A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

One Night in Barcelona

In the Spanish hotel Maxwell Jones was still sleeping as evening drew on. His face was merged in the shadow where the pillows met the wall. His hands were hidden in white kid gloves. He always slept with white kid gloves on his hands; he always had, ever since he’d first fronted a band. “For my sax solos, you know. It keeps them soft and flexible,” he’d once explained to the boys in the outfit.

They’d laughed about it a lot behind his back, Stateside, when they were traveling buses and getting five hundred a stand. They’d stopped laughing now that they were the sensation of places like Brussels, Nice — and this one, Barcelona — and getting three thousand a week.

Six was the hour his day began. Six in the evening. As the lights began to twinkle outside in the Plaza de Catalunya, as the summit of the mountain Tibidabo, in the distance, darkened to rose-mauve in the afterglow of a gone sun.

Nunez, his valet, entered the room where Jones was sleeping, bent over him and prodded him on the shoulder.

“Senor,” he said. “Senor Maxi.”

“Fade it,” Jones mumbled blurredly. “Two’s my point.” He opened his eyes. “I was cleaning up, anyway,” he told the valet. “That’s as good a time as any to quit a game.” He put on a dressing-gown Nunez was holding out for him. It had a little silver saxophone embroidered on its breast.

“Whenever you’re ready,” Nunez ventured, “your bath is drawn.”

Jones flung the dressing-gown on the floor and kicked it out of the way.

“I’ll use bay rum,” he decreed. “It saves time.”

A waiter came in next grimacing, cringing, and clasping a bill of fare between both hands as if it were a breviary.

“The senor permits?” he faltered.

“Well, it’s about time!” Jones snarled, turning his head and pulling out the wing-tie Nunez was in the act of doing up. “Maybe you think I can live on treble notes all night long?”

He took a pencil from the tremulous waiter and gashed a number of items down the line in rapid succession. “This, and this, and this!” he ordered. “And I want it up here inside of five minutes, get me?”

“Yes, senor. How many places does the senor want laid out?”

“Count ’em out there as you leave,” said Jones gruffly. “They’re all there, the sponges. They wouldn’t miss a free feed.”

“Yes sen—”

“Say senor once more,” Jones shouted, “and I’ll throw something at you!”

The waiter got out fast.

When three short tables had been brought into the outside room, placed end to end to make one long narrow one, and covered over with linen, dishes, glassware, and long thin loaves of Spanish bread Jones entered from the bedroom like a lord, dinner-jacket skintight across his broad shoulders, white handkerchief arrow-heading up out of his breast-pocket, white kid gloves on his hands once more. He ate in them, too.

“Evening, everybody,” he said with an air of feudal hospitality.

They all sat down at the table. That was what they had been waiting for, some of them for two hours.

There were eight of them present tonight, not counting Jones. Bill Nichols (trumpet) and girl, Buzz Davis (drums) and girl, “Hot-shot” Henderson (bass trombone) and Roy Daniels (piano), and two unattached girls, that were nobody’s girls, but just there for the food. They’d been coming around for about two weeks now.

With the fish course, a messenger entered the room carrying a small cardboard box.

“For the Senor Maxi,” he announced, “from an admirer.”

Jones opened it and looked inside. There was a single giantsized white carnation, its stem carefully wrapped in silver paper, a pin for eventual use affixed to it. Also a note on orchid paper.

Jones gave this last to Nunez to read aloud, written Spanish being over his head.

Everyone turned around in their chairs to listen, as though a public speech were being made. Nunez cleared his throat and began to read: “I will be there again tonight, just as I am every night. You will see me but you will not know me. But if you will wear my flower in your coat, and if you will play Symphonic for me, you will make me supremely happy.”

“(Signed) ‘An aficionada who has not the courage to come closer.’ ”

“Every night regular, for three weeks now,” Bill Nichols kidded. “Her old man must be in the florist business.”

“Maybe he runs a funeral parlor,” Davis suggested.

Toward the end of the meal, which was signalized by the pouring of boiling-hot coffee into large glasses partly filled with sugar, Nunez, who had been over at the partly open door, conferring with someone unseen on the outside of it, came back to Jones and leaning across his shoulder, whispered:

“There’s a man outside wants to see you, senor.”

“That’s nothing new,“Jones answered patronizingly. “There’s always someone wanting to see me, in this town. Ask him what he wants.”

“I already asked, and he wouldn’t tell me, senor.” Nunez shrugged. “He’s from your own country.”

Jones was suddenly wary. He shook his head.

