tales of the hotel st crispian: chapter 68

"snake dance"

by Horace P. Sternwall

edited by Dan Leo*

illustrated by roy dismas and konrad kraus

a penmarq studios production

*Associate Professor of Classic Literature, Assistant Morale Advisor, Olney Community College; editor of The Dawn of Dread: 36 Previously Uncollected Tales of Domestic Strife, by Horace P. Sternwall; Olney Community College Press, “The Sternwall Project”.) r, and their supposed “friend”, Michael

for complete episode, click here

“Railroad Train to Heaven”, Part 312: Mme Chang

In a dimly-lighted hallway off a dark alleyway near the docks of Singapore, Big Ben Blagwell has discovered our hero Arnold Schnabel, unconscious and being dragged by his feet by the increasingly-dubious Mojo the Midget…

(Kindly click here to read our previous thrilling episode; in case you need your head examined, go here to return to the far-off beginnings of this Gold View Award©-winning 46-volume post-post-modernist masterpiece.)

“The other day at the beach I got so absorbed in reading Arnold Schnabel on my Kindle that I lost track of time and incurred a very nasty sunburn. Oh well, all in a good cause.” -- Harold Bloom, in The New Statesman.

Mojo looked up, saw me, dropped Arnie’s feet, and his right hand reached under his suit jacket and came out with a gun.

It was a Luger.

Arnie’s Luger?

What did I know?

All Lugers look alike.

This Luger was pointed at me.

“Mon cher Benjamin,” said Mojo. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

“Really? Why is that, Mojo?” I asked.

“Because your friend is rather heavy and I was getting tired of dragging him. Now you can do it for me. Come closer, but, how do you Americans say, slow and easy-like?”

“Yeah, that’s what we say,” I said.

“Then, slow and easy-like, s’il vous plaît, approchez.”

I approached, slow and easy-like.

Mojo backed up a couple of steps toward a closed door a few feet behind him, and he kept the Luger pointed at me.

“What’s that you’ve got in your hand?” he said.

“Arnie’s hat,” I said. “And some broiled grasshoppers on a skewer. From that guy down the corner.”

“Oh, his grasshoppers are not bad.”

“Would you like one?” I said.

“Not right now. Perhaps later. How did you find us?”

“Mojo,” I said. “You’re a midget. With a white man. In Singapore.”

“So you simply asked people if they had seen a midget with a white man.”

“Bingo,” I said.

“I don’t like being called a midget, I’ve told you that.”

“But that’s what everyone calls you. Mojo the Midget.”

“I prefer to be called a man of modest heighth.”

“Mojo the Man of Modest Heighth don’t have quite the same ring,” I said.

“How would you like it if people called you Ben the Great Big Ape?”

“I say if the shoe fits wear it.”

“Come around here, cher Ben, but make it slow, slow and --”

“I know,” I said, “slow and easy-like.”

“Exactement.”

Slow and easy-like I walked past Arnie’s prostrate body, and Mojo backed up closer to the door, which had a big pebbled glass pane with some Chinese writing on it -- some obscure dialect I couldn't make head or tail of -- and under that the words, in English:



Mme Chang

Ring Buzzer

“Is Arnie dead?” I said, looking down at him.

“No,” said Mojo. “Merely resting. It seems someone put what you Yanks call a ‘Mickey Finn’ in his drink.”

“What’s the gag, Mojo?” I said. “I thought you had a caper for us to pull off.”

“This is the caper,” said Mojo.

Keeping that Luger on me, he reached behind him with his left hand, turned the doorknob, and pushed the door open. Behind him was what looked like another dimly-lit corridor.

“You didn’t ring the buzzer,” I said.

“I don’t have to ring the buzzer,” said Mojo. “Now throw down that hat and those grasshoppers so you can drag your friend into Madame Chang’s chambers.”

“I don’t mind dropping the hat, Mojo,” I said. “But I’d hate to waste the grasshoppers. I’m starving, man.”

I let the hat drop to the floor but I held onto the grasshoppers. I really didn’t want to waste them. I hadn’t had even a single one yet.

“Mon cher Benjamin,” said Mojo, “if you don’t drop the grasshoppers you may never eat another grasshopper again.”

I didn’t like the looks of this. I didn’t like the looks of it at all. I was holding the skewer in my left hand.

“Look, Mojo,” I said, “just hold the grasshoppers for me, will you, buddy?”

I held out the skewer, and Mojo, I guess just to shut me up, reached out to grab it with his left hand, but right before his stubby little fingers could reach the skewer I gave it a flick and four or five broiled grasshoppers flew off it and into Mojo’s face. I slammed his gun hand with the back of my left hand and then I stepped in and gave the sneaky little man of modest heighth a quick sharp right-hook to the jaw. He fell back hard in the corner between the doorway and the left-hand wall, slid down and crumpled over on his side, out cold.

I hate to hit a little guy, but sometimes you just got to do it.

I hunkered down and pried the Luger out of Mojo’s paw, then straightened up again. The safety was off. I clicked it on, and stuck the gun into the waistband of my dungarees on the right side of my gut, because I still had Maxine’s little Chief’s Special shoved into the left side. I looked down at Arnie. I gave his foot a little kick with my deck shoe.

“Yo, Arnie,” I said, “wake up, pal.”

I picked one of the remaining grasshoppers off of the skewer and tossed it in my yap. It was good, just the way I like it, crunchy, with the special spicy sauce cooked in and not just splashed on it the way some street vendors do it.

“Uh,” said Arnie.

Okay, so at least Mojo hadn’t lied about Arnie not being dead. I gave his foot another little nudge with my deck shoe.

“Come on, pal,” I said. “Rise and shine.”

