Le Pigeonnier held another whole new set of scents that would've entranced Toulon and Chalky for a day or more. The acrid smell of hot tobacco leaf and the head-high pall of smoke from it; the wet reek of chewing tobacco and ejecta in the metal spit-kids along the long bar and spaced conveniently round the club's stygian interior. More hot smells from candles with badly trimmed wicks, beeswax, cheap tallow, or frontier rush dips. There was the faint aroma of bad breath and wine-breath combined, of elegant clothing too long unwashed, bodies that suffered from the same benign neglect, the slightest tinge from a hastily rejected supper spewed up somewhere in the cabaret and slovenly swabbed at; the reek that arose from the back of the club and wafted through the opened rear doors from the outdoor toilets. Hungary Water and cologne, mostly sweet and flowery, tried to mask human stink, but they could only do so much.
And there was the enticing odour of drink: the musk-sweetness of wine, the sweet tang of rum, the even more noticeable but mellower scent of aged brandy, or corn whisky down from the hinterlands. The ice-pinchy smell of juniper berry gin, the yeasty sourness of a variety of beers or ales… though it was a long way from English porters, stouts, and malts, and Lewrie had never heard a good word said for Spanish or French brews.
Here and there, in pools of somewhat honest light, dice rattled in leather cups and clattered on tabletops. In others, men, even a few bawdily gowned women, hunched over cards. 'Van John' to the English, or Vingt-et- Un to the Frogs, was being played. Some jostled and perspired round a Pharoah table or a numbered wheel Lewrie supposed was a roulette game. He caught a few words here and there, enough to inform him that most cardplayers played Piquet, a popular local game called Boure, or an American game of incomprehensible nature; it sounded like it was called Poke Her.
'M'sieur?' a bartender asked from the other side of a long oak counter.
'Ah… let me have a whisky,' Lewrie decided, having grown more than fond of the American decoction. 'The aged corn whisky, not that watery-lookin' poison.' He'd been warned off that last year!
'L'Americain,' the servitor said with a faint sneer as he got up a stone gallon crock, removed the stopper, and poured a small glass half full, stating its price as twenty pesetas, in a tone that accused Lewrie of having no palate, no class, and no business in a real Creole establishment. Even tossing the man a silver British crown made no impression on the publican's hauteur.
The custom of the house was to elbow up along the counter, rest a foot on a wood rail, and drink standing up. Were one sitting, then one was mostly gambling; Lewrie only saw a few seated patrons risking the house cuisine. At some tables, mostly far in back, Lewrie could espy people hunched over their glasses and muttering conspiratorily with each other. To his mind it looked as if they were conspiring… greasy leers, rubbed 'money' fingers, Gallic shrugs, and stony glares.
Christ, they all look like well-paid pirates! Lewrie goggled.
At some tables, though, it was men and women draped upon each other in the dim candlelight. Now that his eyes had adjusted to the gloom, Lewrie took note of scantily clad young women in morning gowns and sheer dressing robes traipsing up the stairs to the upper storey on the arms of jaunty, eager men, whilst others clumped downwards almost alone, trailed by jaded and spent patrons who barely held hands with them, the women's hard eyes already prowling for the next client.
It took Lewrie a long minute or so to unmoor his gaze from the whores; it had been rather a long while since he'd had a free moment for 'doing the needful,' and some of them were more than handsome. He all but shook himself from the idea; there was work to do! He scanned the vast, dim room's expanse, recalling his crewmen's-and Mr. Pollock's-descriptions of Lanxade or Balfa. But after ten minutes he had to admit to himself that those cut-throats weren't present. He looked the room over again to see if there was a single soul he knew. But none of his hands were in the Pigeon Coop, nor could he spot sailors off Pollock's ship; obviously, this cabaret was too high-toned for the common tars.
He did think he saw one of the Azucena del Oeste's mates trotting up the stairs past the music gallery on a whore's arm, but he wasn't so sure he'd wager on it.
A fetchin' whore, he has, Lewrie decided to himself, noting that his glass was empty, of a sudden, and turning belly-first to the bar to whistle up the serving man for a refill. In the private screen of his coat-tails, he felt a tightening in his groin, a pinching from the fork of his tight trousers' crutch as his lubricious nature awakened.
Glass topped up, Lewrie turned back to face the room just as a nigh nakedly 'dressed' Mulatto demimonde came slithering by, her arm brushing men's fundaments or thighs, 'all quite by accident.' He gawped, gulped, looking at the size and springy rounded shape of her 'poonts,' exchanged a brief, red-faced smile… before a patron down the counter looped an arm round her waist, drew her to him, and gnawed at her bare neck like a long-lost lover. Off they went up the stairs.
'Lubricious Nature' began to whisper, which awoke his old companion, 'Amatory Fever,' who began to gibber, leer, and cajole…
Damme, I'm tryin' t' 'spy here! Lewrie pointed out to his groin.
It was a forlorn hope, though, any continued 'spying.' On both sides of him, it was all elbows and shoulders, troops of foreigners in full cry in alien tongues, and the local French patois was so nasally 'hawn-hawn' and rapid he could barely make out one word in four, those mostly harmless and plebeian. He was being jostled at the bar, just a whisker short of intentional insult for an English gentleman, who held a larger personal space than most. Even the music played by a string trio from the old-style gallery irritated him, a jiggery- pokery of gay but jangly airs… when not some mournful dirges, half-Spanish, half-Moorishly minor keyed.
He thought of crying off and heading home to bed, but surely! His first night ashore in untold months, out of uniform and anonymous, in a port town as sinful as Old Port Royal on Jamaica. How dull it'd be to wash out his stockings and underdrawers alone, yet…
The press at the counter got to him. He scooped up his change, wafer-thin foreign 'tin,' felt to see if he still had his coin-purse, then began to wander the main room.
'Mon Dieu, Jean!' Hippolyte whispered maliciously. 'Where did he get such a tawdry ensemble? That fellow there in the wide hat?'
'Why is he walking so oddly… all hunched over?' Helio asked.
'An Americain clown,' Jean-Marie Rancour dismissed. 'Back to what we are discussing… We know M'sieur Bistineau cheats us. Why does he get five percent off the top, when I've heard that criminals who deal in stolen goods pay the thieves first to get them. Lanxade said it's his normal cost of doing business,' Jean insisted in a hot mutter, both elbows on the table round a wineglass, 'And how do we know we can trust Henri Maurepas, either, if he misreports on-'
'Papa trusts him implicitly, Jean,' Helio declared. 'Not once has he ever doubted him. He manages all our affairs. Papa knows…'
'Papa knows how to spend, cher brother,' Charite impatiently countered. 'He has no real head for the intricacies of business. It is beneath true gentlemen. Of course, M'sieur Bistineau is cheating us, and there is little we, or old Henri Maurepas, can do about it… so long as Bistineau is the only trader who'll accept our goods, dare to have them in his store. Later on, well…'
'Later on, perhaps we'll confront Monsieur Bistineau with steel,' Helio, as the eldest, announced. 'His son Claude will inherit. Isn't Claude one of us, the one who presented the scheme to his father, out of patriotism?
