“A little ham,” he said.
One of the crap shooters reached up and cut a slice of ham.
“You haven’t seen this guy Henry around that owns the place, have you?” he asked me.
“That’s me.”
“Oh,” he said. “Sorry. Want to get in the game?”
“Later on,” I said.
“O.K.,” he said. Then his mouth full of ham, “Listen you tar heel bastid. Make your dice hit the wall and bounce.”
“Won’t make no difference to you, comrade,” said the man handling the dice.
Al came out of the bathroom. He looked all clean except for some smudges around his eyes.
“You can take those off with a towel,” I said.
“What?”
“Look at yourself once more in the mirror.”
“It’s too steamy.” he said. “To hell with it, I feel clean.”
“Let’s eat,” I said. “Come on, Manolita. You know each other?”
I watched her eyes run over Al.
“How are you?” Manolita said.
“I say that is a sound idea,” the Englishman said. “Do let’s eat. But where?”
“Is that a crap game?” Al said.
“Didn’t you see it when you came in?”
“No,” he said. “All I saw was the ham.”
“It’s a crap game.”
“You go and eat,” Al said. “I’m staying here.”
As we went out there were six of them on the floor and Al Wagner was reaching up to cut a slice of ham.
“What do you do, comrade?” I heard one of the flyers say to Al.
“Tanks.”
“Tell me they aren’t any good any more,” said the flyer.
“Tell you a lot of things,” Al said. “What you got there? Some dice?”
“Want to look at them?”
“No,” said Al. “I want to handle them.”
We went down the hall, Manolita, me and the tall Englishman, and found the boys had left already for the Gran Via restaurant. The Hungarian had stayed behind to replay the new discs. I was very hungry and the food at the Gran Via was lousy. The two who were making the film had already eaten and gone back to work on the bad camera.
This restaurant was in the basement and you had to pass a guard and go through the kitchen and down a stairs to get to it. It was a racket.
They had a millet and water soup, yellow rice with horse meat in it, and oranges for dessert. There had been another dish of chickpeas with sausage in it that everybody said was terrible but it had run out. The newspaper men all sat at one table and the other tables were filled with officers and girls from Chicote’s, people from the censorship, which was then in the telephone building across the street, and various unknown citizens.
The restaurant was run by an anarchist syndicate and they sold you wine that was all stamped with the label of the royal cellars and the date it had been put in the bins. Most of it was so old that it was either corked or just plain faded out and gone to pieces. You can’t drink labels and I sent three bottles back as bad before we got a drinkable one. There was a row about this.
The waiters didn’t know the different wines. They just brought you a bottle of wine and you took your chances. They were as different from the Chicote’s waiters as black from white. These waiters were all snotty, all over-tipped and they regularly had special dishes such as lobster or chicken that they sold extra for gigantic prices. But these had all been bought up before we got there so we just drew the soup, the rice and the oranges. The place always made me angry because the waiters were a crooked lot of profiteers and it was about as expensive to eat in, if you had one of the special dishes, as 21 or the Colony in New York.
We were sitting at the table with a bottle of wine that just wasn’t bad, you know you could taste it starting to go, but it wouldn’t justify making a row about, when Al Wagner came in. He looked around the room, saw us and came over.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
“They broke me,” he said.
“It didn’t take very long.”
“Not with those guys,” he said. “That’s a big game. What have they got to eat?”
I called a waiter over.
“It’s too late,” he said. “We can’t serve anything now.”
“This comrade is in the tanks,” I said. “He has fought all day and he will fight tomorrow and he hasn’t eaten.”
“That’s not my fault,” the waiter said. “It’s too late. There isn’t anything more. Why doesn’t the comrade eat with his unit? The army has plenty of food.”
“I asked him to eat with me.”
“You should have said something about it. It’s too late now. We are not serving anything any more.”
“Get the head waiter.”
The headwaiter said the cook had gone home and there was no fire in the kitchen. He went away. They were angry because we had sent the bad wine back.
“The hell with it,” said Al. “Let’s go somewhere else.”
“There’s no place you can eat at this hour. They’ve got food. I’ll just have to go over and suck up to the headwaiter and give him some more money.”
I went over and did just that and the sullen waiter brought a plate of cold sliced meats, then half a spiny lobster with mayonnaise, and a salad of lettuce and lentils. The headwaiter sold this out of his private stock which he was holding out either to take home, or sell to late comers.
“Cost you much?” Al asked.
“No,” I lied.
“I’ll bet it did,” he said. “I’ll fix up with you when I get paid.”
“What do you get now?”
“I don’t know yet. It was ten pesetas a day but they’ve raised it now I’m an officer. But we haven’t got it yet and I haven’t asked.”
“Comrade,” I called the waiter. He came over, still angry that the headwaiter had gone over his head and served Al. “Bring another bottle of wine, please.”
“What kind?”
“Any that is not too old so that the red is faded.”
“It’s all the same.”
I said the equivalent of like hell it is in Spanish, and the waiter brought over a bottle of Chateau Mouton- Rothschild 1906 that was just as good as the last claret we had was rotten.
“Boy that’s wine,” Al said. “What did you tell him to get that?”
“Nothing. He just made a lucky draw out of the bin.”
“Most of that stuff from the palace stinks.”
“It’s too old. This is a hell of a climate on wine.”
“There’s that wise comrade,” Al nodded across at another table.
The little man with the thick glasses that had talked to us about Largo Caballero was talking with some people I knew were very big shots indeed.
“I guess he’s a big shot,” I said.
“When they’re high enough up they don’t give a damn what they say. But I wish he would have waited until after tomorrow. It’s kind of spoiled tomorrow for me.”
I filled his glass.
