Росс Томас - The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

Orcutt sent Necessary for the car while he headed toward the rear, either to compliment the chef or to pee. That left me with Carol Thackerty. She put a cigarette between her lips and I leaned over to light it.

When she had it going she smiled and said, “I understand that you grew up in a whorehouse.”

“That’s right.”

“Well,” she said, “we have that much in common. So did I.”

It must have been in the autumn of 1939 that I first met Gorman Smalldane. I was five then, going on six, and sober, and Gorman Smalldane was thirty-four and a little drunk. It was either a Monday or a Tuesday night, about ten o’clock, and I was at my usual post outside the door of Tante Katerine’s joy emporium, waiting to greet customers. There weren’t many and I was glad when the taxi drew up and the man in the blue suit jumped out, paid off the driver, and checked the polished brass plate to make sure that this was Number 27. That was all the identification that Tante Katerine’s establishment ever had. It was all it needed.

Smalldane pushed through the brick wall’s wrought-iron gates, which Tante Katerine claimed came all the way from New Orleans, and made his way towards me, tacking only a little now and then. I was wearing my fancy uniform with the pillbox monkey hat. My face was powdered and painted and for added splendor two of my front teeth were missing.

Smalldane stopped in front of me, all six feet three inches of him. He cocked his blond head to one side and studied me carefully. Then he cocked it to the other side and studied me some more. After that he shook his head in mild disbelief and walked around me to see whether the view was any better from the rear. In front of me once more, he bent from the waist until his face was no more than six inches from mine and I could smell the whiskey. It was Scotch. “Now just what in fuck’s name are you supposed to be, little man?” he said.

“The humble greeter of clients, my lordship,” I lisped because of my teeth, backed up a step, and bowed. Then I launched into a lisping, Australian-accented, English version of the official welcome with all of its bows and flourishes and leers.

Smalldane stood there listening to it all and shaking his head from side to side. When I was done, he bent down from the waist again and said: “You know what I think you are? I think you are a gap-toothed sissy, that’s what.”

I gave him the full benefit of my black and white smile, bowed again, and said in Cantonese, “And your mother, drunken pig, was an ancient turtle who coupled with a running dog.” I’d picked that one up someplace.

Still bent down, Smalldane smiled and nodded his head as if in full agreement. Then he straightened up, put his hands on his hips, and said softly: “You should guard that dung-coated tongue of yours, my little pimp for poisonous toads, or I will rip it from your mouth and shove it up your rectum where it can flap in the breeze of your own wind.” His Cantonese was as good as mine, his imagery more vivid.

He didn’t scare me. Nothing scared me then, probably because I was spoiled rotten. But Smalldane did impress me with his size and his brilliant command of the foul invective. I bowed again, quite low, and made a sweeping gesture toward the door. “This way, my lordship, if you please.”

“Here you go, sonny,” he said and tossed me an American half-dollar.

“A thousand thank yous, kind sir,” I said, another archaic phrase that someone had taught me, but which — because of my absent teeth — came out with all the sibilants missing.

Smalldane went through the door and I followed, partly because I was curious, partly because business was slack, but mostly because I wanted the cup of hot cocoa that Yen Chi, Tante Katerine’s amah , prepared for me nightly.

I was right behind Smalldane when the madame of the house swept into the large entrance hall. She stopped abruptly, her eyes widened, and her hand went to her throat, a dramatic ploy that she copied rather successfully from either Norma Shearer or Kay Francis. I had watched her practice it often enough before her vanity table mirror. But now, for once in her life, she abandoned her pose and ran with arms outstretched toward Smalldane, crying, “Gormy!” at the top of her voice. He wrapped her in an embrace and kissed her for a long time while I watched with clinical interest. That’s one thing about being reared in a whorehouse: displays of affection and emotion will never embarrass you.

There were a number of half-sentences and unintelligible phrases such as “you promised to” and “I couldn’t get away” and “over two years without” and “long time” and “it’s so good to” and all the rest of the things that two persons who are fond of each other say after a long separation. I stood there, probably smirking a little, and watched and listened.

Tante Katerine spotted me then and beckoned. “Lucifer, dear, come. I want you to meet a very good and old friend of mine, Mr. Gorman Smalldane, the famous American radio correspondent. Gorman, this is my ward, Lucifer Dye.” She must have looked up “ward” someplace because it was the first time I’d ever heard her use it.

“Mr. Smalldane,” I said, bowing stiffly, more in the European than the Chinese manner. One of the girls from Berlin had contributed that. Her name was Use.

“He’s an insufferable little prick, isn’t he?” Smalldane said. “Who the hell lets him paint himself up like that?”

“I think it’s sehr aufgeweckt,” she said because nobody in Shanghai then had much use for “cute.”

“Looks like you’re training him for a job in Sammy Ching’s place down on the waterfront — if the Japs haven’t closed it yet. Sailors like little pogey bait like him.”

“Well, you’re wrong, Mr. Gorman Famous Smalldane,” Tante Katerine said. “He’s just a little boy and he goes to school every day. For three hours.”

“Where?”

“Here. We teach him here.”

Smalldane grinned and shook his head. “I bet he does learn a lot at that. And all of it useful.”

I found the conversation fascinating, doubtless because they were talking about me.

“He can do his multiplication through the twelveses,” Tante Katerine said, her English lapsing as her anger rose. “You want to hear him? What’s twelve times eleven, Lucifer?”

“One hundred and thirty two,” the insufferable little prick said.

“There!” she said triumphantly. “See. I bet you can’t do that when you are six.”

“I can’t do it now,” Smalldane said. “I never got past my elevenses.”

“He also speaks six languages. Maybe even seven. How many could you speak when you were his age, Mr. Know-some-all?”

“That’s know-it-all,” Smalldane said, “and I could barely get by in English, but at least I stayed out of Mother’s rouge and powder and wore pants, for God’s sake, and not her bathrobe.”

“Now you don’t like his clothes,” she said, her voice rising. “Now you’re making funny of his clothes. Do you know how much that gown cost? Do you know how many I paid for it? I paid fifteen dollars for it American, that’s how many.”

“He still looks silly.”

“That’s not all he’s got. He’s got four more just as expensive. And he’s got fine American clothes too that come from a famous house of fashion.”

“Sears, Roebuck?”

“Buster Brown, that’s who,” she said.

“Jesus,” Smalldane said. “I quit. Look, Katie, I didn’t come here to argue about some Australian kid that you’ve taken to raise. It’s been more than—”

“I’m not Australian, sir,” I said, “I am an American,” thus proving that there’s a little chauvinism in the best of us.