Росс Макдональд - Trouble Follows Me

I held a fifty-cent piece in the light between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand. “Did you see a big black Cadillac sedan go past here a little while ago?”

“Yes, señor.”

“Where did it go?”

He pointed to the right, up the hill to the center of the town.

“You’re absolutely sure?”

“Yes, señor. That way.”

“Do you know who was in it?”

“No, señor. American lady.”

His eyes were on the coin with an intent and ageless gaze. His thin sallow face could have been anywhere between ten and sixteen. I dropped the coin in his box and he jumped from the running-board and ran away in the dust, his shoulderblades flapping through his shirt like vestigial wings.

We went up the little hill in the direction he had pointed, past weather-warped clapboard dwellings, tamale stands, the one-story establishments of cheapjack lawyers whose signs advertised quick and easy divorces. We stopped at a gas station at the top of the street, and I asked the Mexican attendant if he had seen my friend in the black Cadillac.

“Señora Toulouse?” he said, and widened his mouth with a leer which separated the hairs of his thin black moustache. “I think she has gone home. She is your friend?”

“I met her on the train. She asked me to come and see her in Tia Juana. But I don’t know where she lives.”

“You don’t know where she lives? Then you do not know Tia Juana.” He leered once more, as if there were curiously amusing secrets unknown to those who did not know Tia Juana.

“That’s right, I don’t.”

He turned to Halloran: “You know where the girls are?”

“Yeah.”

“Señora Toulouse has the biggest house in the street. You will see it. It is built of stone.”

I gave him a dollar, which he folded and tucked into his waistband. He stood back and leered us amiably out of sight.

“What the hell is this, anyway?” Halloran said.

We had turned into a noisy street which slanted down between brilliantly lighted houses into final darkness. There was a steady male traffic on the footpaths, and on the lighted porches girls like assorted fruit on display. Between the two, the men in the street and the waiting girls in the houses, there was a low tension which exploded continuously in wisecracks, obscene repartee, and invitations.

We stopped at the first corner and a lean dark youth in a white open-necked shirt appeared from nowhere. He said: “You want something very, very nice?”

“I’m looking for Señora Toulouse.”

“Señora Toulouse phooey,” he said ardently. “They are old stuff and also they supercharge. You come with me. I show you something.” He opened the back door of the cab, leaned forward with his hand on my knee, and whispered: “Virgin!”

I gave him a dollar and said: “Where is Señora Toulouse?”

“Si, señor,” he said courteously. “It is there. The big house in the middle of the block.” He leaned forward again: “Will you tell her Raoul sent you? Raoul?”

I almost closed the door on his narrow, hopeful face. We moved down the road and parked across the street from the big house. It was an imposing mansion of grey stone, not indigenous to the country but squarebuilt like old Ohio farmhouses. It had three stories, all of which were lit, but blinds were drawn over every window. The front door was shut and there were no girls on the porch, but there was the sound of music from inside.

“I’m going in,” I said. “If I don’t come out in half an hour go to the police.”

“No use going to the police. You know what this is, don’t you? These cathouses are protected by the local cops, that’s why they’re here.”

“Go to the police at the border. Then drive back to Diego and go to Mary Thompson at the Grant, got that? Tell her – wait a minute, I’ll write a note.”

I tore a page out of my address-book, wrote a note to Mary telling her to get in touch with Gordon, addressed it and gave it to Halloran. “This is if I don’t come out in half-an-hour. It’s ten now.”

I paid him his fare and some extra, and got out of the cab. I felt awkward and light as I walked up the steps with Halloran’s black eyes on my back, and knocked on the heavy carved door.

A rectangle of face containing two small eyes appeared at a Judas hole. The eyes gave me a once-over, the Judas hole snapped shut, and the door opened.

“What can we do for you?” the doorman said. He was pig-eyed and pig-bodied, shaped like a Japanese wrestler and as wide as the door. His accent was Minnesota Norska. I wondered automatically how deep my fist would sink in the swelling dough of his belly.

I said I would like to see Madame Toulouse.

“She ain’t home. Now if you want a good time we can do business with you. If you don’t want a good time we can’t do business with you.”

I said I was crazy for a good time, and he ushered me through swinging glass curtains into a high wide room where the music was. It came from a piano and a guitar at the far end of the room, played by two cadaverous young men with shining black hair. The walls of the room, which must have taken up nearly the whole first floor, were lined with tables at which men sat drinking, some with girls on their knees.

The center of the room was a dance-floor where the rest of the girls danced with each other or with whatever male partners they could get. The girls wore no clothes, except that some had colored plumes projecting from their powdered buttocks. One had a red feather. One had a blue feather. One had a green feather. These plumes wagged like languid tails as the girls jigged through the bored routine of dancing. The girls with male partners seemed less bored, if you did not look at their faces.

“You can see, we got variety,” the doorman said. “White, black, brown. Blonde, brunette, redhead, fat, skinny, Mexican, Chinese. Anything you want, we got it. You pay the waiter for your drinks and you pay the girl when you take her upstairs. You take your time and you take your pick. That’s the way it works out best.”

I sat down at an iron-legged table by the door and he retired ponderously through the glass curtains. They clicked behind him like unheeded admonitory tongues. The waiter, whose clean white coat insisted that the joint had class, came to my table and I ordered Mexican beer. The unattached girls began to converge on me like hens at feeding-time. Like figures in the dream of a naïve and hopeful hermit, they formed a half-circle about me, leaning forward and kissing the air with writhing carmine mouths and sliding pink tongues. In several languages they said the same thing, and their voices blended in an obscene cooing and twittering. Their breasts swung forward and the rouged tips looked at me like sullen eyes.

I got out of my chair and they gathered about me, making their eyes swoon and sparkle, their blackened lashes flutter in mechanical glee. I moved to the door, wondering if the body of a woman would ever seem good to me again, and escaped through the glass curtains. The doorman was sitting in an armchair across the hall. He looked up at me in surprise. Halfway down the wide staircase Miss Green turned and started back up.

I went after her. The doorman took me by the waist from behind, and before I could turn had locked my arms in a full Nelson which pressed painfully on the back of my neck. I struggled in his grip and got nowhere. My coat ripped at the shoulder seams.

“Let him have it, Jake,” Miss Green said from the top of the stairs.

He let go with his right hand but held me with his left. A small heavy object came down dully on the back of my head. My body reverted to protoplasm and my mind to darkness.

When consciousness returned it came slowly and laboriously like an ambitious chunk of sentient organic matter climbing the stages of evolution from the original warm mud. I pulled myself out of the sucking black slime, the whirling waters that covered the earth, and lay eventually in a dry light place with my cheek on grass. But I found when I opened my eyes that it wasn’t grass. It was a pastel-green rug lit not by the sun but by electric light. I heard voices and tried to sit up. I couldn’t sit up because my wrists and ankles were tied together behind me.