"During the Baroque period of chess the practice of harrying your opponent with some annoying mannerism came into general use. Some players used dental floss, others cracked their joints or blew saliva bubbles. The method was constantly developed. In the 1917 match at Baghdad, the Arab Arachnid Khayam defeated the German master Kurt Schlemiel by humming 'I'll Be Around When You're Gone' forty-thousand times, and each time reaching his hand towards the board as if he intended to make a move. Schlemiel went into convulsions finally.
"Did you ever have the good fortune to see the Italian master Tetrazzini perform?" Lee lit Mary's cigarette. "I say 'perform' advisedly, because he was a great showman, and like all showmen, not above charlatanism and at times downright trickery. Sometimes he used smoke screens to hide his maneuvers from the opposition—I mean literal smoke screens, of course. He had a corps of trained idiots who would rush in at a given signal and eat all the pieces. With defeat staring him in the face—as it often did, because actually he knew nothing of chess but the rules and wasn't too sure of those—he would leap up yelling, 'You cheap bastard! I saw you palm that queen!' and ram a broken teacup into his opponent's face. In 1922 he was rid out of Prague on a rail. The next time I saw Tetrazzini was in the Upper Ubangi. A complete wreck. Peddling unlicensed condoms. That was the year of the rinderpest, when everything died, even the hyenas."
Lee paused. The routine was coming to him like dictation. He did not know what he was going to say next, but he suspected the monologue was about to get dirty. He looked at Mary. She was exchanging significant glances with Allerton. "Some sort of lover code," Lee decided. "She is telling him they have to go now." Allerton got up, saying he had to have a haircut before going to work. Mary and Allerton left. Lee was alone in the bar.
The monologue continued. "I was working as Aide-de-camp under General Von Klutch. Exacting.
A hard man to satisfy. I gave up trying after the first week. We had a saying around the wardroom: 'Never expose your flank to old Klutchy.' Well, I couldn't take Klutchy another night, so I assembled a modest caravan and hit the trail with Abdul, the local Adonis. Ten miles out of Tanhajaro, Abdul came down with the rinderpest and I had to leave him there to die. Hated to do it, but there was no other way. Lost his looks completely, you understand.
"At the headwaters of the Zambesi, I ran into an old Dutch trader. After considerable haggling I gave him a keg of paregoric for a boy, half Effendi and half Lulu. I figured the boy would get me as far as Timbuktu, maybe all the way to Dakar. But the Lulu-Effendi was showing signs of wear even before I hit Timbuktu, and I decided to trade him in on a straight Bedouin model. The crossbreeds make a good appearance, but they don't hold up. In Timbuktu I went to Corn Hole Gus's Used-Slave Lot to see what he could do for me on a trade-in.
"Gus rushes out and goes into the spiel: 'Ah, Sahib Lee. Allah has sent you! I have something right up your ass, I mean, alley. Just came in. One owner and he was a doctor. A once-over-lightly, twice-a-week-type citizen. It's young and it's tender. In fact, it talks baby talk . . . behold!'
"'You call those senile slobberings baby talk? My grandfather got a clap off that one. Come again, Gussie. '
"'You do not like it? A pity. Well, everyone has a taste, feller say. Now here I have a one-hundred-percent desert-bred Bedouin with a pedigree goes straight back to the Prophet. Dig his bearing.
Such pride! Such fire!'
"'A good appearance job, Gus, but not good enough. It's an albino Mongolian idiot. Look, Gussie, you are dealing with the oldest faggot in the Upper Ubangi, so come off the peg. Reach down into your grease pit and dredge out the best-looking punk you got in this moth-eaten bazaar.'
"'All right Sahib Lee, you want quality, right? Follow me, please. Here it is. What can I say?
Quality speaks for itself. Now, I get a lotta cheap-type customers in here wanna see quality and then scream at the price. But you know and I know that quality runs high. As a matter of fact, and this I swear by the Prophet's prick, I lose money on this quality merchandise.'
"'Uh huh. Got some hidden miles on him, but he'll do. How about a trial run?'
"'Lee, for christ sake, I don't run a house. This joint is strictly package. No consumption on premises. I could lose my license.'
"'I don't aim to get caught short with one of your Scotch-tape and household-cement reconditioned jobs a hundred miles from the nearest Soukh. Besides, how do I know it ain't a Liz?'
