Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

“Where?” I asked.

“Know what a gin-flat is?” she asked me in turn.

I thought I’d heard the expression before, but I wasn’t sure of the exact meaning.

“A friend of mine uses the place she lives, her own flat, to sell drinks in,” she explained. “She won’t admit strangers, that way she stays out of trouble, but if you know her you can get in.”

I wondered if it would cost very much. I didn’t say it aloud, but she seemed to read my mind.

“You don’t have to worry,” she said tactfully. “If you run out, I can always get credit there. We’ve known each other a long time.”

That sufficed, and we started out without further ado.

I no longer recall which streets we took to get there. All of San Fran was still so new to me that their names wouldn’t have meant anything anyway. I do remember that the flat- or apartment-building was situated at the intersection of two streets that came together at an angle instead of squarely. In other words the house was wedge-shaped. One of the two streets ran down the slope of a hill at a breakneck incline; the other was on the level.

We went in, rode up I think three floors in an automatic elevator, got out, and she pushed a doorbell. You could hear music and a welter of voices coming from the other side even before it opened. But toned down below the point of creating a disturbance.

It opened and a harridan of about fifty-five stood looking at us. There wasn’t a single personable quality about her to my twenty-one-year-old eyes. Her hair was as coarse as rope, and bleached to the same dirty color. She looked tough, she walked tough, and she talked tough. Even when she stood still, as she was doing now, she was tough standing still. She stood with one hip-joint thrown out of whack, and a hand planted on top of it.

“You,” she said to the girl who’d brought me. She flipped her head curtly. “Mon in,” she said. Then she said to her, “Wherej get the young one?”

The girl ignored that. She whispered to me, “Slip her a couple bucks. It costs a buck a head admission. Then after that you pay for the drinks as you get them.”

“You know the way,” the proprietress or whatever you’d call her said, and she turned aside into an open doorway and left the two of us on our own. She evidently didn’t mix with the paying customers. I caught a glimpse of a tall white refrigerator and a tabletop studded with empty carbonated-water bottles in there where she’d gone.

She’d taken the living-room of her Hat — or rather had had a carpenter do it for her — and knocked up a row of wooden partitions along one wall. Each little enclosure they formed held benches and a clamped-down table. They were all taken except one, down at the very end, and we slipped into that one. Next to us there was a party of four, two sailors and their girls, very noisy but good-natured about it. Then there was a girl wearing an orange dress with black polka-dots, farther down the line somewhere. I can still remember her; you could see that dress a mile away.

And that was about all there was to the place. A haggard waiter with one of these ineradicable subcutaneous blue beards and blue eye-pouches to match. A record-machine to play music, a cigarette machine so you could smoke, and the floor left bare so you could dance. Two baby-spots trained down on it from opposite corners, one swathed in red tissue-paper the other in blue, so you could have atmosphere.

I thought it was the cat’s pajamas, as they said at the time. I thought it was the bee’s knees. I thought this was living it up. At twenty-one you’re easily pleased.

So the evening began. The evening I never forgot all the rest of my life.

They played the songs that were hits that season — Moanin’ Low and Mean to Me and Tiptoe Through the Tulips, which Nick Lucas had introduced in one of the big musical movies that were just beginning to come out. Once we got up and danced, but I had never been a good dancer, and to my surprise I found out that she wasn’t either. I had always thought it was second nature to most girls. She was sort of rigid, hard to push around. After that we just sat there and let the gin do its work.

The gin was murderous; juniper flavoring added to raw alcohol. You couldn’t tell which was worse, the flavoring or the base. But you couldn’t get it any better than that all over America at the time. If you wanted a good drink, you had to cross the border to Mexicali or Montreal.

Even so, the frump who ran the dump must have coined money: there was no overhead to speak of. Just the rank rotgut, a couple of cases of mixer a night, and the tubercular waiter, who looked like he was related to her (probably an illegitimate son) and therefore not on salary. Maybe a monthly fix to the janitor to keep quiet about it.

As I got drunker, every time I glimpsed the girl in the polka-dotted dress I got the weirdest optical illusion I’d ever had in my life. All the polka-dots seemed to swarm upward off the dress and hang there suspended over her, like a cloud of lazy bees hovering in mid-air. She’d move offside, in a plain orange-color dress. Then the dots would all go after her and land back all over it again. She was always just one step too quick for them to go along with her, they always had to catch up afterward.

After a while the sailors and their girls were no longer there, without my noticing at just which point they had left. Just a forlorn and forgotten White Rock bottle stayed on there to mark their place. Then the girl in the polka-dots was gone with her swain too, and that I didn’t mind. Then we were all alone in the place, and it was time for us to go too.

On our way to the door, the roughneck manageress accosted us.

“You didn’t give me my usual discount,” the girl with me told her.

“Listen, baby,” she wheezed, “I’m not in business for my health.”

“Well, I could have steered him somewhere else,” my girl pointed out.

“You wouldn’t have dared,” the other one jeered. “Is he hep?”

“Come on, forget about it,” I said, sensing that a row was brewing between the two of them, and not wanting to get caught in the middle. I went on out the front door of the Hat awhile, waiting for her to come after me.

The moment my back was turned, the thing erupted. There was a scuffling sound, a scream of rage, and then the noise of something falling heavily to the floor.

Then my girl came running out. She didn’t stop, but gave my sleeve a tug as she flashed past me. “Come on, don’t stand there! As long as she wouldn’t give me my cut, I took it away from her anyway.” She didn’t waste time waiting for the elevator, but went skittering down the stairs, so I went chasing down after her.

“She’s liable to call the cops, isn’t she?” I said jaggedly as we clobbered down and around and down some more.

“She wouldn’t take the chance,” she answered. “She’s running an illegal operation up there and she knows it. They’d close her down in a minute if she attracted their attention.”

Before we’d made the street a door opened above and a gin-corroded voice rasped down after us — or after her, I should say — “You’re going to get yourself killed one of these nights. And I hope tonight’s the night you do!”

We chased out into the street, caught our breaths a minute, and finally hooked arms again.

“Let’s go over to my place,” she said. “It’s not too far from here; we can walk it.”

I’d been hoping for this. This was what I’d been aiming at all evening long, ever since I’d first met her. And now it was here, it had been arrived at. All the intervening hours had proved not to be wasted after all. If she hadn’t made her suggestion first, I had fully intended at about this point or not too long after to ask her to come back to my own room at the hotel with me. But this way was better by far; I wasn’t at all sure the desk-man wouldn’t have stopped us on our way in.