This Side of Jordan (42 page)

“Maybe I should get a haircut instead.” Chester lit a cigarette as he came into the boudoir. “I ought to cut out getting drunk, start leading a clean life, and all that.”

“It's not healthy to deny oneself pleasure,” the gypsy remarked, reaching down into the cabinet. Alvin watched her draw out a pale blue decanter of ice water and a pair of tall heavy fluted glasses. “I've always believed intoxications to be borrowed dreams.”

Chester exhaled a plume of smoke. “Sweetheart, I can see you and me are going to get on swell together. What do you say we take a hootch bottle and go hire a car for a joyride, just the two of us?”

“Oh, there's no need to go anywhere,” the gypsy said, sliding open a drawer in the upper cabinet for a china saucer and a pair of silver vented spoons. “I'm sure I have everything you could ever want right here in this wagon.”

“Oh yeah?” Chester cracked a grin.

“Be contented with thy present fortune,” said Mademoiselle Estralada as she opened a tiny porcelain bowl atop the cabinet. “Constancy on thy part will meet a due return.” She placed a handful of sugar lumps on the china saucer with the vented spoons. Alvin muffled a cough with his sleeve, and the dwarf dug an elbow angrily into his ribs. It was stifling in the closet and Alvin wasn't sure how long he could remain crowded into there without getting sick.

“Say, didn't I hop into my best suit to date you up tonight?” Chester asked, picking up a scratched glass daguerreotype in a faded green plush frame. He examined it intently for a few moments. “I tell you, I'm a dandy fine fellow, once you get to know me.”

Mademoiselle Estralada smiled. “You're a very pretty man.”

Chester replaced the daguerreotype, and tapped ash into a silver ashtray. “Well, it's not all that often I get taken in hand by a sweet peach like you, too. Maybe tomorrow night you'll let me blow you to dinner, what do you say?”

“Why, that would be wonderful.” Among the stuffed satin pillows on the divan were beaded pincushions embroidered with fancy chenille and pearls. Mademoiselle Estralada made room among these for Chester. “I hope this is comfortable.”

“Oh, sure it is.” He brought the ashtray with him as he sat down, then eased back onto one of the stuffed pillows. “It's swell.”

Wiping sweat from his forehead, Alvin watched the gypsy take a round wicker basket from behind the divan and draw out a cloudy green bottle which she placed on the teak cabinet with the water decanter and fluted glasses, the vented spoons and sugar lumps.

Chester had a drag off his cigarette. “What're we drinking, honey?”

Mademoiselle Estralada smiled. “La Fée Verte.”

“Beg your pardon?”

She showed him the bottle whose label read
Pernod Fils -60°.

“I'll be damned, that's 120 proof.”

“Too strong for you?”

“Hell no, I've been drinking alcorub all week. I'll be all right. I'm full of pep. You like this hightoned liquor, do you?”

The gypsy smiled again.
“Avec les Fleurs, avec les Femmes, avec L'Absinthe, avec le Feu, on peut se divertir un peu, jouer son rôle en quelque drame.”

Chester laughed. “Gee, I ain't parley-voo'd fran-say with a dame since the war.” He tapped his cigarette over the ashtray.

“Oh, were you in France?” the gypsy asked, pulling the cork from the bottle of Swiss absinthe.

“Me and ‘Black Jack' Pershing himself at Saint-Mihiel with the Austrian 88's.” Chester sung,
“It's the wrong way to tickle Mary, it's the wrong place to go.”

He laughed.

Mademoiselle Estralada said, “That's very nice.”

She poured the absinthe into the first glass, filling about a third of it with a lovely emerald liquid that glimmered in the lamplight.

Chester smiled. “Thanks a million. I tell you, that war was the graft of the century. All I got out of it was a drink habit and some cheap chromos for a souvenir.” He winked. “Don't worry, honey. I came back clean.”

“Did you kill anyone?” the gypsy asked, pouring an inch less absinthe into the other glass. A sweet scent of licorice filtered into the sweltering closet. Alvin had never seen such pretty liquor in his life. Just looking at the green drink made him thirsty. “Naw, I'm a pacifist. I didn't hold much for shooting scrapes. I preferred bourbon and dice with my pals in the drinkeries. It was a hell of a lot safer.”

“That's very sensible.”

