The sweatered man snatched the gun up and stood rigid, watching Malvern.
Malvern got out a handkerchief and wiped the front of his coat, while Targo shut his large well-shaped mouth slowly and began to move the towel back and forth across his chest. After a moment he said:
“Just who the hell may you be?”
Malvern said: “I used to be a private dick. Malvern’s the name. I think you need help.”
Targo’s face got a little redder than the shower had left it. “Why?”
“I heard you were supposed to throw it, and I think you tried to. But Werra was too lousy. You couldn’t help yourself. That means you’re in a jam.”
Targo said very slowly: “People get their teeth kicked in for saying things like that.”
The room was very still for a moment. The drunk sat up on the floor and blinked, tried to get his feet under him, and gave it up.
Malvern added quietly: “Benny Cyrano is a friend of mine. He’s your backer, isn’t he?”
The sweatered man laughed harshly. Then he broke the gun and slid the shells out of it, dropped the gun on the floor. He went to the door, went out, slammed the door shut.
Targo looked at the shut door, looked back at Malvern. He said very slowly:
“What did you hear?”
“Your friend Jean Adrian lives in my hotel, on my floor. She got sapped by a hood this afternoon. I happened by and saw the hood running away, picked her up. She told me a little of what it was all about.”
Targo had put on his underwear and socks and shoes. He reached into a locker for a black satin shirt, put that on. He said:
“She didn’t tell me.”
“She wouldn’t — before the fight.”
Targo nodded slightly. Then he said: “If you know Benny, you may be all right. I’ve been getting threats. Maybe it’s a lot of birdseed and maybe it’s some Spring Street punter’s idea of how to make himself a little easy dough. I fought my fight the way I wanted to. Now you can take the air, mister.”
He put on high-waisted black trousers and knotted a white tie on his black shirt. He got a white serge coat trimmed with black braid out of the locker, put that on. A black and white handkerchief flared from the pocket in three points.
Malvern stared at the clothes, moved a little towards the door and looked down at the drunk.
“Okey,” he said. “I see you’ve got a bodyguard. It was just an idea I had. Excuse it, please.”
He went out, closed the door gently, and went back up the ramp to the lobby, out to the street. He walked through the rain around the corner of the building to a big graveled parking lot.
The lights of a car blinked at him and his coupé slid along the wet gravel and pulled up. Tony Acosta was at the wheel.
Malvern got in at the right side and said: “Let’s go out to Cyrmo’s, and have a drink, Tony.”
“Jeeze, that’s swell. Miss Adrian’s in the floor show there. You know, the blonde I told you about.”
Malvern said: “Yeah. I saw Targo. I kind of liked him — but I didn’t like his clothes.”
4
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 Malvern 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?”
Malvern 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,” Malvern 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. Malvern 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,” Malvern 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.”
Malvern 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 stared at him a minute, then shrugged. He said: “I hope you’re right,” 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 Malvern, you think it’s rough stuff?”
Malvern 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 M.C. 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 hard-boiled red-head sang a hard-boiled 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.
Malvern 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 knees. 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.