Boon by Ed Kurtz (smallest ebook reader txt) 📗

happily, but I’d have preferred another punch.

“If I only had some tobacco, I’d be happy as a pig in shit.”

“This ain’t a vacation, Edward.”

“What’s the next move?”

“We wait a spell. Just keep your eyes and ears open.”

“Eyes and ears,” I agreed, and I killed the beer, too.

There was another beer after that, and then another. Nothing much happened. Men came and went, and when they went it was usually by way of the back stairs with a sporting girl on his arm. At one point, one of the pretty waiter girls dropped out cold from too much punch, and she too was carried up the back stairs. Nobody said a thing about it, but Boon looked fit to be tied, red in the face. She couldn’t do anything about it. Not if she wanted things to go the way she wanted them to go. I felt for her.

An hour or so slipped by in this way before I moved to signal the barman and Boon put her hand on my arm.

“Go with one of the girls,” she said.

“Come again?”

“Don’t bull me like you ain’t done it a hundred times before,” she said. “Only this time it’s business, not pleasure.”

“I’m going to need more instruction than that,” I said.

“Sometimes I wish I was a man so I could just take care of things my own self,” Boon groused. I shrugged. “Listen, sit down and one of those girls will sit with you. It’s what they are here to do. Flirt, play nice, but tell her you’re partial to Oriental girls. Ask if there’s any around, and you’ll pay her to set you up. You came in with me so it’s a cinch she’ll believe it.”

I nodded, not understanding at all. Boon sighed.

“One of three things will happen. She’ll tell you there ain’t any—and I doubt there are, because it’s pretty clearly a white dive. Or there is, and she’ll direct you to her, in which case you’re to go with her and try to find out about Pimchan.”

“And the third?”

“She’ll just tell you about my mother.”

“If I get me a dose from this,” I said, “you are paying for my doctoring.”

“Then keep your pecker in your trousers,” she said.

“Seems counterintuitive.”

“Get to it.”

“And you?” I glanced around the dim, smoky room, full of more than a few unsettling characters.

“I can take care of myself,” Boon said.

I said, “Yes, you sure as shit can.”

She curtsied, her hands still hidden in her sleeves, and slinked away to a corner table, where she sat like she was floating down. I licked my fingers, straightened my eyebrows and mustache, and moseyed over to a table a little closer to the action. The musicians had started up again by then, the red-nosed melodeon player working the bellows like they were his own lungs and he was afraid of suffocating, and a girl in a near-transparent blouse trounced down on my lap before I knew she was there.

“Couple of us got a wager going,” she said. “Some says you’re a john and some says you’re a mack, on account of the China girl.”

“That so,” I said.

“Course I told ’em no reason he can’t be both.”

“Sure.”

“Never heard of a mack didn’t like to sample what he’s selling, matter of fact.”

“Makes good sense.”

“So what wets your whistle, Johnny Mack?”

“Bet you can guess,” I said.

The waiter girl arched her back like a cat and cast her eyes to Boon, who remained demurely perched at her table.

“You’re one of them got yellow fever,” she said.

“Not even a touch of the ague,” I countered.

She tittered. It seemed practiced.

“I mean you like to fuck yellow women,” she said. “This sure is the town for it, only not the right house.”

“No China girls here, then,” I said, acting crestfallen.

“You kidding? We’d have the Tongs and the Six Companies so far up our cabooses we’d get burned to the ground before you could turn around and spit.”

“Sounds serious.”

“It’s all a game, Johnny Mack,” she said, “and games got rules.”

“Reckon they do.”

Again, she emitted one of her patented fake titters, shaking her torso as she did so to make her titties bounce and wiggle beneath the sheer blouse. She kept her eyes on me, wide and a little wet, the whole time. It made for a disquieting effect, which I did not think was the intended outcome. The music stopped and started again, down tempo with the red-nosed gent on the melodeon warbling some sad Irish lament which was in that country’s native tongue—or else the man was just too drunk to make sense. While he sang and the pretty waiter girl tittered and jiggled, I turned my head just enough to catch sight of Boon, who was no longer assuming a slouched and submissive position.

She appeared alarmed, and she motioned with her head toward the bar. I pivoted my head a little more to see the two men emerging from the stairwell. They might have been brothers, because they were near-identical in their oiled mustaches, matching square-crowned hats, black cravats, and striped waistcoats. Both men had long frock coats draped over them, but only one was making an obvious attempt to hide the long gun he had underneath his.

At the very least they’d had the forethought to take off their badges, the Pinkerton dumbshits. They still weren’t fooling anybody. The whole populace of the Palace—me, Boon, the waiter girls, the musicians, the bartender, and every rough and rowdy in the place—stiffened up and quieted down at their arrival. Looked like Willocks had told the truth about this much, anyway. Question was: were we found out?

The girl on my lap said, “Best place to hide out is in a room upstairs, if it’s you they want.”

“What makes you think that?” I said.

“You’re here, Johnny Mack. You see any straight fellers here?”

She had a valid point, but it didn’t much help my unease. And when the two Pinks spotted Boon and shared a word between themselves, my unease began its quick transformation into panic.

“Come to think of it,”