"'Sahib Lee! This is an ethical lot!'
"'I was beat that way one time in Marrakesh. Citizen passed a transvestite Jew Lizzie on me as an Abyssinian prince.'
"'Ha ha ha, full of funny jokes, aren't you? How is this: stay over in town tonight and try it out. If you don't want it in the morning, I refund every piaster. Fair enough?'
"'O. K., now, what can you give me on this Lulu-Effendi? Perfect condition. Just overhauled. He don't eat much and he don't say nothing.'
"'Jesus, Lee! You know I'd cut off my right nut for you, but I swear by my mother's cunt, may I fall down and be paralyzed and my prick fall off if these mixed jobs ain't harder to move than a junky's bowels.'
"'Skip the routine. How much?' "Gus stands in front of the Lulu-Effendi with his hands on his hips.
He smiles and shakes his head. He walks around the boy. He reaches in and points to a small, slightly varicose vein behind the knee. 'Look at that,' he says, still smiling and shaking his head.
He walks around again. . . . 'Got piles too.' He shakes his head. 'I don't know. I really don't know what to say to you. Open up, kid. . . . Two teeth missing.' Gus has stopped smiling. He is talking in low, considerate tones, like an undertaker.
"'I'm going to be honest with you, Lee. I've got a lotful of this stuff now. I'd rather just forget this job and talk cash on the other.'
"'What am I going to do with it? Peddle it on the public street?'
"'Might take it along as a spare. Ha, ha. . . .'
"'Ha. What can you give me?'
"'Well . . . now don't get mad . . . two hundred piasters.' Gus makes a skittish little run as if to escape my anger, and throws up a huge cloud of dust in the courtyard."
The routine ended suddenly, and Lee looked around. The bar was nearly empty. He paid for his drinks and walked out into the night.
Chapter 6
Thursday Lee went to the races, on the recommendation of Tom Weston. Weston was an amateur astrologer, and he assured Lee the signs were right. Lee lost five races, and took a taxi back to the Ship Ahoy.
Mary and Allerton were sitting at a table with the Peruvian chess player. Allerton asked Lee to come over and sit down at the table.
"Where's that phony whore caster?" Lee said, looking around.
"Tom give you a bum steer?" asked Allerton.
"He did that."
Mary left with the Peruvian. Lee finished his third drink and turned to Allerton. "I figure to go down to South America soon," he said. "Why don't you come along? Won't cost you a cent."
"Perhaps not in money."
"I'm not a difficult man to get along with. We could reach a satisfactory arrangement. What you got to lose?"
"Independence."
"So who's going to cut in on your independence? You can lay all the women in South America if you want to. All I ask is be nice to Papa, say twice a week. That isn't excessive, is it? Besides, I will buy you a round-trip ticket so you can leave at your discretion."
Allerton shrugged. "I'll think it over," he said. "This job runs ten days more. I'll give you a definite answer when the job folds."
"Your job. . . ." Lee was about to say, "I'll give you ten days' salary." He said, "All right."
Allerton's newspaper job was temporary, and he was too lazy to hold a job in any case.
Consequently his answer meant "No." Lee figured to talk him over in ten days. "Better not force the issue now," he thought.
Allerton planned a three-day trip to Morelia with his co-workers in the newspaper office. The night before he left, Lee was in a state of
manic excitement. He collected a noisy table full of people.
Allerton was playing chess with Mary, and Lee made all the noise he could. He kept his table laughing, but they all looked vaguely uneasy, as if they would prefer to be someplace else. They thought Lee was a little crazy. But just when he seemed on the point of some scandalous excess of speech or behavior, he would check himself and say something completely banal.
Lee leaped up to embrace a new arrival. "Ricardo! Amigo mío!" he said. "Haven't seen you in a dog's age. Where you been? Having a baby? Sit down on your ass, or what's left of it after four years in the Navy. What's troubling you, Richard? Is it women? I'm glad you came to me instead of those quacks on the top floor."
At this point Allerton and Mary left, after consulting for a moment in low tones. Lee looked after them in silence. "I'm playing to an empty house now," he thought. He ordered another rum and swallowed four Benzedrine tablets. Then he went into the head and smoked a roach of tea. "Now I will ravish my public," he thought.