“Tell him no. Not tonight—”

He stopped and looked. The ineffectively closed door had slowly swung back again and the man was in anyway. The chattering died down, and the others all turned and stared, taken back by this unmistakable piece of lčse-majesté.

He had on a dark-gray suit that could have stood a little pressing. There was a wrinkled topcoat slung over his arm. He carried a well-worn hat, brim slanted down in front. His eyes were blue, his skin-color was on the ruddy side, and his hair was cut down to bristles and sandy-light in shade.

“Close that door and keep—” Jones started to order Nunez, displeased.

But the man did it himself, from the inside now, and then came on slowly. He stopped about four or five feet from Jones’ chair.

“You’re Maxwell Jones,” he said.

“Do I know you?” Jones answered.

“You start tonight.”

“And maybe I finish tonight, too.”

“I wouldn’t count on that. I’d like a little talk with you.”

Jones picked up his coffee-glass, put it to his lips and put it down again, without drinking anything.

Then he touched his napkin to the place the glass had touched.

“I’m eating, can’t you see that?” But he said it a little thinly.

The man didn’t answer; he just stood there waiting.

It was in English so the girls were cut off from the sense of it. But they must have gotten something of its tense, hushed import. None of them moved or spoke. All watched Jones and the stranger.

The man tired of waiting. He broke the silence. “Do you want it in front of all your friends, or do you want it just between the two of us? You can have it either way.” He shifted his topcoat a little higher on his arm.

Jones rose at last.

“Okay,” he said grudgingly. “Come inside.”

“Let’s do that,” the man agreed ironically, and followed him into the bedroom and closed the door.

Jones seated himself on a chair, nervously turning a cigarette around and around in his fingers. The intruder stood there looking down at him. His topcoat had been flung across the top of the dresser, and his hands were sandwiched into the back pockets of his trousers. One of them, on the right, had a peculiar shape through the cloth, like a wedge, ending in a stubby rounded coil of metal. He just kept them there like that, while he talked.

“You’re Maxwell Jones, and you’re thirty-two.”

“And you?” said Jones, with a rapidly evaporating arrogance that was escaping from him like steam and leaving him more wilted by the minute. “Or isn’t this an introduction, maybe?”

“You don’t need my name,” the man said with a half-smile. “One, four, oh, two, one, two. It’s on here.” He took something out of his pocket, the left one, and held it for Jones to see, then put it back.

Jones dropped his cigarette, picked it up, then threw it away for good.

“You’re from a little place outside of Nashville called Liberty.” The man gave that half-smile again. “Most people never heard of it, but you and I have, haven’t we?”

“I’ve never been there in my life,” Jones said haughtily.

“They think you have, and, friend, I just work for them.”

“Who’s they?” Jones asked. His eyes darted too wide of their mark, then came back center to the other man again.

“Now who do you suppose?” the man said ironically. “Sheriff Carney, the constabulary, just about the whole community, I reckon.”

Jones moistened his lips. “What — what for?”

“They want to talk to you.”

“What about?”

“This and that. About Amy Dwyer, the sheriff’s daughter. About Mark Claybourne, son of the councilman. I guess you know.” He elevated himself a little on the balls of his feet, sank down again on his heels. “They were both murdered, at the same time and place. I guess you know all that. Pretty grim stuff.

“They left a powerful lot of mourners. Influential mourners. Sheriff Carney. Amy was the apple of his eye. Greg Dwyer, her husband. Mark’s wife who’s the daughter of another member of the town council. Those three families, between them, just about own the community.

“It was more than a double killing, really. It was a triple one. Doc Stevens had promised Carney a grandchild — his first. All those people, not just two, were killed in one way or another. Mark’s wife is as good as lying in the grave with him; she’s just a ghost that goes walking around in a woman’s dress.

“Greg Dwyer has to be picked up and carried home most every night from the tavern; and you can tell which way they took him by the alcohol smelling up the air. All those people paying up, for just a moment’s heat run wild.” He looked at Jones bitterly.

Jones’ face was the color of wet cement. He stood up, shaking all over. He clenched a fist and pounded it against his forehead.

“I didn’t do it,” he said hollowly. He pounded again, and then a third time. “I didn’t do it.”

The other man spread his hand open.

“Tell them,” he said coldly. “That’s all you’ve got to do. I don’t care whether you did or not, I just work for them.”

Jones sat down again, his arms loose now, like ropes dangling toward the floor.

“I wasn’t even there. I’ve never been in the place. I was born in Chicago—”

The man didn’t consult anything. Any memorandum or anything.

