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you, then?’ said Kölmel in the dressing room. Here they were, today, with Sinner slumped in his green throne and Kölmel standing there like a supplicant; it didn’t reflect how things really were, but it still gave Sinner pleasure.
    ‘I want to go to America,’ Sinner said. ‘New York City.’
    ‘I mean your next fight.’
    ‘Don’t know. Ask Frink.’
    ‘What do you want to go to America for?’
    ‘Proper money over there. And you get treated like royalty, they say.’
    ‘Tossers, Americans. Except my half-brother.’
    Sinner shrugged again. He thought of his father, whose journey from a village in eastern Poland had ended at the Jewish shelter on Leman Street only because he’d been thrown off the ship that was going to take him to the United States.
    ‘You’re talkative tonight, ain’t you?’ said Kölmel. ‘Got a girl waiting?’ He was ugly when he smiled. ‘Course you do. Give her a good hard one from me, son.’ Kölmel didn’t know what Frink knew.
    After Kölmel left, Sinner drank a little more gin, got dressed, and then telephoned for a cab to take him from Bethnal Green to Covent Garden.
    AFTER THE DAY’S ROUTINE SPEND YOUR EVENING AT
The Caravan
81 ENDELL ST.
(Corner of Shaftesbury Avenue, facing Princes Theatre)
Phone: Temple Bar 7665
London’s Greatest Bohemian Rendezvous
said to be the most unconventional spot in town

ALL NIGHT GAIETY     Dancing to Charlie
     
    PERIODICAL NIGHT TRIPS TO THE GREAT
OPEN SPACES, INCLUDING THE ACE OF SPADES, ETC.
     
    The West End was littered now with these little cards, but Sinner had heard about the Caravan’s opening straight from its founder, Will Reynolds, a gambler, boxing enthusiast and well-known Soho rake who had been determined to make the worst possible use of a £300 inheritance from a Presbyterian great-aunt. The basement club was decorated in a nonspecific oriental style, with lacquered furniture, red hanging lanterns and painted silk drapes. Tonight, as every night, it was teeming. The band played ‘When I Take My Morning Promenade’. Later there would be a drag show.
    Sinner liked coming here straight from a fight withoutbothering to wash. All the other men were so soaped, even perfumed, but he just stank, and in the crush at the bar they couldn’t ignore it. It was like walking around with his cock out. A few people greeted him, but he was already sick of talking tonight so he bought a double gin and stood at the end of the bar scanning faces. After a minute or two he noticed a good-looking boy of nineteen or twenty, with a French sort of bent nose, standing there with his thumbs in his pockets looking lost. Sinner shouldered through the crowd. He put a hand on the boy’s arm and bent towards his ear to be heard over the music, lightly brushing the boy’s crotch with the back of his other hand as he did so. ‘You waiting for anyone in particular?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Come on, then.’ Sinner pulled him towards the door.
    ‘Who are you?’
    ‘It don’t matter.’
    ‘Where are we going?’
    ‘Hotel de Paris on Villiers Street. I’ll pay. They know me. You been before?’
    ‘No, I don’t really … I mean. …’
    Sinner never had any trouble. In a club like this, even the boys as beautiful as Sinner would usually join in the flirtation and gossip. That was why you came to the Caravan instead of just hunting in the dark at the Piccadilly News Theatre. But Sinner didn’t have to bother with that – there was something in the way he looked at you and the way he spoke to you. Or at least there was the first time – hardly anyone ever went with him a second time, not only because Sinner himself lost interest, but also because you were still too bruised and shaken, particularly if, like this French boy, you’d been unlucky enough to meet him on a night when he still had half a fight caged in him. Even if you’d been warned, though, you still didn’t turn him down. The best you could do was to pick up another pint of gin on