The busboy had caught a mouse and was holding it up by the tail. Lee pulled out an old-fashioned .22 revolver he sometimes carried. "Hold the son of a bitch out and I'll blast it," he said, striking a Napoleonic pose. The boy tied a string to the mouse's tail and held it out at arm's length. Lee fired from a distance of three feet. His bullet tore the mouse's head off.
"If you'd got any closer the mouse would have clogged the muzzle," said Richard.
Tom Weston came in. "Here comes the old whore caster," Lee said. 'That retrograde Saturn dragging your ass, man?"
"My ass is dragging because I need a beer," said Weston.
"Well, you've come to the right place. A beer for my astrologizing friend. . . . What's that? I'm sorry, old man," Lee said, turning to Weston, "but the bartender say the signs aren't right to serve you a beer. You see, Venus is in the sixty-ninth house with a randy Neptune and he couldn't let you have a beer under such auspices." Lee washed down a small piece of opium with black coffee.
Horace walked in and gave Lee his brief, cold nod. Lee rushed over and embraced him. "This thing is bigger than both of us, Horace," he said. "Why hide our love?"
Horace thrust out his arms rigidly. "Knock it off," he said. "Knock it off."
"Just a Mexican abrazo, Horace. Custom of the country. Everyone does it down here."
"I don't care what the custom is. Just keep away from me."
"Horace! Why are you so cold?"
Horace said, "Knock it off, will you?" and walked out. A little later he came back and stood at the end of the bar drinking a beer.
Weston and Al and Richard came over and stood with Lee. "We're with you, Bill," Weston said. "If he lays a finger on you I'll break a beer bottle over his head."
Lee did not want to push the routine past a joking stage. He said, "Oh, Horace is okay, I guess.
But there's a limit to what I can stand still for. Two years he hands me these curt nods. Two years he walks into Lola's and looks around—'Nothing in here but fags,' he says and goes out on the street to drink his beer. Like I say, there is a limit."
Allerton came back from his trip to Morelia sullen and irritable. When Lee asked if he had a good trip, he muttered, "Oh, all right," and went in the other room to play chess with Mary. Lee felt a charge of anger pass through his body. "I'll make him pay for this somehow," he thought.
Lee considered buying a half-interest in the Ship Ahoy. Allerton existed on credit at the Ship Ahoy, and owed four hundred pesos. If Lee was half-owner of the joint, Allerton would not be in a position to ignore him. Lee did not actually want retaliation. He felt a desperate need to maintain some special contact with Allerton.
Lee managed to re-establish contact. One afternoon Lee and Allerton went to visit Al Hyman, who was in the hospital with jaundice. On the way home they stopped in the Bottoms Up for a cocktail.
"What about this trip to South America?" Lee said abruptly.
"Well, it's always nice to see places you haven't seen before," said Allerton.
"Can you leave anytime?"
"Anytime."
Next day Lee started collecting the necessary visas and tickets. "Better buy some camping equipment here," he said. "We may have to trek back into the jungle to find the Yage. When we get where the Yage is, we'll dig a hip cat and ask him, 'Where can we score for Yage?'"
"How will you know where to look for the Yage?" "I aim to find that out in Bogotá. A Colombian scientist who lives in Bogotá isolated Telepathine from Yage. We must find that scientist."
"Suppose he won't talk?"
"They all talk when Boris goes to work on them."
"You Boris?"
"Certainly not. We pick up Boris in Panama. He did excellent work with the Reds in Barcelona and with the Gestapo in Poland. A talented man. All his work has the Boris touch. Light, but persuasive. A mild little fellow with spectacles. Looks like a bookkeeper. I met him in a Turkish bath in Budapest."
A blond Mexican boy went by pushing a cart. "Jesus Christ!" Lee said, his mouth dropping open.
"One of them blond-headed Mexicans! 'Tain't as if it was being queer, Allerton. After all, they's only Mexicans. Let's have a drink."
They left by bus a few days later, and by the time they reached Panama City, Allerton was already complaining that Lee was too demanding in his desires. Otherwise, they got on very well.
Now that Lee could spend days and nights with the object of his attentions, he felt relieved of the gnawing emptiness and fear. And Allerton was a good travelling companion, sensible and calm.
