"Oh Christ, come on, baby! It's a free, swinging, wide-open city! "

epub or mobi

The man hung about by the door the way Mendip knew well, trying for that bit of extra nerve to push him across the threshold. Out in the alleyway, the rain fell dark, sweeping across the facade of the Swedish woman's apartment who advertised bondage exercises opposite, gathering on the bonnet of the man's Rolls-Royce. Big business, probably. But you get no credit for it in here. Come on in or fuck off out of it, I don't care which you do. We take three ton a week here whether you buy or go fishing. Now another customer arrived, peeping grimly round the hatchway. Mendip knew him well - a tiny spender on spanky kink. An old hand, he went straight to that box and burrowed his head in it. He had a few wisps of dirty hair. His nails were long: cracked and bent. He looked like a labouring man got up in odds and sods of grimy grot and tat, an old navy-blue coat, single-breasted, pinched at the hips and staggering eyebrows arched in with a Woolworth's make-up pencil, and the black Chaplin moustache above the lip, disdainful of all reality, had been helped along a bit with that too. He seemed to know, and resent, that he was de trop even in the shop, everywhere. God knew what he did for a living. He could just have got by behind a ticket-window at Victoria in the rush-hour, and probably did. Eyeing him, Mendip thought he was on the edge of being turned out of his bedsitter because he was for ever spending all the cash he had on this. He had had his needle stuck in the groove of his seventh year; but most of him was nearly sixty.