THE DETECTIVE
101
the very cans which had once contained his vegetables and
his
fruits, and
if
not his, the steward's before
him.
Now they were
empty, but filled with old refuse and rubbish; beer, wine, whiskey
bottles, uncountable cigarette butts and
so
much ash, cosmetic
bottles and soiled crumpled tissues and broken curlers and hair
nets, rags of clothing and silk stockings and torn underthings like
corsets, garters, braces and bands of elastic cotton, pads, straps,
supports, broken shoes, wrinkled old toothpaste tubes, newspapers
. . . just everything that comes out of bedrooms, and the
worst of everything. Acker shut his eyes, shook his head in
grief,
and
opened them again. The illusion, preposterous as it was, persisted:
in
and out of the tiny rooms up and down this attic way people
were scuttling, dancing, leaping, cavorting back and forth in their
underwear, or even, it seemed, less: busboys, chambermaids, wait–
resses-young and older, white and colored, Gentile and Jew. It
might have been the entire dining room staff and all the maids, as
far as he knew. He flung his arms up, as
if
to command silence,
and the weighted ironclad door clanged shut behind
him.
No one
paid any atention: the orgy went on uninterrupted. Acker leaned
back against the dObr, and considered. He had not anticipated any–
thing like this; this was something else! Had everything turned
upside down and inside out? This was like the end of the world!
But Acker girded himself and went forward into chaos.
Besides, having come so far so late, and by a way so much against
his will and bias-creeping and peeping, spying and chasing-from
that silent still office of his in the cool cellar down there in the
earth, there was no way back for him. Most especially, he told him–
self to proceed because he believed he had sufficiently witnessed
already the evidence of misdemeanor and misappropriation and
malfeasance for which he had been seeking. Now he wanted the
source. Dark, the first room to the left: a portable radio, fluorescent
on the sill of the uncurtained window, blared at him,
Ma-ha-hambo,
Gorazon! Ma-ha-hambo, Gha Cha Chat
and as he passed he saw
two cigarette coals pulse red and flare near the floor. The next
room on his right was lit up like day. He halted outside it. Tilly,
wearing nothing more than an old, tattered, cotton housecoat, her
bloody hair down in braids, one of her long Russian cigarettes in
the corner of her mouth, stood at an ironing board, pressing her
