The Money That Money Can't Buy

'Yes, comrade-general,' she said, and added, because the thought of Dovzhenko being overcome by one man was too incredible, 'but may I ask—'

'Quickly,' said Chelichev.

'Are you quite sure this man Craig kidnapped Dovzhenko? He didn't defect?'

'Craig took him,' said Chelichev. 'There can be no doubt. Loomis sent word to me himself.'

Craig took a taxi to Soho. He wore the same gray suit, and over it a vicuna coat he had bought in Rome. He wished he had Grierson's elegance. Grierson wore clothes with a casual distinction that took two hundred years of selective inbreeding to achieve. Beside him, Craig knew he looked a peasant. Grierson looked asleep all the time, yet was as fast as a cat. He had a way of smiling that was lazy too, as if the world was a hell of a good place to be in, if only he could wake up. Grierson was in a psychiatric home now, lying in bed, tying knots in a piece of string, untying them, retying them. All day, every day. If anybody asked Grierson to do anything else, he began to cry. Deliberately Craig blotted Grierson from his mind. He walked past the club, and the cooing enticements of the barker. 'Show starting any minute, sir. Eleven lovely ladies inside. Nonstop strip, sir. Show you all they've got—and they've got everything, sir, believe me.'

Craig hesitated. 'How much is it?' he asked.

'Twenty-five bob, sir. Includes entrance to the bar. You can watch the show from there, sir. All mod cons at the Nuderama.'

Craig gave the half-embarrassed shrug every man gives when he decides to enter a strip show. The movement was perfectly natural. He was half embarrassed. He paid twenty-five shillings to the woman behind the cash desk. The woman had had a henna rinse and wore a black silk dress and pearls. She also had the figure and muscles of a sumo wrestler. Craig decided not to pick a fight with her, and walked down a corridor with wall-to-wall carpeting. The corridor was two feet wide. From time to time, it seemed, the sumo wrestler sprayed it with My Sin. At least there was an atomizer of it beside her, and the place reeked of the stuff. He felt for the handle of the door leading to the theater—the lighting was what the management called discreet—and fumbled his way into what the eighteenth century would have considered an adequate drawing room. Now it contained a stage, a raked auditorium for fifty people who didn't mind each other's company, and a runway down the middle of the auditorium. Behind the auditorium was a raised bar that looked straight into the theater. Stage, auditorium, and bar alike were cheap and nasty. The walls were distempered a vile yellow; the stage curtains, bought as a job lot before Garrick retired, had once been of red velvet but were now the kind of pink that clashed viciously with the yellow walls; the seats had long since lost their springs, and the bar seemed mostly matchwood. The only thing that surprised Craig was how clean it all was.

There were perhaps twenty men sitting in the auditorium. Piped music whispered love to them, but they were all on their own, and all sat either staring straight ahead or looking at their programs, which cost five shillings to buy, six-pence to print, and contained photographs of Karen, Tempest, and Maxine on every page. Their sense of embarrassment was overwhelming: Craig took shelter in the bar. The customers at the bar were in groups. They drank light ale and rubbed their hands and behaved like men who were in for a treat. Each of them seemed to be selling something to the others in his group. Craig eased through them, and went up to the barman, who had 'HARRY' embroidered on the left breast of his dinner jacket and a gold loop earring in his right ear.

'Scotch and dry ginger,' said Craig.

'Yes, sir,' said the barman, and reached for an anonymous bottle of Scotch and a large Schweppes Dry Ginger. He took six shillings from Craig, and went back to opening light ales. Craig sipped the Scotch. It was watered. He drank it and ordered another, straight. The barman reached for the anonymous bottle again, and set a glass in front of Craig. When the measure on the bottle had dropped into the glass, Craig grabbed his wrist. The barman tried to pull away, and found he couldn't.

'I like you,' said Craig softly. 'You're cute.' He sipped his whisky and pushed it back to the barman. 'Change this for me, Harry,' he said. 'I only drink water when I'm thirsty.'

The barman said: 'I don't understand, sir.' The hand on his wrist tightened and he almost yelled out. But he couldn't yell out, not with all the customers watching. They thought the man who held his wrist was teasing him— everybody knew he was gay: it was worth a lot of tips in a strip club—and if he started screaming Mr. Brodski would go berserk. Harry whimpered, and Craig leaned across to him.

