tales of the hotel st crispian: chapter 67

"import/export"

by manfred skyline

illustrated by konrad kraus , roy dismas,
and rhoda penmarq

editorial consultant: Prof. Dan Leo

for complete episode, click here

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 311: Shalimar

In the company of the dubious Mojo the Midget, our hero Arnold Schnabel has mysteriously lost consciousness in a dark alleyway in Singapore, but, fortunately for us, that hearty seafaring adventurer Big Ben Blagwell has deftly picked up the narration while Arnold is indisposed…

(Please click here to read our previous chapter; go here to return to the very beginning of this Gold View Award©-winning 67-volume journey into the unknown.)

“Oh, how I long for my upcoming vacation, during which I intend to spend at least eight hours a day on the porch of our quaint Victorian three-story ‘cottage’ in Cape May, re-reading as much as I can of Arnold Schnabel’s massive chef-d'œuvre on my new Kindle, starting at page one.” -- Harold Bloom, in his “Read a Goddam Book” column in GQ.

One thing about me, it doesn’t take me long to get dressed. Pull on the boxer shorts and dungarees, throw on my Hawaiian shirt, stick my feet into my deck shoes (no socks, thanks, that’s just two fewer things for me to send to the Chinese cleaners), screw my yachting cap onto my noggin, and boom, I’m ready to go. Don’t even need to comb my hair on account of I have a crew cut and what I do is I rub about a half-pint of butch wax in it once a week and then it’s like having my own built-in helmet on my bean.

Maxine’s snubnose I stuck in my waistband, same way Arnie wore his Luger, on the left side, just where my gut curved down into my hip. I took one little gander into Maxine’s dresser mirror, you know, just to make sure I didn’t look any worse than usual. There was some red stuff smeared into my facial stubble, but it was okay, it wasn’t blood, just some of Maxine’s blood-red lipstick. She had a box of Kleenex on the dresser, so I yanked out a tissue and wiped the gunk off with that.

Just for the hell of it, I unstoppered her bottle of perfume and gave it a sniff. Shalimar. Made in France. It sure smelled good. Like Maxine. Like lemons and oranges and roses and tea leaves and incense and Christmas trees and ladies’ leather gloves and vanilla soda pop, with just a hint of cat spray under it all just to keep it real I guess. I went ahead and splashed some of it in my armpits, only because I didn’t have time for a shower. I figured Maxine probably wouldn’t mind, not too much, anyway. I gave myself a few more splashes on my jaw stubble, just for good measure, then I re-capped the bottle.

Dames, they sure do have pretty things. No wonder we sailors get so lonesome sometimes out on our long and admittedly sometimes mind-bendingly boring voyages. No wonder sometimes swabbies make up for the absence of pretty dames and their pretty things by having recourse to certain strictly speaking frowned-upon activities with the younger and fresher-smelling members of the crew. Not talking about myself of course, but then who am I to pass judgement?

I left the beside lamp on, on account of I didn’t want to fall over anything on the way out, because, I didn’t mention this before, I guess you’ve gathered by now that I’ll never be one of those real professional writer fellows, so bear with me, or you know, just bail out and pick up the new James Michener book for all I care, but anyway, yeah, I haven’t mentioned it before, but she had a lot of crap all over the floor. Mostly clothes, hills and mountain ranges of dresses and slacks and skirts and stockings and garter belts and slips and bras and knickers, but there were also hatboxes and hats and suitcases and purses and shopping bags and dozens of shoes and piles of magazines and paperbacks and a guitar and a ukelele and God knows what all else, I guess old Maxine just wasn’t one of those babes who traveled light. So I left the light on, picked my way through the aforementioned crap all over the floor like a gyrene making his way through a Nip minefield, opened the door and went out, remembering only after I was halfway down the hall to go back and turn the little button on the inside doorknob so the door would lock when I closed it again.

You could hear the band loud and clear from up here and I could feel the boards vibrating under my feet, those cats were crashing through “How High the Moon” like a stampede of hopped-up bulls demolishing a china shop, with good old Maxine caterwauling over it all like a banshee in heat. Funny, I always feel kind of quiet and mellow after I’ve performed the manly act, in fact it’s usually all I can do not to turn over after smoking a Sweet Caporal and take a good long nap for eight or ten hours, but from the sound of her, Maxine still had plenty of energy left to burn.

