Three by Cain: Serenade/Love's Lovely Counterfeit/The Butterfly

by James M. Cain

  Halfway up, I felt something coming at me. I fell back a step and braced myself for her to hit me. She didn’t. She shot by me on the stairs, and in the half light I saw she was dressed to go out. She had on red hat, red dress, and red shoes, with gold stockings, and rouge smeared all over her face, but I didn’t catch all that until later. All I saw was that she was got up like some kind of hussy, and I took about six steps at one jump and caught her at the door. She didn’t scream. She never screamed, or talked loud, or anything like that. She sank her teeth into my hand and grabbed for the door again. I caught her once more, and we fought like a couple of animals. Then I threw her against the door, got my arms around her from behind, and carried her upstairs, with her heels cutting dents in my shins.When we got in the bedroom I turned her loose, and we faced each other panting, her eyes like two points of light, my hands slippery with blood. “What’s the rush? Where you going?”

  “Where you think? To the Locha, where you come from.”

  That was one between the eyes. I didn’t know she had even heard of La Locha’s. But I dead-panned as well as I could.

  “What’s the locha? I don’t seem to place it.”

  “So, once more you lie.”

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about. I went for a walk and got lost, that’s all.”

  “You lie, now another time you lie. You think these girl no tell me about crazy Italian who come every night? You think they no tell me?”

  “So that’s where you spend your afternoons.”

  “Yes.”

  She stood smiling at me, letting it soak in. I kept thinking I ought to kill her, that if I was a man I’d take her by the throat and choke her till her face turned black. But I didn’t want to kill her. I just felt shaky in the knees, and weak, and sick. “Yes, that is where I go, I find little muchacha for company, little muchacha like me, for nice little talk and cup of chocolate after siesta. And what these little muchacha talk? Only about crazy Italian, who come every night, give five-quetzal tip.” She pitched her voice into Maria’s squeak. “Sí. Cinco quetzales.”

  I was licked. When I had run my tongue around my lips enough that they stopped fluttering, I backed down. “All right. Once more I’ll cut out the lying. Yes, I was there. Now will you stop this show, so we can talk?”

  She looked away, and I saw her lips begin to twitch. I went in the bathroom, and started to wash the blood off my hand. I wanted her to follow me in, and I knew if she did, she’d break. She didn’t. “No! No more talk! You no go, then I go! Adios!”

  She was down, and out the front door, before I even got to the head of the stairs.

  C H A P T E R

  14

  I ran out on the street just as a taxi pulled away from the corner. I yelled, but it didn’t stop. There was no other taxi in sight, and I didn’t find one till I went clear around the block to the stand in front of the hotel. I had him take me back to La Locha’s. By that time there were at least twenty cabs parked up and down the street, and things were going strong in all the houses. It kept riding me that even if she had gone in the place, they might lie to me about it, and I couldn’t be sure unless I searched the joint, and that meant they would call the cops. I went to the first cab that was parked there and asked him if a girl in a red dress had gone in any of the houses. He said no. I gave him a quetzal and said if she showed, he was to come in La Locha’s and let me know. I went to the next driver, and the next, and did the same. By the time I had handed out quetzals to half a dozen of them, I knew that ten seconds after she got out of her cab I would know it. I went back to La Locha’s. No girl in a red dress had come, said the Indian. I set up drinks for all hands, sat down with one of the girls, and waited.

  Around three o’clock the judiciary began to leave, and after them the army, and then all the others that weren’t spending the night. At four o’clock they put me out. Two or three of my taxi drivers were still standing there, and they swore that no girl in a red dress, or any other kind of dress, had come to any house in the street all night. I passed out a couple more quetzals, had one of them drive me home. She wasn’t there. I routed out the Japs. It was an hour’s job of pidgin Spanish and wigwagging to find out what they knew, but after a while I got it straight. Around nine o’clock she had started to pack. Then she got a cab, put her things in it, and went out. Then she came back, and when she found out I wasn’t home, went out. When she came back the second time, around midnight, she had on the red dress, and kept walking around upstairs waiting for me. Then I came home, and there was the commotion, and she went out again, and hadn’t been back since.