“Sure. At Twenty-three-eleven Paige Street, in the back room on the fifth floor. At eleven at night, March eighteenth, Nineteen-Fifteen. Certificate issued by Doctor Sam Rollini—”

“Cut it out,” Jones panted.

“The double murder in Liberty was committed by an Eddie Jones. And the baby born in Chicago was baptized Edward Jones. But there was a middle initial: M. The mother’s name had been Edith Maxwell.” The man grinned bleakly. “What did you do with the ‘Ed’? Drop it in the middle of the ocean on your way over?”

“There’s a hundred thousand Joneses,” Jones said desperately.

The other man shook his head smilingly. “Not over here. Then why didn’t you stay where there are a hundred thousand other Joneses? You would have been safer. That was a fool play on your part.” He chuckled grimly. “And up in lights, yet, blazing away into the night. Maxi Jones, King of the Saxophones. “He shook his head again, marveling at it. “You were doing all right over here, weren’t you?”

Jones began wringing his hands nervously. A faraway, wistful look came into his eyes, as if he were contemplating something that was already over, beyond recall.

“We packed ’em in in Paris,” he faltered, as if he were pleading some sort of a case.

“You’ll pack them in back there, too,” the man promised.

“We were the biggest thing that hit the town since Josephine Baker brought over the Charleston.”

“You’ll be the biggest thing to hit Tennessee since the Darrow Case.”

“We were held over six weeks in Cannes.”

“You’ll be held over about three weeks back home. That’s about the usual time it takes them to get ready after sentence has been passed.”

Jones’ head went down; the other man could only see the top of it for a minute.

The man hoisted an elbow and looked at his watch. “Okay. Start packing.”

Jones’ head came up again, with a sort of final defiance.

“This is Spanish soil. You can’t touch me.”

The man tapped his own chest. “I’ve got an extradition warrant in here that says yes. I’ve got these—” He took out a pair of handcuffs, twirled them once, put them away again “—that say sure thing. And I’ve got this—” He showed him a gun for a minute, put that away again too “—that says ‘You bet your sweet life.’ So let’s get started.”

Jones stood up slowly.

“Where will the — the arraignment be held? Nashville?”

The other man shook his head. “Liberty. It’s got to be held in the county in which the crime took place.”

Jones tottered, and acted as though he were going to fall for a minute. He took hold of the back of the chair and held onto that.

“You’re not taking me back to be tried for my life. You’re taking me back to certain death. I’m dead already, standing here in front of you. There won’t even be any trial; there won’t be time for it to get started. I’ll be torn to pieces first.”

The other man eyed him without blinking. “They’re dead, too, both of them,” he said. “Everyone has to die sometime.”

“But not at thirty-two, with flaming gasoline poured over you.”

“They won’t do that,” the other man said. Not very strenuously.

“Are you from there?” was all Jones answered.

“I happen to be from upper New York State, myself. But that doesn’t matter.”

“I thought so,” was all Jones said. He went over to the floor-to-ceiling windows and stood looking out.

The other man watched him.

“Don’t go out on the balcony,” he said. “This is three floors up.” He stayed where he was. “Say good-by to it.” He gave Jones time. Finally he said: “Ready now?”

Jones turned around.

“All right, I’m ready,” he said. “I guess I always knew the number would end like this. Well, I’m over my stage-fright now. I’m all set. You won’t have any trouble with me. Only—” He glanced around once more, longingly, at the powdery, lighted scene down below, outside the windows.

“Only what?” said the other man.

“Only, when a man’s in the death-pen, they give him one last meal.”

“You just got through. What was that, in there?”

“Give me one more night. Just one more night here in Barcelona.”

“That’s what you’re going to have. The ship doesn’t leave until tomorrow after sundown. The planes are booked solid, so I’ve got to take you back the slow way.”

“I don’t mean that,” Jones said. “Let me play one last date at the club. Let me stand up there and say good-by with my fingers on the sax-keys. Let me see the crowds and the lights, and hear ’em howl for more. It’s going to be awfully dark and quiet where you’re putting me. Just a plain pine box without room to turn over in. Let me have just one more night, a farewell round.”

“Do you think I’m crazy? And what am I supposed to be doing? Sitting here in the hotel room waiting for you with a lamp burning in the window?”

“I didn’t mean alone. I meant in your custody. You’ll be right with me. I won’t be out of your sight. You’ve got the cuff-links, you’ve got the gat. What chance are you taking?”

“None,” the man said flatly. “Because I won’t be doing it.”

“Not even if I gave you my word?”

“What is this? I’ll give you mine instead. A short ‘No.’ How’s that?”

“That’s that, I guess,” Jones admitted mournfully.

