Lolita

underfoot.
    Master met me in the Oriental parlor.
    “Now who are you?” he asked in a high hoarse voice, his hands thrust into his dressing-gown pockets, his eyes fixing a point to the northeast of my head. “Are you by any chance Brewster?”
    By now it was evident to everybody that he was in a fog and completely at my so-called mercy. I could enjoy myself.
    “That’s right,” I answered suavely.
“Je suis Monsieur Brustère.
Let us chat for a moment before we start.”
    He looked pleased. His smudgy mustache twitched. I removed my raincoat. I was wearing a black suit, a black shirt, no tie. We sat down in two easy chairs.
    “You know,” he said, scratching loudly his fleshy and gritty gray cheek and showing his small pearly teeth in a crooked grin, “you don’t
look
like Jack Brewster. I mean, the resemblance is not particularly striking. Somebody told me he had a brother with the same telephone company.”
    To have him trapped, after those years of repentance and rage … To look at the black hairs on the back of his pudgy hands … To wander with a hundred eyes over his purple silks and hirsute chest foreglimpsing the punctures, and mess, and music of pain … To know that this semi-animated, subhuman trickster who had sodomized my darling—oh, my darling, this was intolerable bliss!
    “No, I am afraid I am neither of the Brewsters.”
    He cocked his head, looking more pleased than ever.
    “Guess again, Punch.”
    “Ah,” said Punch, “so you have not come to bother me about those long-distance calls?”
    “You do make them once in a while, don’t you?”
    “Excuse me?”
    I said I had said I thought he had said he had never—
    “People,” he said, “people in general, I’m not accusing you, Brewster, but you know it’s absurd the way people invade this damned house without even knocking. They use the
vaterre
, they use the kitchen, they use the telephone. Phil calls Philadelphia. Pat calls Patagonia. I refuse to pay. You have a funny accent, Captain.”
    “Quilty,” I said, “do you recall a little girl called Dolores Haze, Dolly Haze? Dolly called Dolores, Colo.?”
    “Sure, she may have made those calls, sure. Any place. Paradise, Wash., Hell Canyon. Who cares?”
    “I do, Quilty. You see, I am her father.”
    “Nonsense,” he said. “You are not. You are some foreign literary agent. A Frenchman once translated my
Proud Flesh
as
La Fierté de la Chair.
Absurd.”
    “She was my child, Quilty.”
    In the state he was in he could not really be taken aback by anything, but his blustering manner was not quite convincing. A sort of wary inkling kindled his eyes into a semblance of life. They were immediately dulled again.
    “I’m very fond of children myself,” he said, “and fathers are among my best friends.”
    He turned his head away, looking for something. He beat his pockets. He attempted to rise from his seat.
    “Down!” I said—apparently much louder than I intended.
    “You need not roar at me,” he complained in his strange feminine manner. “I just wanted a smoke. I’m dying for a smoke.”
    “You’re dying anyway.”
    “Oh, chucks,” he said. “You begin to bore me. What do you want? Are you French, mister? Woolly-woo-boo-are? Let’s go to the barroomette and have a stiff—”
    He saw the little dark weapon lying in my palm as if I were offering it to him.
    “Say!” he drawled (now imitating the underworld numbskull of movies), “that’s a swell little gun you’ve got there. What d’you want for her?”
    I slapped down his outstretched hand and he managed to knock over a box on a low table near him. It ejected a handful of cigarettes.
    “Here they are,” he said cheerfully. “You recall Kipling:
une femme est une femme, mais un Caporal est une cigarette?
Now we need matches.”
    “Quilty,” I said. “I want you to concentrate. You are going to die in a moment. The hereafter for all we know may be an eternal state of excruciating insanity. You smoked your last cigarette yesterday. Concentrate. Try to understand what is happening to you.”
    He kept taking the Drome cigarette apart and munching bits of it.
    “I am willing to try,” he said. “You are either Australian, or a German refugee. Must you talk to me? This is a Gentile’s house, you know. Maybe, you’d better run along. And do stop demonstrating that gun. I’ve an old Stern-Luger in the music room.”
    I pointed Chum at his slippered foot and crushed the trigger. It clicked. He