FOUR
Gus Neishacker was a two-hundred-pound fashion plate with very red cheeks and thin, exquisitely penciled eyebrows—eyebrows from a Chinese vase. There was a red carnation in the lapel of his wide-shouldered dinner jacket and he kept sniffing at it while he watched the headwaiter seat a party of guests. When Carmady and Tony Acosta came through the foyer arch he flashed a sudden smile and went to them with his hand out.
“How’s a boy, Ted? Party?”
Carmady said: “Just the two of us. Meet Mister Acosta. Gus Neishacker, Cyrano’s floor manager.”
Gus Neishacker shook hands with Tony without looking at him. He said: “Let’s see, the last time you dropped in—”
“She left town,” Carmady said. “We’ll sit near the ring but not too near. We don’t dance together.”
Gus Neishacker jerked a menu from under the headwaiter’s arm and led the way down five crimson steps, along the tables that skirted the oval dance floor.
They sat down. Carmady ordered rye highballS and Denver sandwiches. Neishacker gave the order to a waiter, pulled a chair out and sat down at the table. He took a pencil out and made triangles on the inside of a match cover.
“See the fights?” he asked carelessly.
“Was that what they were?”
Gus Neishacker smiled indulgently. “Benny talked to the Duke. He says you’re wise.” He looked suddenly at Tony Acosta.
“Tony’s all right,” Carmady said.
“Yeah. Well do us a favor, will you? See it stops right here. Benny likes this boy. He wouldn’t let him get hurt. He’d put protection all around him—real protection—if he thought that threat stuff was anything but some pool-hall bum’s idea of a very funny joke. Benny never backs but one boxfighter at a time, and he picks them damn careful.”
Carmady lit a cigarette, blew smoke from a corner of his mouth, said quietly: “It’s none of my business, but I’m telling you it’s screwy. I have a nose for that sort of thing.”
Gus Neishacker starcd at him a minute, then shrugged. He said: “I hope you’re wrong,” stood up quickly and walked away among the tables. He bent to smile here and there, and speak to a customer.
Tony Acosta’s velvet eyes shone. He said: “Jeeze, Mister Carmady, you think it’s rough stuff?”
Carmady nodded, didn’t say anything. The waiter put their drinks and sandwiches on the table, went away. The band on the stage at the end of the oval floor blared out a long chord and a slick, grinning mc. slid out on the stage and put his lips to a small open mike.
The floor show began. A line of half-naked girls ran out under a rain of colored lights. They coiled and uncoiled in a long sinuous line, their bare legs flashing, their navels little dimples of darkness in soft white, very nude flesh.
A hardboiled redhead sang a hardboiled song in a voice that could have been used to split firewood. The girls came back in black tights and silk hats, did the same dance with a slightly different exposure.
The music softened and a tall high-yaller torch singer drooped under an amber light and sang of something very far away and unhappy, in a voice like old ivory.
Carmady sipped his drink, poked at his sandwich in the dim light. Tony Acosta s hard young face was a small tense blur beside him.
The torch singer went away and there was a little pause and then suddenly all the lights in the place went out except the lights over the music racks of the band and little pale amber lights at the entrances to the radiating aisles of booths beyond the tables.
There were squeals in the thick darkness. A single white spot winked on, high up under the roof, settled on a runway beside the stage. Faces were chalk-white in the reflected glare. There was the red glow of a cigarette tip here and there. Four tall black men moved in the light, carrying a white mummy case on their shoulders. They came slowly, in rhythm, down the runway. They wore white Egyptian headdresses and loincloths of white leather and white sandals laced to the knee. The black smoothness of their limbs was like black marble in the moonlight.
They reached the middle of the dance floor and slowly upended the mummy case until the cover tipped forward and fell and was caught. Then slowly, very slowly, a swathed white figure tipped forward and fell—slowly, like the last leaf from a dead tree. It tipped in the air, seemed to hover, then plunged towards the floor under a shattering roll of drums.
The light went off, went on. The swathed figure was upright on the floor, spinning, and one of the blacks was spinning the opposite way, winding the white shroud around his body. Then the shroud fell away and a girl was all tinsel and smooth white limbs under the hard light and her body shot through the air glittering and was caught and passed around swiftly among the four black men, like a baseball handled by a fast infield.
Then the music changed to a waltz and she danced among the black men slowly and gracefully, as though among four ebony pillars, very close to them but never touching them.
The act ended. The applause rose and fell in thick waves. The light went out and it was dark again, and then all the lights went up and the girl and the four black men were gone.
“Keeno,” Tony Acosta breathed. “Oh, keeno. That was Miss Adrian, wasn’t it?”
Carmady said slowly: “A little daring.” He lit another cigarette, looked around. “There’s another black and white number, Tony. The Duke himself, in person.”
Duke Targo stood applauding violently at the entrance to one of the radiating booth aisles. There was a loose grin on his face. He looked as if he might have had a few drinks.
An arm came down over Carmady’s shoulder. A hand planted itself in the ash tray at his elbow. He smelled Scotch in heavy gusts. He turned his head slowly, looked up at the liquor-shiny face of Shenvair, Duke Targo’s drunken bodyguard.
“Smokes and a white gal,” Shenvair said thickly. “Lousy. Crummy. Godawful crummy.”
