Tenderloin Panchatantra
Tale of the Fox
Thursday, March 19th, 2020, at 11:50pm
Rain falls from a cold black sky, turning the streets and sidewalks outside into a impressionistic panorama of glittering facades and faceless pedestrians. From within the comfortable confines of the car, the world outside is rendered down to little more than a distant slideshow as the Bentley Mulsanne slides through the narrow streets of the Tenderloin. Warm air and cool jazz circulate through the Mulsanne's cabin lulling Waraj Sind into a comfortable lassitude. The Tenderloin his been his home for over seventy years, and in the flashing strobe of oncoming headlights his mind drifted back to those first early nights after his unnoticed arrival like so many other post-world war refuges seeking to escape their pasts and reinvent themselves on this distant shore.
Before his arrival the Tenderloin had been a Mecca for nightlife and sin, before the Great Quake and Fire, the region had been home to some of the city's best brothels. The 1906 Earthquake and back-fires had erased all that and like a phoenix risen from the ashes the Tenderloin was immediately rebuilt, populated by apartment buildings and hotels. But it was Prohibition that made the Tenderloin notorious with boxing gyms, gambling, billiard halls, speakeasies and all the varieties of nightlife. And the hard-boiled detective fiction of Dashiell Hammett and his most famous character Sam Spade from the Maltese Falcon made the area more famous still and ushered in a new kind of fiction.
All of that had been before his arrival in 1945.
