Read Online Hiroshima Joe by Martin Booth - Free Book Online

eighty and one hundred dollars. His dilemma was whether or not he wanted her. He knew he desired her company, for she listened as he talked. But whether or not he desired her body was another matter.
    ‘Okay,’ he said finally.
    She had been quiet, gently squeezing his thigh every now and again, avoiding the looks of the other girls who wondered why neither of them was talking.
    ‘Okay? What you mean, okay, Joe?’
    ‘I’ll buy you out for one hour. No. Two hours.’
    ‘You sure, Joe?’
    He nodded. She left the cubicle and went to the barman who lifted the counter flap to let her behind the bar and out through a doorway in the rear. In a few minutes, she was back.
    He drained his second beer.
    The girls waved to Lucy as she left. She returned their waves. It was as if she wouldn’t see them for days, yet she’d be back by ten. By then, the place would be packed out.
    ‘It not far, Joe,’ she said as she took his hand and guided him along the pavement. As they went, he cast a glance or two at his surroundings: he had not been this way before. She obviously had yet another room to which to take her clientele, and he assumed that her change of venue must mark a change of pimp or in the ownership of the bar.
    They crossed the street, went down a dim alleyway between two other bars and climbed a set of echoing wooden stairs in a narrow well. At the top was a landing and, from it, three doors led off into rooms. A single, fifteen-watt bulb glowed overhead and from behind one of the doors came the familiar clatter of mah-jong pieces and conversation. While Lucy took a key from a hidden pocket of her dress, Sandingham stood quite still, feeling his nerves shivering at the sound of the game through the door.
    She beckoned him and he went behind her into a small, airless room. It contained an old mahogany wardrobe, badly scratched and dented, a wooden chair, a tiny table and a wide bed with blue cotton sheets on it. There was little space for anything else in the room. On the wall over the head of the bed was nailed a wooden box, painted bright pillar-box red and, in the centre of it, a gold and red varnished household god. In front of his fierce face a joss-stick holder sprouted two sticks of incense, both of them snubbed out halfway down. The room smelled of sandalwood. A lamp was by the bed and Lucy switched it on, at the same time reaching up to extinguish the centre light, a powerful bulb in a green plastic shade. The brightness flicked off and the room became gentler. The distempered walls looked less harsh in the yellow glow from the lamp.
    She sat on the bed and took off her shoes. Then she stood and tugged the zip at the side slits of her cheong-sam upwards so that both her thighs were bare to the waist. She was wearing nothing under the dress. In the traditional style, the bodice of the dress was fastened up one side, to allow for the suckling of a child, had she had one. This she unbuttoned and let slip over her skin. Her breast beneath was as sallow as the rest of her body, and as soft. He reached for the brown ring around her nipple, but she brushed his hand aside and, slipping his jacket off, she undid his shirt. Bare to the waist, he sat on the bed removing his shoes and socks, careful at the same time to thrust both socks into one shoe to hide the money. She saw him do this and realised what his action meant. He did have money, a good deal of it, and it was in his right shoe, jammed into the toe.
    ‘You wan’ to taw’k fu’st?’
    ‘I’m very tired,’ he said. ‘I’ve not been well these past weeks.’
    He did not look as well as he had on his last visit to the bar. She saw that, even in the half-light. She did not know what was wrong with him but she made quite certain, by studying his features and actions, that it was not TB. A dose of VD was something she accepted with stoical resignation, a hazard of the job. But tuberculosis was something else altogether. Sulphur drugs and a course of injections