The Dark Arena - Mario Puzo [44]
Someone brushed past Eddie and went onto the dance floor. It was a girl, stark nakedness exposed on tiny, silvery platforms of ballet slippers. Her pubic hair had been shaved to an inverted triangle, dark red on her body like a shield. In some way she had fluffed out the hair so that it was a formidably thick and matty bush. She danced without skill, coming close to the officers seated on the floor, almost thrusting the triangle of hair into their faces so that some of the young officers started involuntarily and turned their crew-cut heads away, She laughed when they did this and laughed and danced away when some of the older officers made a half-joking grab. It was an exhibition curiously unsexual, with no element of lust Someone threw a comb out on the floor, the girl continued to dance like a draft horse trying to gallop. The officers began to shout jokes she did not understand, and humiliation made her face and dance more strained, ludicrous, until everyone was laughing, throwing combs, handkerchiefs, butter knives, olives from their drinks, pretzels. One officer shouted, “Hide this,” and it became a refrain. The club officer came out on the floor holding an enormous pair of scissors, clicking the shears suggestively. The girl ran off the dance floor, past Eddie back to the dressing-room. Eddie went to the bar. At one corner he saw Mosca and Wolf and went over to them.
“Don't tell me Leo missed the show,” Eddie said. “Walter, you guaranteed he wouldn't.”
“Hell,” Mosca said, “he already latched on to one of the dancers. He's in.”
Eddie grinned and turned to Wolf. “Find the gold mine?” He knew Wolf and Mosca went out nights and traded in the black market.
“Business is tough,” Wolf said, his dead-white face shaking dolefully from side to side.
“Don't kid me,” Eddie Cassia said, “I hear your Frdulein wears diamonds on her pajamas.”
Wolf was indignant. “Now where the hell would she get pajamas?” They all laughed.
The waiter came and Eddie ordered a double whisky. Wolf nodded toward the dance floor and said, “We expected you in the front row tonight.”
“Nah,” Eddie Cassin said. “I'm cultured, I went to the opera. Anyway the broads there are better looking.”
From the other room officers flooded into the bar, the show was over. The room became crowded Mosca stood up and said, “Let's go up to the dice table and play a little.”
The dice table was almost completely surrounded. It was a crudely constructed affair with four unpainted wooden joists for legs and a green cloth stretched over the wooden top. Boards half a foot high formed a rectangle to confine the dice.
The colonel himself, a small, plump man with a blond mustache, extremely neat, was rolling the dice awkwardly, the square cubes slipping clumsily from his clenched hand. All the other players were officers, mostly flyers. On the colonel's right stood the adjutant, watchful, not taking any part in the game while the colonel played.
The adjutant, a young captain, was an ingenuous-looking man with a bland face and a smile that was attractive when not meant to menace. He gloried in his position as adjutant, the petty power that enabled him to select the officers who would perform the more irksome duties on the base, especially on week-ends. The colonel relied on him, and the adjutant did not forget an affront easily. But he was fair, and only vindictive when the affront was one to his position, not to himself personally. The rigidity of Army life and Army procedure was his religion, and any breach of it sacrilegious and blasphemous. Anyone who tried to get something done without going through channels—those straight and narrow paths clearly defined in Army regulations—would suddenly find himself a very busy man, and no matter how hard he worked, busy for a few months at least. He brought to his religion the fanaticism of the young; he was no older than Mosca.
A white-jacketed waiter stood behind a small bar in the corner of the room. When the players called out for a drink he set it up, and whoever