Billiards at Half-Past Nine Read Free

“Come on now, sweetie, out with it. Where can I find him?” And she had given in to him, not knowing just how it happened. She gave away the deep-down secret, the scent of which had so keenly led her on: “Prince Heinrich Hotel.” Whereupon he had murmured something about being an old school friend, about an urgent, a very pressing matter, something about defense, weapons. Behind him he left the aroma of a cigar which, when he smelled it an hour later, set Faehmel’s father excitedly sniffing.
    “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