"I give you nothing. I don' like your looks. Why, even in my back room," puffed Zimballo, "the half-castes and orang sirani, they come here as zaintlemen only!"
He loomed indignant under the glow of his fine oil lamps, just lighted against the dusk, in his fine main shed which it was the sentimental care of his life to run as close as might be on the model of a Levantine waterside dive.
There is a breed, or a type, whose destiny is to go about the world purveying garlic, cheap food, infamous wines, and more or less flea-infested hospitality in all manner of queer corners, by ice-bound bay or coral strand. So they did in the time of the Ph[oe]nicians, and so they still do, and that part is right enough. No one could have found fault with Zimballo's zinc bar, nor his highboy stacked to the ceiling with multicolored bottles, nor his tattered billiard table, nor his battered metal furniture. The flaring, red cotton covers, the gilt mirrors, and the crude prints of obscure royalties; the blue-glass siphons and the pinky lace curtains: these he had found some heroic means of transplanting, like the fixtures of a faith.
Meanwhile the East is the East and a good deal of a fixture itself, and behind his drawn jalousies and his masking vines Zimballo served the local devil quite successfully.
Not the red and lusty wickedness of other climes, but a languid sort, thriving in a reek of musk and raw Chinese apple blossom, of stale cooking and incense and stifled rooms and poisonous sweet champagne, as dreary as the click of fan-tan cash and the drag of silks and the voices of a cheeping bird cage that circulated through the secret mazes of the establishment day and night. An unsmiling devil—in the flesh and on the spot very well represented you would have said, by one of the billiard players, a tall, yellow, corpsy individual who had remarked the stir of Merry's arrival and who now lounged about the table.
"What's the row, Zimballo?" he drawled. "Let's have a share if there's any fun going. My word—is that a friend of yours?"
"No friend—Cap'n Silva, sir!" protested the hotel keeper, rubbing his hands in a fluster. It annoyed him vehemently that he had not banished this disreputable stranger at sight. "Ope to die, sir—I never see 'im before!"
Other guests had begun to gather at the promise of diversion: a bat-eared clerk from the Consulate office, a broken engineer, a benzoin trader looking professionally neat and antiseptic, and two or three loafers looking considerably less so—but all entire gentlemen, unpatched, and all expectant of Silva's lead and grateful for it.
"Well, well. A new specimen, then." The captain was pleased to assume a scientific interest as he propped himself on his cue and waved aside a wreath of cigarette smoke. "And a blasted poor specimen at that, I'd say.... Now which tribe would you take him to be, just as he stands?"
Captain Silva had a reputation of the kind invaluable to a humorist; it assured him an audience. Also, he had that rare immunity in tropic heats which makes any man formidable, and even sinister. An Anglo-Portuguese strain was supposed to account for him—for his color, for his superior air, and for various ventures of his not easy to define since piracy went out of date. Perhaps it did. But the gleam in his eye, a certain evil quickening with which he studied the unfortunate Merry, might have argued a darker origin.