“What’re you so leary about, anyway? You’ll get a fair trial.”

“Take a good look at me, mister, and then say that.”

The man took the look, but he didn’t say it.

“Yeah,” Jones agreed softly, at the unspoken admission.

The man got a little sore.

“Ah, don’t look at me like that!” he said. “That’s the way they always look at you, all of them! It reminds me of a—” He didn’t finish it.

“What?” Jones prompted.

“None of your business!” The man scowled. But then he went ahead and finished it anyway. “Of a dog I picked up in the street one day, right after it had been run over. I had to use my gun. Just before I did, it rolled its eyes up at me and gave me that same kind of look.”

“They like to live, too,” Jones agreed. “All of us do. Only, the dogs get off lucky. Other dogs don’t set fire to them.”

“Why do you keep harping on that?” the man said.

“Because they were roasted to death in a cabin, Claybourne and Amy Dwyer. And because Sheriff Carney swore that if he ever got his hands on the man that did it, he’d barbecue him alive.”

“Then you were there in the town,” the man said quickly. “To know that and to hear it. That was just an outburst of grief. Carney didn’t really mean it.”

“It was an unspoken promise, a pledge, that every man in the town will help him keep when the day comes,” Jones said. “I can tell you’re not from down around there, or you’d understand.”

The man didn’t say anything. He kept staring at the band leader with an odd intensity.

Jones nodded.

“Yes, I was there in the town when it happened,” he said. “And I’m ready to take it; I made up my mind over there by the window a few minutes ago. I’m ready to die. I’m willing to go back with you without lifting a finger. But that isn’t what I asked you for before. I only wanted one last night, just because it is so certain. And you won’t give it to me—”

He must have seen something in the other’s face.

“Well, if you won’t give it to me of your own accord, how about letting me try to win it from you? How about giving me a chance, a sporting chance? I’ll give odds. If you win, I’ll go out of here without another word. If I win, just one more night for a finale, six hours more until the club closes down at four?”

He took out a pair of dice. Clicked and cast them. Bent and picked them up without seeing what they’d made.

“What do you think this is?” the detective said. “Rolling them to see who buys the drinks at a bar?”

“Be a sport,” Jones said in a strangely husky, throbbing voice. “I’m your prisoner anyway. This doesn’t alter the main idea. Hold out your hand.”

The detective didn’t move but Jones reached for his hand and put the dice in his palm.

“Are they straight?” the detective asked drily.

“They’re straight,” Jones said. “I make three thousand a week here, American. When you’re in that bracket, it’s the fun you want out of them, not the money. If they were loaded, I couldn’t get any fun out of them.”

“I see what you mean,” the detective said.

“Go ahead,” Jones said. “I’ll take the highest odds you can stack against me. So high they’re impossible to beat. One throw. One throw apiece.”

The detective was still fiddling with them.

“Those odds aren’t so steep,” he said drily. “Suppose I pitch a three or four? You’ve got eight chances against one to better it.”

“You didn’t get me. Not like in the game. One throw, I said. And I have to make your point. Repeat it in my own throw.”

“You can’t do it,” the detective said firmly. He was beginning to vibrate the dice a little in his palm. “It can’t be done. You know that yourself. Why do you want to make it so tough for yourself?”

“Because I’m a fatalist,” Jones answered. “And I want to find out if I’m meant to have this one last night or not. This is my way of pinning fate down and finding out the answer.”

“Now I know they’re spiked,” the detective said skeptically.

“There’s the phone. Call down and order another pair.”

The detective went over to it, put his hand on it, watched Jones.

Then he came away again. “Now I know they’re on the up,” he said.

“Throw,” Jones pleaded. “I can’t stand much more of it.” He wiped off his forehead.

“I haven’t made any agreement,” the detective warned him. “I haven’t made my bargain with you.” But he was starting to beat them up, first slowly, then faster and hotter. “This is between you and fate, strictly.”

“I know,” Jones said. “But I’m beginning to know you.”

The detective suddenly let go of the dice with a jerk, and they landed. They turned up a two.

Jones didn’t move, didn’t even go over to where he could read them.

“What was it?” he asked from where he was.

The detective told him, picked them up. “That’s a bad point,” he said grimly. “I don’t think ‘fate’ and you have much chance. That’s the toughest point of the lot. If it had been an eight, for instance, you could have made it with maybe two fours, six and two, five and three—”

“I know how the combinations run,” Jones answered quietly. “But maybe it’s just as well. Now I’ll find out for sure whether fate wants me to have this one last night or not. Now there’ll be no mistake about it.”

