Fo'castle Waltz

"How you like that?" gloated Mush as he swaggered along. "I kin speak Spanish. That Spik cop understood when I sez bordellos—bordellos and senoritas. How you like that?"

We walked quite a distance and came to a big house with the proverbial high-lighted doorway set back from the street. That was the bordello—a big one.

There was a little cop stationed in front of that door who searched each of us before he admitted us en masse. Philip told us that was to make sure we carried no knives—to start trouble. He didn't want us fighting over any of the women. As he was giving me the once-over he grinned and mumbled some crack to Philip who had been using his Spanish on him.

It just about killed Philip and he sputtered a translation which I didn't get—something about "the only weapon the professor carries is the same as the rest of you caballeros and there's little danger"—and whatever else was said was lost in the stir when the cop opened the big door and we went into that big house.

The lobby of the place was larger than any we'd seen up in Rio Santiago and it was crowded. All the small tables were taken and we stood around waiting for one. There weren't many girls sitting anywhere—seemed they were all busy—and as soon as they returned from the patio and deposited their money at the Madame's desk, they wearily marched back into the darkness with another customer.

We finally got a table and sat around sipping black coffee. The Madame occasionally would climb down from her desk and move among the tables. Now and again she'd question some of the Argentinians and they'd bring out some official-looking papers from their inner coat pockets. Sometimes her voice would rise in anger as she'd grab some little guy by the shoulders and pull him out of his seat.

Philip told us she was checking on the under-aged kids who got past the cop outside. Those papers must have been birth certificates, or cards of identification, he thought.

We sat there smoking and quietly considering whether we ought not to try another big house the traffic cop had told Philip about. It wasn't very cheerful sitting where we were, and no one seemed eager for the girls, even Mush. The place was quiet for a little while. Then a shrill scream coming from the patio gave an added chill to that already cold lobby we sat in.

The girl who had let out that squawk let out another—then a few more in quick succession. The silence of the lobby was broken by the cackle of the high heels of the Madame and a couple of the girls as they ran across the tile floor and out into the darkness.

The screaming girl out there, between hysterical sobbing, kept repeating a few words—over and over again.

'"The woman hollers—he's too big—the man—-he killed her, she says." Philip murmured a translation of the girl's scream.

Her cries had subsided into an incoherent wailing. I looked around the lobby. None of the men sitting around those little tables had stirred. They looked pale and tense as they quietly smoked their cigarettes and looked toward the sound.

Well, here was that time-honored Joe Miller of bawdy jokes. The one Rabelais, Balzac, Boccaccio, and numberless other literary lights had tossed off so brightly—and it had been repeated in countless versions—always good for a belly laugh in every smoking car, club, stag party, barroom, barn, schoolyard, back alley, and been cleaned up again for tea parties and refined socials—here it was in the flesh. Well, it wasn't funny.

We sat there uncomfortable for a moment or two listening to the girl cry. Then we saw her, a skinny, coarse-looking woman, being supported on one side by the Madame and on the other by one of her colleagues—as they led her slowly toward us. Her face was blotched, her hair disheveled, and a lot of the girls hovered around giving her hoarse-voiced sympathy until they led and carried her through the door into the lobby.

The man had been back in the shadows. We could see him lurking there. Then he slithered along the patio wall and we caught just a flash of him as he quickly and silently came out into the light of the room, picked his way through the tables, and was gone out the front door.

He was a narrow little man who kept his hat pulled down over his swarthy face. The eyes of everyone in the room followed his quick passage. The girls looked after him too. They weren't angry with him—they seemed sorry for him. A gloomy silence settled over that big room broken only by an occasional stirring of restless feet and the whimpering of the hurt girl.

"Aw, come on, let's go someplace," said Mush. We all nodded "sure" and left that house.

22. Pink Shrimps and Sweet Caporals