At that time, the five reigning queens of the Casbah were two Englishmen and three American women. Eugenia Bankhead was among the females—a woman as original as her sister Tallulah, someone who made a mad sunshine of her own in the twilights of the harbor.
And Jane Bowles, that genius imp, that laughing, hilarious, tortured elf. Author of a sinisterly marvelous novel, Two Serious Ladies, and of a single play, In the Summer House, of which the same description could be given, the late Mrs. Bowles lived in an infinitesimal Casbah house, a dwelling so small-scaled and low-ceilinged that one had almost to crawl from room to room; she lived there with her Moorish lover, the famous Cherifa, a rough old peasant woman who was the empress of herbs and rare spices at the largest of Tangier’s open-air bazaars—an abrasive personality only a genius as witty and dedicated to extreme oddity as Mrs. Bowles could have abided. (“But,” said Jane with a cherubic laugh, “I do love Cherifa.
Cherifa doesn’t love me. How could she? A writer? A crippled Jewish girl from Ohio? All she thinks about is money. My money. What little there is. And the house. And how to get the house. She tries very seriously to poison me at least every six months. And don’t imagine I’m being paranoid. It’s quite true.”)
Mrs. Bowles’ dollhouse was the reverse of the walled palace that belonged to the neighborhood’s third genetically authentic queen, dime-store maharani Barbara Hutton—the Ma Barker of Bab’s bunch, to quote Jay Hazlewood. Miss Hutton, with an entourage of temporary husbands, momentary lovers and others of unspecified (if any) occupation, usually reigned in her Moroccan mansion a month or so each year. Fragile, terrified, she rarely voyaged beyond its walls; exceedingly few locals were invited inside them. A wandering waif—Madrid today, Mexico tomorrow—Miss Hutton never traveled; she merely crossed frontiers, carting forty trunks and her insular ambiente with her.
“HEY THERE! HOW’D YOU LIKE to go to a party?” Aces Nelson; he was calling to me from a café terrace in the Petit Socco, a Casbah piazza and great hubble-bubbling alfresco salon from noon to noon; it was past midnight now.
“Look,” said Aces, who wasn’t high on anything but his own high spirits; in fact, he was drinking the Arabé. “I have a present for you.” And he juggled in his hands a wiggling plump-stomached bitch puppy, an Afro-haired pickaninny with white rings circling both her big scared eyes—like a panda, some sort of ghetto panda. Aces said: “I bought her five minutes ago from a Spanish sailor.
He was just walking past with this funny thing stuffed in the pocket of his pea jacket. Head flopping out. And I saw these lovely eyes. And these lovely ears—see, one drooping, the other perked up. I inquired, and he said his sister had sent him to sell it to Mr. Wu, the Chinaman who eats roasted dogs. So I offered a hundred pesetas; and here we are.” Aces thrust the little dog at me, like a Calcutta beggar woman proffering an afflicted infant. “I didn’t realize why I bought her until I saw you. Sauntering into the Socco. Mr.… Jones? Have I got that right? Here, Mr. Jones, take her. You need each other.”
Dogs, cats, kids, I had never had anything dependent upon me; it was too time-consuming a chore just changing my own diapers. So I said: “Forget it. Give her to the Chinaman.”
Aces leveled at me a gambler’s gaze. He set the puppy on the center of the café table, where she stood a moment, trembling traumatically, then squatted to pee. Aces! You son of a bitch. The nuns. The bluffs above St. Louis. I picked her up and wrapped her in a Lanvin scarf Denny Fouts had given me long ago and held her close. She stopped trembling. She sniffed, sighed, slumbered.
Aces said: “And what are you going to name her?”
“Mutt.”
“Oh? Since I brought you together, the least you might do is call her Aces.”
“Mutt. Like her. Like you. Like me. Mutt.”
He laughed. “Alors. But I promised you a party, Jones. Mrs. Cary Grant is minding the store tonight. It’ll be a bore. But still.”
Aces, at least behind her back, always referred to the Huttontot (a Winchell coinage) as Mrs. Cary Grant: “Out of respect, really. He was the only one of her husbands worthy of the name. He adored her; but she had to leave him: she can’t trust or understand any geezer if he isn’t after le loot.”
A SEVEN-FOOT SENEGALESE IN A crimson turban and a white jellaba opened iron gates; one entered a garden where Judas trees blossomed in lantern light and the mesmeric scent of tuberoses embroidered the air. We passed into a room palely alive with light filtered through ivory filigree screens. Brocaded banquettes, piled with brocaded pillows of a silken lemon and silver and scarlet luxury, lined the walls. And there were beautiful brass tables shiny with candles and sweating champagne buckets; the floors, thick with overlapping layers of rugs from the weavers of Fez and Marrakech, were like strange lakes of ancient, intricate color.
