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 stared 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 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 redhead 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.
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.