“That’s it talk to em Slats.”
“Come seven!” Slats shot the bones out of his hand, brought the thumb along his sweaty fingers with a snap. “Aw hell.”
“You’re some great crapshooter I’ll say, Slats.”
Dirty hands added each a nickel to the pile in the center of the circle of patched knees stuck forward. The five boys were sitting on their heels under a lamp on South Street.
“Come on girlies we’re waitin for it.... Roll ye little bastards, goddam ye, roll.”
“Cheeze it fellers! There’s Big Leonard an his gang acomin down the block.”
“I’d knock his block off for a ...”
Four of them were already slouching off along the wharf, gradually scattering without looking back. The smallest boy with a chinless face shaped like a beak stayed behind quietly picking up the coins. Then he ran along the wall and vanished into the dark passageway between two houses. He flattened himself behind a chimney and waited. The confused voices of the gang broke into the passageway; then they had gone on down the street. The boy was counting the nickels in his hand. Ten. “Jez, that’s fifty cents.... I’ll tell ’em Big Leonard scooped up the dough.” His pockets had no bottoms, so he tied the nickels into one of his shirt tails.
A goblet for Rhine wine hobnobbed with a champagne glass at each place along the glittering white oval table. On eight glossy white plates eight canapés of caviar were like rounds of black beads on the lettuceleaves, flanked by sections of lemon, sprinkled with a sparse chopping of onion and white of egg. “Beaucoup de soing and dont you forget it,” said the old waiter puckering up his knobbly forehead. He was a short waddling man with a few black strands of hair plastered tight across a domed skull.