THE DETECTIVE
91
quisite whatever remained, and likely the cook had given
that
pesky,
pimply boob the last can in order to drive him away. Without
speaking or glancing at him further, Acker went by avoiding. Had
he the stomach to look more closely, he would have seen such a
picnic laid out that he might have been disturbed in quite a differ–
ent way from that caused him by the merely obnoxious sight of this
young glutton at work. But Acker's virtue was also his failing: he
had room in his mind for only one thought at a time. So he kept on
to the side entrance, where he quickened his climb up the shaky
stairs because he heard even over the loud and painful clatter of
the rented Saturday night
cha cha cha
band with its absurd cow–
bells and maracas and woodblocks and bongo-bongoes, the grunting
voice of Gruber, and apprehended him vaguely as a kind of obscene
boar whom he had had to track to ,his lair.
Parting the bead curtains of the portal to the Cubana Casbah
Cabaret, as it was now named, he paused. The "younger people,"
the "fast set," a gang of long-married couples, were already, and so
soon after dinner, flinging about the tiny floor in what they termed
dancing, or else sitting around soaking up the sauce. All week these
skinny women laid like mummies on the beach, cigarettes stuck in
their greasy faces and oily white cotton swabs over their eyes,
ignoring their children and waiting for the tired husbands who
came out on the weekend to visit with them. Also there were the
singles, old maids of both sexes, these balding and those graying,
these sedentary and those shapeless, busy hunting each other up and
down and all over the bar. Well, it was a hotel. Through this hoop–
dydo and frenzy, Acker could see him down at the far end of the
bar, where he sat fat-assed in fancy white linen pants on a
chromium stool. A sport shirt printed with orchids and flamingoes
loosely covered the vast, 'boiled pulp of his upper body, from which
stuck two short borschtpink woolly arms: in one mush mitt, the big
cigar, in the other the familiar tumbler of scotch. Dark aviator's
sunglasses obscured the terrible eyes of that buttered, smouldering
visage. Acker waited until Gruber saw him and snapped his fingers
summoning him; then he came forward through this milling and
jangling foretaste of hell which already sufficed to jar his satisfac–
tion over his recent feat of stewardship to incomprehensibly scat·
tered bits.
