TWENTY-EIGHT

The attack at the cockfight had given me a new respect for the lengths Robillard was willing to go to when riled. And since I intended to rile him even more than I already had, I decided a little protection was in order. There were two pawnshops in town. At the smaller I found a Colt Pocket Auto much like Little’s. I also bought a kidskin shoulder holster at a local saddle shop. A phone call to Colonel Garrison resulted in his contacting the local district judge, a thin, acerbic, sixtyish man named Colin Striker who was part of the Manlow Rhodes faction in town. The next day Judge Striker quietly issued me a permit to carry a pistol.

When the next Friday rolled around, Della and I were once again reduced to one car. A bad head gasket put the new Ford wagon into the shop for a few days. It was under warranty, but we were left with only the Lincoln for the weekend. That evening Della dropped me off as usual at the Weilbach, and went on her merry way back home with a stack of books from the library. The first hand had just been dealt with four players sitting in when I came in the room. I stood and watched for a few moments amid the low murmur of voices and the occasional soft rustle of money at the table.

Poker is the stuff of legends, though its real history is as alluring as any of the folklore that surrounds it. A primitive version of the game was first known in Italy during the Renaissance, and some form of it was brought to this continent by Italian immigrants who came to New Orleans not long after the War of 1812. From there it spread via the Mississippi River, which became the mother vein of American poker. The first modern version played on this continent was the game of draw, and the earliest record of it dates back to 1829. That mention is a notation in a traveling Englishman’s diary that recounts the popularity of the game on Mississippi River boats a full three decades before the Civil War. Draw retained its ascendancy throughout the nineteenth century, and it was the game of choice in the days of the old West. It was two pair in a hand of draw poker—aces and eights, the famous Dead Man’s Hand—that Wild Bill Hickock was holding when the fatal shot was fired into his back. Around 1900 five-card stud became popular, and there is no doubt in my mind that it was invented by professional card players. Draw is still the best game for novices because it reveals very little about a player’s holdings. The advantage of stud to a professional is that ultimately he knows four of your cards and sees your hand as it unfolds. He also sees your reaction to those cards. While you have the same information about his hand, his superior card skill and his experience at reading people put him in a far better position to make use of the knowledge. All the other card games popular today, games like Omaha hi-lo, Texas hold ’em and Mexican sweat, were concocted by skilled card men with an eye to their own advantage.

There are two things the novice needs to remember about professional poker players. In the first place the professional is in the game to win money. This seems like a truism, but beginners often overlook the fact that winning the most money is not the same thing as winning the most pots or the biggest pots. Good poker players know that the player who steadily wins more than his share of the small and medium-sized hands will come out ahead of the player who wins only a couple of big, dramatic hands during the course of a game. Good players must also learn to bet by the odds and control their own urges to plunge and gamble against the percentages. The second thing the novice needs to understand is that the true pro has learned to assess the game with his head rather than with his hormones, and that he can usually resist the normal human urge to see a hand of poker as the Gunfight at the OK Corral. While he may have pride in his ability (or her ability; some women are very fine players), he is not humiliated by temporary setbacks and sees no disgrace in folding when the odds are against him. One other thing I have noticed about professionals is that eventually most of them will lose their edge and start to get sloppy. While three hours of poker played each Friday night can be thrilling for anyone, sitting at the table hour after hour, several days a week for years on end can become fully as boring as running a punch press in a factory or practicing tax law. When a card player reaches that point, he either finds it difficult to maintain his level of concentration or he begins to knowingly make risky bets in order to add spice to his life. The latter had happened to me in the last few years before I sat down at the game at the Weilbach.

In my best days I was in the upper echelon of the second rank of good poker players in this country. What kept me out of the top ranks wasn’t any lack of skill or knowledge but the fact that I’ve always been more of a gambler than a professional card player. A true gambler, no matter what his level of skill at the table, loves risk and seeks it out for its accompanying thrills. In contrast, the professional card player hopes to minimize risk at all times, and prefers to live a life no more exciting than that of the CPA who does your taxes. Since coming to the Weilbach I had done consistently well, but this was more a testimony to my skill than to my temperament. Other than a couple of exceptions like Wilburn Rasco, I was simply a far better card player than the other men in the game. But my tendency to plunge was a positive advantage to me in confronting Clifton Robillard. All I had to do was keep my head above water financially and go head-to-head with him as often as possible in order to unnerve and rattle him.

