PONSONBY LIVED IN A CLASSIC GEORGIAN HOUSE, ON A block in Georgetown which was entirely occupied by houses exactly like his. Architecturally it was probably the most consistent block in America. In that block, the Federal period lived again, in more ways than one. The housemaid who asked for my hat—I had taken to wearing my hat almost constantly, when in Washington—asked for it so quietly that I didn’t hear her. She left me in a small room, in which there was no object that had been made after 1806, except the lightbulbs. Before I could properly assess that fact an equally soft-spoken young secretary appeared. She was dressed in a variant of a middy blouse, a dark skirt, and sensible shoes. The secretary led me upstairs to a large sitting room, where, besides the lightbulbs, the only objects made after 1806 were several hundred truncheons, in polished walnut racks along the walls.
Ponsonby was clearly a perfectionist. His truncheons didn’t dangle. Each rested horizontally, in a grooved rack. Space had been left for a couple of rather smoky portraits of eighteenth-century Ponsonbys, but otherwise the wall space was totally filled with truncheons.
While I was glancing over some of the lesser truncheons, Ponsonby lumbered in. Although not particularly large, he seemed to lumber.
“Good morning,” I said. You certainly have some wonderful truncheons.”
“It is no longer morning and these truncheons are of no consequence whatever,” Ponsonby said. “My better truncheons are in the study, where we will now proceed.”
He was right, too. In the study, in equally well-polished racks, were more than a thousand truncheons. Even knowing nothing about truncheons, I could tell that these were superior.
“I shall come immediately to the point,” Ponsonby said, lighting a cigarette with a somewhat shaky hand. “Do you still possess the Luddite truncheon?”
“Yes I do,” I said.
Ponsonby was silent for a bit. He was not exactly in a trance, but neither did he seem in a happy or a communicative mood. The news that I still had the truncheon, far from cheering him up, seemed to have made him feel even more bleak.
“It’s rather depressing,” he said finally. “I was meant to have that truncheon. Woodrow Eberstadt had no business keeping it all his life, and Lou Lou most emphatically had no business selling it to anyone but me.”
“May I make a point?” I said.
Ponsonby merely looked at me.
“Lou Lou hates your guts,” I said. “That’s the point. You were the last person she would have offered the truncheon to.”
It was true. Lou Lou Eberstadt was a little Boston lady with a face like a dried-up apple, but that had not kept her from expostulating at great length on her dislike of Jake Ponsonby.
“Lou Lou was never stable,” Ponsonby replied, his ego having automatically deflected the criticism.
“The truncheon’s in my car,” I said. “I’ll bring it in and show it to you if you like.”
I brought it in and laid it on a rather wobbly Colonial side table. I had it wrapped in felt, and I unfolded the felt carefully, as if I were about to display the Hope diamond.
As truncheons go, the Luddite truncheon was a crude piece of work. All it had to recommend it was extreme rarity. There were only two like it in America, and half a dozen in England.
Ponsonby didn’t touch it, but as he looked at it he began to shake. There was a little silver bell on the side table and he seized it and rang it violently. Almost immediately the soft-spoken maid appeared with a glass of whiskey on a silver tray. Evidently she had been standing in the next room, waiting for Ponsonby to ring the bell that meant whiskey.
“It’s rather sad,” Ponsonby said. “Woodrow had only a common intelligence. He was wrong repeatedly, throughout his life, and he would never accept correction. Now it has come to this.”
Though I had not observed him drinking, the glass of whiskey was empty. He was still shaking, but more gently.
“I am prepared to offer five thousand dollars for the truncheon, as it sits,” Ponsonby said.
“Come now, Mr. Ponsonby,” I said.
He looked at me contemptuously.
“I do not need to come, now or at any time,” he said. “I am at home, as it happens.”
“I’m sorry I bothered to come by,” I said. “I assumed you were a serious man.”
I stopped, and we considered one another.
“The price is twenty thousand dollars,” I said.
Ponsonby immediately turned red—almost purple, in fact.
“Quite impertinent,” he said. “I made you a fair offer. I want that truncheon.”
“I paid Mrs. Eberstadt more than you offered,” I said. “I think you’re living in the past. Who knows what this truncheon would fetch if I sent it to auction. You do have rivals, you know.”
Ponsonby sniffed. “None who can be taken seriously,” he said. “I have over seventeen hundred truncheons. My rivals, as you flatteringly call them, mainly have only a few hundred.”
