"Brandy, Norris.
How do you like your brandy, sir?"
"Any way at all," I said.
The butler went away among the abominable plants.
The General spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work show-girl uses her last good pair of stockings.
"I used to like mine with champagne.
The champagne as cold as Valley Forge and about a third of a glass of brandy beneath it.
You may take your coat off, sir.
It's too hot in here for a man with blood in his veins."
I stood up and peeled off my coat and got a handkerchief out and mopped my face and neck and the backs of my wrists. St. Louis in August had nothing on that place.
I sat down again and I felt automatically for a cigarette and then stopped.
The old man caught the gesture and smiled faintly.
"You may smoke, sir.
I like the smell of tobacco."
I lit the cigarette and blew a lungful at him and he sniffed at it like a terrier at a rathole. The faint smile pulled at the shadowed corners of his mouth.
"A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy," he said dryly. "You are looking at a very dull survival of a rather gaudy life, a cripple paralyzed in both legs and with only half of his lower belly.
There's very little that I can eat and my sleep is so close to waking that it is hardly worth the name.
I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider, and the orchids are an excuse for the heat.
Do you like orchids?"
"Not particularly," I said.
The General half-closed his eyes. "They are nasty things.
Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men. And their perfume has the rotten sweetness of a prostitute."
I stared at him with my mouth open.
The soft wet heat was like a pall around us.
The old man nodded, as if his neck was afraid of the weight of his head.
Then the butler came pushing back through the jungle with a teawagon, mixed me a brandy and soda, swathed the copper ice bucket with a damp napkin, and went away softly among the orchids.
A door opened and shut behind the jungle.
I sipped the drink.
The old man licked his lips watching me, over and over again, drawing one lip slowly across the other with a funereal absorption, like an undertaker dry-washing his hands.
"Tell me about yourself, Mr. Marlowe.
I suppose I have a right to ask?"
"Sure, but there's very little to tell.
I'm thirty-three years old, went to college once and can still speak English if there's any demand for it.
There isn't much in my trade.
I worked for Mr. Wilde, the District Attorney, as an investigator once.
His chief investigator, a man named Bernie Ohls, called me and told me you wanted to see me.
I'm unmarried because I don't like policemen's wives." "And a little bit of a cynic," the old man smiled. "You didn't like working for Wilde?"
"I was fired.
For insubordination.
I test very high on insubordination, General."
"I always did myself, sir.
I'm glad to hear it.
What do you know about my family?"
"I'm told you are a widower and have two young daughters, both pretty and both wild.
One of them has been married three times, the last time to an ex-bootlogger who went in the trade by the name of Rusty Regan.
That's all I heard, General."
"Did any of it strike you as peculiar?"
"The Rusty Regan part, maybe.
But I always got along with bootleggers myself."
He smiled his faint economical smile.