  I shaved, cleaned the dried blood off my hand, changed my clothes. Around eight o’clock I tried to eat some breakfast and couldn’t. Around nine o’clock the bell rang. A taxi driver was at the door. He said some of his friends had told him I was looking for a lady in a red dress. He said he had driven her, and could take me to where he left her. I took my hat, got in, and he drove me around to a cheap hotel, one of those I had been to myself. They said yes, a lady of that description had been there. She had come earlier in the evening, changed her clothes once and gone out, then came back late and left an early call. She hadn’t registered. About seven thirty this morning she had gone out. I asked how she was dressed. They just shrugged. I asked if she had taken a cab. They said they didn’t know. I rode back to the house, and tried to piece it together. One thing began to stick out of it now. My being out late, that wasn’t why she had left. She was leaving anyway, and after she had moved out she had come back, probably to say goodbye. Then when she found I wasn’t there she had got sore, gone to the hotel again, changed into the red dress, and come back to harpoon me with how she was going back to her old life. Whether she had gone back to it, or what she had done, I had no more idea than the man in the moon.

  I waited all that day, and the next. I was afraid to go to the police. I could have checked on the Tenth Avenue end of it in a minute. They keep a card for every girl on the street, with her record and picture, and if she had gone there, she would have had to report. But once I set them on her trail, that might be the beginning of the end. And I didn’t even know what name she was using. So far, even with the drivers and at the hotel, I hadn’t given her name or mine. I had spoken of her as the girl in the red dress, but even that wouldn’t do any more. If they couldn’t remember how she was dressed when she left the hotel, it was a cinch she wasn’t wearing red. I lay around, and waited, and cursed myself for giving her five thousand quetzals cash, just in case. With that, she could hide out on me for a year. And then it dawned on me for the first time that with that she could go anywhere she pleased. She could have left town.

  I went right over to one of the open-front drugstores, went in a booth, and called Pan-American. I spoke English. I said I was an American, that I had met a Mexican lady at the hotel and promised to give her some pictures I had taken of her, but I hadn’t seen her for a couple of days and I was wondering if she had left town. They asked me her name. I said I didn’t know her name, but they might identify her by a fur coat she was probably carrying. They asked me to hold the line. Then they said yes, the porter remembered a fur coat he had handled for a Mexican lady, that if I’d hold the line they’d see if they could get me her name and address. I held the line again. Then they said they were sorry, they didn’t have her address, but her name was Mrs. Di Nola, and she had left on the early plane the day before for Mexico City.

  Mexico looked exactly the same, the burros, the goats, the pulquerías, the markets, but I didn’t have time for any of that. I went straight from the airport to the Majestic, a new hotel that had opened since I left there, registered as Di Nola, and started to look for her. I didn’t go to the police, I didn’t make any inquiries, and I didn’t do any walking, for fear I’d be recognized. I just put a car under charter, had the driver go around and around, and took a chance that sooner or later I’d see her. I went up and down the Guauhtemolzin until the girls would jeer at us every time w
e showed up, and the driver had to wave and say “postales,” to shut them up. Buying postcards seemed to be the stock alibi if you were just rubbering around. I went up and down every avenue, where the crowds were thickest, and the more the traffic held us up, the better it suited me. I kept my eyes glued to the sidewalk. At night, we drove past every café, and around eleven o’clock, when the picture theatres closed, we drove past them, on the chance I’d see her coming out. I didn’t tell him what I wanted, I just told him where to drive.