“What about the Australian?” I said. “He may not have as many truncheons as you do yet, but I imagine he has more money. I have a feeling he wouldn’t quibble over twenty thousand if I offered him the Luddite truncheon.”
The blood that had just rushed to Ponsonby’s head rapidly drained out, leaving him white and shaky again. He rang the whiskey bell and the maid immediately stepped through the door with another glass of whiskey.
Ponsonby looked at me again, not with renewed respect—he had never had any respect—but with a new wariness. The fact that I knew about Captain Kimbell, the fabulously wealthy Australian who was currently tearing up the truncheon market, clearly shocked him.
“The man is a vulgarian,” he said.
“I know, but he’s very rich.”
“I will raise my offer to six thousand dollars,” Ponsonby said, “though to do so violates principles that have guided me through a long and distinguished career as a collector. As a rule, I never haggle.”
I began to wrap the truncheon with the felt.
“I never haggle either,” I said. “I own the truncheon, and I didn’t invite an offer. I set the prices on the pieces I sell. If you want it for twenty thousand dollars, fine. If not, I’ll check out Captain Kimbell.”
A look not unlike panic appeared on his face. He knew quite well that he would probably never see a Luddite truncheon again, if he let this one get away. He turned away from me and walked over to the window, as if to compose himself.
I waited, and was sorry I did. When Ponsonby turned again his manner had changed completely. He smiled, a terrible smile. After watching him flush and grow pale, this sudden baring of teeth was so unexpected that the hairs stood up on the back of my neck.
Obviously, he had thought his way through the dilemma. I had been ahead of him, now he was ahead of me.
He picked up the phone and in a voice full of the old contempt asked his secretary to bring up a check made out for twenty thousand dollars.
“No thank you,” I said, immediately. “No check.”
Ponsonby was still smiling his horrible smile. He turned it on me, not much affected by my remark.
I picked up the truncheon, which caused him to stop smiling at once.
“What are you doing?” he asked loudly.
“I’m taking my truncheon,” I said, “unless you’re prepared to pay me in cash.”
Ponsonby glared, and he was clearly not a man who was used to having his glares ignored.
“Are you questioning my check?” he asked.
“I think you’re good for twenty thousand dollars, all right,” I said. “But if I took your check you’d stop payment on it before I got around the block. Then I’d have to sue you to get my truncheon back. I’d prefer to be paid in cash.”
At that moment the young secretary walked in with the check on a silver tray. She sat the tray down and left the room.
I tucked the truncheon under my arm, ignoring the check. I felt just slightly apprehensive. For all I knew Ponsonby, like Cyrus Folmsbee, kept a neat Korean assassin in his employ for just such occasions. I took one of my cards out of my shirt pocket—it had a nice little cut of a 1906 Cadillac on it, plus my name and phone numbers and my address in Houston. On the back I wrote the name of my Houston bank, and my account number. I laid the card on the tray beside the check.
“If you object to cash you can make a wire transfer directly to this account,” I said. “Then I’ll deliver the truncheon.”
“Do you think I’m a fool?” he said. “You would have my money but I would not have the truncheon.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be glad to get rid of this truncheon. I’ve owned it long enough. Once I know the money’s in my bank I’ll ring your doorbell and hand it to your secretary.”
Ponsonby continued to glare, but I didn’t stay to be glared at. Three minutes later I was across the Key Bridge and on my way out Wilson Boulevard toward the Little Bomber’s.
Fortunately Boog’s dirty black Lincoln was sitting there, in front of the Double Bubble. He if anyone would know what Ponsonby’s sharklike smile had meant.
I found Boog in a hot tub with Lolly, Janie Lee, and a skinny brunette I didn’t know. Although Boog had probably contracted for all the specials of the day, none of the girls were paying him the slightest attention. Lolly was practicing her shorthand in a little shorthand notebook, Janie Lee was watching a soap on the huge TV, and the brunette was reading a book about running.
“Look, Janie Lee, Jack’s back,” Lolly said, looking up from her shorthand practice.
“This is B.J.,” she added, nodding toward the brunette.
“’lo,” the brunette said.
Boog had been taking a nap, but he groaned and opened his eyes.
“I thought somebody was gonna go get some barbecue,” he said.
“Not right now,” Janie Lee said, her eyes glued to the TV screen.
Boog looked at me unhappily. The moodiness which had suddenly seized him still had him in its grip.
“Get in here and help me with this orgy I’m havin’,” he said. “We can split the cost of watching these girls do their own thangs. Ain’t none of them doing much for my thangs.”
“Oh, Boog, hush,” Lolly said. “We’re all real busy.”
