, seven times the key made a ringing sound like a xylophone with only one tone. Then, half a minute later, Hugo, older of the two bellboys, came along and asked, “The usual?” Where-upon the desk clerk nodded, knowing that Hugo would now go to the restaurant, get a double cognac and a carafe of water, and disappear into the billiard room upstairs until eleven o’clock.

  The desk clerk sensed something ominous in this habit of playing billiards every morning from half-past nine till eleven, always in the same bellhop’s company. Disaster or vice. Against vice there was a safeguard. Discretion. Discretion went with the room when you hired it. Discretion and money went together, abscissa and ordinate. Eyes that looked yet did not see, ears that heard yet did not hearken. Against disaster, however, no protection existed. Not all potential suicides could be spotted at the door. Indeed, were they not all potential suicides? It came, disaster, in with the suntanned actor and his seven pieces of luggage. Took the room key with a laugh. As soon as the bags were stacked, slid the pistol from his overcoat pocket, safety catch already off, and blew his brains out. Disaster came sneaking in like something from the grave, in golden shoes, with golden hair and golden teeth, grinning like a skeleton. With ghosts in vain pursuit of pleasure, who left an order for breakfast in their room at half-past ten, hung a ‘Please Do Not Disturb’ card on the outer knob, inside piled suitcases high against the door, swallowed poison pills. And long before the shocked room-service girl dropped the breakfast tray, already it was rumored through the hotel that ‘There’s a body up in Room 12.’ Rumors even spread at night, when late drinkers were slinking from the bar to their rooms and at Room 12 sensed foreboding behind the door. There were even some who could tell the silence of sleep from death’s silence. Disaster. He felt it in the air when he saw Hugo going up to the billiard room at a minute after half-past nine with a double cognac and the water carafe.

  Around this time of day, too, he could ill spare the boy. A tangle of hands formed at his desk, demanding bills, grabbing an assortment of travel folders. At this time of day again and again he caught himself—a few minutes after half-past nine—getting impolite. Right now, to this schoolteacher, of all people, the ninth or tenth person to ask him how to get to the graves of the Roman children. The teacher’s reddish complexion disclosed the fact that she came from the country, her coat and gloves that she lacked the income presumptive in Prince Heinrich guests. He wondered how she happened to be regimented along with these other agitated old biddies, not one of whom felt obliged to inquire after the price of her room. Would she, now tugging self-consciously at her gloves, would she consummate the all-German miracle, against which old Jo
chen had bet ten marks? ‘Show me a German who ever asks how much anything costs before he buys and I’ll give you ten marks.’ No, even she wasn’t going to win him the prize. He calmed himself with an effort, pleasantly explained how to get to the graves of the Roman children.

  Most of them asked straight off for the boy now slated to be in the billiard room for an hour and a half. It was he all of them wanted, to bring their luggage to the foyer, to take it to the airlines coach, to the taxi, to the railroad station. Ill-tempered globetrotters waiting in the foyer for their bills, discussing plane arrivals and departures, all of them wanted ice for their whiskey from Hugo, him alone to strike a match for the cigarette dangling unlit in their mouth, just to see how well trained he was. Hugo alone they wished to thank with a wave of languid hand. Only when Hugo was on the scene did their faces quiver in mysterious spasms, impatient faces, whose owners could hardly wait to rush, carrying their nasty tempers with them, to distant corners of the earth. They were champing at the bit, longing to ascertain in the mirrors of Persian or Upper Bavarian hotels the exact shade of their tan. Shrill female voices were calling for lost articles. It was ‘Hugo, my ring,’ ‘Hugo, my handbag,’ ‘Hugo, my lipstick.’ All of them expected Hugo to dash to the elevator, noiselessly ascend to Room 19, Room 32, Room 46 to search for ring, handbag and lipstick. And there was old Madame Musch, leading in her mongrel, which, after lapping up milk, gorging on honey and turning up his nose at fried eggs, would have to be taken out for a walk, so he might relieve his doggy needs, and revive his fading sense of smell, on kiosks, parked cars and waiting buses. Obviously only Hugo could cater to this dog’s spiritual needs. Then there was Oma Blessieck, who spent a month every year at the Prince Heinrich, while she visited her children and evermore-numerous grandchildren. Though she had hardly set foot in the place, already she was after Hugo. “Is he still here, that nice little young one who looks like an altar boy? The thin one with the auburn hair who’s so pale and always looks so serious?” The idea was to have Hugo read the local newspaper to her while she ate her breakfast, while she licked honey, drank her milk and did not turn up her nose at fried eggs. As he read, the old girl, hearing the names of streets familiar from her childhood, would look up ecstatically. Accident near Memorial Field. Robbery on Frisian Street. “I had pigtails this long when I used to go roller-skating there—this long, Hugo.” The old girl was frail, but tough. Was it for Hugo’s sake she had flown across the great ocean? “What?” she said, disappointed. “Hugo won’t be free till eleven?”