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slipped out of my oilskin and gave it back, put a kiss on my mouth with her fingertips, and slipped inside. When I’d put the oilskin back on I started for the hotel, but on the way decided to take advantage of the cat being away. I kept on to Common, turned, walked down one block to Camp, and went into the City Hotel. It was a nice place, not quite in the St. Charles class, but a good hotel just the same, very gay just now, with quite a few people in costume. I registered: “William Crandall, Algiers, La.” My baggage, I said, was delayed, but I’d pay two nights in advance. The clerk took my money, marked my room in the book, called a boy, and gave him the key. However, I took it, saying: “I’ll go up later,” and tipped.
    Out on the street again, I walked up Common, checking a hardware store as I went. It was closed, but as I remembered it from passing once or twice, it had lettered on the window, in the lower left-hand corner:
LOCKSMITH
    Serrurier
    At the St. Charles, I had sandwiches and beer sent up and mumbled to myself as I munched: “What the hell have you got yourself into? You’re supposed to have your mind on raising twenty-five thousand bucks.”

Chapter 4
    B URKE SHOWED AT THE St. Charles next morning, even sooner than I had hoped. I’d sent the corduroys out to be pressed, put on my dark suit, and stepped down the street to the locksmith’s, to get him started on the skeleton I needed, made from a blank to correspond with my City Hotel key, for the rummage job I had in mind. I came back, had breakfast in the bar; when I went upstairs again Burke was in the hall, popping my door with his knuckles. In Scotch tweeds, cloth hat, and brown shoes, with a rain cape over one arm, he looked even bigger than he had in his red Mardi Gras costume, but I sang out loud and hearty: “Mr. Burke, I believe? Welcome to my humble abode—I’m flattered that you’ve come.” His round, pink face broke into smiles and he held out his hand, expressing “the honest pleasure I feel at meeting our Good Samaritan.” He spoke with an Irish brogue, but not a shanty-Irish brogue. I can say plenty against him, but—allowing for small things like iv for of, be for by, and me for my—he handled the English language in a most distinguished way; not saying he couldn’t manhandle it, to the point of just plain filth, when his temper got the best of him.
    But now he was graciousness itself, saying very respectfully: “Could I have a word with you, me boy? Poor Adolphe’s me friend as well as me partner, and I think we should have a talk.”
    “Certainly,” I said, unlocking. “Come in.”
    I hung his cape and hat in the armoire, and seated him; at once he began thanking me “for all you’ve done—not only for Adolphe, but the little one, too, Mrs. Fournet. She told me all about it.”
    “Then she got to the ball?” I asked.
    “Aye—we were late but made a sensational entrance, she favoring the Black Tulip, I a Tipperary cardinal at his golden jubilee mass. I went as a charro , in a red velvet rig I once bought for a Mexican fandango. The hat has bells on’t which I swear play ‘La Paloma.’ ”
    “You’ve been in Mexico, then?”
    “In the cotton boom, early on in the war—at Matamoros and Bagdad. I didn’t do badly. I made a bit.”
    “I’ve heard the sky was the limit.”
    “The sky? Me boy, it showed mirages, with minarets, date palms, and Moorish dancing girls nekkid as when they were born. Bagdad was not accidentally named.”
    “Just exactly where is it?”
    “Mexican side, mouth of the Rio Grande.”
    “Must be quite a place.”
    “The stinkhole iv the Western World—built on pilings, iv slabs and adobe and canvas, populated be sailors, pimps, and muchachas , all drunk as fiddler’s bitches, but paved, here and there, with gold.”
    “Gold made from cotton?”
    “Aye.”
    He seemed quite fond of bragging, and as I measured him up, it came to me that the last thing I should be, if I meant