Chapter 7
They flew from Panama to Quito, in a tiny plane which had to struggle to climb above an overcast. The steward plugged in the oxygen. Lee sniffed the oxygen hose. "It's cut!" he said in disgust.
They drove into Quito in a windy, cold twilight. The hotel looked a hundred years old. The room had a high ceiling with black beams and white piaster walls. They sat on the beds, shivering. Lee was a little junk sick.
They walked around the main square. Lee hit a drugstore—no paregoric without a script. A cold wind from the high mountains blew rubbish through the dirty streets. The people walked by in gloomy silence. Many had blankets wrapped around their faces. A row of hideous old hags, huddled in dirty blankets that looked like old burlap sacks, were ranged along the walls of a church.
"Now, son, I want you to know I am different from other citizens you might run into. Some people will give you the women-are-no-good routine. I'm not like that. You just pick yourself one of these señoritas and take her right hack to the hotel with you."
Allerton looked at him. "I think I will get laid tonight," he said.
"Sure," Lee said. "Go right ahead. They don't have much pulchritude in this dump, but that hadn't oughta deter you young fellers. Was it Frank Harris said he never saw an ugly woman till he was thirty? It was, as a matter of fact. . . . Let's go back to the hotel and have a drink."
The bar was drafty. Oak chairs with black leather seats. They ordered martinis. At the next table a red-faced American in an expensive brown gabardine suit was talking about some deal involving twenty thousand acres. Across from Lee was an Ecuadoran man, with a long nose and a spot of red on each cheekbone, dressed in a black suit of European cut. He was drinking coffee and eating sweet cakes.
Lee drank several cocktails. He was getting sicker by the minute. "Why don't you smoke some weed?" Allerton suggested. 'That might help."
"Good idea. Let's go up to the room."
Lee smoked a stick of tea on the balcony. "My god, is it cold out on that balcony," he said, coming back into the room.
"'. . . And when twilight falls on the beautiful old colonial city of Quito and those cool breezes steal down from the Andes, walk out in the fresh of the evening and look over the beautiful señoritas who seat themselves, in colorful native costume, along the wall of the sixteenth-century church that overlooks the main square. . . .' They fired the guy wrote that. There are limits, even in a travel folder. . . .
&nbs
p; "Tibet must be about like this. High and cold and full of ugly-looking people and llamas and yaks.
Yak milk for breakfast, yak curds for lunch, and for dinner a yak boiled in his own butter, and a fitting punishment for a yak, too, if you ask me.
"You can smell one of those holy men ten miles downwind on a clear day. Sitting there pulling on his old prayer wheel so nasty. Wrapped in dirty old burlap sacks, with bedbugs crawling around where his neck sticks out of the sack. His nose is all rotted away and he spits betel nut out through the nose holes like a spitting cobra. . . . Give me that Wisdom-of-the-East routine.
"So we got like a holy man and some bitch reporter comes to interview him. He sits there chewing on his betel nut. After a while, he says to one of his acolytes, 'Go down to the Sacred Well and bring me a dipper of paregoric. I'm going to make with the Wisdom of the East. And shake the lead out of your loin cloth!' So he drinks the P.G. and goes into a light trance, and makes cosmic contact—we call it going on the nod in the trade. The reporter says, 'Will there be war with Russia, Mahatma? Will Communism destroy the civilized world? Is the soul immortal? Does God exist?'
"The Mahatma opens his eyes and compresses his lips and spits two long, red streams of betel nut juice out through his nose holes. It runs down over his mouth and he licks it back in with a long, coated tongue and says, 'How in the fuck should I know?' The acolyte says, 'You heard the man. Now cut. The Swami wants to be alone with his medications.' Come to think of it, that is the wisdom of the East. The Westerner thinks there is some secret he can discover. The East says,
'How the fuck should I know?'"
That night Lee dreamed he was in a penal colony. All around were high, bare mountains. He lived in a boardinghouse that was never warm. He went out for a walk. As he stepped off a streetcomer onto a dirty cobblestone street, the cold mountain wind hit him. He tightened the belt of his leather jacket and felt the chill of final despair.
Lee woke up and called to Allerton, "Are you awake, Gene?"
"Yes."
"Cold?"
"Yes."
"Can I come over with you?"
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