Billiards at Half-Past Nine Read Online Free

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