‘It’s the age of specialization is what it is,’ he began preaching a new faith, ‘Do you go to a eye doc to get a tooth yanked? Do you go to the ice cream parlor for stamps? New fields is opening and one is the bug field. Hundreds of bugs loaded with gold, the Depression aint even touched them, willing to pay somebody to make them happy. It don’t make a bug happy to come into a joint, point out a girl and go to bed. Nowadays he wants the bit spiced up. He wants the girl to tell him, “Do what you want with me.”’
Perhaps too it was Finnerty’s new girl, a spare and bitter child just out of a Houston jail who had encouraged him, for she seemed not to care in the least what became of her. ‘My name is Kitty Twist,’ she had told him, ‘and I do everything.’
Her breastless, sexless personality was no matter, Finnerty knew. For this was the kind of girl upon whom a man might recover something of which a wife or mistress had robbed him. The city was full of hatless Harrys seeking not so much love but vengeance for wrongs, real or fancied, forever imposed by women: wife, nurse, sister, daughter, mistress or aunt. Woman, there was the cause of it all.
A traffic founded on self-pity that paid off better than the old-fashioned traffic in love. Love’s dividends came in single bills; but hatred’s comes by twenties.
‘It’s the new way of doing things,’ Finnerty approved.
And the men who came buzzing in the lieutenant’s wake had the twenties. Apparently they didn’t read the papers, for they gave no sign of knowing that the country was in the very depths of an economic disaster. They were men who had been sheltered all their lives and were sheltered yet. Their world was the world of their own needs alone, and if they looked out of a window at the street below, nothing they saw, or nobody down there, had any relationship to their own safe halls.
Brokers and buyers, efficiency experts with private means, personnel managers from banking families, men who had been born to ownership of ships or banks or mines or wells – the whole contented clan of white-collar foxes whose hearts were in their collars and their love locked in their files, who yet wanted to know of life – ‘What’s the answer?’ Without pausing once to wonder what was the question.
‘These are class people,’ Finnerty tried to impress his girls. ‘If one tells you to swing from the chandelier, baby, you swing.’
‘Why not just sell the beds and buy trapezes for the money?’ the new child wanted to know right off.
‘You’re always in there with the wise answer, aint you?’ Oliver warned her.
‘Because you’re always there with the right question, Little Daddy,’ Kitty tried quickly to soften her new daddy.
Against the collar clan the lunch bucket brigadiers – boiler-makers, janitors, construction workers, merchant mariners, grease-monkeys, slaughter house bullies, plasterers and bricklayers didn’t stand a chance. The collars had fancied love up until the best looking and youngest of the women were out of range of the bucket boys. Why tie up a piece of merchandise for half an hour with a date smelling of fish or tar, when one smelling of nothing but after-shave lotion would pay five times as much and perhaps not even soil a towel?
‘Mama,’ Oliver gave out the news, ‘we’re going to forget these workin’-ass bums who don’t even know a girl has a soul. I know one pimp willing to stand on the corner waiting for a broad to turn a three-dollar trick so he can get a haircut, but I don’t call that a pimp. I got every one of my broads insured and I got a plane to keep up too. What the workin’-ass man wants he can get elsewhere. From here on out we cater strictly to the bug who wants something he’s afraid to ask his wife for – or what he’d rather not have her give. Or what she can’t give.’
‘I’m not sure I’m following, Oliver.’
‘You’re following all right,’ Finnerty assured her.
‘Well, I don’t care for where I think you’re leading. What can any girl of ours give a man that his wife can’t?’
‘Virginity, woman,’ the pander almost spat the word – virginity. Else how is it that when I say to some clown – “Would you like to see the girls, mister?” he just dogeyes me and keeps on walking. But when I say, “Mister, are you interested in a girl who’s never been had?” it’s just too much for him. He slows down, thinking it over, turns the corner, comes back on the other side of the street and all I have to do is wait. He comes to me then. “What did you mean by that?” he wants to know and by the way he says it I know whether he’s the law or a bug. “I meant are you interested in witnessing a girl giving in for the first time?” Mama, you’d be astonished how almost every one will come up with a ten-spot just on a promise like that. Honest to God, some days I feel rotten about everyone but myself.’
‘Some days I feel rotten about you too, Oliver,’ Mama admitted.
The little man sat clasping his stomach as though in pain. ‘What kind of a sport wouldn’t hop to a chance like we’re offering? Why, it’s like having a girl’s very soul. Love he can get at home – but the soul, the soul – Did his mother neglect him? Did his auntie seduce him? Did his mother-in-law rob him? Did his wife desert him? Did his mistress betray him – Here’s a chance to get even with them all.’
‘Calm yourself, Oliver,’ Mama urged him, ‘because no man is coming for no such purpose to any house of mine,’ Mama found her voice at last, ‘I’ve been an underworld woman all my days. I have faith my Lord will forgive me for that. For I’ve been straight with Him and straight with myself—’
‘—and straight with your girls too, of course,’ Finnerty stopped her. His very tone stopped her. ‘Sit down, old woman. There’s something I’ve been meaning to have out with you and this is as good a time as any.’
Mama sat down.
‘It’s a little matter of a bill that went into your hand a C note and came back to me as a ten-spot. If it had been any broad but the Looney I’d think maybe it was her and not you. But it’s true that the girl never actually looked at that bill – I’ve watched her take money time and again and she never looks at it, just puts it away until she sees me, then hands over the lot. So I know she gave it to you as she got it – old woman, it was you pulled the gypsy switch on your best, your only friend. Do you call that being straight for the Christian-killing Moses’s sake, old woman?’
‘Oliver, if I know what you’re talking about I’ll kiss your behind before God.’
Finnerty cocked his head a bit at that. ‘You know what you just said is as strong a statement I’ve heard a Louisiana nigger make to a white man for some time?’
‘Oliver, it’s the truth. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Look,’ he began losing patience. ‘I whupped the broad and she said “No.” I whupped her harder and she still said “No.” Finally I took my mittens off, ready to give her the real thing. She still said “No.” Mama, I don’t want to whup you. But I know it wasn’t the broad. I know it was you.’
Mama could scarcely bear the injustice of this. ‘For God’s sake, boy. What makes you so sure it wasn’t the mark who switched on you?’
Finnerty smiled thinly. ‘I was wondering how long it was going to take you to come up with that. It don’t go, old woman. I never took eye off that bill from the moment I put it in the mark’s pocket.’
‘Were you in the room when he gave it to the girl?’
‘As good as. I had my eye to the hole.’
‘How could you see the number on the bill through a keyhole?’
The shadow of a doubt passed across the pander’s mind – but he recalled the sheer simplicity of Dove’s face and the shadow passed. It just couldn’t be. For that redheaded country boy hadn’t been just an ordinary mark. He had been a mark’s mark, the kind a man might wait a lifetime to meet, so simple it was pathetic.