'You're too pretty to be dishonest,' Craig whispered. 'Pour me a proper drink.'

'Yes, sir,' said Harry, 'I'm very sorry, sir.'

'You should be,' said Craig. 'I might have hurt you, Harry.'

The barman poured him a Teacher's. Again Craig sipped, but this time he smiled. Harry shuddered and looked down at his wrist. The marks of Craig's fingers lay across it like red bars. Harry took the other glass away, and sold it three minutes later to a man in the costume-jewelry game from Edgebaston. He didn't notice a thing. Craig waited till the barman came past him, then said: 'Why don't you buy me a drink, Harry? You can afford it.' This time he hadn't lowered his voice, and the group on either side of him watched in awe as Harry poured a double for Craig, dug into his pocket, and put twelve shillings into the till. Every habitue of Nuderama knew that Harry never, never bought anybody a drink.

Then the bar lights dimmed, the lights in the auditorium went out, and a drummer, a pianist, and a guitar player scrambled into a space the size of a coffin for the lady sumo wrestler. The piped music faded and died, the pianist struck an E, and the guitar player tightened his strings with the air of a man who has worked in strip clubs long enough to know that the audience seldom listens to the music. Some of the men at the bar left then, to try for seats near the runway. The rest took their drinks to the edge of the auditorium, and watched in silence, and with care. After all, twenty-five shillings is a lot of money. The drummer struck a roll, the curtains jerkily parted, and the show was on.

It was memorable solely in that it was utterly devoid of talent. None of the girls involved, not even Karen, Tempest, or Maxine, made the slightest effort to sing, mime, or dance. Their movements were the movements of women, not of dancers. They were tired, bored, and utterly without grace. As entertainment the show failed to achieve the standard of a Girl Guide Gang Show on the first day of rehearsal. But what Girl Guide ever finishes a number naked on a runway, with the nearest cash customer a foot away? And that was the way Karen, Tempest, and Maxine finished every number, while often as not the eight supporting lovelies did the same behind them. Karen was brunette, Tempest was a blonde, and Maxine was a redhead, so there was something for everybody. They were young enough, and prettily fleshed, and the clothes they removed were pretty too. Long gloves, fur stoles, bras and panties of lace and nylon: they were all designed to excite. Their postures too, should have been exciting: the crook of a leg to emphasize the curve of calf and thigh and buttock, the shoulders thrown back to emphasize the sheer fall of a breast, the tightness of the under-curve, the slow recline on a pink divan. // only, Craig thought, they weren't so bored. But they were bored, and made no move to hide it as they stood under the spotlights and filled the world with nippies and navels, bellies and buttocks and breasts, and thought of nothing but how cold it was if you copped the draught from stage right.

The show finished in an hour and a quarter exactly, and the piped music crashed into the dream world of 'Harem Nights' and 'The Lady Takes a Bath' with a brass band Sousa medley that scattered the customers faster than a burst from a machine gun. Craig sat on alone, and drank Scotch.

'The show's over,' said Harry. 'If you want to stay on it'll cost you another twenty-five bob.'

'When's the next show?' Craig asked.

'Half an hour,' said Harry, and added, 'sir.'

'I was wondering if those three young ladies would take a drink with me,' Craig said.

'They'd take a barrel with you,' said Harry, 'so long as you're paying.'

'Go and ask them,' said Craig. Harry went to the bar, and walked toward the stage. 'And Harry—' the barman turned around. 'Do it nicely,' said Craig.

Harry must have done it nicely, because the three girls came back in no time at all. All three had changed into loose-fitting dressing gownsthat from time to time slid disconcertingly over the nude flesh beneath, and all three had mink coats slung over their shoulders as casually as fighting troops wearing field equipment. They came up, smiled at Craig, and sat beside him, white legs flashing as they moved. Tempest had belted her gown tightly beneath her bosom: the twin points of her breasts pointed at him like guns. Craig ordered champagne.

'A bottle?' asked Harry.

'For four? Make it a magnum,' said Craig.