Росс Макдональд - Blue City

But it was a full minute before the door was opened. Mrs. Sontag was in a pink silk negligee which revealed and exaggerated the amplitude of her figure. Her heavy, black hair was down her back. Her bold, soft face might once have been very handsome, and might still have been amiable.

“What do you want?” she said in a brisk, forbidding voice, which implied that I was entitled to no wishes. Over her frilled shoulder I could see a dark-gray pinstriped coat laid across one arm of the red satin chesterfield. I couldn’t be sure in the dim, aphrodisiac light of her rose-shaped lamps, but it looked like the coat of a man’s suit.

“I’d like to speak to Mr. Joseph Sault. Your brother?”

“Joe isn’t here.” She made a move to shut the door in my face.

“Can’t you tell me where I can find him?” I said quickly. “It’s business I want to see him about.”

“What kind of business?” Her bright black eyes looked into my face with caution. A movement of air in the apartment behind her flooded my nostrils with her perfume. It was good perfume.

From somewhere out of sight a man’s voice called: “Who is it, Francie?”

“Somebody wants to see Joe.”

“I’m in the market,” I told her. “There’s something I want to buy from him.”

It made no sense to me, but it seemed to make sense to her. “He should be in back of the poolroom. You know, where they run the poker game.”

I picked a name out of my memory of the neon signs on Main Street: “Weber’s?”

“No, Charlie’s.” She closed the door so sharply it cut my “Thank you” in half.

She went back to her strenuous profession, and I went back to the street. My drive was a long way from running down, but I was beginning to feel just a little like a salesman of something nobody wanted. Or a billiard ball looking for a carom and finding nothing to hit.

But I still felt like a special kind of billiard ball, not subject to the forces of gravity and friction. I walked the three blocks to the corner of Main Street in three minutes. Without seeming to go anywhere, the night crowds were thinning out, as if there were trap doors in the pavement. But there was a higher proportion of drunks, and fewer unassorted couples. The bars were beginning to empty, and the night-blooming floozies were steering their catches to the walk-up apartments and sleazy hotels they called home.

There was a tall, blue policeman on the corner, watching the crowds benevolently like a pagan god at a carnival in his honor. He was very tall and very fat, looking the way a cop should look if he isn’t expected to catch anything.

I planted myself in front of him, and after a minute he looked down at me with a pained expression on his serene stultified face. “Anything I can do for you?”

“Can you tell me where Charlie’s poolroom is?”

“Ain’t it a little late for playing pool?” He winked with an effort that twisted the corner of his mouth.

“What time does it close – at twelve? There should be time for one game.”

I had amused him. He laughed and slapped the holster on his hip. “Sure, there is. But watch yourself, kid. You don’t look any too well heeled. The stakes are pretty high in Charlie’s game.”

“Where is it?” I said sharply.

“All right, don’t get peppery. I was just going to tell you.” He pivoted on his base and pointed down West Main Street. “Two blocks down to your left. I warned you, don’t forget.”

“Why should I struggle for a second million?” I asked him over my shoulder, and left him winking both eyes.

Charlie’s Billiard Emporium and Soft Drinks was a little tobacco shop with a big basement underneath. The shirt-sleeved man behind the counter gave me a sleepy look, snapped one of his purple arm bands like a signal to himself, and went back to his racing sheet. I went down the unswept stairs and stood at the foot for a moment, peering through the smoke-blue air. The smoke haze hung in the wide, low room like a cloudy liquid, through which men appeared like half-human creatures moving slowly over a sea floor in an undersea ritual. The click of billiard balls cracked the illusion, and I went on into the room.

The walls were partly lined with cue racks, some of which were padlocked. There must be players here who took the game seriously, to own their own cues. Between the racks were group portraits of old football teams, some with handlebar mustaches; signed photos of game little forgotten fighters, with huge fists and shoulders leaning gamely into the camera and tiny disappearing waists; an unknown wrestler, wearing a championship belt almost as wide as a corset, who signed himself: “All the Best to My Old Pal Charlie, Al”; pictures of naked women as bright and empty as balloons; advertisements for rubber goods and specifics and quack doctors waiting for despair, when everything else had failed, to gravitate to them.

These Herculaneum murals depressed me, and I looked away into the room. There were six or eight tables, bright green under their double cones of light: a couple for snooker or English billards, one without pockets for three-cushion, the rest for ordinary pool. Most of the tables were being used by boys and young men who leaned over them in precise and prayerful attitudes or stood back in meditation chalking their cues. The cues shot forward quickly and certainly, like little goads of fate; the balls rearranged themselves according to the laws of physics, like well-trained molecules taken in infinitely slow motion, or infinitely miniature planets. Once a player miscued, and his ball jumped the table and rolled away on the floor among the filth of years.

A young man knocking the balls around at a table by himself scooped it up and tossed it back. He had white hair and a goose-flesh face as white as typewriter paper. The outer corners of his pale-pink eyes drooped towards the corners of his mouth, as if his face had been parted in the middle and combed backwards.

He went back to his game, shooting casually, and sank four balls in succession. I found a straight cue in one of the open racks, and asked him for a game.

“Plain pool, one-two-three?”

“Suits me,” I said.

“For two bits?”

“I can use two bits.”

He smiled sadly, set up the balls, won the flip, and broke them. I sank the one in a side pocket and nudged the two halfway down the cushion into the end. The three was behind a cluster of other balls, and I couldn’t quite see it. I tried a cushion shot and hit the three but missed the side pocket by an inch. He couldn’t see the three either, because the seven was in his way, but he put a lot of english on the right side of his ball and curved it around the seven. The three dropped in, and he’d left himself a setup for the four in the end pocket.

“Nice position,” I said. “Seen anything of Joey tonight?”

“He was sitting in the back room until about an hour ago.” He sank the four, drawing the cue ball into position for the five. Then he sank the five.

The six ball was an impossible shot, tight on the cushion at the other end of the table. He made it.

“Where is he now?”

His pale gaze stroked me mildly and returned to the table. He dropped the seven in the side pocket and left himself a setup for the eight. “You a friend of Sault’s?”

I thought the business approach would be safest. “I’d like to be. I’m interested in buying what he’s got to sell.”

He sank the eight ball. “He wouldn’t be doing any business tonight. He told me he’s running a party for some of the girls.”

“My business can’t wait,” I said. “Where is the party?”

The nine was in a tight spot, out of line with any of the pockets. He looked at it carefully, and the cue slid forward between his white fingers. The nine traveled the length of the table and rebounded into a side pocket.