I started down those narrow stairs, and I wondered if Maxine already had her eye on some other likely looking big dumb stud in the bar that she could spike his drink with one of those Pink Death Bomb pills and then drag him up to her room on her next break.

Well, I couldn’t worry about that now.

I went through the doorway at the bottom of the stairs, and out into the mob alongside of the stage. I stopped when I got in front of the band, and turned and gave a little wave to Maxine. She gave me a light nod, at least I think it might have been a nod, it might have just been a natural movement of her pretty little head as she belted out “How High the Moon.” I’m pretty sure she saw me though, I mean I was only a few feet in front of her, and the stage was only a couple feet high, and I’m six feet four. But after all she was in the middle of her song, so I wasn’t offended. Not me. Not Big Ben Blagwell. I don’t let little things like that bother me. Not usually. Anyway, after giving her another slightly less little wave and getting even less of an acknowledgement in any way, shape or form or of any type or category or description of any possible interpretation even by the most kind and openhearted sap, I turned and headed through the crowd and on out of that dive.

Left had been the direction I had seen Arnie and Mojo going, so left was the way I went along the terminal road, in the direction of the docks and all the little dark alleyways down in that neighborhood, with its cut-rate tattoo parlors and opium dens and mahjongg-joints and rum shacks and really cheap cathouses, in other words it was a neighborhood I knew fairly well, or at least as well as any white man can, which, now that I think about it for about one second is probably not very well at all. But better than not at all, because I knew one thing, and that was if you were going to be walking around this neighborhood at night it was a good idea to be packing a gun. And no need to worry about getting braced by a cop for illegal carrying of a firearm, no need whatsoever, because the cops never set foot in this neighborhood, except for a big sweep at election time, and that was just for show.

I did realize pretty soon I had one little problem though, I mean besides the big problem of the neighborhood I was walking into, and that problem was that Arnie and Mojo were nowhere to be seen. There were a lot of other people passing to and fro, along with cars and trucks and rickshaws and bicycle cabs, but no Arnie and Mojo.

For a second there I thought, what the hell, go back to the bar, you still got six bucks to spend on booze, maybe Maxine would loan me some dough on her next break so I could get a couple of Shanghai Sally’s water-buffalo steaks in my belly with all the trimmings, but I kept walking, thinking, I’ll just go one more block, just for the hell of it, and then at the corner I had the bright idea to ask this street vendor on the opposite side for some gen, so I crossed over. He was a little old guy, selling grasshoppers broiled on skewers, I know, it sounds disgusting, but they’re actually pretty tasty once you get used to them.

I asked him in Malay if he had seen a midget in a white suit and a straw hat with a regular-size white man. The guy just stared at me, so I tried Chinese, and, again, nothing.

“Maybe you should just say it in English,” he said.

“Oh,” I said, “you don’t speak Malay or Chinese?”

“I speak Malay and Mandarin Chinese. Also Tamil, Dutch, French, Spanish, and, as you might have gathered by now, English.”

“Oh,” I said. “I guess I must’ve been speaking a different dialect of Malay or Chinese.”

“Yes, that must be it,” said the guy.

“Anyway,” I said. “Did you see a midget and a white guy pass by here just now?”

“Yes,” he said, “they went into that alley just up ahead.”

“You noticed that,” I said.

“Yes, I noticed it.”

“What’s in that alley, you know?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“No, I do, I really do,” I said.

“It is not safe for a white man to go down that alley.”

I stared at him, but he was one of those guys you really have to prod along to get any information out of him.

“Why is it not safe to go down that alley?” I said.

“Not safe for a white man,” said the guy.

“Okay, not safe for a white man,” I said.

“You buy broiled grasshopper skewer?”

The thing was, as I mentioned before, I was really hungry.

“Okay,” I said. “How much?”

I’ll spare you the next bit as I haggled him down to a quarter for a skewer of a dozen grasshoppers.

“Okay,” I said, finally, after the deal went down, finally, “now what’s so dangerous about this alleyway?”

“Madame Chang,” said the guy, after he had bit my quarter to make sure it was good.

Madame Chang.

The broad that Mojo said would be able to help Arnie out of the jam he was in, but who would need to be paid three or four grand American for the job. But why would Mojo take Arnie to her already, since Arnie didn’t have but more than one thin simoleon on him? It made no sense.

