Armchair in Hell (Prologue Books) Page 8

  “No message. The guy doesn’t know me from a hitching post. I was told a friend of mine might be here, so I dropped by. A guy, Barry Drumgoole.”

  Chapter Ten

  IT WAS an immense room with a tremendous rail-enclosed dance floor. It could easily accommodate fifteen hundred couples. It was, in fact, accommodating at least fifteen hundred couples as I came up the stairs. A name band shot the music

  at them from a bandstand in the corner. There was another bandstand in another corner; for the rumba band when the name band took relief for a smoke or a fast one from a bottle or a visit to the men’s room for more relief or a dab at the hair and a smile at the mirror.

  There was a balcony upstairs with a beer bar. Along the side, upstairs, there was a lounge with easy chairs so you could rest with the lady of your choice and try out your propositions. Downstairs, there were seats all along the walls, and off to a side there were chairs and tables where you could have your beer served to you and talk about it in comparative privacy.

  Crag-faced bouncers, with shoulders like stuffed sea bags, towered amongst the dancers, circulating with ponderous grace. They were hired for their rocky beauty, their height, and their adroitness in picking up and putting down when the boys with stuff in the flask pocket (a nip in the toilet and beer on the balcony) began to resent matters. (“I resent that,” in liquid tones, is not limited to the plush-and-silver caves in the East Fifties.)

  I pushed through the throng of stags and the hopeful hopeless girls with the funny faces until I came to a raised velvet-roped dais where the hostesses sat like the gentry in a box at the opera. If you’re bashful, if you’re old, if you want the fragrance of young, impersonal beauty — there are always hostesses in the Utopia, in all the Utopias all over the world, for, of course, a fee.

  I looked at them. They didn’t look at me.

  There were ten of them, truly beautiful, and from the front row center a face came up fast and hit me like a jolting, unexpected crash of cymbals, and, for a moment, I was back again in Madeline Howell’s apartment tipsily engaged with a smoldering face out of a smoky-yellow background.

  Mona Crawford.

  Yes. But yes.

  2

  I shoved through to the glass-encased booth with the gilt-lettered legend: ”INSTRUCTION CARDS. HALF-HOUR CARDS — $1.50” and I said. “One hour,” to a henna-haired lady with a scrawny neck and she said, “Three dollars,” and she gave me a punched timecard and a large smile opulent with hooks from the bridgework. I went back to the velvet rope and I said, “May I?” to front row center and I handed her the card.

  She looked at me and smiled.

  My heart began typing love letters to my stomach.

  She stood up and unhooked the velvet rope and she came through, still smiling: absent, expressionless, professional. She moved toward me; a tall young woman, sectioned off in luscious bunches, undulating slightly in a strapless, frontless, backless evening gown, cream-borsch pink and clinging. Then she stopped and the smile went away and she looked at me again like she’d just come awake, toes to head and back again, and a new, slow smile crept across her face: not absent, not expressionless, not professional. Brother, but no.

  She was coal-eyed and oval-faced with a little nose and tender nostrils and a high forehead and long, black upgoing eyebrows and thick, dark hair, parted down the middle, framing her face and lounging on her bare shoulders in rough-massed ringlets. Her lips were curved and full and cushiony-soft and pouting, cherry-ripe-red and moist.

  She came up close to me, very close, and she stopped.

  “Shall we dance?” I said, with blessed originality.

  “That’s the way it looks.”

  I touched her fingers and we went to a break in the rail and we stepped onto the dance floor and I put my arm around her and my cheek against her cheek and we moved to the music.

  It was a waltz, Strauss, and they were playing it well, and this was a lovely, lissome lass in my arms and the false stars twinkled down from the ceiling and for once life was good and life was beautiful for a shamus out on a pitch….

  “Too tight,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Too tight, that’s what. We dance at three beans an hour for the house. Or we kick feet. But we don’t hug, swell feller. It’s not allowed.”