Robillard was already at the table when I arrived that Friday night, and his eyes were wary and guarded as I walked in the room. I had decided to maintain my pretense that the attack in the parking lot had never happened. Once he saw that I wasn’t going to bite him, he relaxed and even preened a little. News of the bet at the cockfight had spread quickly, and he quickly made a good-natured show of paying me. The man had swallowed his initial humiliation and was now basking in the renown of losing the town’s biggest wager in recent memory.

After I’d taken my money and shaken hands all around, I gave the porter a hundred dollars for my part of the rent. I also threw a second hundred into the jenny. Zip Zimmerman had the deal and he called a hand of seven-card stud. I pitched in the ante and we began. I was a few hundred down an hour and a half later when Robillard relaxed and became talkative once again. I’d just taken him for about $500 when he folded after the third card in a hand of five-card stud. Besides his statuesque brunette, there were two other young women present in the suite that night, both obvious call girls. They’d come up with Simon Van Horn, who was another consummate womanizer despite having a wife and a couple of children back home in Fillmore. One of the other players had already taken the younger of these girls into a bedroom for an hour’s interlude.

“You don’t ever seem to sample the talents of any of these fine-looking girls,” Robillard said to me.

“No sir, I don’t. I don’t believe in mixing my pleasures, and I come up here to play cards.”

“Speaking of women, that little blonde you are keeping certainly is fine looking.”

I gave Robillard an easy smile, and said, “Della’s not a kept woman. If anybody’s kept in the arrangement, it’s me. She was the one who got us into the oil business.”

“Is that a fact?” he asked.

“It is indeed, and even though Deltex Petroleum is half mine on paper, she’s the brains behind the whole thing.”

“Brains or no, I bet she’s a hot little number in the bedroom,” he said. “A fine-looking girl like that…”

I gave him another smile, this one more patronizing than amused. “Mr. Robillard, do you know what separates human beings from the lower animals?”

“Why, I never gave it much thought, to tell you the truth. I leave that kind of thing to you college boys.”

I nodded and began to shuffle the cards. “Then let me enlighten you on the subject. Some scientists think it’s our use of language. Religious people believe that we have souls and animals don’t. Philosophers claim that we are aware of the nature of death while horses and cats and so forth aren’t, and that this knowledge colors all our actions. Personally, I’m convinced that the main distinction is that we humans have a sense of privacy about our sexual lives that’s lacking in animals. We copulate behind closed doors while monkeys and dogs and chickens go at it anytime and anyplace the urge hits, regardless of who or what is watching. And I imagine that if they could talk, they would discuss it with the same lack of discretion and taste.”

He said nothing more on the subject that evening, but his face reddened, and I could tell that my comments had stung him hard. He reddened even more a few minutes later when I dealt myself a third ten showing against his pair of queens, and it was several hours before he tried to needle me again.

The cards were cold that night. Finally along about midnight he and I went head-on in a hand of seven-card stud in which I lost seventeen hundred dollars. It wasn’t a plunge. I played the odds the same way any good player would have played them, and simply lost the hand to better cards. But it made Robillard voluble and a little curious. “I believe you talk less than any man I ever played with,” he remarked.

“The less you say, the less you give away,” I told him with an easy smile.

He laughed an honest laugh. “I can’t argue with you there, but I like to have fun, and talking is part of the fun to me.”

Needling and humiliating people is part of the fun to you, I thought, but I didn’t say so. Instead, I took the cards and passed the deal to my left. “Oh, I have plenty of fun at the table,” I said. “It just doesn’t take a lot of talk to give it to me.”

On the next hand Zip Zimmerman drew one of his freak combinations, but ran everybody out by betting too aggressively. The game took a break and the other players rose from their seats, leaving Robillard and me at the table.

“Have you always been a professional gambler?” he asked.

“I’ve never really been a full-time pro, Mr. Robillard. But I understand what you mean, and the answer is no.”

“What else have you done?”

“Well, after college and law school I put in four years in the navy, then in the late ’30s I worked for the State Department for a while.”

“Really?” he asked with interest. “What did you do at State?”

“My title was assistant to the attaché for cultural affairs, but the truth is that I was little more than a glorified translator at our embassy in Berlin.”

“Germany?” he asked with surprise. “You served in Germany?”

I nodded and gave him a cryptic smile.

“And you speak the German language?”

“Oh yes. Fluently. As a matter of fact I accompanied Ambassador Wilson to the famous dinner party where Hermann Göring gave Charles Lindbergh that medal. It was called the Service Cross of the German Eagle. Pompous-sounding thing, wasn’t it? And later on I played poker with Göring.”

He couldn’t keep himself from asking the next question. No one ever can who hears the story. “Was he any good?”