Carmady smiled slowly, moved his chair a little. Tony Acosta stared at Shenvair round-eyed, his little mouth a thin line.
“Blackface, Mister Shenvair. Not real smokes. I liked it.”
“And who the hell cares what you like?” Shenvair wanted to know.
Carmady smiled delicately, laid his cigarette down on the edge of a plate. He turned his chair a little more.
“Still think I want your job, Shenvair?”
“Yeah. I owe you a smack in the puss too.” He took his hand out of the ash tray, wiped it off on the tablecloth. He doubled it into a fist. “Like it now?”
A waiter caught him by the arm, spun him around.
“You lost your table, sir? This way.”
Shenvair patted the waiter on the shoulder, tried to put an arm around his neck. “Swell, let’s go nibble a drink. I don’t like these people.”
They went away, disappeared among the tables.
Carmady said: “To hell with this place, Tony,” and stared moodily towards the band stage. Then his eyes became intent.
A girl with corn-blond hair, in a white wrap with a white fur collar, appeared at the edge of the shell, went behind it, reappeared nearer. She came along the edge of the booths to the place where Targo had been standing. She slipped in between the booths there, disappeared.
Carmady said: “To hell with this place. Let’s go Tony,” in a low angry voice. Then very softly, in a tensed tone: “No— wait a minute. I see another guy I don’t like.”
The man was on the far side of the dance floor, which was empty at the moment. He was following its curve around, past the tables that fringed it. He looked a little different without his hat. But he had the same flat white expressionless face, the same close-set eyes. He was youngish, not more than thirty, but already having trouble with his bald spot. The slight bulge of a gun under his left arm was barely noticeable. He was the man who had run away from Jean Adrian’s apartment in the Carondelet.
He reached the aisle into which Targo had gone, into which a moment before Jean Adrian had gone. He went into it.
Carmady said sharply: “Wait here, Tony.” He kicked his chair back and stood up.
Somebody rabbit-punched him from behind. He swiveled, close to Shenvair’s grinning sweaty face.
“Back again, pal,” the curly-haired man chortled, and hit him on the jaw.
It was a short jab, well placed for a drunk. It caught Carmady off balance, staggered him. Tony Acosta came to his feet snarling, catlike. Carmady was still rocking when Shenvair let go with the other fist. That was too slow, too wide. Carmady slid inside it, uppercut the curly-haired man’s nose savagely, got a handful of blood before he could get his hand away. He put most of it back on Shenvair’s face.
Shenvair wobbled, staggered back a step and sat down on the floor, hard. He clapped a hand to his nose.
“Keep an eye on this bird, Tony,” Carmady said swiftly.
Shenvair took hold of the nearest tablecloth and yanked it. It came off the table. Silver and glasses and china followed it to the floor. A man swore and a woman squealed. A waiter ran towards them with a livid, furious face.
Carmady almost didn’t hear the two shots.
They were small and flat, close together, a small-caliber gun. The rushing waiter stopped dead, and a deeply etched white line appeared around his mouth as instantly as though the lash of a whip had cut it there.
A dark woman with a sharp nose opened her mouth to yell and no sound came from her. There was the instant when nobody makes a sound, when it almost seems as if there will never again be any sound—after the sound of a gun. Then Carmady was running.
He bumped into people who stood up and craned their necks. He reached the entrance to the aisle into which the whitefaced man had gone. The booths had high walls and swing doors not so high. Heads stuck out over the doors, but no one was in the aisle yet. Carmady charged up a shallow carpeted slope, at the far end of which booth doors stood wide open.
Legs in dark cloth showed past the doors, slack on the floor, the knees sagged. The toes of black shoes were pointed into the booth.
Carmady shook an arm off, reached the place.
The man lay across the end of a table, his stomach and one side of his face on the white cloth, his left hand dropped between the table and the padded seat. His right hand on top of the table didn’t quite hold a big black gun, a .45 with a cut barrel. The bald spot on his head glistened under the light, and the oily metal of the gun glistened beside it.
Blood leaked from under his chest, vivid scarlet on the white cloth, seeping into it as into blotting paper.
Duke Targo was standing up, deep in the booth. His left arm in the white serge coat was braced on the end of the table. Jean Adrian was sitting down at his side. Targo looked at Carmady blankly, as if he had never seen him before. He pushed his big right hand forward.
A small white-handled automatic lay on his palm.
“I shot him,” Targo said, He pulled a gun on us and I shot him.”
Jean Adrian was scrubbing her hands together on a scrap of handkerchief. Her face was strained, cold, not scared. Her eyes were dark.
“I shot him,” Targo said. He threw the small gun down on the cloth. It bounced, almost hit the fallen man’s head. “Let’s—let’s get out of here.”
Carmady put a hand against the side of the sprawled man’s neck, held it there a second or two, took it away.
“He’s dead,” he said. “When a citizen drops a redhot—that’s news.”
Jean Adrian was staring at him stiff-eyed. He flashed a smile at her, put a hand against Targo’s chest, pushed him back.
“Sit down, Targo. You’re not going any place.”
Targo said: “Well—okey. I shot him, see.”
“That’s all right,” Carmady said. “Just relax.”
People were close behind him now, crowding him. He leaned back against the press of bodies and kept on smiling at the girl’s white face.
FIVE