  I churned around with her, rhythmically. I bumped a couple of close-knit couples. I pulled up my head to apologize but nobody knew me from glissando on the slide trombone. The music was good. I was getting warm. There was a lot of cigarette smoke. There was a lot of perspiration.

  “Too tight,” she said again, suddenly, sadly.

  “Sister,” I said. “You’re nuts. You are gorgeous and even beautiful and completely out of this world, but you’re nuts. You’ve got a fixation. Or something. We are a couple with rare

  propriety. Furthermore, that’s the way I dance. With you, or anyone. With my mother.”

  “With your mother?” Her black eyes opened and she giggled. “Like that, boy, it’s incest, or whatever they call it. Just loosen up, long guy.”

  “Mona,” I said. “You’re hypersensitive. You’ve got organs on the brain. Also, you are bumpy. You need a psychiatrist, but more than that you need a two-way stretch.”

  She jumped, settled back, then jumped some more standing still, all over, like electric figures on a tote board. Then she grabbed me.

  “Too tight,” I moaned.

  “Mona!” she said.

  “Too tight. Please.“

  “Mona! What gives here?”

  “Now you loosen up. Think of me being squeezed between a couple of those gruesome bouncers. Think of my boiling point….”

  “Who the devil are you?” Mona said.

  “Let’s have a beer, kid.”

  “But who …?”

  “How’s about a beer?”

  “All right, all right.”

  We broke and I led her off to the side where the tables were. “Two beers,” I said to the waiter.

  “Bottles or glasses?”

  “How?”

  “Bottles or glasses, that is how. Bottles is bottles and glasses is tap. That is how, and I got no time, mister.”

  “Oh. Bottles.”

  “Bottles is sixty-five cents a crack.”

  “Bottles,” I said.

  He went away.

  “I knew it,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Bottles.”

  “You knew it,” I said, unhappily. “Bottles.”

  “I’m in love with you.”

  “Quit it.”

  “You have something. Presence. Whatever they call it.”

  “What the hell has that got to do with bottles? Excuse me.”

  “For what?”

  “For the hell.”

  “Don’t be silly. It’s got everything.”

  “What’s got everything?”

  “To do.”

  “To do?”

  “Whoa. Please. It has everything to do. To do with what you asked me. Look, you’re the kind of a man who won’t risk dirty beer pipes in a place like this. So you order bottles. And what’s the difference about the sixty-five cents per. That’s what I meant before. About presence. I’m in love with you. Just like that. You stood there in front of me asking me to dance, shylike and sort of embarrassed, and all of a sudden I’m in love again. It’s funny. It’s never happened to me like that, ever.”

  “Stop with the kidding,” I said.

  “I’m not kidding.”

  The waiter came with the bottles. He unhooked the caps and he poured a little into each glass. “A dollar thirty,” he said. I gave him two dollars and I waved my hand. “Thank you,” he said.

  She filled her glass quickly and thickly with a large head and she dug in and drank half. She moved her chair close to mine. I felt the touch of her thigh. “Well?” she said.

  “We left off,” I said, “where you loved me. I was standing there shylike in front of you and you loved me.”


  “No. How did you know my name?”

  “Mona?”

  “Mona.”

  “Mona Crawford?”

  “Mona Crawford.”

  “You were there,” I said, “between casement windows over a large day bed with cushions.”

  “Madeline,” she said.

  “An angry face. A magnificent, angry, passionate face.”

  “You like her?”

  “Sure I like her.”

  “I mean Madeline Howell.”

  “Sure I like her.”

  “No you don’t. She’s old and hard and brittle.”

  I drank beer.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry I said that.”

  “The hell with it.”

  “Do you go for her? Really?”

  “Sure I go for her.”

  Sharply she said, “Stop laughing at me. Do you or don’t you?”

  “I don’t. I go for you.”

  “That’s better.”

  She filled her glass and she filled mine. She leaned back and she half closed her eyes and she probed a caressing finger at my chin and I got prickly as an asterisk.