I thanked the guy and took off with my skewer of grasshoppers.

The alleyway was only a few yards away. It was dark, with just a faint light down at the other end. I took a step into it, and my foot hit something soft. I looked down, and I could just barely see a man’s hat lying there on the cobblestones. I crouched down and picked it up, stepped back a little toward the light from the road. It was a worn brown fedora, and it looked exactly like the one that Arnie had been wearing. I looked inside the hat. Printed on the sweatband in faded letters was “Robert Hall - The ‘Hall-Mark’ of Quality”.

I was holding the hat in my left hand, the skewer and the grasshoppers in my other hand. I transferred the skewer to the hand that held the hat, and I pulled out the snubnose and started down the alley, slow.

The faint light got less faint, although not by much, and after about twenty feet I came to a door with a tiny weak little lightbulb stuck in a plain tin fixture over the header. A wooden sign was nailed to the door with some Chinese writing on it, black paint on white, and I can read Chinese pretty well, but this must have been one of those really obscure dialects because it was Greek to me, even if I do read some Greek, but anyway it didn’t matter because there were some English words painted under the Chinese characters.

Madame Chang
Consultations and Advice
Prices Negotiable
Walk-Ins Welcome

There was a doorbell button but something told me not to press it. My hands were full, so I stuck the pistol back in my dungarees, and turned the doorknob, slow and easy like, and pushed the door open, slow and very, very easy like.

It was a narrow hallway about ten feet deep, lit by another dim light hanging in the ceiling, and at the other end of the hall Mojo was dragging Arnie along the floor by his feet, with Arnie on his back and his arms trailing behind him.

(Continued here, but of course.)

(Kindly look to the right-hand column of this page to find a strictly up-to-date listing of links to all other legally-available chapters of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train To Heaven©. Coming soon from the Olney Community College Press: The Nicest Guy You’d Ever Want to Meet: Conversations with Arnold Schnabel’s Friend, Ben Blagwell, edited by Dan Leo {Assistant Professor of Classics and Bullpen Coach, Olney Community College}.)

tales of the hotel st crispian: chapter 66

"williams"

by manfred skyline

illustrated by roy dismas, rhoda penmarq, and konrad kraus

editorial consultant: Prof. Dan Leo

williams was a night person, and found his employment as butler with the collinsons congenial. all the members of the family expected immediate service at any hour of the day or night, and an unspoken agreement had evolved that he would be available at night, and that the under-butler or one of the maids would be sufficient during the day after breakfast (when they - the collinsons - tended to be asleep or absent). williams had found that the collinsons expected prompt, but not constant service, and so he was free to spend most of his time at night daydreaming, looking out the windows at park avenue or 86th street, doing crossword puzzles, or doing absolutely nothing at all.

especially since the demise of old colonel collinson, the nights had passed like a parade of peaceful dreams...


(click here to go to the complete thrilling episode. a rhoda penmarq studios production.)

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 310: afterwards

We last saw our hero Arnold Schnabel sinking into oblivion in an alleyway in Singapore. We certainly hope he’s okay -- well, obviously he’s not “okay”, but let’s just hope and pray that something really, really horrible isn’t happening to him. But, in the meanwhile, what of big Ben Blagwell, last seen going off for an assignation with that sultry exotic “canary” Maxine Parraquette?

(Kindly click here to read our previous thrilling episode; if you are recovering from a nervous breakdown and have been ordered to take six months’ bed rest and are afraid of getting bored, then you might want to go here to return to the very beginning of this Gold View Award©-winning 97-volume masterpiece.)

“The serial publication of Arnold Schnabel’s massive autobiography is perhaps the greatest phenomenon in the world of letters since a young actor named William Shakespeare first took up his quill pen, dipped it into his inkwell, and then put to paper the words ‘Actus primus, Scena prima’.” -- Harold Bloom, The Weekly Reader.

Well, as soon as we were finished, no flies on Maxine as they say, she turned the bedside lamp on, jumped right out of the rack and made it for the bathroom. She kept the door open and I could hear a shower come on. That was good, that she had a shower I mean, because I’ll tell ya, I had been sweating like a pig even before we tumbled into the eiderdown, but now I felt like I was floating in the Dead Sea that mattress was so soaked. I figured I had lost at least twenty pounds in those ten minutes we had been playing hide-the salami. It had been better than a Turkish steam bath in that regard, and a hell of a lot more enjoyable, too.

