Don't Stop the Carnival Read Online Free PDF Page B

minute, his naked gray-furred chest perspiring in running streams. Paperman sat hugging his knees, staring straight ahead.
     
     
6
     
     
The bar was jammed. The talk and laughter were loud; it was almost eight; a low brilliant evening star cast a narrow silver path on the still sea. Negroes and whites were roosting on the terrace rail or sitting on the steps. Paperman's immediate concern was whether he was properly dressed. He had longed to wear his new custom-tailored white dinner jacket, but overdressing was abhorrent to him. He had settled on black Bermuda shorts and knee socks, a madras jacket, and a maroon bow tie. He saw at once that it hardly mattered. There were men dressed like himself, and men in light shirts and slacks; girls in cocktail dresses, in toreador pants, and in shorts. A party in evening dress sat around the big low circular table in the center: Negroes, whites, a naval officer in a beribboned white uniform, and two ebony Africans in red-and-gold robes and crimson skullcaps. Mrs. Ball sat with them.
     
     
Lester was not in sight. He had disappeared while Norman slept.
     
     
"Hey, Norman!"
     
     
Bob Cohn, dressed in an olive gabardine suit, was waving at him from the bar. Muffled in a shirt and tie, the frogman looked insignificant, an ugly little young man with an outsize nose. Sitting beside him, her back to Paperman, was a tall blond woman in white.
     
     
"Hi, Bob. I'm paying for those drinks," Paperman said, approaching them. The woman turned her head. Before he saw her face, Paperman knew that it would not be disappointing. Ugly women did not carry their heads or turn them in this way.
     
     
"Sure thing. Mrs. Tramm, meet my new swim buddy, Norm Paperman from New York."
     
     
"Hello there," said the woman, with a slow blink of large alert hazel eyes.
     
     
Cohn started to slip off his stool. "Come on, join us. Sit here."
     
     
Paperman put a hand on his shoulder. "What's this? Respect for gray hairs? Get back on your chair. Martini, please," he said to the bartender. "Bombay gin. Boissiere vermouth, two to one. Lemon peel. Chill the glass, please."
     
     
"Bless my soul," said the woman in white. "That's precisely how I like a martini. Cold, and tasting like a martini. This idiocy of waving the vermouth bottle at a glass of plain vodka!" She tinkled her glass at him. "But I gave up on the chilling long ago. I drink them with ice."
     
     
"Wrong, wrong," said Paperman. "Lumps in the oatmeal. The coward's compromise. You have to fight for the things you believe in. The martini before dinner is a sacrament. A chilled glass. To those who believe, no explanation is necessary. To those who do not believe, no explanation is possible."
     
     
Mrs. Tramm burst out laughing. "The Song of Bernadette! Ye gods. Somebody else remembers." She pushed her glass at the bartender. "Thor, please make me one exactly like Mr. Paperman's."
     
     
"Yes, ma'am."
     
     
"My name's Norman."
     
     
"Mine's Iris."
     
     
Paperman held out his hand, and Mrs. Tramm shook it, still laughing. She had a cool bony hand. There were no rings on her unusually long fingers. Earrings swayed and sparkled with each motion of her head; to Paperman's practiced eye, platinum and diamonds. It was obvious to Paperman that he had had a very wrong idea about "this babe." For some reason it had amused her to accept a dinner invitation from the young swimmer, but she was not the kind to bother with Cohn. She was a powerful woman on the loose.
     
     
Iris Tramm was-on a quick inventory of what was visible-a divorcee in her thirties; a woman with a lovely face of English or Scandinavian cast, with strong sloping bones, a small tilted nose, and fine teeth. There was a curl to one side of her lips, a flattening, a touch of unbalance to the mouth, and her eyes were strikingly brilliant. She was the kind of woman Norman found most appetizing, though he still admired, with wry regret, the pretty Broadway girls whom he had played