  She brought the words out long and slow: “I don’t know. Maybe it’s the blue eyes with the dark lashes, maybe it’s the way that lick of black hair falls over that nasty eyebrow, maybe it’s that high-up eyebrow itself. It’s not the slick mustache, a mustache doesn’t mean a thing to me. Maybe it’s the way you talk or your manner or because you’re long and lean, or maybe the way you wear those expensive casual clothes …”

  “Wh-a-a-t?”

  She leaned closer. “I hate a cold-eyed bastard like you,” she whispered. She moved away an inch. “Where’d you get the English on the ball, feller?”

  “Look,” I said, “sister. I love it. But just in case; if you’re making for a conquest, it’ll fold. I’ve been conquered before. It adds up trouble when you start making with conquests like you’re making now.”

  She winked at me, manlike, squeezing one side of her face together and letting go, fast and no flutter.

  “You won’t have trouble with me,” she said, “brother.”

  The way she said it, I wished it was bourbon in my hand instead of beer. I drank the beer like it was bourbon and I wiped my lips like it was beer and not bourbon with the back of my hand.

  “Let’s keep it,” I said, “like the way you said about the clothes. Casual.”

  She moved away another inch. “Okay by me, baby. But I dare you. Remember that. Maybe you have been conquered before. But, sonny, you have never been conquered by me. Yet.”

  Sonny.

  I’d say she was twenty-one.

  I’d say I was thirty-six, with enough lines on my face to prove it.

  She slid a quiet, warm hand over mine.

  “Let’s get.”

  “Can you?”

  “I’m going upstairs. I’m reporting sick.” She patted my

  other hand under the table and she slipped two fingers up along my wrist beneath my shirt cuff. “Look. I’m hungry. You know the Turf here on Broadway?”

  “Sure.”

  “Ever eat those miniature sandwiches up at the bar?”

  “Sure.”

  “I love them. They have a tiny steak sandwich on a soft roll dipped in natural gravy that sends me.”

  “I know. It sends me too.”

  “They also have a tiny Virginia ham sandwich, same style. When you order both of them, combination, one sandwich — sweetheart, it is heavenly. And can I eat!”

  She let go my hand and she pulled out and stood up and put knuckles on the table and leaned over, all the way. I didn’t look up. I’m spiteful. I got English on the ball. She waited for me to admire her bosom and then she knew I wasn’t going to.

  “Conquest,” she said. “I’ll fix you. All right, trouble, I’ll meet you at the Turf bar in fifteen minutes,” and she swished off in her gorgeous dream dress, smoked-salmon pink and marvelously filled, where it was filled.

  3

  We ate sandwiches at the Turf. We drank whisky and soda at the Number One bar and listened to the two pianos. We drank whisky and water at the White Rose Café on Fifty-second Street where black and white mix like checks on hound’s-tooth slacks. We sat on stools around Leon and Eddie’s oval bar and listened to Eddie Davis sing “Comin’ Round the Mountain” to the hillbillies. We sat amongst the diamonds at the Monte Carlo. We had whisky sours at the China Doll. We had ravioli at the Panda.

  We went home.

  To Gracie Square. One floor higher. Four-B.

  She took off her coat and put it over her arm and she swung her hat off and shook out her hair. She took my hat and coat and patted my cheek and went away. I stood in the middle of the room and I waited.

  She came back and she said, “You’re a problem for me. I’ve got a sweetheart and a boy friend. Now, I’ve got you. Too.”

  She came near and she looked up at me, then she moved in close, head down, like a tired fighter steering for a clinch. I reached around and my left hand squirmed at the thick-piled hair on her shoulders and I tugged and her face tilted

  up and I looked at the pouting, parted, shining lips. The palm of my right hand brushed her jaw and my fingers took her cheeks and brought her face over and I spread my mouth over her mouth, the way her lips had been begging from the moment I talked to her, and the tip of her tongue came through and hammers started banging in my stomach.

  I saw the door open. I was facing it.

  It didn’t make a sound. It just opened.

  There are people who close their eyes when they kiss and there are people who don’t close their eyes when they kiss and there are people who sometimes close their eyes and sometimes they don’t.