I reached down to the floor and grabbed my Sweet Caporals and Musso and Frank’s matches out of the pocket of my Hawaiian shirt that was lying there, then I scrunched back up against the brass tubing of the headboard and lit up a smoke, tossing the match into the overflowing glass ashtray Maxine had on her night table. “Palm Grove Hotel, Singapore,” was painted on the ashtray in red.

I smoked and looked down at my gut.

Yeah, the old belly did look a little smaller maybe, more like a tight basketball than say a slightly deflated beach ball: who knows, maybe I had lost even twenty-five pounds.

To tell the truth, although I’ve always been a big muscular powerful kind of guy, I’ve also always tended to pack it on a little if you know what I mean, especially when I’m in between ships. What can I say? I like to eat. Why, just that morning I had started the day off with a big fat T-bone steak and a dozen fried eggs, with hash browns. This had been at a joint called Bill’s Sail-Right Inn which caters to the Yankee sea-dog trade, and it’s the closest you can get to a decent American hash-house in Singapore. I washed it all down with seven or eight cups of black Joe laced with a little whiskey, which old Bill isn’t supposed to serve, but he does anyway, God love the mug.

Then for lunch it had been what they call a rijsttafel at this other joint that caters to Dutch swabbies, called Dutchman Bob’s, and that had been a pretty big lunch too with I guess about thirty-five or forty dishes, with seconds and thirds of pork bellies and lots of shrimp crackers, all of it washed down with about half-a-dozen bottles of good Dutch lager. I figure I must’ve gained a good ten pounds at that meal alone.

Then after an afternoon at the pub me and some of the boys went over to this other joint called Chip’s Chippie which caters to the British nautical types, and we had what they call a “tea”, which consisted of four different types of sausages, rashers of bacon a half-inch thick, lots of toast with butter and jam, and mountains of what they call “chips”, but don’t worry, they’re just French fries really. Of course you had to drink tea, too, but what they hell, when in Rome, and anyways I’m used to living it rough in exotic foreign climes, and I won’t deny that I’ve eaten cat and dog and snake as well, even insects when push came to shove, although no matter how desperate and starving I was I swear on my dead mother’s grave I never tasted one bite of what they call “long pig” out there.

The thing was though, I still hadn’t had dinner, not really. I mean, sure, I guess I’d eaten a couple or three big bowls of peanuts when I had been playing poker downstairs, but I still hadn’t had a proper meal since that tea at Chad’s Chippie, and here it was going on eight bells on the last dog watch, and all of a sudden I realized I could eat a horse, and not a little seahorse either, but a real horse, full-grown, and come to think of it I have eaten horse on at least one occasion, down in Paraguay it was…

Maxine came out of the bathroom, still in her birthday suit except for her string of pearls which she had never bothered to take off. They gleamed on her wet skin, like drops of moonlight, or maybe like tiny little moons, or, I don’t know --

“You can use the shower if you want,” she said.

“Thanks, baby,” I said. “Maybe I will.”

She picked her shiny silvery dress up off the floor and gave it a couple of good shakes, because you never know what’s going to be crawling around on the floor in Singapore.

“Water pressure’s pretty low, don’t be surprised if it runs out halfway.”

She didn’t bother looking for her underwear, she just pulled that shiny dress on over her head.

“I’ll soap up and rinse it off real quick then,” I said. “I hate that itchy feeling when you don’t get all the soap off --”

“Yeah,” she said. “That stinks, so you better make it quick.”

She was dipping her feet into her high-heeled pumps, pulling each lovely gam back behind her a little so she could screw the shoe on with her delicate little hand. She looked really pretty.

“Y’know, it’s funny, Maxine,” I said, blowing out a sophisticated-type cloud of Sweet Caporal smoke. “Some guys like to linger in the shower, I know, in fact a lot of sailors are like that, beats me why, but --”

She was bending down to look in the mirror over her dresser, and she ran a brush through her hair a couple of times.

“No hot water of course,” she said.

“Fine with me, doll,” I said, “fine, a warm night like this, you know, I think it’s kinda refreshing to --”

She uncapped a tube of lipstick and gave her lips a quick smear. She smacked her lips together a couple of times, then capped the lipstick and dropped it into her purse.

