Black Mask (Vol. 20, No. 8 — October 1937)

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The Parson cracks his Luger at double-crossers.

The Montecita club on upper Leeward Road is the one spot in Cariba where you can find half the male population on any given night. Its horseshoe cabaret floor is always crowded, always noisy with conversation in three or four tongues, alive with the clinking of bottles and glasses and the scraping of chairs and feet; the blurred rhythms and dark, primitive gourd rattlings of the cubañola orchestra. It is a place meant for pleasure.

Once each week a ringside table was occupied by the beefy British resident-General and his stringy, horse-toothed British wife. Caste lines are lax in Cariba, “the little Paris of the Caribbean,” and Lee Fong, the plump smiling Chinese proprietor of the Montecita, stood at the glass curtain which is the street entrance and warmly shook the hand of each patron — black, yellow, white and the in-between color variants.

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