“All right, old kid,” said Bill Grey. They went together over to the door. Fuselli opened it and looked in. He let out a breath through his teeth with a faint whistling sound.
“Gee, come in, Bill,” he said, giggling.
The room was small, nearly filled up by a dining table with a red cloth. On the mantel above the empty fireplace were candlesticks with dangling crystals that glittered red and yellow and purple in the lamplight, in front of a cracked mirror that seemed a window into another dingier room. The paper was peeling off the damp walls, giving a mortuary smell of mildewed plaster that not even the reek of beer and tobacco had done away with.
“Look at her, Bill, ain't she got style?” whispered Fuselli.
Bill Grey grunted.
“Say, d'ye think the Jane that feller was tellin' us he raised hell with in Paris was like that?”
At the end of the table, leaning on her elbows, was a woman with black frizzy hair cut short, that stuck out from her head in all directions. Her eyes were dark and her lips red with a faint swollen look. She looked with a certain defiance at the men who stood about the walls and sat at the table.
The men stared at her silently. A big man with red hair and a heavy jaw who sat next her kept edging up nearer. Someone knocked against the table making the bottles and liqueur glasses clustered in the center jingle.
“She ain't clean; she's got bobbed hair,” said the man next Fuselli.
The woman said something in French.