And finally, panting, sides needled by delicious breathlessness, to sink to the curb near a busy intersection and sit with back resting against metal trash box and laugh and laugh, gaspingly, in each other’s faces, doubling up after each new glimpse of the hustling crowd on the conveyor-belt called a sidewalk, every single face too proper or blasé-blind to look at you—and the equally wooden visages behind the wheels of the endless stop-starting string of cars that almost pinched your toes as they went grunting by.
Just then a police siren sounded and a large gray truck grumbled to a stop in front of them. Without hesitation, Carr scooped up Jane and sat her on the projecting backboard, then scrambled up beside her.
The light changed and they jounced across the intersection. The siren’s wail rose in volume and pitch as a paddy wagon turned into their street a block behind them. It swung far to the left, around a while string of cars, and careened into a pocket just behind them. They looked into the eyes of two red-jowled coppers. Jane thumbed her nose at them.
The paddy wagon braked to a stop at the curb and several policemen poured out of it and into a dingy hotel.
“Won’t find us there,” smirked Carr. “We’re high-class.” Jane squeezed his hand.
The truck passed under the dark steel canopy of the Elevated. Its motor growled as it labored up the approach to the bridge.
“I’ve a private barge on the river,” said Carr airily, “Unpretentious, but homey. And a most intellectual bargeman. Physical and mental giant. He’ll carry us to the ports of Hell and back and talk philosophy with us all the way.”
“Not tonight,” said Jane.
Carr pointed at the splintered end of the barrier. “Your friend did that on his way down,” he informed her amiably. “I wish he were along with us.” He looked at Jane. “No, I don’t,” he added.
“Neither do I,” she told him.
His face was close to hers, he started to put his arms around her, but a sudden rush of animal spirits caused him instead to plant his palms on the backboard and lift himself up, feet kicking.
He fell backward into the truck as Jane yanked at him. “You’re still quite breakable, you know,” she told him and kissed him and sat up quickly.
As he struggled up beside her, the truck hustled down the worn brick incline at the opposite end of the bridge and ground to a stop. A maroon and green awning stretched to the edge of the sidewalk. Above the awning, backed by ancient windows painted black, a bold, blinking, blue neon script proclaimed: Goldie’s Casablanca.
“That’s us,” said Carr. He hopped down and lifted Jane off as the truck started up again.
Inside the solid glass door beneath the awning, a tall, tuxedo-splitting individual with the vacant smile of a one-time sparring partner, was remonstrating quietly with an arm-swinging fat man whom he held pinned against the wall with one hand. Jane and Carr swept past them. Carr whipped out several dollar bills and held them clipped between bent finger and thumb. They descended a short flight of stairs, made a sharp turn, and found themselves in the noisiest and most crowded nightclub in the world.
The bar, which ran along the wall to their left, was jammed three deep. Behind it towered two horse-faced men in white coats. The one was reaching behind him for a bottle. The other was violently shaking a silver cylinder above his head, but the rattle was lost in the general din. He might, Carr thought, be performing a mysterious rite in honor of the Moorish maidens on the mural behind him. The willowy harem figures suggested El Greco, but someone—Goldie no doubt—had pasted cut-out, larger-than-life-size photographs of the faces of popular movie stars just above their bright yellow necks. The effect was arresting.
Packed tables, with no discernable aisles between extended from the foot of the stairs to the edge of a small and slightly raised dance floor, upon which, like some thick vegetable stew being stirred by laziest cook in creation, a solid mass of hunchedly embracing couples was slowly revolving.
The tinkly music for this elephantine exercise, almost as inaudible as the cocktail shaker, came from somewhere behind an inward-facing phalanx of alternately black and bare shoulders toward the far end of the wall to the right.
Everyone, even the dancers, seemed to be talking as fast as they could get the words out and as forcefully as the strength of tobacco-fogged lungs would permit.
Two couples marched straight at Carr. He swung aside, bumping a waiter who was coming around the end of the bar with a tray of cocktails. The waiter checked himself while the others passed, a crashing chord jetted up over the phalanx, applause vehement as carpet-beating began, and Carr substituted two of the bills for two of the cocktails just as the waiter continued forward and another couple came between them. Deftly holding the two cocktails in one hand and the rest of the bills in the other, Carr turned to Jane. But she had already left him and was edging through the press some tables away. Beyond her was a busy door marked “Setters,” close beside another labeled “Pointers.” Carr grimaced, leaned against the wall, closed his eyes, downed one of the cocktails, put the empty glass in his pocket and slowly sipped the other.
When he opened his eyes again, the dancers had all squeezed themselves into hitherto imperceptible nooks and crannies around the tables. The phalanx had dispersed to reveal a grossly fat man whose paunch abutted the keyboard of a tiny, cream-colored piano. A short apish individual who looked all dazzling white shirt-front—Goldie, surely at last—was standing on the edge of the empty dance floor and saying in a loud hoarse voice that in total lack of any honest enthusiasm would have been suitable for a carp: “And now let’s give the little chick a great big ovation!”
The earnest carpet-beaters started to work again. Goldie, ducking down from the platform, rewarded them with a cold sneer. The fat man’s hands began to scuttle up and down the keyboard like two fat white rats. And a blonde in a small black dress stepped up on the platform. She held in one hand something that might have been a shabby muff.
But even as the applause swelled, most of the people at the tables started to jabber at each other again.
Carr shivered. Here you have it, he thought suddenly—the bare stage, the unlistening audience, the ritual of the machine. The bacchanal shrunk to a precalculated and profit-motivated booze-fest under the direction of a Pan who’d gone all to watery flesh and been hitting the dope for two thousand years. The dreadful rhythm of progress without purpose. Did these people see or hear at all? Did they taste or touch? Did they even thrill to their drunkenness? Oh, into what sterile corners the whip of beauty-hunger has driven the drugged, near-dead if not dead already, spirit of man!
The blonde raised her arm and the muff unfolded to show, capping her unseen hand, a small face of painted wood that was at once foolish, frightened and lecherous. Two diminutive hands flapped beside it. The blonde began to hum to the music.
Continuing to toy with the piano, the fat man glanced around briefly. In a rapid, piping voice on the verge of a titter he confided, “And now you shall hear the sad tale of that most unfortunate creature, Peter Puppet.”