“I got to go to work, big boy.”


“Yeah, sure, doll,” I said. “I understand --”

She yanked the stopper out of a perfume bottle and gave herself a few quick splashes from it.

“Don’t set the bed on fire with that cigarette, and make sure the door’s locked when you leave. Just turn the little button on the doorknob before you go out.”

“Little button?”

“Little button, on the doorknob, turn it vertical before you go out.”

“Vertical?”


“You want me to write it down for you?”

“No, I think I got it,” I said. “Vertical, right?”

She just looked at me for a moment, and then she turned and headed for the door.

“Hey, Maxine,” I said, kind of throaty-like, and loud, but not yelling-loud. I just wanted to get her attention.

She stopped and turned, but just her head, her body she kept facing the door.

“What?” she said.

“Maybe later we can, you know, have a drink, maybe have a little, I don’t know, talk.”

“Talk,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Talk.”

She looked at me, over her shoulder.

“Talk about what?” she said.

“Gee, doll,” I said, “I don’t know. Whatever you want to talk about. Flowers, puppies.”

“Flowers and puppies.”

“Kittens?”

She stared at me for another long moment, then turned her head to the front again, opened the door, and walked out, closing the door behind her.

Dames.

I never will figure them.

I thought dames liked flowers and puppies and kittens, but I guess not all of them do.

Well, what the hell.

I heaved myself up and managed to make it to my feet. It always felt funny to me being in a broad’s room. Kind of like you were someplace you could just go back to bed in and smoke a few more cigarettes, maybe take a little nap before going out and facing the world again, but that bed was so sweat-soaked I decided against that, and anyways, I needed to get some food in my gut. I wondered if Maxine kept anything up here that was edible, just something to hold me over, but a quick recce revealed nothing more edible than a jar of Pond’s cold cream, and I wasn’t that hungry.

I did find something else though, shoved in the night-table drawer, under some old movie magazines: a snubnose .38, Smith & Wesson. I took it out, spun the cylinder. All five chambers were loaded. Hey, call me old-fashioned but I like something a little bigger like the old service .45, but that’s just me. A little dame like Maxine, a snubby .38 was good for her, and God knows a good-looking dame has to be able to defend herself in this day and age. There’s too many bums out there who are just not gentlemen, and a .38 slug or two somewhere in the torso was probably gonna do the job almost as well as a .45 and without making so much of a mess, too. I stuck the pistol back under the magazines, and shoved the drawer shut.

I walked over to the one and only window she had. It looked out on the alley next door and on the terminal road out front. I took one more drag of my Sweet Caporal and then flicked it down into the darkness.

Time to hit the shower, get dressed and go back downstairs and find out about this caper that Mojo the Midget had talked about. I still only had six bucks in my poke, so what I decided to do, I decided I would ask Mojo for a little advance on my cut of the take, just so I could go get a good dinner over at this joint called Shanghai Sally’s, the proprietress of which, despite her moniker, hailed from Kansas City, Kansas, and she served the thickest juiciest porterhouse water-buffalo steaks you ever did taste, but then I couldn’t believe my eyes because walking past the alleyway’s entrance came Mojo and Arnold, Mojo practically pulling Arnold along, and Arnie looking like he was about to keel over any second.

Then they were gone, past the corner of the building across the alley.

Something was wrong.

Why did those two leave without me?

Why was Arnie staggering?

Why was Mojo pulling Arnie along like Arnie was a stubborn mule instead of the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet, and a personal friend of mine?

Something was definitely wrong. I turned from the window and went back to where my underwear and dungarees and Hawaiian shirt and my deck shoes and my yachtsman’s cap were lying on the floor.

I had to get dressed, and quick, and I decided that while I was at it I’d better borrow Maxine’s snubnose .38, just in case.

As for the shower, well, that was just going to have to wait, and it looked like maybe that porterhouse water buffalo-steak was going to have to wait, too.

(Continued here; we have only just begun to scratch the surface.)

(Kindly refer to the right-hand column of this page for an up-to-date listing of links to all other legally-accessible chapters of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train To Heaven©. Coming soon from the Olney Community College Press: Give Us Each Day Our Daily Arnold: Words of Wisdom For Every Day of the Year; edited and with an introduction by Bennett Cerf, with a foreword by Steve Allen and an afterword by Oscar Levant.)