“They’ll fix it,” he said. “Do we go in?”
“We go in,” I said. “You got a gun?”
“Yeah,” he returned. “I hope you have a permit.”
I grinned, walked to the open door, went in.
Inside, under dim lights, was a bar and a dance floor. In a corner, on a yellow and red carpet, an orchestra of four played: a pianist with kinky hair, a sallow-faced fiddler, a nigger drummer and a blond saxophonist. Behind the bar stood a Cuban.
Several couples moved listlessly around the dance floor. The men looked the type you’d expect to find in a joint like this; the girls danced in their underwear. Each had on a brassiere, silk panties, silk stockings and high-heeled slippers. There was a line of flesh on each girl from breast to hip and from one-third down their thighs to their knees. Some of the girls were quite pretty.
The air in the room was torrid, heavy, humid; a combination of human sweat, dime-a-squirt perfume, gin breath. Paper streamers hung from the ceiling like Spanish moss.
We handed our hats to a Chinese boy, and paused to get our bearings.
I glanced at my wrist-watch. It was ten minutes past eleven.
“For the next twenty minutes, you can relax. At eleven-thirty we start work.”