Earl shook his head again. Jesus Christ, he thought.
'We got to keep moving, Earl,' said the old man. 'They don't like baggage in a joint like this. You play or you leave.'
As they moved downstairs, they passed through the crowded bar. Five girls tended it, hustling this way and that to stay with the demand. Behind them, in the elaborate mahogany structure, ranks of dark bottles promised an exciting form of numbness.
'You want a drink, Earl?'
'Nah,' said Earl. 'I gave that shit up.'
Earl wore a new blue pinstripe three-piece suit and a brown fedora low over his eyes. He had a yellow tie on, and a nice shiny pair of brown brogues. He felt like he was wrapped in bandages but he looked like $50 worth of new goods, which is what he was.
'Probably a good thing,' said D. A. 'I won sixteen gun-fights drunk, but, goddamn, there came a time when I was drinking so much I was afraid I'd wake up in Hong Kong with a busted nose, a beard, a tattoo and a brand-new Chinese family to support.'
'Happened to more than a few Marines I knew,' Earl said.
They walked out onto the street. Before them, on the other side of Central like seven luxury liners tied up in dockage, the town's seven main attractions?bathhouses?blazed against the night, and even now were crowded with people seeking the miracle power of the waters, which emerged from the unseen mountain behind them at a steady, dependable, mineral-rich 141 degrees.
People had been coming to this little valley for centuries and so the city had acquired an odd clientele: it was for those in need. If you needed health and freedom from the cricks of arthritis or the rampages of the syph you came to Hot Springs and soaked for hours in the steamy liquid, which if nothing else numbed the pain and cleaned out your dark crevices. When you got out, you felt like a prime. Better? Well, possibly. At least you felt different. But as the years passed, the city grew to offer the fulfillment of other needs, all of them elemental, and its clientele by the year 1946 was not merely the old and the infirm but the young and the very firm: there was no human need that could not be satisfied in Hot Springs in a single evening, from sexual to financial to criminal to redemptive.
The city the hot spigots nurtured was spread along the curve of a now-buried creek, the one side buttressed by the bathhouses, the other by the town's commercial strip, which was a hurdy-gurdy boardwalk: oyster houses, restaurants, shooting galleries, nightclubs, casinos, sports books and of course whorehouses. The street was a broad boulevard, and lit so well it appeared to be a kind of limited daylight. Only the mountain, which the U. S. government owned, was invisible, but every other damn thing was there to see.
'It's like Shanghai in '36,' said Earl, 'except the whores' eyes ain't slanty.'
From their vantage point?across Central, standing on the sidewalk before the Fordyce Bath House and looking up and down the street, which ran between the mountains and seemed to be guarded at the north end by a gigantic gateway consisting of the vast Arlington Hotel on one side and the much taller Medical Arts Building on the other? it seemed gigantic. The lights rolled away to either horizon, a mile of sin and hustle. Yet that was only Hot Springs' most visible self. From the main thoroughfare, other roads curved up into the hills, and each block had a whorehouse and a casino and a sports book, sometimes more than one each. Out Malvern, the color turned black, for in Hot Springs sin knew no racial barriers, and the action got even smokier and steamier out there, toward the Pythian Hotel and Baths, the only place in town where the Negroes who actually provided the labor for the place could sample the burning waters.
'Boy, I don't see how Becker is going to close this place down with just twelve of us,' Earl said. 'It would take a division.'
'Well, here's the drill,' said the old man. 'There's maybe five hundred sports books in this town, and they're the heart of the operation. Everything feeds off of them. But of them, there's one that's called the Central Book, and all the other books feed off it. It's got all the phone wires and all the race data comes pouring into it; the geniuses in it chalk the odds, and call around town to the other book so that the bets can be laid right up to post time. Then they tab the results, and get them out, and the traffic goes on. It's a great business; the house edge is two percent and the house wins, win or lose. But its problem is it's vulnerable to a wire shutdown. It all depends on how fast they get info from the outside. That's the lifeline. See, here's the deal?if we can shut down that main book, man, we hurt 'em. We nail 'em.'
'Do we know where it is?'
'Of course not. Lots of folks do, but they ain't gonna be telling us. What we're going to do is hit a variety of places, close 'em down, wreck the machinery, and turn the prisoners over to the cops. The cops won't hold 'em but a day, but the key is wrecking the machinery. You pull those slots off the wall, and you'll see that some of them have been tagged ten or twenty times for destruction by the Hot Springs PD. Somehow, it never gets done. So we smash the slots, wreck the gaming tables, confiscate the money and the slips, and look for financial records or anything that will tell us where the Central Book is. See, it's simple. It's like the war. We take out Jap headquarters and we win.'
They were drifting north up Central, and in most of the second-and third-floor windows of the buildings that lined its gaudy west side, girls hung out and called.
'Hey, sugah pie. Hey, you come on up, and we'll teach you a thing or two.'
'Come on, baby. Here's where it's so sweet you gonna melt, honey.'
'We got the best gals up here, sweetie. We got the prime.'
'Care to get laid, Earl?' said the old man.
'Nah. I'll get a dose for sure. Plus my wife has gone and gotten herself pregnant, so I don't need no complications.'
'Pregnant? When's it due?'
'Hmm. Truth is, I don't know. She's been that way for a while, only I didn't notice.'
'Earl, if I'd a known you had a pregnant wife, maybe I wouldn't have signed you up. This could be scratchy work.'
'Don't you worry about it, old man. It's what I do best.'
'Shouldn't you be happier? I had a kid, and even though he died young, I never regretted it. Those were happy times. Anyhow, you're going to be a daddy. That's supposed to be a time of joy for every man.'
'Ah,' said Earl grumpily.
'You'll figure it out, Earl. Believe me, you will.'
They moseyed along, past the bathhouses on the right and the casinos and the whorehouses on the left. In time, the bathhouses gave way to a nice little park, where the city fathers had laid out flower beds and trees and the like. It was so pretty, and behind it rose the mountain which presented Hot Springs with its thermal liquids and turned it into a town like no other.
The sidewalk was crowded, for in Hot Springs nobody stood still. The two undercover men slid through knots of the desperate who'd come to Hot Springs out of the belief its vapors could cure them and knots of the rich, who'd come to Hot Springs out of belief in fun. The former were shabby, scrawny and chalky; they looked half dead already, and they were invisible to the pleasure seekers, who were always sleek and in suits or gowns, with straw hats or veiled hats, usually pink and full, usually hearty and hungry and looking forward to the night's fun. Now and then an HSPD black-and-white would prowl the streets, with a couple of slovenly semi comatose officers looking out, watching the crowd for pickpockets or strong-arm boys.
'We should tell them cops there's gambling going on here,' said D. A.
'Why, they'd be shocked,' Earl said.
At last they came to a magnificent structure maybe four blocks north of the Ohio Club, literally in the shadow of the Medical Arts Building and the gigantic Arlington Hotel, with its tiers of brightly lit rooms. But as magnificent as the Arlington was, it could not compete with the elegance of the place across the street.
It was the Southern Club. Black marble porticos held up by marble columns announced its palatial ambitions; the whole thing was polished to gleam in the dark like something out of a Hollywood movie set in Baghdad. Inside the foyer, a chandelier glittered, sending slices of illumination into the street; the whole place was emblazoned with lights. Limousines pulled up slowly, letting out their moneyed passengers, and the tuxedo was the order of dress for the men, while the women, usually heavily jeweled, wore diaphanous white gowns that clung to their bodies.
'This is where the high rollers go,' said D. A. 'This is Owney's masterpiece. Man, the money he makes in there.'
