“You old fraud!” I exploded. “That hearing aid is a phony. You were listening to every word!”
“No such thing!” She was indignant. “I’m stone deaf!”
“Then how . . . ?”
She smiled beatifically. She looked for all the world like Whistler’s favorite mother19 . And when she spoke, it was pure melted butter, sweet and easy on the tired old gums.
“I read lips,” she said. “I read lips!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Ciudad Juarez red-light district isn’t the sort of homey place to bring a girl like mother. Anybody’s mother. Even a CIA mother!
Sex, Juarez style, is pretty much youth-oriented. The little old lady couldn’t compete. Not that she didn’t get some offers. She had a certain geriatric appeal that did bring bids from a few obvious Oedipus wrecks. But the prices offered were so low it was insulting.
The name of the whorehouse was “Caesar’s Palace.” It wasn’t hard to find. But it did involve acting out the traditional charade.
You see, Ciudad Juarez is right across the border from El Paso, Texas. A so-called “free bridge” connects the two cities. Once the border was the Rio Grande River, but the course of the river changed, and today the bridge spans a dry bed.
Juarez used to be the quickie-divorce capital of the Western Hemisphere. Quite recently, however, the Mexican government has changed the residency requirements, and U.S. mate-shedders have been forced to seek relief from marriage elsewhere. But this doesn’t seem to have changed the image of Ciudad Juarez in other ways. It’s the prototype of the border town, rivaled only by Tijuana. Its business is sex and drugs. The customs officers at either end of the free bridge don’t noticeably interfere with either enterprise.
On the Mexican side of the free bridge you’re immediately swamped by pimps, prostitutes, and little kids selling everything from French postcards to heroin. The major entrepreneurs are the Juarez cabdrivers. The meter is secondary to them. Their primary source of income is the kickback they receive for steering tourist johns to bed, plus whatever tip the grateful john may supply for getting in and out of the area un-jackrolled.
The hackie-pimps huckster with a two-way pitch. On the one hand, they proclaim the youth and virginity to be found at the particular establishment they’re pushing. On the other, they hiss dire warnings of venereal disease20 and violence awaiting customers sucked in by rivals. All of which is a hype most American tourists never catch on to even after they’ve had their Juarez adventure.
The hype is simple. Sex in Juarez is run by the Mexican government. The one thing they don’t want is trouble with Americans. The red-light district is thick with cops staked out to protect visiting Yankees. Anything and everything to separate the American dollar from its possessor is permissible— except violence. His pocket may be picked in any number of ways, but every precaution is taken to ensure both his safety and his health. You’re a lot more likely to get rolled in Frisco, or to pick up V.D. in New York, than to fall victim to either in Ciudad Juarez.
Nor is that all there is to the hype. Judging from the downtown action, you’d think the town was filled with brothels. But with the government running everything in one way or another, such competition would be self-defeating. The truth is that in all Juarez, there’s only one brothel!
That’s right! It has thirty names, and twenty separate back-street entrances, but the fact is there’s only one. The fierce competition among the hackie-pimps is the biggest hype of all. Each of them will take you by a different route to a different entrance to the same place. Caesar’s Palace has many names, but they’re all Caesar’s Palace. And the competition for your business, the bickering and bartering, is simply the acting out of a traditional charade as old as the city itself.
It was after midnight when we entered Caesar’s Palace. The bar and lounge where the girls circulated who weren’t already occupied was jammed. Most of the customers were American men—young service-men, a few teen-agers, middle-aged-businessman types, the blusterers, the scared, the first-timers, and the experienced. The place was thick with smoke and smelled heavily of perfume and booze.
I led the little old lady up to the bar. Immediately a young Mexican Indian girl sidled up alongside me. Her full breasts were spilling out of the inch-wide straps which constituted the top of her dress. Her bare leg slithered through the slit of her skirt and rubbed up against mine.
“Hello, señor,” she greeted me. “I admire an hombre who does not leave his mother sitting home alone.” She chucked me under the chin. “My name is ‘Elena,’ ” she introduced herself. “You like to come upstairs with me and bring Mama so she sees how well I treat you? I don’t mind. I have great respect for motherhood.”
“No, thanks,” I told her. “I’m looking for a guy named ‘Bugs Ameche.’ ” I untangled my leg from hers. “Do you know where I can find him?”
“I never hear of him.” Elena shrugged.
“If I could speak with the boss a minute,” I suggested.
Phoebe Phreeby had said that if I told the boss of this place that a friend of Phoebe Phreeby’s wanted to see Bugs Ameche, the word would be passed along and Ameche would see me on the strength of her name.
“The boss is upstairs,” Elena told me.
“Thanks.” I started for the bottom of the staircase, the old lady following in my wake.
“You can’t go up there without a girl.” Elena was at my elbow again, nuzzling it with her right breast.
She was right. A giant-sized Mexican, his face impassive, was blocking the entrance to the staircase.
“But I don’t want sex,” I told Elena. “I just want to see the boss.”
“The only way to get upstairs is to take a girl.” She was stubborn.
Dense as I was, it percolated through. “Okay. How much?” I asked her with a sigh.
“Fifteen dollars American.” She beamed at me as I handed her the money. “You won’t be sorry,” she purred.
“I just want to see the boss,” I repeated. “No service required.”
“What about her?” Elena indicated the old lady.
“What about her?”
“It’s fifteen for her, too.”
I was really tempted to try to leave the old lady behind. But I’d seen enough of her to know she wouldn’t take that lying down. A fuss would be time-consuming, and I didn’t want to waste any time. So I forked over another fifteen simoleons to Elena, and we followed her up the stairs.
“You want to see an exhibition?” Elena suggested when we reached the top of the stairs. “Only twenty dollars. Two girls, you know.” She winked. “Sixty-nine separate Spanish ways to make love. Very instructive.”
“I just want to see the boss.”
“Fifteen more dollars, American, I’ll show you a good time like you never dreamed.”
“Just the boss.”
“Ten dollars for a blow-job you’ll never forget. I’m the best in Juarez.”
“The boss.”
Elena’s scowl said she felt rejected and hurt. She led us through several turns of a winding hall and finally drew up in front of a closed door. She knocked, and a voice called out in Spanish that it was all right to enter.
A meticulously groomed Mexican who looked more like a successful international banker than the overseer of a whorehouse stood up politely when we entered. He fetched a chair for the old lady, one for me, nodded to Elena to leave, and then reseated himself behind his modest desk. “How may I be of service?” he inquired. “What is your pleasure? Drugs? Marijuana? Some highly selective pornography?”
“I’m looking for Bugs Ameche,” I told him.
“I know of no one by that name.” Bland innocence.
“If you’ll get word to him that Phoebe Phreeby sent me, it will be all right,” I assured him. “He’ll see me.”