Mademoiselle Estralada put a lump of sugar in one of the vented spoons, then took the pale blue decanter, placed the spoon over the fluted glass, and dribbled ice water onto the sugar, gradually dissolving it through the spoon into the emerald absinthe below.

Chester took one last drag off the cigarette butt, and snuffed it out in the silver ashtray. “Say, that reminds me, this beauty pageant you were telling me about, that wouldn't have been at the Navy Pier, would it? See, I went out to a speakie on the South Side one evening to shake a hoof with a dame from Halstead Street. You know, the sort a fellow wants to slick up for even if he's just taking her downtown to a ping-pong parlor.”

The gypsy lightly stirred the mixture, her spoon making a pleasant tinkling sound as the swirling green liquid became a cloudy opalescent. Then she gave the glass to Chester. “À votre santé.”

“Thanks.” He sniffed it, and took a sip. “Say, that's not half bad.”

“It's sweet, no?”

He took a longer sip and licked his lips. “Yeah, sort of minty.”

“I'm happy you like it.”

“Sure I do.” Chester took a long swig, draining half the glass. “Anyhow, trouble was, this dame's pop was one of those old-timers who thinks nobody younger than himself'll ever amount to anything. If a fellow dating his little girl wasn't rubbing elbows with the well-to-do, he thought she'd laid an egg for letting the fellow pay a call on her in the first place.”

Chester took another drink of absinthe while the gypsy stirred her own glass. “Well, she wasn't exactly a society dame herself, but when I bought her a fox neckpiece, he acted like I hadn't done anything more than have her down to a sweetshop for a couple of chocolate drops. Told her I was a missing link! Well, that made me pretty sore, so I fibbed to the cops that his alleydog'd bitten me in the back of the leg and they came and took it to the pound. I tell you, that old goat cried like a dame when he found out.”

Chester finished the glass of absinthe. He studied it briefly, and gave the glass back to Mademoiselle Estralada. “Gee, that was swell. How about another?”

“Certainly.”

Alvin watched the gypsy set her own glass aside and fill Chester's half up with absinthe. She took another lump of sugar with the vented spoon and slowly dissolved more ice water into the gangster's glass.

“At any rate,” Chester said, settling back on the divan, “I got nothing to kick about tonight.”

“You seem very happy.”

“Sure I am.”

The dwarf scuttled away from Alvin into the wardrobe of dresses where he covered his face with one of the gypsy's gowns and sneezed. Then he crawled back to the slot just as Mademoiselle Estralada returned Chester's glass to him. “Here you are.”

“Thanks.” He drank half of it down in one long gulp and broke a grin afterward. “Gee, that's refreshing.”

The gypsy sipped her own absinthe, then sat down next to Chester on the puffy divan. A wind gust outside shook the wagon windows. Lamps flickered. She remarked, “Lester says you're from the Big Town.”

Chester took another drink. “Not lately. I had a run-in last spring with some mental defectives mucking around Lauterbach's saloon in Cicero. They were pretending to be snoopers in their Sunday blacks while hijacking two dozen barrels of rum a month out of the storehouses in Skaggs grocery trucks. Too bad none of 'em were any too good at it.”

Alvin watched Chester finish off his second glass of absinthe, and wipe his lips with the back of one hand. Madamoiselle Estralada asked, “You were a watchman?”

He shook his head. “Naw, I worked for a messenger service Lauterbach hired to send these sports a notice about how unhappy he was with the job they were doing. After me and some of the boys delivered them a valentine to a garage at North Clark Street, I decided I ought to get away from the liquor traffic for a while, maybe buy a secondhand motor, go see some of the country.”

The gypsy smiled. “What a marvelous idea. Would you care for another drink?”

Chester gave her the empty glass. His eyes had drooped a fair amount since entering the painted wagon, his speech deteriorated to a mild slur. “Don't mind if I do.”

Mademoiselle Estralada filled his fluted glass more than half full with absinthe. Once again she performed her ritual with the sugar lumps and the vented spoon and the dribbling ice water. Alvin began to feel closed in and worried that Chester had a cast-iron stomach and could probably drink arsenate of lead without getting knocked flat. Chester picked up one of her Japanese fans and waved it about. “Say, I thought you were gonna tell my fortune.”

Mademoiselle Estralada stirred the drink. “Would you still like me to?”

She tapped the spoon clean on the rim of the absinthe glass and set it aside. Her painted eyelashes glittered in the kerosene shadows.

