Росс Макдональд - Blue City

Garland stepped through the door and closed it behind him. His sensitive little mouth was quivering, but his right hand was in his coat pocket holding something solid and steady.

I took a step backwards so that I could watch both of them, and in the same movement I stooped and had the knife. “I’ll keep this. I make a collection of knives that try to cut me.” I pressed the catch and forced the four-inch blade back to its place in the handle, then dropped it in my pocket.

“You want me to call some of the fellows, Joey?” Garland said.

Sault was smoothing his hair, rubbing his jaw, massaging his dented personality. “We handle this hard boy ourselves. Tell him to give me back my knife.”

“Give him back his knife.”

“I wouldn’t want him to cut himself.”

He jerked his heavy pocket. “Give it back.”

“It’s for my collection,” I said. “My friend who sent me here wouldn’t like it if you shot me. And most wounds would give me time to throw you downstairs.”

“He thinks I couldn’t give him a head wound from the hip,” Garland said to Sault. He giggled like a mischievous little girl. “Tell him about me, Joey.”

“He’s fast,” Joey said sullenly. “And his name’s Weather, he says. We wouldn’t want to kill him here and spoil the party, like you said.”

“Sault doesn’t sound gay,” I said to Garland. I was getting tired of watching both of them, shifting my weight with every heartbeat. “Maybe what he needs is for you to get him another reefer.”

“Say the word, Joey. It would be nice to shoot him.”

Sault’s face was working with thought. Finally he said: “Lay off him, Garland. Maybe we better take it to Kerch.”

“Who is Kerch?” I said.

“You don’t want to know,” Sault said. “You may think you do, but you don’t want to know.”

“Kerch is the man I work for,” Garland said. “I work for Kerch twenty-four hours a day.”

“You better take some of your overtime and buy yourself something to eat. You look hungry.”

“I look better than dead people look.”

“Take a look in your mirror. You’ll be surprised.”

“You go away from here,” Garland said in a thin menacing voice. “But quick.”

“Natch, Gloria. Natch.”

I went down the stairs, not too fast and not too slow, feeling five eyes on my back: Sault’s black eyes, Garland’s gray eyes, and the hidden eye of the gun.

There was nothing Oriental about the Cathay Club except its name and an insane plaster turret, of remotely Byzantine influence, over the front entrance. It was a long, white two-storied building, standing by itself a hundred feet back from the highway on the west side of town. It was just outside the city limits, and the taxi driver charged me two dollars to take me there.

It cost me another dollar to get in, since a fat man in a decaying tuxedo collected the cover charge at the door. I had seen the place before, but I had never been inside. It was like a hundred other city-limit night clubs all over the country – a room as big and as roughly built as a barn, the cheap simplicity of its construction concealed by dim lighting and fire-hazard decorations. A tiered orchestra stand at the back, precariously supporting an apathetic and underpaid Negro orchestra. In front of the orchestra stand, a dance floor, where the crowds of paying customers walked around in time to the music, and the paid entertainers sweated out their three-a-day. The rest of the floor was packed elbow to elbow and back to back with rickety little tables and uncomfortable little chairs. A blonde waitress in a bright red slack suit led me to one of them, and brought me a ninety-cent drink as hard to swallow as an insult.

“You missed Archie Calamus,” she said. “He’s the best number in the floor show. Where he takes off the young girl getting ready to go to a party–”

“I’d certainly hate to miss Archie,” I told her.

“He comes on again at 3 A.M., if you want to wait. This is only the second show.”

“That’s swell,” I said, thinking how disappointed she’d be when she didn’t get the tip she was working for.

A Hawaiian dancer with Polish blue eyes from the northwest side of Chicago came on the floor and rotated her hips, which looked fine for child-bearing. She did a few concluding bumps, with percussion accompaniment by the orchestra, and swaggered massively off. The crowd clapped.

“And now, ladies and gentlemen,” said the slender, dark young man who served as master of ceremonies, “I take great pride and pleasure in presenting to you a fine young singer whom you all know. That sensational lyric tenor, Ronald Swift.”

The crowd clapped and laughed. “You tell ’em, Ronnie,” a woman yelled.

The dark young man stayed where he was at the microphone and began to sing in a limply endearing way. I looked around at the audience. It seemed prosperous and indiscriminate. Young couples waiting for their chance to dance, and above all to take or be taken home. Older couples from the stores and insurance companies and factory offices nibbling with a delightful sense of shame and daring at their bimonthly slice of life. Middle-aged men paternally fondling their young companions. Some middle-aging women striving a little desperately with smiles and chatter to hold the attention of their younger escorts. A few unattached girls and women drinking alone, their eyes on the prowl. All but the last were drunk enough to be enjoying themselves.

The sensational lyric tenor became a master of ceremonies again, and announced a sensational Spanish dance team. The man was drying up with age, and the woman was getting too heavy, but they danced well. The dialogue of their castanets was as sharp as good repartee. When their intricate steps brought them together, passion crackled between them like electricity. Their stamping was as violent and real as love or hate. They left the floor with wet faces, walking stately together.

Somebody close behind me was saying: “I didn’t think Kerch’d be able to keep his slot-machine racket after Allister got in.”

“He had a lot of you bastards fooled,” a brash salesman’s voice cut in. “I could’ve told you what’d happen, and it happened.”

“You mean nothing happened.”

“Absolutely. What’d you expect to happen? It’s always the same when these wild-eyed reformers get in. I seen it happen when I was a kid in Cleveland. But what the hell are you kickin’ about?”

“Who’s kickin’! I always said a wide-open town was good for business. Which is why I didn’t come out for Allister.”

“You might as well next time. Looks as if he’s going to be with us a long time.”

The orchestra began to play dance music. “C’mon, Bert,” a woman whined. “We didn’t come here to talk politics. Let’s dance before it gets too crowded.”

“Absolutely, Marge. Absolutely.”

I saw them step onto the dance floor, a florid man in Harris tweeds, with his thick arm around the waist of a fading blonde.

“He knows his way around,” the other man said behind me. “Bert’s a good head.”

“He’s too fat,” a woman said. “You’re not too fat.”

One of the unattached girls sat down opposite me at my table. Her thick brown hair swung forward and brushed her white shoulders. Her face was solemn and young, with steady somber eyes and a still mouth too garishly painted.

“A nice boy like you,” she recited, “shouldn’t be sitting all by his lonesome.”

“A nice girl like you shouldn’t be wasting her time on a guy like me.”

“Why, what’s the matter with you? I think you’re kind of cute.”

“You flatter me.”

“Sure. Now that I’ve flattered you, you can buy me a drink.”