We'd picked a table and sat there. Joe stretched out his long legs, loosened his jacket, and looked around the unpainted, sparsely furnished room. He smiled happily and said, "Nice, huh, keed? No slops today."
"Yeah. What'd Perry get—? What'd he bring along—?"
Joe shushed me. "Sh-u-sh. Forget it."
Perry rushed back to us, his face all aglow. The curtain to the back room bellowed out in his passing wind. He sat down and rubbed his hands vigorously together with his elbows held high—evidently he'd concluded a fine bit of business.
"O.K., fellers—all fixed. Now lessee what we gonna have. . . ."
"What dey got special?" asked Joe.
Perry threw himself back in his chair with the violent way he always moved and turned toward our host leaning there on his elbows at the bar. He had lit up a sawed-off cheroot which dangled from his mouth now. He too was satisfied with his business acumen.
After a few minutes of give and take in Spanish, Perry turned back to us, banged the table with his fist, and said, "That's it—dat's fine. Oh boy, oh boy. How's about some steak Caballero and a couple of liter of swell Argentine wine, de rojo —some good bread and some fr-e-sh butta—?" And he switched his head back and forth from Joe to me with such a delighted anticipating grin, his mouth open and drooling, we said sure, swell—promptly.
Perry straightened up, and with a straight-armed wave of the hand gave our host the go-ahead signal. Whereupon he disappeared into that door and returned with a fistful of bone-handled assorted cutlery which he dropped on the table in a heap, a long loaf of bread, and with his fingers gripped into three heavy glasses. Then from under his arm he plucked a large, dark, unlabeled bottle and banged it down in the center of our table and shuffled back into the little room.
Perry grabbed the bottle, held it high for our inspection, then worked the cork loose and sniffed its contents with his eyes blissfully closed.
"Boy—d'bouquet, d'aroma—here, smell it," and he thrust the bottle at my nose.
"Come on, come on, set 'em up." Joe was impatient.
Perry flourished the bottle and carefully filled our glasses to the brim. We all raised our glasses to each other. I took my first mouthful. It tasted exactly like the red wine—the red ink —I'd been drinking in the Italian speakeasies in New York for the past five years.
After his first gulp Perry sniff'ed the remaining wine in his glass, sampled it gently, and rolled the taste of it around on his tongue. Again he went through a spiel on its excellence. Joe had taken his drink in one swallow.
"Feenish up—pour anudder. Dees good for de tonsil."
Perry poured and midway he stopped and sniffed the air around us.
"Get dat. Dat's dem."
There was the distinct smell of meat being scorched and a thin cloud of bluish smoke began to seep out from the door with the cretonne curtains.
"Yeah. That smells good." Joe grinned, nodded his head, and emptied his glass again.
It wasn't long before the unsmiling proprietor, bartender, and cook of the Chicago Bar backed into the room with three smoking plates. He silently set them down in front of us and gave no response to Perry's enthusiasm.
"Bueno, bueno — muy bueno."
"Look at them," he directed us. "Look at them. Dere's food for ya—no galley slops—steak Caballero."
They did look good and Joe's gurgling laugh and his quick attack indicated he thought so. And they lived up to their looks. I was tempted to ask—since steak Caballero is a broiled steak with a fried egg riding on top. Why, since egg and steak were good in themselves—and alone. According to Perry, who talked with egg yolk and steak juice dribbling down his chin, "Dese steaks is prime—yeah, prime Argentine beef—dere's none better. And d'eggs—dere fried in butta," he told us confidentially, his eyes rolling back and forth from Joe to me. "Yes, butta, fresh butta. D'ya taste it?"
Why mix them up? They could both stand on their own merits. But I remembered hearing of some Europeans visiting in the States who on being served our national concoction— the sacred ice-cream soda—questioned the logic of combining an ice (as they called it) with flavored carbonated waters, and damn near brought on a diplomatic incident by their indiscretion.
So I swallowed my curiosity with my steak Caballero and drank my share of the second and third liter of wine Perry ordered with his magnanimous gestures. When he called for a fourth bottle, the proprietor shook his head and brought a slip of paper scribbled in Spanish to the table. After Perry and he pored over it a few minutes, Perry was convinced there was no more coming to us on that deal he'd managed and we'd get no more wine. We sat there munching the crisp white bread smeared with butter.
"Did ya notice dis butta—unsaltered butta," Perry gourmandized as he sprinkled his hunk of bread and butter liberally from a salt cellar. "Yeah, dat's strictly fresh unsaltered butta—regular Jew butta. Tastes good, huh?"
When there was nothing more to eat or drink or enthuse over we happily strolled back to the ship.
The crew was standing around waiting for an immense derrick on a slow-moving flatboat to edge up alongside and lift the iron boilers we had brought down up off our decks. Joe, Perry, and I kept our mouths shut. We weren't talking. We had made a pact to stick together that evening and do this port right. Perry knew every bar, every dive, every dark crevice in it, and would lead us right.
The longshoremen were busy on the afterdeck and there were a few men who had come aboard who looked as if they had something to do with the ship's business. One, a round-faced, pasty-complexioned young guy with slicked-down black hair and wide-open, long-lashed eyes was talking to some of the deck crew. He said he was an American down there with a three-year contract to work for the steel company, that it was terribly lonesome down here with no one to talk to—none of the Argentinians spoke English. Then he suggested in an offhand manner if some of the fellows wanted to see some places in Rio Santiago he'd take us around. He knew all the best houses, swell girls, etc.
Perry shoved Joe and me off in a comer—again. Again he had some dope.
"Lissen, that guy's a pimp. Don't lissen to him. He's just roundin' up business for some bordellos he's workin'."
"Well, if he knows de houses," Joe said.
"What do ya mean if he knows d'houses? He can't know 'em any better dan me. I tell ya I know dis port—I shipped down here before. And furdermore, he's a pimp I tell ya. He's commoicial. Sure, he gets a commission."
Well, that topped it. Joe shrugged his big shoulders, dug his hands in his pockets, and nodded his head. Of course, if Perry could get it for us wholesale, he was amenable. Our pact to do Rio Santiago together still stood.
There was a lot of hustling around the deck that afternoon, but the crew hadn't much work to do. It took a long time before that tremendous derrick on the flatboat had ponderously moved itself into a position alongside the ship so that it could pluck first one, then the other, big boiler off our decks. We just stood by to unlash the chains that held them down. There were no watches now and all the crew were day men. I wondered how experts like Joe, Perry, Slim, and the rest would manage to keep their records and hands clean when we started the sloppy port work I heard was in store for us.
When we knocked off that evening we lined up in the officers' mess and the Captain, seated behind a table flanked by the Purser with his account books, dealt out Argentine money—an advance against what we were to be paid off in New York,
I drew the equivalent of ten good American dollars in Argentine pesos—the most unconvincing money I ever held in my hand. Those pesos, a two-inch by three strip of smudged tissue paper, rolled up in our palms like the leftover debris you find in a little-used old coat pocket. If I'd ever decide to make a career of counterfeiting, that's the sort of money I'd start with. An interwoven complicated engraving all over the note and then dip it in a greasy bath of dishwater and let it linger in a pool of spilled coffee, and you have a perfect peso worth, in those days, forty cents real money.