Serenade - James M. Cain [3]
"Seńor."
I got up and bowed. I was looking down at her, almost touching her. She was smaller than I had thought. The voluptuous lines, or maybe it was the way she held her head, fooled you.
"Seńorita."
"Gracias, thanks, for the billete."
"It was nothing, Seńorita. I hope it wins for you as much as it lost for me. You'll be rich--muy rico."
She liked that one. She laughed a little, and looked down, and looked up. "So. Muchas gracias."
"De nada."
But she laughed again before she turned away, and when I sat down my head was pounding, because that laugh, it sounded as though she had started to say something and then didn't, and I had this feeling there would be more. When I could trust myself to look around, he was still standing there near the door, looking a little sore. From the way he kept looking at the damas, I knew she must have gone in there, and he wasn't any too pleased about it.
In a minute, my waitress came and laid down my check. It was for sixty centavos. She had waited on me before, and she was a pretty little mestizo, about forty, with a wedding ring she kept flashing every time she got the chance. A wedding ring is big news in Mexico, but it still doesn't mean there's been a wedding. She pressed her belly against the table, and then I heard her voice, though her lips didn't move and she was looking off to one side: "The lady, you like her dirección, yes? Where she live?"
"You sure you know this dirección?"
"A paraquito have told me--just now."
"In that case, yes."
I laid a peso on the check. Her little black eyes crinkled up into a nice friendly smile, but she didn't move. I put the other peso on top of it. She took out her pencil, pulled the menu over, and started to write. She hadn't got three letters on paper before the pencil was jerked out of her hand, and he was standing there, purple with fury. He had tumbled, and all the things he had wanted to say to me, and never got the chance, he spit at her, and she spit back. I couldn't get all of it, but you couldn't miss the main points. He said she was delivering a message to me, she said she was only writing the address of a hotel I had asked for, a hotel for Americanos. They must like to see a guy framed in Mexico. About six of them chimed in and swore they had heard me ask her the address of a hotel, and that that was all she was giving me. They didn't fool him for a second. He was up his own alley now, and speaking his own language. He told them all where to get off, and in the middle of it, here she came, out of the damas. He let her have the last of it, and then he crumpled the menu card up and threw it in her face, and walked out. She hardly bothered to watch him go. She smiled at me, as though it was a pretty good joke, and I got up, "Seńorita. Permit me to see you home."
That got a buzz, a laugh, and an Olé.
I don't think there's ever been a man so moony that a little bit of chill didn't come over him as soon as a woman said yes, and plenty of things were going through my head when she took my arm and we headed for the door of that café. One thing that was going through was that my last peso was gone at last, that I was flat broke in Mexico City with no idea what I was going to do or how I was going to do it. Another thing was that I didn't thank them for their Olé, that I hated Mexicans and their tricks, and hated them all the more because the tricks were all so bad you could always see through them. A Frenchman's tricks cost you three francs, but a Mexican is just dumb. But the main thing was a queer echo in that Olé, like they were laughing at me all the time, and I wondered, all of a sudden, which way we were going to turn when we got out that door. A girl on the make for a bullfighter, you don't exactly expect that she came out of a convent. Just the same, it hadn't occurred to me up to that second that she could be a downright piece of trade goods. I was hoping, when we reached the main street, that we would turn right. To the right lay the main part of town, and if we headed that way, she could be taking me almost anywhere.