"It would bother me if I had a brandy," I told him. "It won't bother me if you have one."
"Then I think I will," he said, and caught the waiter's eye. After the man had taken the order and gone off to fill it, Hildebrand picked up the saltcellar again, put it down again, and drew a quick breath. "The club of thirty-one," he said. "I think somebody's trying to rush things."
"To rush things?"
"To kill the members. All of us. One by one."
3
"We got together last month," he said. "At Keens Chophouse onWest Thirty-sixth Street. That's where we've been holding our dinners ever since Cunningham's closed in the early seventies. They give us the same room every year. It's on the second floor, and it looks like a private library. The walls are lined with bookshelves and portraits of somebody's ancestors. There's a fireplace, and they lay a fire for us, not that that's what you necessarily want in May. It's nice for atmosphere, though.
"We've been going there for twenty years. Keens almost went under, you know, just when we were beginning to settle in there. That would have been tragic, the place is aNew York institution. But they survived. They're still there, and, well, so are we." He paused, considered. "Some of us," he said.
His glass of Courvoisier was on the table in front of him. He still hadn't taken a sip. From time to time he would reach for the small snifter, letting his hand cup the bowl, taking the stem between his thumb and forefingers, moving the glass a few inches this way or that.
He said, "At last month's dinner, it was announced that two of our members had died in the preceding twelve months. Frank DiGiulio had suffered a fatal heart attack in September, and then in February Alan Watson was stabbed to death on his way home from work. So we've had two deaths in the past year. Does that seem significant to you?"
"Well…"
"Of course not. We're of an age when death happens. What significance could one possibly attach to two deaths within a twelve-month period?" He took the glass by its stem, gave it a quarter-turn clockwise. "Consider this, then. In the past seven years, nine of us have died."
"That seems a little high."
"And that's in the past seven years. Earlier, we'd already lost eight men. Matt, there are only fourteen of us left."
Homer Champney had told them he'd probably be the first to go. "And that's as it should be, boys. That's the natural order of things. But I hope I'll be with you for a little while, at least. To get to know you, and to see you all off to a good start."
As it turned out, the old man lasted well into his ninety-fourth year. He never missed the annual dinner, remaining physically fit and mentally alert to the very end.
Nor was he the first of their number to die. The group's first two anniversaries were unmarked by death, but in 1964 they spoke the name and marked the passing of Philip Kalish, killed with his wife and infant daughter three months earlier in a car crash on the Long Island Expressway.
Two years later James Severance was killed inVietnam. He'd missed the previous year's dinner, his reserve unit having been recalled to active duty, and members had joked that an Asian war was a pretty lame excuse for breaking such a solemn commitment. The following May, when they read his name along with Phil Kalish's, you could almost hear last year's jokes echoing hollowly against the paneled walls.
In March of '69, less than two months before the annual dinner, Homer Champney died in his sleep. "If there comes a day when you don't see me by nine in the morning," he'd instructed the staff at his residential hotel, "ring my suite, and if I don't pick up then come check on me." The desk clerk made the call and had a bellman take over the desk while he went up to Champney's rooms himself. When he found what he'd feared, he called the old man's nephew.
That nephew in turn made the calls his uncle had instructed him to make. On the list were the twenty-eight surviving members of the club of thirty-one. Champney was leaving nothing to chance. He wanted to make sure everyone knew he was gone.
The funeral was atCampbell 's, and it was the first club funeral Lewis Hildebrand had attended. The overall turnout was small. Champney had outlived his contemporaries, and his nephew- a great-nephew, actually, some fifty years Champney's junior- was his only surviving relative in theNew York area. Besides Hildebrand, the contingent of mourners included half a dozen other members of the thirty-one.
Afterward, he joined several of them for a drink. Bill Ludgate, a printing salesman, said, "Well, this is the first of these I've been to, and it's going to be the last. In a couple of weeks we'll be all together at Cunningham's, and Homer'll have his name read with the others, and I guess we'll talk about him. And that's enough. I don't think we should go to members' funerals. I don't think it's our place."
"I felt I wanted to be here today," someone said.
"We all did or we wouldn't be here. But I talked to Frank DiGiulio the other day and he said he wasn't coming, that he didn't think it was appropriate. And now I've decided I agree with him. You know, back when this thing first got rolling, there were a few members I used to see socially. A lunch now and then, or drinks after work, or even getting together with the wives for dinner and a movie. But I stopped doing that, and when I spoke to Frank I realized it was the first conversation I'd had with any of the group since dinner last May."
"Don't you like us anymore, Bill?"
"I like you all just fine," he said, "but I find myself inclined to keep things separate. Hell, I haven't even been to Cunningham's since the last get-together. I don't know how many times someone'll suggest it for lunch or dinner, and I always make sure we wind up someplace else instead. 'Oh, I'd rather not,' I told a fellow just last week. 'I had a bad meal last time I was there. The place isn't what it used to be.' "
"Jesus, Billy," somebody said, "have a heart, huh? You're gonna put them out of business."
"Well, I'd hate to see that happen," he said, "but do you see what I mean? Once a year's enough for me. I like having thirty guys that I only see once a year, in a place I only go to once a year."
"That's twenty-seven guys now, twenty-eight including yourself."
"So it is," he said gravely. "So it is. But you see my point, don't you? I'm not telling the rest of you what to do, and I love you one and all, but I'm not coming to your funerals."
"That's okay, Billy," Bob Ripley said. "We'll come to yours."
"Thirty men in 1961, ranging in age from twenty-two to thirty-two with a median age of twenty-six. Thirty-two years later, how many would you expect to find alive?"
"I don't know."
"Neither did I," Hildebrand said. "After the dinner last month I went home with a headache and tossed and turned all night. I woke up knowing something was very wrong. You've got a group of men in their late fifties and early sixties, you're going to have some losses. Death is going to start making in-roads.
"But it seemed to me we were way over the probabilities. My mind kept coming up with different explanations, and I decided the first thing to do was find out if my sense of things was accurate. So I called up a fellow I know who's always trying to sell me more life insurance and told him I had an actuarial problem for him. I ran the numbers for him and asked him what percentage of deaths you'd expect over that span of time in a group like that. He said he'd make a couple of calls and get back to me. Take a guess, Matt. How many deaths would you expect in a group of thirty?"
"I don't know. Eight or ten?"
"Four or five. There ought to be twenty-five of us left and instead we're down to fourteen. What does that say to you?"
"I'm not sure," I said, "but it certainly gets my attention. The first thing I'd do is ask your friend another question."
"That's just what I did. Tell me your question."