Omaha daily bee., 1921-07-17
By DOROTHY THOMPSON.

| Vienna, July 16.-Do you want to
sell handful of jewels or a wagon
load OF grain-and no questions
asked? There is market in Vienna
where it can be done.
If you are a Philistine you have
probably wandered in and out of the
place half a dozen times during a
short sojourn in the city without re-
alizing that you were in the most
famous "schieber" exchange in all
central Europe and the near east.
Atlantis cafe bears no visible sign tc
distinguish it from any other coffee
house along the Ringstrasse. Only
the dealers in illegal traffic have put
their cross over its door, and if you
belong to the famous international
of the profteers, beside which the
Third of Moscow is harmless as a
dove, be you Italian, or Serbian, or
Hungarian, or German, the Atlantis
is the Mecca of your journeys.
1t stands on the busiest Vienna
street across from the great Imperial
hotel. Behind its plate glass win
dows, candidly open to every passer-
by, is large room, upholstered in
red leather, with comfortably-padded
benches along the walls and around
the posts which support the ceiling.
Arm chairs are fitted into cozy
hooks and efficient walters trot from
table to table, carrying syphons, fill
ing liqueur glasses, pouring Turkish
coffee thickly out of little copper
mugs. The orchestra, goaded by a
temperamental conductor, sighs out
the strains of a heavy, honey-sweet
Viennese valse. Altogether typ
ical Vienna cafe.
| But if-instead of burying your
nose in the Neue Erie Presse or the
Arbeiter Zeitung, both of which are
handily at your elbow, supported on
frames fitted with handles-you look
about you keenly you will hear
strange whisperings and see hands
reaching out to each other under
cover of the table, and now and then
you will see something CLEAN in
transit. Or you will see eager heads
bent together over some small pack
age wrapped in tissue paper, and
over and over again you will catch
one word, repeated in all languages,
l"Combien?" "Quanto?" "Skolko?"
"Wie Viel?" "How much?"
The Uninitiated Barred.
If you want to do, business in the
Atlantis you must know the ropes.
This is no place where you come in,
put down your money and ask for
what lou want. You would be
thrown out if you did, with indig-
nant protests that this is no shop, but
cafe. No, you must know exactly
to which table to go in order to dis
pose of grain, jewels, money, women.
Yes, even the women are bought
and sold, SO they say, in the Atlantis
cafe. Pretty Viennese, with their
shoes run down at the heel and their
stockings in holes, are offered posi-
tions as actresses in Rio Janeiro or
Bueno Aires and are contracted for
and shipped away. What becomes of
them afterward no one knows, but
many hazard a guess.
When you have seated yourself at
what you judge to be the right table
the conversation begins in cryptic
phrases. Recently a man said to an
other laconically: II have wagon"
The other replied equally laeon-
ically), "How much?"
The first man named his price.
The second: Every dear. White
or spotted?"
The first, snorting, white or
spotted! Are you crazy?" And
he goes away in huff. He had
been trying to sell wheat at the
bean table!
Around the different tables diff
ferent nationalties gather. 1t is