Brew is so scared that he needs the drive through the night to help him pull himself together....I’d say offhand the easiest way to commit suicide in Puerta del Sol is to go ask el Señor questions about his business. Some of the cops who tried it haven’t been found yet.
I really wish SRD could have used his original title for this book -- the one dividing the city between day and night.Night was something I understood. At night people did things for reasons that made sense to me.
SRD’s description of el Señor clarifies the relationship of all drug dealers with their marks. Referring to the people who attend el Señor’s night club, who might think a pusher is their benefactor, Brew says:
Whoa! Here’s a great one!...They have too much money and not enough sense to know that the man who feeds them their kicks has nothing but contempt for them.
Did you have any doubts that SRD would call el Señor's world hell?After wading a few yards along a carpet as deep and rich as lava...
And then comes the fateful meeting of Brew with el Señor’s bodyguard Muy Estobal.
Come on, SRD, are you trying to tell us Muy Estobal couldn’t pay for a jacket that fits? No, I think he’s trying to tell us Muy Estobal has threat popping out all over him. But Brew beats him up! Yes, he does! When Muy Estobal throws a gut punch just to put fear into Brew, Brew fakes being hurt worse than he is. Then he knocks Muy Estobal over a desk and tromps on his neck. Ha! Very satisfying....He was built like an armored car. His arms were so heavy they made his sleeves look like sausage casings, and he couldn’t have buttoned his jacket across that chest with a steam winch.
(For lack of Kasten at the moment, I thought we could use a little of Kasten’s tone. )
Here is the clientele of el Señor’s casino:
Anybody want to invite SRD to go gambling? I thought not....I still had time to spot at least one man and two women who didn’t have the vaguest idea that they were tossing away every cent they had. They were so stoned that you could’ve hit them over the head with a brick and they wouldn’t have known the difference.
The really screwy thing about it all was that if you’d taken a poll in the room, most of those suckers would’ve told you they were more alive right then than under any other circumstances.
Here is El Señor:
El Señor is severe about Brew having removed the ammunition from Muy Estobal’s gun. He also doesn’t like private detectives. But when Brew speaks el Señor’s name, which Manolo had told him as a kind of secret password, he listens.From his manicured fingertips to the ends of his vandyke beard and mustache, he was the perfect dapper grandee. He couldn’t have been more than five six. That desk should’ve made him look like a dwarf, but it didn’t.
Brew excuses his bad manners by an appeal to el Señor’s sense of family, his protectiveness toward his daughters. Brew tells him about his niece Alathea, and the threat to other young girls through drugs, the urgency of finding one more girl before she is killed.
We think el Señor has been reached. We think he will help. But then he demands the one price Brew wouldn’t pay. So they force the stuff on him. After all his heroism and denial and stubbornness, Brew is finally drunk again.
Then I went blind with tears while the stuff burned its way into my guts.