88
JASCHA KESSLER
going to·get somewhere now, he was on the right path, thoug4 still
he hadn't any notion where it led, and had not given proper
thought to his immediate, his real task: procuring a delivery of
meat and specialties, and getting it in by morning. In fact, he'd
already forgotten that tomorrow was Sunday, that he should have
been home long ago, relaxing, and having eaten, and showered,
and that he should have been by now all spruced for his wife's
evening promenade on the boardwalk where they contemplated the
callow princes and princesses playing out their twelve weeks, their
brief summer's glory.
Outside, it was not as bad as such a fulminating day might
have warranted. Down the alley the sun was about to sink behind
the privet which screened the new patio-and saltwater-swimming–
pool of the Miramar, once the Avalon, before that the Empire
Royale. He looked at his watch: eight-ten. Overhead the sky was
yet light: a pale, weak, Florida blue where striplets of cloud swam,
iridescent, much like an idle school of pickled herrings. Luckily,
a suggestion of air, perhaps the onset of the seawind that could
usually be counted on, except for a day as hot as this had been,
stirred off the water. Acker listened, but heard no sound of surf;
the Atlantic must have been still and sweet as a pond. Swallows
darted chirping through this narrow alley between the back of the
Metropole and the old Egyptian Nights hotel. More people
used to prefer sitting in lukewarm brackish Turkish baths than
swimming in the ocean. He remembered the last time he had been
into this place-more than twenty years ago, surely.
It
was with
poor Paulie, his best friend, who'd emigrated to California ten years
before and then come home from the desert rich, come home to
Brooklyn to die on him, as it turned out. They had had a drink or
few, too many it could be, and then gone to these baths to straighten
themselves out; it was here the dirty crooks stole his wallet right
from the safe, and then had the absolute nerve to accuse
him,
Acker,
of lying, only because his bad luck was compounded: somehow he
had mislaid his valuables ticket! That was on a Saturday night, he
remembered, and it cost him his week's wages. Since then he had
never gone home to his wife on Saturday later than nine, and never
polluted. When would they tear down this empty, nailed-up hulk
already, with its disgracefully weatherbeaten and shredding shing-
