Big Money Read Online Free

was purple and pink. An el train clattered raspingly through the empty Sundayevening streets. The wind that streamed through the bottom of the window had a gritty smell of coalashes. Charley put the window down and went to wash his face and hands. The hotel towel felt soft and thick with a little whiff of chloride. He went to the lookingglass and combed his hair. Now what?
    He was walking up and down the room fidgeting with a cigarette, watching the sky go dark outside the window, when the jangle of the phone startled him. It was Ollie Taylor’s polite fuddled voice. “I thought maybe you wouldn’t know where to get a drink. Do you want to come around to the club?” “Gee, that’s nice of you, Ollie. I was jus’ wonderin’ what a feller could do with himself in this man’s town.”
“You know it’s quite dreadful here,” Ollie’s voice went on. “Prohibition and all that, it’s worse than the wildest imagination could conceive. I’ll come and pick you up with a cab.” “All right, Ollie, I’ll be in the lobby.”
    Charley put on his tunic, remembered to leave off his Sam Browne belt, straightened his scrubby sandy hair again, and went down into the lobby. He sat down in a deep chair facing the revolving doors.
    The lobby was crowded. There was music coming from somewhere in back. He sat there listening to the dancetunes, looking at the silk stockings and the high heels and the furcoats and the pretty girls’ faces pinched a little by the wind as they came in off the street. There was an expensive jingle and crinkle to everything. Gosh, it was great. The girls left little trails of perfume and a warm smell of furs as they passed him. He started counting up how much jack he had. He had a draft for three hundred bucks he’d saved out of his pay, four yellowbacked twenties in the wallet in his inside pocket he’d won at poker on the boat, a couple of tens, and let’s see how much change. The coins made a little jingle in his pants as he fingered them over.
    Ollie Taylor’s red face was nodding at Charley above a big camels-hair coat. “My dear boy, New York’s a wreck. . . . They are pouring icecream sodas in the Knickerbocker bar. . . .” When they got into the cab together he blew a reek of highgrade rye whiskey in Charley’s face. “Charley, I’ve promised to take you along to dinner with me. . . . Just up to ole Nat Benton’s. You won’t mind . . . he’s a good scout. The ladies want to see a real flying aviator with palms.” “You’re sure I won’t be buttin’ in, Ollie?” “My dear boy, say no more about it.”
    At the club everybody seemed to know Ollie Taylor. He and Charley stood a long time drinking Manhattans at a dark-paneled bar in a group of whitehaired old gents with a barroom tan on their faces. It was Major this and Major that and Lieutenant every time anybody spoke to Charley. Charley was getting to be afraid Ollie would get too much of a load on to go to dinner at anybody’s house.
    At last it turned out to be seventhirty, and leaving the final round of cocktails, they got into a cab again, each of them munching a clove, and started uptown. “I don’t know what to say to ’em,” Ollie said. “I tell them I’ve just spent the most delightful two years of my life, and they make funny mouths at me, but I can’t help it.”
    There was a terrible lot of marble, and doormen in green, at the
apartmenthouse where they went out to dinner and the elevator was inlaid in different kinds of wood. Nat Benton, Ollie whispered while they were waiting for the door to open, was a Wall Street broker.
    They were all in eveningdress waiting for them for dinner in a pinkishcolored drawingroom. They were evidently old friends of Ollie’s because they made a great fuss over him and they were very