“Uh?” he said, and now his eyes opened.

I popped another grasshopper into my mouth.

“Come on, buddy,” I said. “Look, I got your hat.” I bent down, picked up his fedora, and dropped it on his chest.

“Arggh?” he said, still lying there, but with his eyes staying mostly open now.

I picked off another grasshopper. They really were good.

“Mojo slipped you a Mickey,” I said. “Why, I don’t know. But here’s what I think we should do. We’ll roll Mojo, take his fat wad of bills, then go get some hot java in you. Then, after you wake up a bit more, we grab a cab or a rickshaw and head over to Shanghai Sally’s and get some water-buffalo steaks.”

“Wa buffa?” said Arnie.

“Right,” I said, chewing another grasshopper. “Water buffalo. It might sound weird, but trust me, they’re delicious, especially the way Sally makes ‘em. What she does is, she marinates the steaks in bourbon, then she sprinkles ‘em with Kosher salt and cracked pepper, then --”

“Wa -- buffa?” said Arnie.

“Yeah,” I said. “Water buffalo. So, like I said, you got your bourbon-marinated steaks, and they’re liberally sprinkled with the kosher salt and the cracked pepper, and then what she does --”

“Beh,” said Arnie.

“Beh?” I said. I popped another grasshopper in my trap.

“Beh, Ben,” said Arnie. “Ben.”

“Right, that’s my name, pal. Ben. Can you say your name?”

“Ar,” he said.

“Go on,” I said, crunching another grasshopper. “You’re almost there.”

“Nold,” he said.

“Good,” I said, and I gobbled up another grasshopper. Like I said, I was hungry. “’Arnold’. Say the whole word now.”

“Arnold,” he said. And this time he even raised his right arm, and sort of pointed his limp fingers at me. “Beh, Ben,” he said.

“Right,” I said, tossing the last grasshopper into my maw. “You’re Arnold, or Arnie as I call you, and I’m Ben.”

See, I’ve had to deal with a lot of delirious guys in my time, and this is what you got to do, you got to keep them talking. At this critical juncture you got to keep them yapping away even if they don’t feel like it, otherwise their sanity might slip away for good and they become a drooling idiot or worse, like this one time I was shipwrecked on a rubber raft with this one guy for three or four days with no water and this guy kept getting more and more morose and all quiet like, while me, I just kept talking the whole time, telling stories, trying to keep the old brain lively, you know, and then I guess it was in the middle of the fourth day with no water and I’m right in the middle of one of my stories, and this guy who hadn’t said a word in a couple of days all of a sudden he lets out a scream and dives into the ocean. I jumped in and tried to save him, I really did, even as exhausted and dehydrated as I was, but, I don’t know, it was like he really wanted to croak, because he just sank like a bag of rocks, so I gave up, swam back to the raft, hauled myself in, and just went back to telling myself stories. And next day, wouldn’t you know it, one of our planes spotted me, and pretty soon I got picked up by a seaplane. So that’s all I’m saying. Keep them talking, and if they won’t talk then keep talking to them. And then if they jump off the raft and drown themselves, well, at least nobody can say it’s your fault.

“Beh, Ben,” said Arnie again, and this time he even raised his head a little bit, and he lifted his arm a little higher, and it seemed like the poor guy was trying to point his finger at me.

Well, I had finished off the last of the grasshoppers, so I tossed the skewer to the floor.

“Yeah, that’s right, Arnie,” I said. I took my pack of Sweet Caporals out of my Hawaiian shirt pocket, gave it a shake, and got one between my lips. “I’m Ben, pal, and you’re Arnie.”

I took out the book of Musso and Frank’s matches that Arnie had loaned me and gave myself a light.

“Musso and Frank’s,” I said, looking at the book. “That place all right? They broil up a good steak there?”

“Ben,” said Arnie, and this time he almost yelled it. He was still pointing at me with his finger.

“That’s my name, Arnie-boy -- don’t wear it out.”

I tossed the match to the floor and dropped the matches back in my shirt pocket.

“Ben!” said Arnie, and I guess I should say, “yelled Arnie”, because he really did yell this time, and he even lifted himself up a little on one elbow, while still pointing at me.

“Right, Arnie,” I said. “’Ben’. Now don’t get too excited, and, tell you what, just you rest there a second more while I roll Mojo for his gelt, and then I’ll help you up and we’ll stagger the hell out of this joint. Tell ya the truth, it kind of gives me the creeps.”

So I turned around to roll Mojo and what do I see but this knockout Chinese broad, in one of those silk flowery dresses Chinese broads like to wear, her face all painted up like a little China doll, and her hair all sleeked back in some kind of complicated hairstyle.

Oh, and also, she had a gun in her hand, a little automatic, and it was pointed at yours truly.

It was getting like I couldn’t even turn around without somebody being there holding a gat on me. It was just one of those kinds of nights.

“Hello,” I said.

I mean, what else am I going to say?

“Hello,” she said, right back at me. “I am Madame Chang.”

(Continued here, and for who knows how long now, as a whole new batch of Arnold Schnabel’s marble copybooks has just been discovered in an army footlocker in the attic of his aunts’ house on North Street, in Cape May, NJ.)

(Please turn to the right-hand column of this page for a current listing of links to all other officially-authorized chapters of Arnold Schnabel’s Railroad Train To Heaven©. Coming soon from PBS in conjunction with BBC One and Canal+: The Rhyming Brakeman: Arnold Schnabel, a new 12-part documentary from Ken Burns, introduced by Alistair Cook and narrated by Orson Welles, featuring Stephen Ambrose, David McCullough, Harold Bloom, and a host of Hollywood stars; original music by Flatt & Scruggs.)

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}.)