“Terrible,” I said with a laugh. “But he thought he was an absolute master at the game. You see, he never played with anybody but his own subalterns, and they always let him win. I imagine they were afraid not to, but I wasn’t afraid, and I trimmed him good. I must admit that he lost with good grace, though he jokingly accused me of being a Jew because I played so carefully. You see, it was part of the Nazi race theory that each race would play cards a certain way, and play the violin in a certain fashion, and I suppose even fornicate in some racially determined manner. And Göring believed it to the hilt. Or at least he claimed to. Utter nonsense, of course. A Jewish friend of mine in the navy was such a reckless player that he made Zimmerman look like the soul of prudence.”

“Are you?” he asked.

“What? Jewish? Hardly. Scots-Irish and Cajun in equal proportions.”

He liked that. Now he could start needling me with the coon-ass jokes. But I didn’t care. I intended to have the last laugh. I’d planted a little seed with my story about Göring, and the next time we met I intended to tell him about my meeting with the Butcher of Prague.

*   *   *

I broke off and went to bed at 4:00 A.M., then slept until noon, and then went down to the restaurant for lunch. I had just returned to the suite when the porter told me that Della had called while I was out. I dialed our number and got her on the third ring.

“Why don’t you tear yourself away early tonight?” she asked.

“Sure. Something special?”

“I’m always something special, you dunce,” she said with a velvety laugh. “Be in front of the hotel at exactly nine this evening.” I heard the soft click of the connection being broken as she gently placed the receiver back on the cradle.

The game went on through that afternoon without heating up. I managed to slowly recoup my losses from Friday night, and by six that evening I was even a few hundred dollars ahead. I’d bluffed Simon Van Horn out of a good pot with a pair of nines showing and nothing in the hole, and a short time later I had the satisfaction of plunging heavily and seeing Robillard fold a hand that he should have stayed with. The odds had been in his favor, even if the cards weren’t, before he lost his nerve and flipped his cards over after looking at his stake with a little frown of concern. I knew then that my information had been correct, and that he was in a cash bind despite his millions.

A little before nine I pocketed my winnings and said good-bye. I was waiting at the curb when Della pulled up in front of the Weilbach in the Lincoln. The top was down and she was wearing her mink.

“So you found it,” I said as I climbed into the car. “I intended to surprise you.”

“I knew you did, but I thought I would just turn the tables and surprise you instead.”

“Isn’t it a little hot tonight to be wearing a fur coat?”

“Not if you don’t have anything on under it,” she said perkily.

“I don’t believe you,” I told her with a grin.

By then we were only a block from the hotel and Saturday night traffic was fairly heavy. She reached down and undid two buttons, then flipped the coat open. There she sat at the wheel of that big car, wearing nothing but a pair of kidskin pumps, her cute little rimless glasses and the mink.

*   *   *

Much later that evening we sat in the kitchen finishing off a midnight supper of lamb chops, scalloped potatoes and Champagne. Della was in her black silk robe and I wore a pair of ragged old pajamas.

“And now dessert,” she said, and rose from the table to retrieve a bowl of sugared strawberries and a canister of whipped cream from the refrigerator. A home-baked pound cake emerged from the cabinet, and a moment later she was building me a strawberry shortcake. Meanwhile, I opened a second bottle of Champagne and filled both our glasses.

“I’m tired of going to work every morning,” she said as she sat back down.

“Then let Mona handle the office for a while.”

She shook her head. “No, I want out from under the whole thing. She and Andy would like to buy the abstract company from us.”

“It’s your call, sweetheart,” I said. “As far as I’m concerned you can give it to them.”

“I thought about that, but I decided not to. They feel too obligated to us already. If we make it a business deal, we can all stay friends in the future.”

“I’ll sign whatever you want me to. But isn’t the abstract game going to play out after the whole field gets leased up?”

She looked at me with an amused smile. “You really don’t know much about the oil business, do you?”

I smiled across at her and slowly shook my head. “No, I don’t. Never claimed to, either.”

“Well, the truth is that it’s just going to get even better as these holdings start to get into production and begin to split and divide as operators make assignments to borrow against their royalties. The company will set those two kids up for years to come. Besides, I’ve lent them a little money along the way, and they’ve been able to pick up a few leases of their own.”

“So sell it to them. Just show me where to sign.”

Thus ended Della’s short foray into the business world. In a period of four months she’d secured both our futures, and I’ve always wondered what she could have done with an MBA. Probably she’d have spent fifty years as a midechelon executive for a big Manhattan company, and then retired with a gold pin and a sheaf of windy testimonials.