The detective handed him the dice. But then Jones just stood there holding them, for such a long time that finally the detective suggested: “Now you’ve lost your nerve. Now you want to call it off.”

Jones shook his head slowly. “You don’t call fate off like that. What is to be, is to be. I’m just wondering which answer’s waiting for me, that’s all.”

He started to pump his hand. Then he opened it toward the floor, and the cubes flew out, and hit. The detective, watching him, saw him keep his eyes closed as he did so.

He opened his eyes, and without moving, said: “Read them for me.”

The detective went over and got down, knuckling one hand to the floor. He stayed that way a minute, much longer than he needed to just read them. Then he gathered them together and got up. He still didn’t say anything.

“Why is your face so white and strange-looking?” Jones said.

“I’d like to keep these,” the detective said. “Do you mind?” He went ahead and put them in his pocket without waiting for the owner’s permission.

“What was it?” Jones asked.

The detective took a deep breath. “It was a two,” he said, his voice a trifle bated.

Jones sank down suddenly in the chair, as though his legs had collapsed.

“I sure was meant to have that night,” he said, staring sightlessly before him.

The detective took out a handkerchief and patted it across his upper lip. “I never saw anything like that,” he admitted.

Jones looked up at him finally, focusing his gaze from far away.

“How about it?” he said.

The detective kept him waiting. He took out the manacles, and weighed them in the center of his hand, and threw them up, and caught them. Then he put them away again. He took out a .38, and checked it, and let Jones see that it was loaded. He let it lie flat in his hand for a moment, and gave it an emphatic smack with his other palm.

“You don’t get a second break,” he said. “Is that understood? You don’t get any warning to halt and come back. You just get all six of these slugs at once, straight through the back. You’re in my custody, and I have the legal right to do that to you. I wouldn’t even be questioned for it.

“So be careful how you bend to get a drink of water from a cooler. And be careful how you move your hands, even if it’s just to take up the saxophone. And be careful where you stand, when you’re around me. I may not like it, but you’ll be dead before you find it out. If you want it that way, you can have it. You don’t get a second break.”

He put the gun away.

“But you do get a first. You get your one last night in Barcelona.”

Jones exhaled slowly. “You can tell you’re not from — down around there,” was all he said.

After a moment or two he got up from the chair.

“It’s not taking on death that’s tough, it’s leaving off life. I better change my collar. It got all wilted since we came in here.” He opened a cigarette case, looked in it. “I guess there’s enough here to hold me until morning. After that—” He made a gesture of throwing it away.

“What’s your name?” he added, evening the wings of his tie. “Do you mind?”

“Not at all,” the detective answered. “Freshman. Kendall Freshman.”

Jones nodded his head toward the closed door.

“Do they have to know? The other fellows?”

“Not particularly. I’m not a press agent, I’m just a dick.”

Jones poured a jigger of brandy, shot it through his teeth. Then he squared his shoulders, turned to face the door.

“I’m ready. Let’s go. Just one more night of being king.”

Freshman tapped his pocket. “Remember, one false move, and the king is dead.”

There was a round of introductory handshaking in the outside room, sponsored by Jones.

“Meet my friend Mr. Freshman. He’s sticking with me from now on.”

No one asked any questions; it seemed as if, in their business, they were used to people drifting in, from nowhere; drifting on again, to nowhere.

Each man’s world was his own. They let him be.

Jones broke it up. “Come on, let’s travel. It’s almost clubtime.”

They got rid of the girls by the simple expedient of dropping them then and there. Henderson gave his street pick-up a farewell pat on the flank in parting, but the rest didn’t even bid theirs that much of a good-by.

There was a concerted scramble for the stray cigarettes left behind, and the half-emptied bottles of wine, and even the unfinished portions of food (to be jealously wrapped and taken home to their families) on the part of the female detachment, almost before the door had closed behind their recent hosts. But the hosts seemed to take it all for granted, paid no attention. The squealing and heated imprecations carried all the way down the hall to where they stood grouped, waiting for the wirework lift to come up for them.

Jones and his escort stood very close together, a little to the rear. The others were in front of them.

“What time do you open?” Freshman asked.

“We don’t go on till eleven. A tango band warms it up for us until then. Nothing much doing any earlier. They eat late here in Spain, you know.”

They trooped into the shaky lift. Jones and Freshman stood with their feet touching, toe to toe and heel to heel, the left against the right. Freshman had his hand back somewhere, to the rear of him.

They emerged onto the crowded Plaza de Catalunya, with lights spotted all over it, like a huge pinball machine with the glass left off it. They hollered and they cat-called, and Henderson even blew a couple of wild notes on his instrument, and then they finally got a cab. Something that looked as though it had been through the Civil War. The Spanish one. And probably had.

