Росс Томас - The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

“Do you speak Chinese?”

“A little.”

He switched to Mandarin. “Then I very much hope that you will join us when the cards are laid out next week. The game is to be held at my house and your presence would honor it.”

“One cannot refuse so gracious an invitation,” I replied.

“Yes,” he said in English, looking at the hand he’d dealt himself, “you do speak it a bit.”

“Let’s play cards,” the two-star general said from around his cigar. “You open, Dye?”

I opened for ten dollars on three tens. Everybody stayed and I filled with a pair of fives. I bet twenty-five into Colonel Gay’s one-card draw. He raised me twenty-five, the two-star general called. He had drawn two cards. I folded and Colonel Gay looked at me and smiled. “Four sixes,” he said, laying down his hand.

“Beats kings over,” the general grumbled.

“Openers, Dye?”

I flipped three cards out in the center of the table. “Tens,” I said.

“A lot of persons would have stayed with a full house,” Colonel Gay said.

“A lot of persons don’t know any better,” I said and earned a glare from the two-star general.

“They also tell me,” Colonel Gay said, “that you were the youngest master sergeant in the Army.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Why didn’t you apply for OCS?”

“That’s what I told him,” Schiller said.

“I’m not very ambitious, Colonel.”

“Pot’s light,” the two-star general said.

Gay slid two one-dollar chips in. “Sorry.”

“Five-card stud,” the buck general said.

“Deal,” said the general with two stars.

“Did you like military life?” Colonel Gay asked me.

“Not much.”

“First king bets, Dye,” said the two star general.

“King bets five,” I said.

“What are your plans?” Gay asked.

“Go back to school.”

“Where?”

“King-jack bets,” said the two-star general.

“Another five,” I said. “I don’t know. Columbia maybe.”

Colonel Gay looked at his hole card. He had a seven and a queen showing. “Raise five,” he said. I had the kings wired, so I raised him back. Only the one-star general dropped out.

The next round brought me another king and Colonel Gay picked up another queen. I bet twenty-five on the kings and he only called. The rest of them dropped out. Neither of us improved on the final card and I bet twenty-five again. Gay folded.

“A lot of persons would have paid to see my hole card,” I said.

“A lot of persons don’t know any better,” he said. “By the way, here’s my address.” He gave me a card. “Why don’t you drop around early next Friday night. For dinner, say around seven?”

The two generals exchanged glances and smiled faintly. “Why don’t you recruit on your own time, Colonel?” the two-star general said.

“We take what we can get where we find it,” Gay said.

“Let’s play cards,” the one-star general said.

We played cards for the rest of the evening and nobody cheated and I won $265, two hundred of which I lent Major Schiller to cover the bum check that he wrote for his losses.

Her eyes were lighter than her father’s, almost dove gray and just as gentle. She opened the door to my knock and said, “You’re Lucifer Dye. I’m Beverly Gay, the colonel’s favorite daughter. Please come in.”

“Thank you,” I said.

She was eighteen then and she wore the standard college-girl’s uniform, a sweater, a skirt, and brown loafers, but she wore them better than most. We moved down the hall of the middle-class bungalow in a middle-class San Antonio neighborhood and I admired the way that she walked and the sway of her skirt. “What do you like people to call you, Lu, Lucifer, or Mr. Dye?”

“Sam,” I said.

“Is that your middle name?”

“No. It’s Clarence.”

“Oh.”

“That’s what I think, too. I would use my initials, but...”

“You don’t look like an Elsie,” she said. “Why Sam?”

“I don’t know. I just made it up.”

We were in the living room then and it looked as if it had been furnished by a peripatetic world collector who could never say no in the native bazaars. There were spears from East Africa and rugs from the mideast. Woven cane chairs from the Philippines nestled next to American Indian pottery. Chinese scrolls of doubtful merit flanked a tapestry from Iraq. Some of the heavier pieces looked as if they had been manufactured in Berlin during the thirties and they competed grimly with some small knurled tables that may or may not have been early American. Tasseled ottomans from the mideast and gaudy leather poufs from West Africa were scattered about the room for those whose feet were weary. A large Bechstein grand piano crouched in one corner.

“Terrible, isn’t it?” she said.

“Well, it’s different.”

“It belongs to some old friends of the colonel. He’s retired from the State Department and they’re doing Europe this summer. For the fifteenth time, I think. They let us have the house while Dad gets his treatments at the hospital.”

“I didn’t know he was ill.”

“Schistosomiasis,” she said. “It’s a blood fluke that he picked up in Burma during the war.”

Colonel Gay came in from the hall and smiled at me. “I see you’ve met the favorite daughter.”

“So she claimed,” I said, accepting a firm grip from his curiously slender hand.

“She’s also my only one. What would you like to drink — martini?”

“Not when I play poker.”

He gave me an amused look. “You like to win, don’t you?”

“It’s better than losing.”

“A beer?”

“Fine.”

Beverly Gay served us each a beer, but drank nothing herself. She sat on the severe couch with her father. I sat in a leather chair that was all angles and sharp edges.

“I’ve done some checking on you during the past week,” Gay said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“If it’s already done, there’s not much I can do about it. I don’t know whether I mind or not.”

“I’d mind,” Beverly Gay said. “There’re too many Paul Prys around as it is.”

“She doesn’t much care for the Senator from Wisconsin,” the colonel said. “What do you think of him?”

“Joe McCarthy? He’s a menace.”

“Why?”

“I don’t like being told what I should be frightened of. I like to find out for myself. Maybe I won’t be frightened. Maybe I’ll like it.”

“Such as a hot stove?”

“That’s an oversimplification, Colonel.”

“Hah,” his daughter said to him and smiled at me. She had a fine smile that came quickly and went slowly, leaving a warm afterglow. I thought that she was less than beautiful, but more than pretty. Appealing perhaps. It may have been her grace and poise and grooming, but that was only part of it. She looked as if she might have been made yesterday, still too new to be shopworn, and incredibly fresh and clean — not clean as the antonym of dirty, but in the sense that a meadowlark’s call at dawn is clean — if you’ve ever been up that early. Her gray eyes as she looked at the colonel seemed solemnly mischievous and her mobile face was seldom in repose. She used only a touch of color on her full, sensitive mouth, and somehow I forgave her for being able to wrinkle her nose like a rabbit.

“My daughter is hopelessly partisan,” the colonel said.

“They sometimes make the best cooks.”

“What does that mean?” she said.

“I’m not sure.”

“Probably that he’s hungry.”

“You’ll eat in fifteen minutes,” she said. “Besides, if I left you’d lose half your audience.”

Colonel Gay leaned back in the sofa and looked at me quizzically. His wide shoulders made him resemble an inverted isosceles triangle that was loosely hinged in two places.