  I don’t: when it’s strictly for hammers in the stomach.

  I saw the door open.

  I kept right on kissing.

  Chapter Eleven

  VERY NICE,” the small man said.

  She didn’t turn around.

  The softness went out of her lips and her back hardened and I could feel her fingernails. She moved her head and she looked up at me, her eyes widening like spilled wine on a white tablecloth. She was a smart girl and she liked me and she did her best. She kept her body between me and the two men in the doorway.

  It was the first time I had seen the Little Guy.

  I had heard about the ex-jockey, the terrible pygmy, the little giant who had clawed his way up from quiet murderer to smart money. Now I saw him. I saw him at a disadvantage, alongside a great bulk of a man, but he had that something: I saw the Little Guy practically exclusively. He was less than five feet tall with innocent brown eyes and a smooth, narrow face that was handsome despite the thin nose that was hooked like a Chinaman’s fingernail. He was very erect and his hair was white, but young and shiny, and he wore it long and crush-brushed flat and dandy over his ears. He carried a cigarette in a holder and he wore a ring on each finger of his left hand except his thumb.

  I knew the mountain that came with him. Max Crumb; six feet six of piled-up flesh, with a face as lopsided as a newly-wed’s mattress, with tremendous weight up from the thighs

  and one clam ear and hands the size of four-dollar steaks at Paul the Dutchman’s.

  But you looked at the Little Guy.

  His mouth moved gently and his face was composed but the dark blue felt hat in his right hand was doing a tap dance on his knee.

  “How do you do?” he said.

  Mona’s hands dropped from around me and she sucked in her lower lip and she put her teeth down over it. I moved her over to a side.

  The small man looked at me curiously. “What’s your name?”

  “Me?”

  “No. The Russian in the Kremlin. Him. Not you.”

  “I know the guy,” Max Crumb said. “A puddin’head.”

  He had a voice like his larynx was sprinkled with cockroach powder.

  “Take him out of here,” the small man said. “Take him do
wntown and polish him. Polish him good. Mark him up and tell him regards from the Little Guy.”

  “Let’s go, bub,” Max Crumb said.

  I moved forward on Max Crumb as per direction. A rapid knee to where the hair grows would cut him down to size. I would have to carom off to the Little Guy. I wasn’t too worried about that. But Maxie was cautious. He put his hand in his pocket and it came up a plump flat-nosed sawed-off, tiny in the vastness of his fist, with a rude, black muzzle.

  That presented another problem.

  I looked at the girl.

  Gallantly I said, “How’s about it?”

  “Please,” she said. “Don’t worry about me. Please.”

  “Crumb,” the small man said. “I want that thing out of there. I want it carted over to my place in Sea Gate. So take this monkey down there, polish him, get rid of him, and you and the boys wait for me till I get there. I want to talk to the Frog first. Soon as I leave here.”

  Skin prickled around my ears. The Little Guy didn’t know me from a rathole in the barn. He was talking about something I was very much interested in — I hoped. Max Crumb was going to have much less trouble with me than either of us had anticipated.

  “Yeah, boss,” he said.

  “You ought to get going, Crumb,” the small man said.

  Max smiled and showed me an excellent porcelain upper.

  “Crumb,” he said. “That’s the moniker. Let us go, bub.”

  “Okay,” I said, “crumb.”

  His eyes squinted at me, merrily, and his lips spread out against the porcelain plate and the store teeth gleamed at me, viciously. He rumbled in his chest. He blew a blob of phlegm from the corner of his mouth. It splattered on my lapel like an obscene nosegay. I took out a handkerchief and I wiped it and I threw the handkerchief at his face and I missed.

  “That’s the moniker,” he said. “Crumb. Let’s go, puddin’head. You and me’s going to have fun. Fun.”

  2

  Baruch Place is a fancy name.

  It used to be Goerck Street.

  It is between Lewis and Mangin in the ghetto of the ghetto of Manhattan’s lower East Side. On the corner of Baruch Place and Houston Street a flake-painted white house rears up for six stories and looks like it is going to topple.