They all piled into it together, stepping on each other’s feet, and drove down the Rambla to its lower end.

Where it narrowed, a vivid scarlet neon-sign flashed on and off against the night sky, proclaiming: Club New York, and underneath in slightly smaller but no less fiery lettering: El Hot Jazz, Orquestra Americana, Maxwell Jones, Rey de los Saxofonos, each on a separate line.

“Billing,” commented Freshman, as it suddenly turned the inside of the cab brick-red when they got near. “That’s what tipped you off to me,” he said to Jones after the others had cleared out ahead of them. “I was just passing through here. I wasn’t even stopping over. I already had my plane ticket to Madrid in my pocket when that thing hit me in the eye through the cab window.”

“I knew it was risky,” Jones admitted, regarding it hypnotically. He gave a deep sigh. “But it was worth it.”

Freshman looked at him curiously. “Does it do what they say to you, to see your own name up in lights like that? I’m just a dick, I wouldn’t know.”

“It does what they say to you. That’s your pay-check. That’s your bread and butter and wine.”

They went in, cased instruments in hand. Single file except at the end, then Jones and Freshman side by side, elbow to elbow. The only difference being their strides; counterpoint, and not in step, otherwise, it would have been almost a lateral lock-step.

A long-drawn, shuddering sigh of ecstasy went up all over the room.

“Oooooh, Maxi.”

“You’re doing all right for yourself,” Freshman remarked. “No wonder you wanted one last night. Funny world.”

“Ain’t it, though? On one side of the water, a bum. On the other side, a king. Same man.”

They went into the dressing-room and sat around smoking. It wasn’t meant for seven, but they all got in somehow. The ones who couldn’t find anything to sit on, sat on what they had already, spreading handkerchiefs or newspaper-sheets between them and the floor.

Freshman stood up against the door, its seam running down his spine. He and Jones had broken contact for the first time since leaving the hotel-bedroom, but there was only one door.

Nobody asked Freshman anything further. They already seemed to take him for granted by this time. Just one more moocher who had attached himself to the outfit’s leader; only this time a transatlantic one. Maybe cashing in on some past favor, back home in the lean days.

A knock hit Freshman in the kidneys, and a voice said through him, with a curiously ventriloquist-like effect: “Listo para el senor Maxi.”

They filed out. Again Jones and Freshman were last, again they were side by side.

“How are you going to fix this?” the detective asked.

“You want to stay in the wings? I’ll be in full view of you there.”

“But the rest of the room won’t.”

“You want to come right up onto the stand with us? Sit in the back line in an empty chair?”

“No, thanks. I don’t play anything,” Freshman said drily. “Push a table right up against it, front and center. I’ll be sitting right under you while you lead. And when you knock off, no wings, you come and sit with me.”

Then he added: “I never take it out of my pocket, you know. I shoot right through it.”

He showed him two small darned patches, where there had been round holes made in the weave. About like moth-holes, but not made by moths.

“I believe you,” Jones said wryly, “without that.”

They passed the tango band going off, and looks without any lost love in them were exchanged by the rival musicians.

They filed up a short flight of slatted steps, and came out onto the stand and in full view of the night club. The pinkish light bothered Freshman’s eyes for a second or two, until he got them gauged to it. Chairs were scraped around and put in place, and stands shifted over to match them. The tango band sat in different format.

Jones was bending down over the rim talking to the headwaiter. Somebody applauded, and he broke off to bow an acknowledgement, then went ahead. The headwaiter nodded, glanced at Freshman, shrugged. He went off.

Two waiters came over carrying a spindly table between them. They shoved it up against the pit of the bandstand. It was isolated; there was nothing but dancing-space all around it. It got the full benefit of the copper-colored spot sighted at the dance floor and stand. Then they dragged over a couple of chairs.

“There you are,” Jones said. “That what you wanted?”

Freshman didn’t answer. He vaulted down over the low edge of the stand, right where he was, instead of going down the ladder at the side and coming around front again.

He sat down on one of the two chairs. That way he was looking straight forward at the band. And its leader. That way the glare was behind him, and in their faces. That way the dancers were behind him, wouldn’t distract him by their constant movement.

He could feel people looking at him from all sides for a minute or two, but it soon wore off. They must have thought he was some particularly close friend of Jones, to demand and get such special privileges.

A waiter tried to put a cloth down, but Freshman wouldn’t let him.

“Leave it plain,” he said gruffly. “Cloths can be jerked off and then thrown over you, tangling you up.”

