Master of the Crossroads - Madison Smartt Bell [307]
The entryway was dark, and smelled of blood and vomit. A wizened old woman crouched in a corner, doing something with a bucket in a rag. The doctor pushed open a door to his left, comforted to feel Riau coming in behind him. The shuttered room they entered was a large salon, but dark and smoky and dense, with a few patches of candle or lamplight here and there. A stench of tallow and spilled liquor. Beyond an overturned upholstered loveseat toward the center of the room, a number of people sat gambling around a long, oval mahogany table. Nearer the door was another pool of light, over a low sofa where a woman lay face down with her knees drawn up under her and her dress rucked up to her shoulders. A tall sallow man crouched behind her, thrusting with an energy that fluttered her buttocks and imparted a serpentine movement to her spine. Several onlookers stood around, making low comments, maybe waiting their turns. One held a watch in his palm and there seemed to be a wager, though the doctor could not guess what was in gage. Among the spectators he recognized young Cypré, one of the newcome officers Maillart particularly detested; he seemed to be extremely drunk. The woman’s face scrubbed against the velvet of the sofa, insensible from rapture or indifference it was hard to tell, her eyes showing rings of white and her lips slackly open on a stain of drool. The doctor did not know her.
Cypré drew himself up and said with a hiccup, “No niggers wanted here. This is a private establishment.”
Riau walked past him as if he were invisible, toward the gambling table. The doctor followed.
Here Choufleur himself presided over the entertainment. There was a deck of cards by his left elbow, but these were not in play; instead he rattled a cup of dice above a mound of mismatched stakes: coins of several different mints, a watch, a bracelet, a jeweled stickpin . . . Six or seven men in the game, and one woman who looked white, with wispy blond hair and small pink pimples all over her cheeks—she wore a dull and dazed expression.
Choufleur glanced up at the doctor with no sign of surprise. He tipped the dice cup onto the table. Eight, numbered the black dots drilled into the bones.
“Encore de la merde,” complained the pimple-faced woman. She swayed against the mulatto beside her, nuzzling his uniformed shoulder, then pouting when he shrugged her off.
Choufleur glanced from Riau to the doctor. “I don’t object to you,” he said. “But in this house I don’t like to see any face darker than a good café au lait—unless on a servant, of course.”
The doctor barely registered this remark. His eyes were on Nanon, who sat to Choufleur’s right. Her bodice was loosened and pushed down below her breasts, whose exposed nipples excited a feeling of sorrow in him. Around her neck was a riveted iron collar with a light chain running down her back from its ring. She did not seem aware of the doctor’s presence, though she was looking in his general direction. Her eyes were dead.
“Faites vos jeux,” Choufleur said.
He cupped the dice and handed them to his left, then leaned down and collected the free end of the chain from the floor beside his chair. When he gave the chain a brisk tug, Nanon responded as woodenly as if that collar were locked around a post.
“Shall we cut the cards for her?” Choufleur proposed, widening his eyes at the doctor. He opened the deck with his left hand, turning up the ace of spades. “Ah well—hard luck,” he said. “But never mind. To me, it is all one. You may have the use of her for an hour if you like.”
He offered the doctor, who stood frozen, the chain’s end.
“No?” Choufleur said. “But I can tell you, she is not quite sucked dry. There’s still a drop or two of good juice to be wrung from her.”
The doctor did not answer this either. A step behind him he was aware of the deep flow of Riau’s respiration—this was not audible, exactly, but he seemed to draw inspiration from the other