“Why sure, it'd be swell.”

The pretty gypsy gave Chester his third glass of absinthe, then sat down again beside him on the divan and took his free hand in her own and gently traced the map of his palm with her fingertips while he drank two-thirds of the sweet liquor. “Let not distrust mar thy happiness.”

Chester kept his eyes on her as he took another drink. He waited for her to speak again. When she didn't, he frowned. “Is that all? Nothing about me and Sunshine Charlie and a basement full of mazuma? I thought you were a fortune teller. You sure ain't no Evangeline Adams, honey. Go on, try again, but this time tell me how big my fortune's going to be.”

He drank the rest of his absinthe and let the fluted glass roll off his fingers onto the divan. In the closet, the dwarf started to whisper something until Alvin hushed him.

Mademoiselle Estralada frowned. “Please don't scold me. When I was a child, I tamed lions for the circus in Budapest and charmed the king cobra.”

“Sister, I don't know that I'd hire you to train a flock of seals if you weren't any better at it than you are at telling a fellow's fortune.”

Narrowing her eyes, the gypsy took his other hand and rapidly re-traced the lines across his palm. Then she advised, “If thou payest attention to all the departments of thy calling, a fortune awaits thee, greater than any treasure within the country in which thou residest.”

Chester cracked a sloppy grin. “Gee, now that's more like it, sweetheart. Sounds like I ought to break into the foreign oil game, what do you think?”

The dark-skinned gypsy leaned over and retrieved Chester's empty glass from the divan, then stood up, her jewelry tinkling in the shadowy boudoir. She told him, “As the seasons vary, so will thy fortune.”

Chester laughed. “Oh yeah? Well, here's one for you, sweetheart: As long as dandelions bloom, as long as fruit ripens, as long as grain grows, just so long will men drink! Now, go ahead and fill 'er up again. I'm getting thirsty.”

“If you like,” the gypsy replied, taking Chester's glass back to the bottle of Pernod Fils.

“I sure do.”

Alvin watched Madamoiselle Estralada sip briefly from her own drink, then pour more absinthe from the green bottle into Chester's glass. Black wisps of burning kerosene diffused the lamplight throughout the boudoir.

Chester spoke up from the liquor trance he had been lapsing into for the past quarter hour. “What do you say you come over here and we tell each other some smutty stories?”

The gypsy stirred the absinthe into another milky green cloud. She arched an eyebrow. “You wish to be naughty?” The spoon clinked on the inside of Chester's glass.

“You bet I do.”

Mademoiselle Estralada put down the vented spoon, brought him the glass of absinthe, and kissed him on the cheek. He grabbed her by the elbow and kissed her on the lips.

“Sweetheart,” he murmured as he let go, “you just drain me up.”

The gypsy smiled.

Chester drank half the glass, then burped. “Say, what do you got in this liquor of yours? Gasoline?”

“Elixir of wormwood,” Mademoiselle Estralada replied, “grown in the Val-de-Travers.”

“You don't say.” Chester drank another gulp, his mouth smeared crimson with the gypsy's evening lipstick. “Well, it's got one hell of a wallop, whatever it is.”

“I'm so glad you enjoy it.”

“A good cocktail sure makes the evening go, don't it?” Chester poured more absinthe down his throat, then stared cockeyed at the gypsy. “How come you ain't sitting here beside me, honey? Got a tummy ache?”

He giggled like he was daffy.

Mademoiselle Estralada reached behind her to the tea table between the closet door and the divan and drew out a Chinese lily from the cut glass vase.

Chester said, “Make love to me, honey, and I promise I'll take you to Jelly Roll Morton's show at the Cotton Club next week. Cross my heart.” He gulped more absinthe and started blinking strangely. “You see if I don't.”

The gypsy sniffed the delicate lily as she swayed in front of Chester. “Darling, I'm afraid I'm awfully done in tonight.”

Alvin watched Chester drink to the bottom of his fourth glass of absinthe. The gangster groused, “Aw, so that's how it is, sweetheart, you don't love me, do you?” His voice had degenerated now to a sad drunkard's slur.

“Of course, I do, you pretty man. You know I do.”

Chester dropped his empty glass onto the Persian rug in front of the divan. “I'm not a bad sort,” he mumbled. “I tell you, we'll have packs of fun, won't we?”