The waiter tried to put down a glass ashtray, and he wouldn’t let him do that either. After an ashtray gets full, its contents can be suddenly thrown in your eyes, blinding you.

“Does the senor want anything at all?” the waiter demanded affrontedly.

“Just keep back and give me lots of room,” Freshman said. “I want to watch the music.” That was the right word, too; he wanted to see, not hear.

They had spread themselves all around now and were in their places. They were making noises like crickets; squeaky, metallic crickets.

Jones tapped his stick twice, spread his arms.

“Number Fifteen on the books,” he said.

A rocket-bomb went off and people were dancing all around on three sides of Freshman. He went ahead looking steadily at Jones. There wasn’t much to see, from the back like that.

Jones must have had an expensive barber. The back of his neck, where the hair tapered off, was a beautiful job. None of these straight lines running across. His coat rippled a little across his back, with the play of his shoulders, which kept time to the beat. One leg kept jittering up and down, too. That was about all there was to see.

They played three numbers through, without a break.

Then the music stopped as though a switch had been thrown, and the stillness was deafening.

“Take five,” Jones said to his musicians.

He came down the way Freshman had, vaulting over the edge, and sat down at the table with him.

He was panting a little, Freshman noticed, although he’d been standing still in one place; so all that shaking must have been work, too.

He was a band leader to the bitter end.

“How’d it sound?” he asked Freshman.

“Screwy,” the latter said. “It hits the ceiling first, and then comes straight down from there.”

“That’s because you’re under the edge of the stand.”

“And that’s where I’m staying,” Freshman let him know.

Jones’ eyes kept roving questioningly over the three sides of the room behind Freshman, going from table to table, lingering a moment, then going on again.

“What’re you looking for, a raiding party to rescue you?” Freshman asked.

“No, that ain’t it.” Jones smiled bleakly. “I got this.” He took the message that had come with the lapel-flower out of his pocket and showed it to him. “We’re going to be shipmates for the next ten days so you may as well know about it.”

Freshman read it, didn’t say anything.

“She keeps teasing me. I know she’s been here every night. I know she’s in the room right now, somewhere over there, looking straight at me. The hell of it is, which one is she? If she doesn’t tip me off tonight, she’s going to be one night too late.”

His men were starting to straggle out onto the stand again. He stood up unhurriedly.

“Well, happy half-notes,” he said. “Be with you.”

He was lithe and agile. He got up the way he’d come down; with the help of one hand and a catlike swing of the legs.

The musical thunderstorm broke again. The flattened-out dancing shadows wheeled slowly across the surface of Freshman’s table. He sat and watched the rippling of Jones’ back muscles under the cloth of his coat.

They seemed to play sets of three each time, and then rest. He came back again. He took a cigarette out of an expensive gold case and thumbed an expensive gold lighter to it. Then as an after-thought, he offered one to Freshman.

He began talking about it, suddenly. The other thing.

“I didn’t do it, you know,” he blurted out. He looked down at the table, as though he could see the whole thing reflected on there.

“I’d say that, too,” Freshman said tonelessly.

“You’d say that, too. Only, they’d give you a chance to prove it. They won’t do the same for me.”

Freshman didn’t dispute that, somehow. “I want you to know about it,” Jones insisted.

“I don’t have to know,” Freshman parried. “I’m not a priest. I’m wearing a tie.”

Jones brought his fist down on the table.

“I have to tell somebody about it! It’s been shut up in me too long. And this is my night for spilling it.”

Freshman sighed with a sort of wearied patience.

“Go ahead,” he said, “I’m listening.”

“I was the driver for the Carneys; the old man, the sheriff, and his son-in-law, Greg Dwyer. I guess you know that. I was the family chauffeur. They had a Packard job, old as Methuselah, but it still ran. Then they had a little Ford coupe. She used to drive that, Miss Amy. Young Mrs. Dwyer. It was her own. A present from her father. I still see it all in my nightmares. Peagreen.

“She’d go out in it in the afternoons, alone. Just for a drive, maybe. It must have been just for a drive. Always out in the country, not toward the village, like for shopping or anything. She’d come back in a couple of hours. About the time I’d go in and pick up the two menfolk.”

His musicians were coming back onto the stand.

He turned his head abruptly, called: “Buzz, lead the next three for me will you? Twenty, Six, and Nine. I’m telling my life-story to this man.”

“Wait’ll Eight-oh-two hears about this,” somebody said and grinned cheerfully.

Jones went ahead telling it to Freshman.

