The Rendezvous was a charming basement beer hall near the ship channel. It stank of spilled brew, dirty clothing and the elusive scent of rare sin. The rest of the building was a honeycomb of rooms for furtive meetings, the exchange of smuggled goods, the viewing of strange sex acts. I had been there often in my fledgling days with Macy.
I went down dirty littered steps to a little concrete-paved area that looked like the drunk tank in a jail. There was a man in one corner, huddled away from the touch of sun on the floor. The drain was layered with filth. I stepped over it, holding my breath, went through old-fashioned swinging doors and down two steps to get to The Rendezvous. It hadn’t changed much. They still didn’t believe in lights. The floor was the same buckled linoleum, and the walls were as damp as ever. The customers might have been the same. I didn’t know. I couldn’t see their faces. At The Rendezvous there are few faces, few names to be remembered. They had a jukebox but it wasn’t working. The only sounds were the buzz of a fly, the slow swing of a fan, the broken garble of a man talking to himself in one of the secluded corners.
A few eyes looked at me as I walked across linoleum hills and sat down at a table. I moved the chair a little so I had the wall at my back. I did it without thinking about it. I had learned that precaution a long time ago in The Rendezvous.
The bartender saw that I was too well dressed to be on a casual drinking tour. He put a towel over one arm, shuffled around the bar and came suspiciously toward me. His right side seemed frozen. The shoulder was down and he dragged that leg with an effort. He wasn’t old. His face had a square sullen look.
“What do you want?” he said.
“Whisky.” I looked around. A woman sitting at a table near the door was combing stringy hair and looking at me expectantly. She had been playing some kind of game with bottle caps when I came in. I let the bartender know I was looking at her.
“Make it two,” I said.
“Ah,” he grunted. It had satisfied him to know what I had in mind. Half of him dragged the other half back to the bar.
She walked over to me with too much hip swing. She wore a cheap flower-print cotton dress that ended a couple of inches below her knees. She sat down next to me, smiled a little. She had heavy lips and a chin that sagged. Flesh shook on the bones of her upper arms when she moved them.
I smiled back. “Hot day,” I said.
“Yeah.” She smoothed hair on top of her head with chubby fingers. The hair looked as if it had been dyed with coffee. “That’s why I like to sit in here on days like this. Too hot to go out.” Her eyes were busy, deciding how much I was worth.
“I bought you a drink,” I said, trying to seem pleasantly nervous. “I thought you might like one.”
“Well, thanks.” We were good buddies. She grabbed hers off the tray while the bartender was still approaching the table. I took the other glass and paid him. I didn’t touch mine. She drank hers with relish, the throat muscles pulling greedily.
“Say,” she said, swinging the glass down. “That’s good. Good as gold.” She licked her lips.
I put my own down, trying to look as if I had enjoyed it. “Yeah,” I said solemnly. “It’s good to taste liquor again.”
Her eyes went appraisingly over my suit. She reached out and handled the sleeve. “That’s a pretty good suit,” she said wittily.
I kept looking at her as if she were the closest thing to an angel I had seen yet. I hoped my look was full of lust. “They gave it to me when I got out,” I said.
She nodded. “Thought I recognized the cut of it. Prison goods.” She crossed her legs, because it was about that time in the script — the script she had written for herself a long time ago. Her hips pushed tightly against the thin dress. I looked where I was supposed to look.
“How long were you in?” she said.
“Five years.”
“That’s too bad,” she said sympathetically. “Five years in the can ain’t no fun. No liquor. No women.” She gave me a long look. “Say,” she said, “I got half a bottle in my room. I mean, it’s goin’ to waste, I don’t like to drink alone. You and me could have a pull at it. I mean, since you just got out and all—”
“I’d like that,” I said. “Where’s your room?”
She nodded. “Up the stairs back there. It’s not a very fancy place. Just a place to lay my head.” She giggled. We got up together. She took my hand and led me past the bartender. He didn’t look at us.
Her hand felt damp and slightly greasy. She held tightly to me, almost pulling me up the narrow stairway. I stopped when we went through the door into her room. A man was sitting at a table in the center of the floor, his face on the yellowing cloth. He was snoring his head off. There was a jug of cheap wine near him. I could smell it throughout the room.
“Don’t mind him,” she said. “He’ll sleep for hours.” She released my hand, went to the bed, lifted a thin, stained mattress, pulled a flat bottle of whisky from under it.
“Here we are, honey,” she said gaily, holding the bottle high. She pitched it at me. “Catch. Glasses over there on the dresser.”
I turned away and set the bottle on the dresser. The hot room smelled vaguely like a whore-house scrub room. There was a toilet in one corner that bubbled constantly.
I heard her unzipping the dress and turned around. She wiggled out of it, kicked it away with a heavy flat foot. She wore no underwear. Her breasts sagged over her belly. The nipples pointed almost straight down.
“After you’ve had some of that you can have some of this,” she said, pointing. “But only the booze is free, baby.”
I took out my wallet, peeled off a five-dollar bill. I put the wallet back. Her eyes were bright. “We could have a real party,” she said, the words oozing out. “Maybe some harder stuff than whisky. Lots harder.”
“What name you go by?”
“Gretchen. Just call me Gretchen, darlin’. Let’s have that drink.”
“No, thanks. The five only buys one thing.”
She stopped advancing toward me. “What’s that, darlin’? I don’t go in for none of these tricks—”
“I just want to know where Rose is. That’s what I get for the five.”
She frowned. “Rose?”
“She used to work here. About five years ago. For all I know she’s still here.”
I had her puzzled. “She did work here. She ain’t here now. She—”
I found myself listening with part of my mind for a sound that wasn’t there any more. I turned toward the table as the man who had been sitting there leaped at me. Surprise was all he had. When I turned I took that away from him and all that was left was a big double-edged knife and no technique. He slashed at me with the blade from a place behind his ear. I got an arm up to block his try, then hammered him in the gut. He hit the floor on his back. I stepped on his wrist with one foot, kicked the knife out of his hand with the other. I kept my foot on the wrist and looked at him while he went about learning how to breathe again. He was dark and had a thick mustache.
“Who are you?” the naked woman said shrilly. “What d’you want?”
I told her to shut up. I hauled the guy off his back and hit him in the mouth. He stumbled back against the table, then dived for his knife. I was already there. I picked it up. The blade was about a mile long, and the handle was wrapped with tape. There was dried blood on the tape. The blade looked as if it had been sharpened many times, done much work.
I picked him up again and jammed him against the wall and put the edge of the blade under his chin. He sweated wine from every pore. He chewed me out in thick jumbled Spanish.
“What was this supposed to be?” I said. “Your afternoon workout?”
“Ain’t no goddam cop gonna come around here actin’ wise,” he said.
“What do you care how she earns her money? What are you to her, anyway?”
