"Just to meet a guy? Hey, that's pretty stiff."
"Take it or leave it." The cabby had a hoarse voice. The folds of his neck spilled over his collar.
"Aw, what the hell," I said. "It's only money, huh? You can't take it with you."
The cabby put his hand back over the seat without looking. I put two tens in it. He tucked it into a shirt pocket, turned right, and in two minutes he pulled in at the curb on Dorrance Street in front of the Westminster Mall. Without looking back he said, "That'll be three- eighty." I gave him a five and he put that in a different pocket.
I said, "How about my change."
"Tip," he said. Then he handed me back a plain white sheet of paper. "Roll that up in your left hand and walk down the mall," he said. "Guy's name is Eddie. He'll find you."
I took the paper, made a tube out of it, and got out of the cab. The toad pulled away. To my left was the flossiest Burger King in the world; ahead stretched a paved pedestrian way among a bunch of stores in the process of restoration. Some very classy fronts were mixed in with some very sleazy ones, but the place had the nice live feel that open city space has if a lot of people are bustling around in it.
I started up the mall. A squat red roan horse was tethered to an information booth in the middle of the mall and a Providence cop was in getting warm with the civilians. Near a soon-to-be-rented-but-not-fullyrestored storefront a guy in a down vest said, "How ya doing? I'm Eddie."
I said, "Hey, how are ya?"
He walked along beside me. "What can I do for you?" he said.
"Fella in a cab told me you could find me a little action," I said.
Eddie nodded. He had pale blond hair parted on the left and gold-rimmed glasses and pale skin. Under the down vest he wore a plaid shirt. "Sure," he said. "What kind of action you looking for''"
"Well"-1 scowled and looked embarrassed-”I hear you might have something a little different around here." Eddie stopped with his hands in his back pockets and looked at me.
"Unusual?"
I spread my hands, "Yeah, a little kinky, you know. Sometimes you like a change."
"What kinda bread you ready to pay?" "Oh, I got money. Listen, that's not a problem. I can pay." Eddie nodded again. Then he nodded and winked. "Yeah, I can fix you up. Cost you two bills-one to me, one to the manager of the place. You got that?"
"Sure."
"After that it depends what you want, you understand. You want more than one broad, that's extra, you want S and M, that's extra. Get the idea?"
I nodded.
"And you want to tip any of the broads, that's between you and them."
I nodded.
"Gimme two hundred," he said. "I'll drive you up."
I took a hundred and five twenties from my wallet and gave them to Eddie. He counted them and. put them away and led me down a narrow cross street to a Pontiac Firebird Trans Am. We got in and headed up the hill toward the university. We went past the School of Design and Brown University, past some of the most elegant Victorian houses anywhere. In ten minutes Eddie parked the Trans Am on Angell Street near the corner of Stimson, in front of a deep blue three-storied Victorian house with a vast mansard roof. Over the windows was an ornamental sunrise design in yellow and black.
"This is it," he said, and got out of the car. I followed him. We went up three wide wooden stairs and across a deep veranda and Eddie rang the doorbell. A husky young man wearing a green Lacoste sweater over a white shirt opened the door. He had a health club tan, a bushy mustache, and dark hair blown dry.
Eddie said, "Fella to see Mrs. Ross."
The man nodded. Eddie gave him my hundred-dollar bill. The man smiled at me and said, "This way, sir."
He showed me into a high-ceilinged living room with a marble fireplace and bow windows on two walls. I sat on a hard sofa with claw-and-ball feet, and the man went away. In maybe a minute a woman came in. She was a small woman, middle-aged, with her gray hair in a frizzy perm. She wore a black turtleneck sweater and a pleated red plaid skirt and black boots. There was a gold medallion on a chain, and large hoop earrings, and rings on most of her fingers. She came in and stood in front of me. She had no makeup except for some red color on her cheeks that stood out against her white skin.
"Good afternoon," she said. "I'm Mrs. Ross. We have ten girls here. What kind of arrangement would you like to make?"
"I heard your girls do specialty stuff."
"Anything you want," she said firmly.
"All of them'?"
"Absolutely."
"Maybe I better meet them," i said.
"Of course," she said. "Two are busy at the moment, but I'll ask the rest to come in and say hello. Would you care for a drink?"
I shook my head. "Not right now."
Mrs. Ross nodded. "Certainly. I'll get the girls."
She went back out and down the corridor and I sat quietly in the nineteenth-century room. Students on bicycles went by on
Angell Street outside. I heard Mrs. Ross's boot heels tapping briskly along the hardwood floor of the corridor, and then she came through the archway. Behind her came eight young women. Four were white, three were black, and one was Oriental. The third one through the door was April Kyle.
The eight girls stood in an informal semicircle, staring blankly into the middle distance the way models do at a fashion show. They had each their own expression, and it didn't change. It was their stage face, I realized. The oldest was maybe nineteen, the youngest fourteen or fifteen. They were all dressed young, too, with a kind of buttons-and-bows little-girl look that must have been calculated. April, for instance, was wearing a white blouse under a green plaid jumper with black knee socks and penny loafers. Her blond hair was caught back on one side with a barrette. The fun-loving Bobbsey. "Your choice?" Mrs. Ross was not a dawdler, nor did she encourage it in others. I wondered if I ought to check their teeth.
"That one," I said.
"Fine," Mrs. Ross said. "April, show the gentleman to your room." The other seven girls went out of the living room and April stepped toward me, put out her hand, and said, "My name's April, what's yours?"
"Alley Oop," I said.
She smiled without warmth or meaning. "Okay, Alley, want to come with me?"
"Hey," I said with a big hearty smile, "I'd follow you anywhere, honey."
She took my hand. In the hallway there was a wide stairway that turned halfway up. We went up the stairs hand in hand-with wand'ring steps and slow, I thought -turned at the landing, and continued to the big second-floor hallway. There were no rugs on the floor and no furniture. It was as if by the time you got here you were sold, and they didn't need to impress you. April's room was at the end of the hall on the right. We went in.
Chapter 15
The room was Spartan. There was a good mahogany double bed and bureau. The window in the wall opposite the bed was covered with red drapes. Behind the entry door was a door that I assume led to a closet. April sat on the bed, letting her legs fall carelessly open. Unless she had a lot of self-control, she'd be fat when she was forty. Right now she was pretty in a pink-cheeked, almost plump way. Her mouth was pouty and her teeth were white and even. There was something theatrical about her movements when they occasionally became unrestrained, as when she had flopped on the bed.
I opened the door that I took to be a closet. It was. There were a few dresses hanging in it. There were also various leather restraints hanging from hooks and a wooden paddle that was too long for Ping-Pong and too short for canoeing. On the floor were a pair of sneakers and a pair of sling-back spike-heeled pump.s Apparently she had more than one image. There was nothing else in the closet.
I turned back toward April. She had hiked the jumper skirt up over her thighs so that I was aware that she wore nothing beneath it. She looked at me with her stage look -pouty innocence, Lolita, Debbie Does Dallas. Probably practiced her look in the mirror between tricks.