Free William F. Buckley Jr. by Brothers No More Page A

whiskers and maybe a monocle or two. There were no windows in the Casino Royale, no more than in the Brayeux brothel he had visited in Paris. Everywhere there was velvet. The walls were a shimmering red, broken up only by the gilt that adorned the mirrors and sconces. It must have been a shattering concession by management—surely some duke or count or deposed dowager empress—to have taken down the candleholders and replaced them with yellowed lights? Or were they gas ports? Danny would look into it. He fixed his eyes on the dazzling green of the gaming tables, and on the company at hand.
    Only half of the players were Americans, the balance pretty much the same mix as the year before, heavily adorned Frenchwomen of all ages, Dutch burghers, slim-boned Italian polyglots, English aristocrats speaking in single syllables. But during the preceding hour Danny had paid no attention to the backgrounds of the other guests, or indeed to his surroundings; he was aware only of resources suddenly, drastically, depleted.
    Danny O’Hara was not used to bad luck. Only the weather, he once told Henry jauntily, had ever really let him down. Last year he had returned to Yale after his summer in Europe with gifts for everybody in sight, with special gift cards written out for his mother, for his stepfather, Harry Bennett, and for Bill Fenniman,the bank official who presided over his inscrutable trust. Even with the gifts all paid for, he had had almost four hundred dollars left over. To each of his gifts he had appended a card, “With love from the Casino Royale, Nice.” His mother told him over the telephone that yes, darling, she loved her gift—a Fabergé cigarette case—but that it was really very childish for him to advertise that he had gambled at a casino inasmuch as there was no stupider activity on earth than to gamble when the odds are fixed against you. Danny had handled that telephone conversation with a Yes-Mom sequence while watching television. Television sets were forbidden at Silliman College in students’ rooms, for electrical reasons, which made matters slightly inconvenient for Danny, but he quickly devised means to keep his set nicely camouflaged. Now, one year later, he was disporting at the same casino at which exactly one year earlier he had triumphed—and was very hard-pressed.
    When the little Neapolitan croupier looked over at him to see whether, in the upcoming round, he was going to put a chip down at the roulette wheel, Danny motioned with his hand, no—he would pass. What he badly needed to do was to check his wallet, but he didn’t want to be seen doing so. Certainly not by the blasé chain-smoking thirtyish beautiful blonde with the tiara seated on his right; or by the fat imperious Egyptian on his left—could that be King Farouk? King Farouk was betting ten-thousand-franc notes, the blond lady on his right, a thousand francs. It would not do—no, not do at all!—for the dashing young American
beau idéal
, dressed in black tie as the casino demanded, to be seen reaching into his wallet and peering into it, a beggar foraging for scraps. He would pretend he was going to the men’s room.
    But what he knew he had to do would take up more time than even a protracted pee, and therefore he mustn’t—not in that crowded room—preempt a player’s slot at the roulette game. “
Je reviendrais,
” he nodded to the croupier, “
mais ça sera question de quelques minutes.
”
    There. The croupier was free to interpret “a few minutes” as he chose. He might decide that a few minutes was a modestenough holding time for the comely, urbane young American who hadn’t won a hand in an hour; on the other hand, “a few minutes” might be interpreted as just indefinite enough to justify the croupier’s giving over the player’s slot to someone standing in line to play the game.
    What Danny needed to do was something he very much didn’t want to do, which was to telephone his mother.
    He went back to