The pianist could have passed for a corpse in any mortuary if he had only stayed still, instead of tossing his fingers in bunches at the suffering keyboard. His batting average in hitting the notes was about .333, which would have been good enough for a Coast League ballplayer. He was white and loaded to the gills, it was hard to tell with what. I sat down at a table near the piano and watched him until he turned his face in my direction. He had the sad bad center-less eyes I expected, wormholes in a withered apple with a dark rotten core.
I ordered a beer from a sulky waitress in an orange apron. When I left her the change from a dollar, she hoisted a long-suffering smile from the depths of despair and offered it to me: “Zizi’s as high as a kite. They ought to make him shut up when he’s so wild, instead of encouraging him.”
“I’d like to buy him a drink.”
“He doesn’t drink.” She corrected herself: “With the customers, I mean.”
“Tell him I want to talk to him when he stops. If he can stop.”
She gave me the twice-over then, and I tried to look as degenerate as hell. Maybe it came easier than I thought. I wanted to drink the beer, but I let it stand on the table, going flat, while Zizi battered his way through half a dozen requests. Moonlight and Roses, the girls wanted. Stardust and Blue Moon and other pieces that brought other times and places into the midnight basement at the bottom of the city. One of the sailors made up his mind and left the bar. Without preliminary, he attached himself to the blonde in the green dress and steered her out, lean-hipped and swaggering. The bartender’s face watched them over the bar like a dead white moon. Happy Days Are Here Again, and Stormy Weather. One of the women tried to sing it and burst loosely into tears. The others comforted her. The pianist struck a plangent discord and gave up. A lone drunk sitting against the wall behind me was talking in a monotone to his absent mother, explaining very reasonably, in great detail, why he was a no-good son-of-a-gun and a disgrace to the family.
A stranger voice, husky and loose, wandering between the masculine and feminine registers, rustled like damp dead leaves in the corners of the room. It was Zizi announcing a break: “Excuse me folks my stint is done but I’ll be back when the clock strikes one to bring you more hot music and fun.” He pushed the mike away and rose unsteadily.
The waitress elbowed through the group of women around him and whispered in his ear, gesturing in my direction. He crossed to my table, a tall middle-aged man who had once been handsome, fixed by that fact in the mannerisms of a boy. Leaning with one hand spread on the table in an attitude of precarious grace, he inclined towards me. His jaw dropped lackadaisically, showing discolored teeth.
“You wanted to speak with me, boy friend? I am Zizi. You like my music?”
“I’m tone deaf.”
“You are fortunate.” He smiled sickly, revealing pale gums above the discolored teeth.
“It isn’t music that’s on my mind.”
“Yes?” He leaned closer, his long frail body half-collapsed against the edge of the table.
I lowered my voice, and plucked at the sleeve of his greening tux in what I hoped was an appealing gesture. “I need a fix real bad,” I said. “I’m going off my stick.”
His thin weeded eyebrows rose towards his thinning hairline. “Why do you come to me?”
“I’ve been getting it from Ronnie in Pacific Point. He said you knew Mosquito.”
He straightened slowly, swaying like a willow, and peered into my eyes. I let them gaze. “For God’s sake, Zizi, give me a break.”
“I don’t know you,” he said.
“Here’s my card, then.” I put a twenty on the table by his hand. “I got to have it. Where can I find Mosquito?”
The hand crawled over the bill. I noticed that its nails were broken and bleeding. “Okay, boy friend. He lives in the Grandview Hotel. It’s just around the corner, a block above Market. Ask the night clerk for him.” The hand closed over the bill and dove into his pocket. “Remember I haven’t the faintest notion why you want to see him. Tee hee.”
“Thank you,” I said emotionally.
“Sweet dreams, boy friend.”
The Grandview Hotel was an old four-story building of dirty brick squeezed between taller buildings. An electric sign over the entrance advertised SINGLE WITH BATH, $1.50. The brass fittings on the front door looked as if they went back to the earthquake. I pulled it open and entered the lobby, a deep narrow room poorly lit by a couple of ancient wall-fixtures on each side. Two women and three men were playing draw poker at a table under one of the lights. The women were bulldog-faced, and wore coats trimmed with the fur of extinct animals. Two of the men were fat and old, bald probably under their hats. The third was young and hatless. They were using kitchen matches instead of chips.
I moved toward the lighted desk at the rear, and the hatless youth got up and followed me. “You want a room?” Apparently he was the curator. He suited the role. Bloodless and narrow, his face was set in a permanent sneer.
“I want to see Mosquito.”
“Does he know you?”
“Not yet.”
“Somebody send you?”
“Zizi.”
“Wait a minute.” He leaned across the desk and lifted a house-phone from a niche at one end, plugging it in to the old-fashioned switchboard above it. He spoke softly into the mouthpiece and glanced at me, with the receiver to his ear. He hung up and unplugged the connection: “He says you can go up.”
“What room?”
He sneered at my ignorance of his mysteries. “307. Take the elevator if you want.” His feet were soundless on the decayed rubber matting as he padded back to the poker game.
I piloted the ramshackle elevator cage to the third floor, and stepped out into an airless corridor. The brown numbered doors stood like upended coffins on each side, bathed in the static red flames of fire-exit bulbs that dotted the ceiling at intervals. 307 was half-way down the corridor to the left. Its door was open a crack, throwing a yellow ribbon of light across the threadbare carpeting of the hallway and up the opposite wall.
Then the light was half obscured by someone watching me from the other side of the door. I raised my hand to knock. The door swung inward sharply before I touched it. A young man stood in the doorway with his back to the light. He was middle-sized, but the great black bush of hair on top of his head made him seem almost tall. “Zizi’s little friend, eh? Come on in.” His voice was adenoidal.
One of his hands was on his hip, the other on the doorknob. I had to brush against him to enter the room. He wasn’t heavy-looking but his flesh was soft and tremulous like a woman’s. His movements seemed invertebrate as he closed the door and turned. He was wearing a soft green shirt, six-pleated high-rise trousers of dark green gabardine, a brilliant green and yellow tie held by a large gold clasp.
His other hand moved to his other hip. He cocked his head on one side, his face small and pointed under the top-heavy hair. “Carrying iron, old man?”
“I use it in my business.” I patted my heavy jacket pocket.
“And what’s your business, old man?”
“Whatever I can knock off. Do I need references?”
“Long as you don’t try to knock off daddy.” He smiled at the ridiculousness of the idea. His teeth were small and fine like a child’s first set. “Where you from?”
“Pacific Point.”