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By Root 2312 0

had already passed that I hadn’t observed. Harry went on to win the ninth, making the score eighteen to seven in his favor. I watched even more diligently as Edward did just enough to win the tenth game and, with a rash double, just enough to lose the eleventh, bring the score to twenty even, so that everything would depend on the final game. I swear that nobody had left the room that evening, and not one back remained against a chair; some members were even hanging on to the window ledges. The room was now full of drink and thick with cigar smoke, and yet when Harry picked up the dice cup for the last game you could hear the little squares of ivory rattle before they hit the board. The dice ran well for Harry in that final game and Edward only made one small error early on that I was able to pick up; but it was enough to give Harry game, match and championship. After the last throw of the dice everyone in that room, including Edward, gave the new champion a standing ovation.”

“Had many other members worked out what had really happened that night?”

“No, I don’t think so,” said Eric. “And certainly Harry Newman hadn’t. The talk afterwards was that Harry had never played a better game in his life, and what a worthy champion he was, all the more for the difficulties he laboured under.”

“Did Edward have anything to say?”

“Toughest match he’d been in since Monte Carlo, and only hoped he would be given the chance to avenge the defeat next year.”

“But he wasn’t,” I said, looking up again at the board. “He never won the club championship.”

“That’s right. After Roosevelt had insisted we help you guys out in England, the club didn’t hold the competition again until 1946, and by then Edward had been to war and had lost all interest in the game.”

“And Harry?”

“Oh, Harry. Harry never looked back after that; must have made a dozen deals in the club that night. Within a year he was on top again, even found himself another cute little blond.”

“What does Edward say about the result now, thirty years later?”

“Do you know, that remains a mystery to this day. I have never heard him mention the game once in all that time.”

Eric’s cigar had come to the end of its working life and he stubbed the remains out in an ashless ashtray. It obviously acted as a signal to remind him that it was time to go home. He rose a little unsteadily, and I walked down with him to the front door.

“Good-bye, my boy,” he said. “Do give Edward my best wishes when you have lunch with him tomorrow. And remember not to play him at backgammon. He’d still kill you.”

The next day I arrived in the front hall a few minutes before our appointed time, not sure if Edward Shrimpton would fall into the category of early or late Americans. As the clock struck one, he walked through the door: There has to be an exception to every rule. We agreed to go straight up to lunch since he had to be back in Wall Street for a two-thirty appointment. We stepped into the packed lift, and I pressed the No. 3 button. The doors closed like a tired concertina and the slowest lift in America made its way toward the second floor.

As we entered the dining room, I was amused to see Harry Newman was already there, attacking another steak, while the little blond lady was nibbling a salad. He waved expansively at Edward Shrimpton, who returned the gesture with a friendly nod. We sat down at a table in the center of the room and studied the menu. Steak-and-kidney pie was the dish of the day, which was probably the case in half the men’s clubs in the world. Edward wrote down our orders in a neat and legible hand on the little white slip provided by the waiter.

Edward asked me about the author I was chasing and made some penetrating comments about her earlier work, to which I responded as best I could while trying to think of a plot to make him discuss the pre-war backgammon championship, which I considered would make a far better story than anything she had ever written. But he never talked about himself once during the meal, so I despaired. Finally, staring up at the plaque on the wall,