Upstairs, the feller answered the door in his bathrobe.
“My name is Flowers.”
He looked at Gladys, then at me.
“We spoke on the telephone about a month back, when you were passing through on the Empress.”
“That’s right,” he said. “I thought maybe you’d forgotten.”
“I made a note of it here,” I said, tapping my desk diary. “Anyway, here she is, skipper.”
Now he leered. Gladys nodded and looked beyond him into the cool shadowy room.
“Thanks very much,” he said. He opened the door for her, then fished five dollars out of his pocket and handed the money to me.
“What’s this?”
“For your trouble.”
“That doesn’t exactly cover it,” I said.
“It’ll have to.”
“Hold your horses,” I said. “How long do you want her for?”
“We’ll see,” he said.
Gladys was in the room, looking out the window.
“Gladys, don’t let—”
“Leave her out of this,” the feller said.
I wanted to sock him. I said, “Until tomorrow morning is a hundred and twenty bucks, or sterling equivalent, payable in advance.”
“I told you we’ll see” he said. “Now bugger off.”
“I’ll be downstairs.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“It’s my usual practice,” I said. “Just so there’s no funny business.”
“Suit yourself,” he said, and slammed the door.
At half past three Gladys was nowhere in sight. I was standing by the elevator, afraid to sit in the main lobby and get stared at by the Struldbrugs who would know what I was up to as soon as they saw me alone. Until Leigh came I had never found that embarrassing.
Next to the elevator there was a blue Chinese vase filled with sand, and bristling from the sand were cigarette ends, crumpled butts, and two inches of what looked to me like a good cigar. I was anxious, and I quickly realized that the source of my anxiety was a longing to snatch up that cigar, dust it off, and light it. What troubled me was that only the thought that I would be seen prevented me from doing it.
A fifty-three-year-old grubber in ashtrays, standing in the shadows of the Palm Grove lobby. Downtown, on Beach Road, a towkay hoicked my name and kicked his dog and demanded to know where I was. Between the cremation of a stranger and the session of hard drinking that was to come, I had obliged a feller with a Chinese girl and been handed five bucks and told to bugger off. I had kept the five bucks. I waited, doglike but without a woof, and I went on swallowing self-pity, hugging my tattoos and watching Chinese hurry through air remarkably like the smoke their own ashes would make. I knew mortality, its human smell and hopeless fancies. What was I waiting for?
“She’s not down here, skipper,” I said over the room phone. “You’re overtime.”
“You’re telling me!”
“Where is she?”
“Take a wild guess.”
“I’ll inform the management,” I said. “You leave me no other choice.”
“I’ll inform the management about you. Moo-wah!”
“Be reasonable, skipper. I don’t find that funny.”
“Stop pestering me. You her father or something?”
“Guardian you might say.”
“Is that what they call it these days!”
“I’ve just done you a big favor, pal!” I shouted. “And this is what I get for it, a lot of sass!”
“I don’t owe you a thing.”
“You owe me,” I said, “a great deal, and you owe Gladys—”
“Go away.”
“I’m staying put.”
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” the feller said, and hung up.
In the basement corridor I passed a fire alarm; the red spur of a switch behind glass, with a handy steel mallet hanging next to it on a hook. The directions shouted to me. I waited until the corridor was empty, then sprang to it and followed the clear directions printed on the black label riveted to the wall. I smashed, I pulled. A bell above my head rapped and rang and lifted to a scream.
2
AN HOUR LATER, in a phone booth, that alarm was still screaming in my ears, turning my recklessness into courage as I dialed the American embassy. I held the receiver to my mouth like an oxygen mask; I was out of breath, and panting, felt incomplete — rushed and unimaginative. The phrases I was prepared to use, urgent offers of service my canny justifications, you might say, had once mercifully blessed, struck me as whorish. They had not troubled me before—“Anything I can do—,” “Just name it—,” “Leave it to me—,” “An excellent choice: couldn’t have done better myself—,” “No trouble at all—,” “It was a pleasure—,” “That’s what I’m here for—,” “What are friends for—?” But that was when I had a choice. This phone call was no decision. It was hardly my choice; it was the last plea possible. I was on my back. I needed a favor. Is there anything — anything at all — you can do for me?
“Ed, remember—”
“Flowers, is that you?” It was a relief to hear Shuck’s jaws, the familiar and endearing buzz as he casually moistened my name with the kiss of his fishy lisp. “Where have you been hiding yourself?”
“Had my hands full,” I said.
“It’s good to be busy.”
“It was driving me bananas,” I said.
“Nice to hear your voice.”
“Same here,” I said. “I thought I might drop around sometime. Chew the fat. Maybe this afternoon if it’s okay with you. Things are pretty quiet at the office. I could hop in a taxi and be over in a few minutes, or—”
“I’d really like that,” Shuck said. “But I’m tied up at the moment.”
For pity’s sake, I was going to say. I resisted. “Some other time then. It’s just that I’m free this afternoon, and, ah, I don’t know whether you remember, but we’ve got some unfinished business.”
Shuck hummed. He said, “Jack, to tell the honest truth I didn’t think I’d hear from you again. You know?”
“That’s what I want to explain.”
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you called,” he said. “I’m damned glad you called.”
“How about a drink?”
“Sorry,” he said.
“What about after work? What time do you knock off?”
“I’ll write you a letter,” Shuck said quickly.
“A letter? What if it gets lost in the mail?”
“You’re a card,” said Shuck. “Hey, heard any good ones lately?”
“Gags? No, nothing.” I thought of my double, the hilarity and malice he provoked, the embarrassment of his presence which was the embarrassment of a comic routine (“Does this establishment—?”), fumblings which circumstances twisted into laughless gestures of despair, the alien clown killed by tomfoolery. At a distance, as a story — with death absent — it was a joke I could enter into. But death turned the shaggy-dog story into tragedy by making it final. If Leigh had survived I would have found it all screamingly funny; I could have kicked his memory with a mocking story at the Bandung. But it was different, I was on the phone; the memory of smoke stopped my mouth.
“You’ll get the letter tomorrow,” said Shuck. “Stay loose.”
It was delivered to Hing’s by an embassy peon. I signed for it and took it into my cubicle to open. It was a limp envelope of the sort that just squeezing it in my fingers I knew contained nothing important. I slit it open and shook out a brown coupon and a small memo. The coupon said, HARBOUR TOUR — ADMIT ONE ADULT $3.50; the memo specified a day and time, and bore Edwin Shuck’s squinting initials.