  By the end of that day I hadn’t even caught a glimpse of her. I told the driver to be on deck promptly at eleven the next morning, which was Sunday. We started out, and I had him drive me into Chapultepec Park, and I was sure I’d see her there. The whole city turns out there every Sunday morning to listen to the band, ride horses, wink at the girls, and just walk. We rode around for three hours, past the zoo, the bandstand, the boats in the lake, the chief of the mounted police and his daughter, so many times we got dizzy, and still no trace of her. In the afternoon we kept it up, driving all over the city going every place there might be a crowd. There was no bullfight. The season for them hadn’t started, but we combed the boulevards, the suburbs, and every place else I could think of. He asked if I’d need him after supper. I said no, to report at ten in the morning. It wasn’t getting me anywhere, and I wanted to think what I was going to do next. After dinner I took a walk, to try and figure out something, I passed two or three people I had known, but they never gave me a tumble. What left Mexico was a big, hard, and starved-looking American. What came back was a middle-aged wop, with a pot on him so big it hid his feet. When I got to the Palacio de Bellas Artes, it was all lit up. I crossed toward it, and thought I’d sit on a stone bench and keep an eye on the crowd that was coming in. But when I got near enough to read the signs I saw it was Rigoletto they were giving and this dizzy, drunken feeling swept over me, that I should go in there and sing it, and take the curse off the flop, and show them how I could do it. I cut back, and turned the corner into the town.

  Next to the bullring box office is a café. I went in there, ordered an apricot brandy, and sat down. I told myself to forget about the singing, that what I was trying to do was find her. The place was pretty full, and three or four guys were standing in front of one of the booth tables against the wall. Through them I caught a flash of red, and my mouth went dry. They went back to their own table and I was looking right at her.

  She was with Triesca, the bullfighter, and more guys kept coming up to him, shaking his hand, and going away again. She saw me, and looked away quick. Then he saw me. He kept looking at me, and then he placed me. He said something to her, and laughed. She nodded, kept looking off somewhere with a strained face, and then half laughed. Then he ogled at me. By the way both of them were acting I knew he didn’t connect me with New York, and maybe he didn’t know anything about the New York stuff at all. All he saw was a guy that had once taken his girl away from him, and had then turned out to be a fag. But that was enough for him. He began putting on an act that the whole room was roaring at in a minute. Her face got hard and set. I felt the blood begin to pound in my head.

  A mariachi came in. He threw them a couple of pesos, and they screeched three or four times. Then he got a real idea. He called the leader, and whispered, and they started Cielito Lindo. But instead of them singing it, he got up and sang it. He sang right at me, in a high, simpering falsetto, with gestures. They laughed like hell. If she had dead-panned, I think I would have sat there and taken it. But she didn’t. She laughed. I don’t know why. Maybe she was just nervous. Maybe she played it the way the rest of them expected her to play it. Maybe she was still sore about Guatemala. Maybe she really thought it was funny, that I should be following her around like some puppy after she had hooked up with another man. I don’t know, and I didn’t think about any of that at the time. When I saw that laugh, I got a dizzy, wanton feeling in my head, and I knew that all hell couldn’t stop me from what I was going to do.

  He got to the end of the verse, and they gave him a laugh and a big hand. He struck a pose for the chorus, and then I laughed too, and stood up. That surprised him, and he hesitated. And then I shot it:

  Ay, Ay, Ay, Ay!

  Canta y no llores

  Porque cantando se alegran

  Cielito lindo

  Los corazones!

  It was like gold, bigger than it had ever been, and when I finished I was panting from the excitement of it. He stood there, looking thick, and then came this roar of applause. The mariachi leader began jabbering at me, and they started it again. I sang it through, drunk from the way it felt, drunk from the look on her face. On the second chorus, I sang it right at her, soft and slow. But at the end I put in a high one, closed my eyes and swelled it, held it till the glasses rattled, and then came off it.