Boog suddenly slid downward, immersing himself in hot water. He stayed under for quite a while.
“I don’t know what’s happened to that man,” B.J. said. “He used to be real jolly.”
“It’s a midlife crisis,” Janie Lee said. “It’s just like the one Richard’s having.”
“Who’s Richard?” I asked.
“On General Hospital,” the girls said, in chorus.
Boog surfaced. “What’d you do all morning, try to fuck my wife?” he asked.
“I had a little run-in with Mr. Ponsonby,” I said. “Is he dangerous or just obnoxious?” I told him about the deal.
“Better men than you have runt from him,” Boog said. “Whoever heard of charging twenty thousand dollars for a billy club? I imagine he would have just stopped payment on the check. Wonder what he does with all them billy clubs?”
There was a green lawn chair nearby. I pulled it up and sat in it.
“Lolly’s gettin’ real good at shorthand,” Boog said. “Teddy Kennedy’s gonna hire her to run his office any day now.”
“Shoot, I may not even live here much longer,” Lolly said. “Me and Janie Lee may move to California.”
“Eviste moved in,” Boog said. “Boss is gonna train him to mow the lawn or something, so he can pay his keep. He’s gonna give the kids lessons in conversational Franch, so they can be worse snobs than they are already.”
“Boog, you oughta take up running,” B.J. said. “It’s real good for depression and thangs.”
“Depression ain’t my problem,” Boog said. “Thangs is my problem.”
“Well, jogging’s good for a wide range of problems,” B.J. assured him.
“I ain’t about to run up and down the sidewalk,” Boog said. He climbed out of the hot tub and walked off to get dressed.
“My dad was real grouchy which is why Momma left him,” Lolly said. “She took it for twenty years and then she couldn’t take it no more.”
Boog reappeared, still moody, in a bright green suit.
“You girls is all wastin’ your lives,” he remarked as we left.
“Yeah, but so what?” B.J. said. She had an argumentative look about her.
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked, as we headed for the Cover-Up.
“Shut up and drive,” he said. “You ain’t no psychoanalyst, why should I tell you?”
He looked blankly out the window as Arlington merged imperceptibly into Falls Church.
“I been thanking about goin’ back to Winkler County,” he said.
“What could you do there?”
“I could thank about my roots,” Boog said.
I snorted. The notion of Boog brooding about his roots was ludicrous.
“Laugh all you want to,” he said. “Yore young. You ain’t ground to a halt in the pit of pointlessness yet.”
“The pit of what?”
“Pointlessness. The point at which all that was at one time more has become less.”
“The girls are right,” I said. “You’re having a midlife crisis.”
“It’s a rest-of-my-life crisis,” Boog said. “Them girls is sweet but they barely got brains enough between them to focus a TV set.”
“I just mostly wanta go home and sit on the porch,” he said, a moment later. “Watch the sun come up and the sun go down. Coexist in harmony with the possums and the skunks. At night I could listen to the sounds of the oil patch. Motors chuggin’. Might grow a tomato once in a while, or raise ocelots or something.”
“You?” I said. I could hardly believe I was hearing this fantasy of the rural life from Boog Miller, one of the most compulsively urban people I had ever known.
Boog shrugged. “There is a great tendency to return unto the first place,” he said. “The home of one’s youth. The scene of the first humiliations. Winkler County, in other words.”
“You wouldn’t last a week,” I said. “What would you do without massage parlors? Flea markets? Auctions? Politics?”
“I could read Spinoza,” he said. “Might write my memoirs.”
“You’d miss Boss a lot,” I said. “Boss isn’t going to Winkler County.”
“No, she’s got to stay here and teach that little Frenchman how to mow the grass,” Boog said. “Boss and me been married thirty-two years. We couldn’t miss one another if we tried.”
It was strange to think that the Miller marriage was only one year younger than I was. When they had gone to the altar I had been tottling around the trailer house in Solino.
“She makes the best biscuits I ever tasted,” Boog said. “I thank that’s what kept us together. I appreciate good biscuits, a rare trait in modern man.”
I parked at the Cover-Up, amid a few hundred Datsuns and Toyotas. Boog, who had been starving, didn’t seem in any hurry to get out and go in.
“You want to go in the antique business with me?” I asked, thinking he might really like a change of profession, though at the moment the nature of his profession was rather vague. “We could still probably get one or two of the Smithsonian warehouses.”
“Nope,” Boog said. “Ain’t interested. I thank I’d rather just go back to Winkler County and read Spinoza.”