'Thank you,' Bogus calls after her, and she waves her muff over her shoulder, exposing for a second one ungloved, elegant, long-fingered hand with winking rings.
In the lobby of the Pension Taschy are two other prostitutes who have stepped in out of the cold and stand stamping their boots, slapping their pink calves together. In the light of the lobby, eyeing Trumper's long-traveled mustache and suitcase, they don't bother to smile.
From the window of his room at the Taschy, Trumper can see one side of the mosaic roof of Saint Stephen's Cathedral, and also watch the whores clicking down his street to catch a late bite at the American Hamburger Spa a block up the Graben from Spiegelgasse.
At this apparently late hour the prostitutes are bringing few customers to the Taschy, where they're provided with a few dozen rooms on the second floor. But Trumper can hear them guiding men through the halls below him and see them escorting men down the Spiegelgasse sidewalk to the lobby.
One by one, the men depart alone, and Trumper hears the flushing of the second-floor bidets. It's this late-hour plumbing that makes him bold enough to ask Frau Taschy if he can take a bath. Reluctantly she draws him one, then waits outside the bathroom while he splashes about - listening, to make sure I don't draw another drop.
Bogus was ashamed of the color of the bath water and hastily pulled the plug, but Frau Taschy heard the first thick gurgle and from the hall cried that she'd attend to the cleaning up. Embarrassed, he left her his ring to scrub, but couldn't help noticing the slight catch in her breath when she viewed it.
Frau Taschy had been pleasant enough when he'd registered, but as he stepped clean and chilled into his room, he noticed she'd done more than turn down his bed. His suitcase had been opened and the contents were neatly arranged on the broad window seat, as if the Frau had taken a careful inventory in preparation for an outstanding debt.
Though the room was unheated, he felt drawn to sit down for a moment at his new typewriter and try out all those funny umlauts. He wrote:
My room at the Taschy is three floors up, one block down Spiegelgasse from the Graben. The first-district whores use the place. They are first-class. I stay with nothing but the best.
Then Frau Taschy interrupted him, reminding him of the lateness of the hour and that his typing was noisy, but before he could ask her what late hour it was, she crept off. He heard her pause on the stair landing, and when she descended he resumed his typing:
Frau Taschy, an old hand at estimating a lodger's fate, can decipher pending doom from rings left in bathtubs.
Then he typed three lines of German diphthongs and attempted to write the typing-test sentence about the quick brown fox and the lazy dog, using only umlaut vowels. Or was it a lazy frog?
Listening for Frau Taschy, he heard another bidet flush and remembered the whores. He wrote:
In Vienna, prostitution isn't simply legal; it's both aided and controlled by law. Every whore is issued a sort of license to practice, renewable only with regular medical check-ups. If you're not a registered prostitute, you can't legally be one.
/> Merrill Overturf used to say, 'Don't ever buy until you see their safety stickers.'
Just as officially, uncertain hotels and pensions in each district are licensed to handle the trade. Prices are supposedly fixed for both hotels and whores, and the first district has the youngest, prettiest and the most expensive of them. As you move away from the Inner City, the whores in the outer districts grow older, uglier and more economical. Overturf was fond of remarking that he lived on a fifteenth-district budget.
Then Bogus got bored with writing and went to his window and watched the sidewalk. Below was the whore with the fur coat and matching muff. He tapped the double-pane window and she looked up. He turned his face back and forth in the window for her to see, trying to catch just enough light from his night table to show her who he was, thinking that from below he must resemble some embarrassed exhibitionist not quite daring to hold still.
But she recognized him and smiled up at him. Or she smiled out of habit, recognizing him only as someone simply male, summoning her inside. She pointed up to him and wagged her finger; again he saw the bright, bejeweled hand. When she started for the door, Trumper tapped fiercely on the glass: No, no! I'm not calling you inside. I was just saying hello ... But she looked as if she took his wild tapping for excitement, and she actually skipped, tossing her face up to him. From a distance he couldn't see a trace of her make-up; she might have been a flirting cheerleader agreeing to a ride home after the game.
He thumped out into the hall, still wearing his towel; it rose over his navel when he straddled the stairwell and caught the draught of the closing lobby door below. He recognized the woman's hand on the banister, sliding up to the first landing. When he called down to her, her head jutted out of the stairwell and she looked right up his skirt, giggling like a fresh girl.
He shouted, 'Nein!' But she moved up another landing, and he shouted, 'Halt!' Again her face darted into the stairwell space and he pinched his towel together with his knees. 'I'm sorry,' he told her. 'I didn't mean for you to come up.' Her mouth turned down at one corner, causing sudden crow's feet to delta from her eyes; now she looked in her thirties, perhaps forties. But she kept coming.
Trumper stood like a statue, and she stopped a step below him, breathing in short, perfumed gasps, the outdoors cold still radiating off her clothes, her face nicely flushed. 'I know,' she said. 'You only wanted to ask me the time?'
'No,' he said, 'I recognized you. I just tapped on the window to say hello.'
'Hello,' she said. Now she exaggerated her breathing, leaning on the banister, growing older in front of him, just to make me feel especially bad.
'I'm sorry,' Bogus told her. 'I don't have anything to give you.'
She stared at his towel and touched the corners of her mouth. She really was quite lovely. In the first district, they often are. Not so whorish; more elegance than burlesque. Her coat was nice; her hair was simple and looked clean; her bones had taste.
'Really, I would like to,' Bogus said.
Again she stared cruelly at his towel, and said - too sweetly, playing a mock mother to him - 'Put some clothes on. Do you want to catch a cold?'
Then she left. He followed her nice hand along the banister all three flights down, then padded back to his typewriter; he was about to command his keys to be lyrical, to make some unembarrassed statement of self-pity, when he was interrupted by one more flushing bidet below, and by Frau Taschy scratching outside his door. 'No more typing, please,' she said. 'People are trying to sleep.'
People are trying to screw, she meant. His typing disturbed their rhythm or their consciences. But he didn't touch his funny foreign keys; they could prepare their lyrics overnight. Looking down on Spiegelgasse he observed the whore he'd twice misled arm in arm with another prostitute, headed for a coffee break. He thought about how the years must be for them, pacing young and glittering along the Karntner Strasse and the Graben, then moving out, district by district, year by year, past the Prater amusement park and along the dirty Danube, getting mauled by factory workers and technical high school students for half the fare they had once charged. But it was at least as fair as the real world, perhaps fairer, because the district you ended up in wasn't always a predictable downfall, and in real life you couldn't always choose a glittering beginning.
Out the window, Bogus watched the ringed woman with her muff - once more the cared-for hand animated her talk with another whore; her hand snaked out in the cold, brushed something off the other woman's cheek. A speck of soot? A tear turned to ice? Some smudge made by her last mate's mouth?