  When I opened my eyes wide she wasn’t looking at me. She was looking past the bar, behind me. The mob was cheering, people were crowding in from the street, and all over the place they were passing it around, “El Panamier Trovador!” But in a booth was an officer, yelling into a telephone. How long that kept up I don’t know. They were all around me, jabbering things for me to sing. Next thing I knew, she was running for the door, Triesca after her. But I was ahead of him. I rammed through the crowd, and when I got to the street I could see the red of her dress, half a block away. I started to run. I hadn’t gone two steps before some cops grabbed me. I wrestled with them. From up the street came shots, and people began to run and scream.Then from somewhere came a rattle of Spanish, and I heard the word “gringo.” They turned me loose, and I ran on. Ahead of me were more cops, and people standing around. I saw something red on the pavement. When I pushed through she was lying there, and beside her, this quivering smile on his face, was a short guy in uniform, with three stars on his shoulder. It seemed a long time before I knew it was the politico from Acapulco. I got it, then, that order to lay off the gringo. He couldn’t shoot me. I was too important. But he could shoot her, for trying to escape, or resisting arrest, or whatever it was. And he could stand there, and wait, and get his kick when I had to look at her.

  I jumped for him, and he stepped back, but then I turned to water, and I sank down beside her, the cops, the lights, and the ambulance going around and around in a horrible spin. If he had done that to her, what had I done?

  Once more I was in the vestry room of the little church near Acapulco, and I could even see the burned place on the bricks where we had made the fire. Indians were slipping in barefooted, the women with rebozos over their heads, the men in white suits, extra clean. Her father and mother were in the first pew, and some sisters and brothers I didn’t even know she had. The casket was white, and the altar was banked with the flowers I had had sent down, flowers from Xochimilco, that she liked. The choir loft was full of boys and girls, all in white. The priest came in, started to put on his vestments, and I paid him. He caught my arm. “You sing, yes, Señor Sharp? An Agnus Dei perhaps?”

  “No.”

  He shrugged, turned away, and pulled the surplice over his head. This horrible sense of guilt swept over me, like it had a hundred times in the last two days. “… Never.… Never again.”

  “Ah.”

  He just breathed it, and stood looking at me, then his hand traced a blessing for me, and he whispered in Latin. I knew, then, I had made a confession, and received an absolution, and some kind of gray peace came over me. I went out, slipped in the pew with her family, and the music started. They carried her out to a grave on the hillside. As they lowered her down, an iguana jumped out of it and went running over the rocks.

  Love’s Lovely Counterfeit

  LAKE CITY is an imaginary metropolis; the people who live there are fictitious, and the situations which engage them invented; they do not represent, and are not intended to represent, actual places, persons, or events.

  C H A P T E R

  1

  Through the revolving door came a tall man with big shoulders, wh
o crossed to the elevators, and after nodding to the starter, stood looking over the lobby. It was the standard lobby, for hotels of the first class in cities of the second class, to be found all over the United States: it had quiet, comfortable furniture; illuminated signs with green letters over the windows of grand functionaries; oil paintings of lakes, streams, and forests; and heavy urns, filled with sand, for cigarettes. Various desks, tables, and booths, staffed with women in assorted uniforms, gave it a touch of high, wartime consecration. Yet, in spite of all this, it contrived to seem a bit disreputable. Possibly the clientele, now debouching from dining room, fountain room, and cocktail bar, grabbing its hats after lunch, and hastening away, had something to do with this. It was made up of men distinctly political, together with the slightly too good-looking women one encounters behind desks in city halls. Indeed, many of them, after leaving the hotel, streamed over to the City Hall across the street, a traffic cop blowing his whistle as each batch appeared, and making this rite seem portentous, as though the vehicles that he stopped had all the panting impatience of an Empire State Express.

  The man at the elevators, however, noted little of this, and seemed so much a part of it that he may have been incapable of seeing it. He was at least six feet, and something about his carriage suggested that at some time in his life he had been a professional athlete. His face, however, was at variance with the rest of him. Although he was not far from thirty, it had a juvenile look, and the part that was face, as distinguished from the parts that were cheek, jowl, and chin, seemed curiously small. Allowing for that, he had a fair amount of masculine good looks. His hair was light, with the tawniness that touches such hair in the late twenties. His eyes were blue, his skin showed the sunburn of many seasons; his step, as he entered the car, was springy. He rode up to the seventh floor, got out, walked down a corridor, stopped before a door with no number on it, pressed a button. A slot opened, then the door opened, and he went in.