The guests were few and all subdued, as though waiting for the hostess to retire before tossing themselves into an exuberant freedom—the repression attendant upon courtiers waiting for the royals to recede.
The hostess, wearing a green sari and a chain of dark emeralds, reclined among the cushions. Her eyes had the vacancy often observed in persons long imprisoned and, like her emeralds, a mineralized remoteness. Her eyesight, what she chose to see, was eerily selective: she saw me, but she never noticed the dog I was carrying.
“Oh, Aces dear,” she said in a wan small voice. “What have you found now?”
“This is Mr. Jones. P. B. Jones, I believe.”
“And you are a poet, Mr. Jones. Because I am a poet. And I can always tell.”
And yet, in a touching, shrunken way, she was rather pretty—a prettiness marred by her seeming to be precariously balanced on the edge of pain. I remembered reading in some Sunday supplement that as a young woman she had been plump, a wallflower butterball, and that, at the suggestion of a diet faddist, she had swallowed a tapeworm or two; and now one wondered, because of the starved starkness, her feathery flimsiness, if those worms were not still gross tenants who accounted for half her present weight. Obviously she had somewhat read my mind: “Isn’t it silly. I’m so thin, I’m too weak to walk. I have to be carried everywhere. Truly, I’d like to read your poetry.”
“I’m not a poet. I’m a masseur.”
She winced. “Bruises. A leaf drops and I’m blue.”
Aces said: “You told me you were a writer.”
“Well, I am. Was. Sort of. But it seems I’m a better masseur than a writer.”
Miss Hutton consulted Aces; it was as if they were whispering with their eyes.
She said: “Perhaps he could help Kate.”
He said, addressing me: “Are you free to travel?”
“Possibly. I don’t seem to do much else.”
“When could you meet me in Paris?” he asked, brisk now, a businessman.
“Tomorrow.”
“No. Next week. Thursday. Ritz bar. Rue Cambon side. One-fifteen.”
The heiress sighed into the banquette’s goose-stuffed brocades. “Poor boy,” she said, and tapped curving, slavishly lacquered apricot nails against a champagne glass, a signal for the Senegalese servant to lift her, lift her away up blue-tiled stairs to firelit chambers where Morpheus, always a mischief-maker to the frantic, the insulted, but especially to the rich and powerful, joyfully awaited a game of hide-and-seek.
I SOLD A SAPPHIRE RING, also a gift from Denny Fouts, who in turn had received it as a birthday present from his Grecian prince, to Dean, the mulatto proprietor of Dean’s Bar, the principal rival of Le Parade for the colony’s haute monde trade. It was a giveaway, but it flew me to Paris, and Mutt, too—Mutt stuffed into an Air France travel bag.
On Thursday, at one-fifteen precisely, I walked into the Ritz bar still toting Mutt in her canvas satchel, for she had refused to remain behind in the cheap hotel room we had moved into on the rue du Bac. Aces Nelson, slick-haired and gleamingly good-humored, was waiting for us at a corner table.
He patted the dog and said: “Well. I’m surprised. I didn’t really think you’d show up.”
All I said was: “This had better be good.”
Georges, the head bartender at the Ritz, is a daiquiri specialist. I ordered a double daiquiri, so did Aces, and while they were being concocted, Aces asked: “What do you know about Kate McCloud?”
I shrugged. “Just what I read in the junk papers. Very handy with a rifle. Isn’t she the one who shot a white leopard?”
“No,” he said thoughtfully. “She was on safari in India, and she shot a man for killing a white leopard—not fatally, fortunately.”
The drinks appeared, and we drank them without another word between us, except Mutt’s intermittent yaps. A good daiquiri is smoothly tart and slightly sweet; a bad one is a vial of acid. Georges knew the difference. So we ordered another, and Aces said: “Kate has an apartment here in the hotel, and after we’ve talked I want you to meet her. She’s expecting us. But first I want to tell you about her. Would you like a sandwich?”
We ordered plain chicken sandwiches, the only variety available in the Ritz bar, Cambon side. Aces said: “I had a roommate at Choate—Harry McCloud. His mother was an Otis from Baltimore, and his father owned a lot of Virginia—specifically, he owned a big spread in Middleburg, where he bred hunting horses. Harry was very intense,
