Billiards at Half-Past Nine Read Online Free PDF Page B

idea how to handle a hotel clerk. As if secrets were for sale at the Prince Heinrich! As if a guest who paid forty or sixty marks for his room could be had for one green twenty. Twenty marks from a stranger whose only reference was hisexpensive cigar and his fancy suit. And that was the type, mind you, that got to be a cabinet minister, a diplomat, even, and yet didn’t even know how to grease a palm, most ticklish of all arts. Gloomily Jochen shook his head, left the green bill untouched.
Their right hand is full of bribes
.
    Can you beat it! A blue bank note was being added to the green one, raising the bid to thirty; a dense cloud of Partagas Eminentes was puffed into Jochen’s face.
    Blow away, pal, blow your four-mark cigar smoke in my face, and cough up another bill, a violet one, if you want to. Jochen’s not for sale. Not for you and not for three thousand in bills. I haven’t cottoned to many people in my life, but I happen to like that young fellow up there. Tough luck, pal, you and your important face and that hand of yours always itching to sign something, tough luck, but you got here a minute and a half too late. You ought to know that folding money isn’t down my alley. In case you don’t realize it, I’ve got a notarized contract right in my pocket, which says that the rest of my life I can live in my little room up under the roof and keep pigeons. For breakfast and lunch I have the choice of the menu, on top of that a hundred and fifty marks cash every month, three times more than I really need for my kind of tobacco. I have friends, too, in Copenhagen, Paris, Warsaw and Rome. If you only knew how carrier-pigeon people stick together! But of course you don’t. All you think you know is that money is everything. That’s what you and your kind tell each other. Naturally, you think, naturally a hotel clerk will do anything for money; he’d sell his grandmother down the river for a fifty-mark note. There’s only one thing I’m not allowed to do, my friend, one single curb on my freedom. When I’m down here working the desk I can’t smoke my pipe. And this exception I regret for the first time today. But for that I’d show you and your Partagas Eminentes a cloud or two of smoke; I’d turn you into a herring. To make it plain and simple, you can kiss my arse a hundredand twenty-seven times. Faehmel’s not for sale to you, friend. He’ll play billiards up there without being bothered from half-past nine till eleven. Not that I can’t think of something better for him to be doing, namely sitting in your place in the ministry. Or, even better, throwing a few bombs the way he did as a young fellow, to put the fear of God into bags of crap like you. If you don’t mind, my friend, when he feels like playing billiards from half-past nine till eleven, then billiards he’s going to play. You can put your cabbage back in your pocket and call it a day, and if you flash another bill in my face, I won’t be responsible for what happens. I’ve had to swallow tactlessness by the gallon, put up with bad taste by the ton and not say a word. I’ve written down adulterers and queers by the dozen on the register, guys wearing the horns and wives on the warpath. But don’t ever get the idea that was all in the cards when I was born. I was always a good boy, used to serve Mass, as no doubt you did yourself, and sang the songs of Father Kolping and St. Aloysius in the Kolping Glee Club. Pretty soon I was twenty, with six years’ service in this fleabag behind me. And if I haven’t lost all faith entirely in humanity since then, it’s only because of people like young Faehmel up there and his mother. Put your money in your pocket, take that cigar out of your mouth and bow down, then, before an old man who’s wrung more dirty water out of his mittens than you ever knew existed. Then let the boy back there open the door for you, and scram.
    “Have I got it right? You want to talk with the manager,