I said I would like to see Madame Toulouse.
“She ain’t home. Now if you want a good time we can do business with you. If you don’t want a good time we can’t do business with you.”
I said I was crazy for a good time, and he ushered me through swinging glass curtains into a high wide room where the music was. It came from a piano and a guitar at the far end of the room, played by two cadaverous young men with shining black hair. The walls of the room, which must have taken up nearly the whole first floor, were lined with tables at which men sat drinking, some with girls on their knees.
The center of the room was a dance-floor where the rest of the girls danced with each other or with whatever male partners they could get. The girls wore no clothes, except that some had colored plumes projecting from their powdered buttocks. One had a red feather. One had a blue feather. One had a green feather. These plumes wagged like languid tails as the girls jigged through the bored routine of dancing. The girls with male partners seemed less bored, if you did not look at their faces.
“You can see, we got variety,” the doorman said. “White, black, brown. Blonde, brunette, redhead, fat, skinny, Mexican, Chinese. Anything you want, we got it. You pay the waiter for your drinks and you pay the girl when you take her upstairs. You take your time and you take your pick. That’s the way it works out best.”
I sat down at an iron-legged table by the door and he retired ponderously through the glass curtains. They clicked behind him like unheeded admonitory tongues. The waiter, whose clean white coat insisted that the joint had class, came to my table and I ordered Mexican beer. The unattached girls began to converge on me like hens at feeding-time. Like figures in the dream of a naïve and hopeful hermit, they formed a half-circle about me, leaning forward and kissing the air with writhing carmine mouths and sliding pink tongues. In several languages they said the same thing, and their voices blended in an obscene cooing and twittering. Their breasts swung forward and the rouged tips looked at me like sullen eyes.
I got out of my chair and they gathered about me, making their eyes swoon and sparkle, their blackened lashes flutter in mechanical glee. I moved to the door, wondering if the body of a woman would ever seem good to me again, and escaped through the glass curtains. The doorman was sitting in an armchair across the hall. He looked up at me in surprise. Halfway down the wide staircase Miss Green turned and started back up.
I went after her. The doorman took me by the waist from behind, and before I could turn had locked my arms in a full Nelson which pressed painfully on the back of my neck. I struggled in his grip and got nowhere. My coat ripped at the shoulder seams.
“Let him have it, Jake,” Miss Green said from the top of the stairs.
He let go with his right hand but held me with his left. A small heavy object came down dully on the back of my head. My body reverted to protoplasm and my mind to darkness.
When consciousness returned it came slowly and laboriously like an ambitious chunk of sentient organic matter climbing the stages of evolution from the original warm mud. I pulled myself out of the sucking black slime, the whirling waters that covered the earth, and lay eventually in a dry light place with my cheek on grass. But I found when I opened my eyes that it wasn’t grass. It was a pastel-green rug lit not by the sun but by electric light. I heard voices and tried to sit up. I couldn’t sit up because my wrists and ankles were tied together behind me.
I raised my head from the rug and the blood beat at the base of my skull like an iron fist. What I could see of the room was bare, pleasant and strange. The only furniture I could see was the end of a chaise longue upholstered in bright rich silk, and a fragile table holding a slender vase of flowers. On the wall there was a wash-drawing of birds, with a conical white mountain in the background, done in faint and delicate colors. The rest of the wall was naked, except for a long curved sword in a gold-embossed scabbard which hung horizontally above my head.
A woman’s voice was saying in a sibilant birdlike chirp: “It would not be wise to kill him here. I forbid it.”
“I agree, Baroness,” Anderson said. “I absolutely agree. We’ll take him out to the ranch.”
I craned my neck and saw at the foot of the chaise longue a small black slipper which flipped up and down impatiently on the tip of a silk-clad toe. “It will be necessary to transfer him with great discretion,” the voice chirped. “Attention must not be attracted to this house. It is safe now because we have been very careful. We will continue to be careful.”
“We’ll put him to sleep again before we take him down,” Miss Green said. “I’ll go down and get Jake’s blackjack.”
“No you won’t,” Anderson said. “I don’t want him to be sapped again. I don’t want his skull damaged. I’ve got a use for his skull.”
“You are quite clever, Lorenz,” the bird-voice said.
“I try to find a use for everything,” Anderson said complacently. “I’m glad Drake dropped in, as a matter of fact. Hector is too big.”
“I am sorry you came here,” the bird-voice said. “At all costs we must avoid the serious attention of the police.”
“It’s my business that’ll be ruined if they come here,” Miss Green said. “But I had to bring him. Jensen wasn’t safe in San Diego.”
“You can say that again,” Anderson said. “I even spotted a plain clothes man at the border, but they don’t pay much attention to chauffeurs.”
“It is not only your business that will be ruined if the police come seriously, Miss Toulouse,” the bird-voice said. “More intimate values than the financial are at stake.”
“Don’t I know it,” Miss Green said. “Let’s get him out of here. And I still say sap him.”
“We won’t sap him again,” Anderson said firmly. “It might leave a dent on his skull. We’ll put him to sleep with ether.”
“Not my ether you won’t. I have a hard time getting that stuff. I damn near went nuts those last two days on the train.”
“Get your ether,” Anderson said.
“Like hell I will. You can gag him, can’t you?”
“Get your ether,” Anderson said. There was the sound of a blow on flesh and a low female sigh. A woman’s footsteps crossed the rug behind me and left the room.
“I don’t like to see you mistreat women,” the bird-voice said. “It is destructive of harmony. Perhaps one day you will be punished, Lorenz.” The speech left flat tinny echoes of menace in the room.
I thought it was time I entered the conversation. “You’re damn right he will.”
“Why, Ensign, it’s nice to have you with us again,” Anderson said. “Say, turn around and let me look at you. There’s nothing I like better than the face of an old friend.”
He took me by the hair and pulled me around so that I faced into the room.
“Don’t forget,” the bird-voice said. “You do not wish to damage his skull.”
“Hell, the hair and scalp don’t matter.” By way of illustration he took hold of my hair again, lifted my head and shoulder a foot or so from the floor, and let me drop. “It’s just the skull I’m worried about.”
The woman on the chaise longue whose voice was like a flat chirp had a tiny ivory-tinted face above which balanced carefully coiffed masses of dull black hair held in place by a tortoiseshell comb. There was something dainty and old-world about her, an air which was enhanced by her dress. This was a flowing robe of blue silk, full in the sleeve and skirt, gathered at the waist under a broad silk waistband. The ivory throat on which her head was poised was small and delicate. My attention was occupied by that pure throat. I was intensely interested in whether the Samurai sword on the wall could sever it in one stroke.