“First she’d just go once a week. Then afterwards, two or three times. Then pretty nearly every day. She’d always take a book with her. I guess she’d stop and read it in the car. Or maybe get out and sit in the shade of a tree. She was a slow reader, though. The jacket on the book was always the same color.

“There was an old backwoods woman did the washing for them. Took it home and brought it back. I met her once at the gate, coming in. She told me she’d spotted the pea-green coupe standing still off the road, in a grove of trees, miles out. She told me there wasn’t anybody in it.

“She asked me what I supposed Miss Amy went all the way out there alone like that for. She told me she thought she spotted another car, a tan roadster, also empty, on the opposite side of the road. But this was a considerable distance below, not anywhere near the first car. And she sort of looked at me — you know how these old women do.

“I told her she ought to learn minding her own business. I told her she better keep that big mouth of hers closed.

“Maybe she did. Maybe it was somebody else’s mouth. Maybe nobody’s mouth at all. Sometimes things are just in the air, and they’re catching from one person to another, like headcolds.

“I thought Greg Dwyer acted kind of strange, pretty soon after that. His face was kind of white and set, like there was something troubling him. Something private, between himself and his conscience.

“Then the very next time she’d gone off on one of her lonesome rides, all of a sudden there he was back at the gate, in the middle of the afternoon, without any warning. I wasn’t supposed to pick him and the sheriff up until evening.

“He didn’t ask for her; he didn’t ask any questions. He didn’t even come into the house. I think I was the only one who saw him. The others were all round in back. He just stayed there by the gate. He beckoned, and I dropped the garden hose and went over to him. He said he felt like taking a little drive and told me to get the car out.

“I brought it around and he got in. Next to me, in front.

“ ‘Not that way,’ he said when I started off. ‘Out into the country.’

“I backed and turned, and headed the other way. We went for miles. Way, way out. Farther out, I think, than I’d ever been before. Suddenly he said, ‘Stop here!’ ”

Maxi Jones paused and drew a folded handkerchief out of his pocket and carefully mopped his brow.

“I didn’t see anything to stop for,” he went on. “Nothing at all. On one side there was a wooded patch. And on the other a big open meadow, sloping downward from the road.

“He got out and he said, ‘Wait for me,’ and he went off. In among the trees.

“I watched him. That’s when I first saw it. By looking after him, where he was going. A little fleck of pea-green visible through the trees. The car must have turned off the road further back, where there was an opening, and skirted the far side of the trees to where it was now, and then stopped.

“It couldn’t have driven straight through from the place where we were parked. There wasn’t enough space between the trees. You couldn’t have seen it from the road in a thousand years, unless you were looking for it.

“He took about ten minutes. Then he came back, stood beside the car and rested his hand on the door-top and he didn’t say anything. It wasn’t up to me to say anything, so I just waited for him.

“Finally he said, ‘I nearly stepped on a rattlesnake in there just now. Ed, you got that gun with you?’

“They’d given me a gun. It went with the job. A hitch-hiker had robbed and murdered somebody on one of the roads about a year before, and it dated from then. As Sheriff, Carney had turned one of his over to me at that time, to keep with me in the car, and arranged it so that I was licensed to do so. It was mine, and yet it wasn’t. It was on loan to me, you might say, but only so long as I was their driver. It wasn’t my physical property. I was just the custodian.

“ ‘Give it to me,’ he said. ‘I’d like to go back in there and see if I can hit it.’

“ ‘Be easier to club it with a piece of deadwood, wouldn’t it?’ I suggested.

“ ‘Come on, let’s have it,’ he said, in a tone that meant he didn’t want any argument about it.

“I took it out of the side pocket of the car and handed it to him. He put it in his pocket, and then he seemed to forget all about it. He didn’t even go back the way he had come. He strolled straight down the road instead.

“I started to turn my engine over, to pace him slowly along, so he could get back in again whenever he took a notion to.

“He turned his head sharply, and said, ‘Kill that. Stay where you are.’ That was the last thing he ever said to me.

“He turned off the road, but this time on the other side, the meadow side, and went down the slope and across the big yellow-green open patch, diagonally, working his way toward a disused cabin that sat way over in the far corner of it.

“He kept getting smaller and smaller as he went. The cabin was facing the other way, toward a footpath that straggled off the road and went past it, and he came up to it from the rear. He went around two corners of it, to get to the front, and then I couldn’t see him any more.

“The air was quiet and sleepy, like it is out there in the country. Then all of a sudden I heard two cracks, way off in the distance. Widely spaced. One, count ten, and then another. They carried slowly, like they do when the air is hot and hazy. They made a very small, lonely sound, no bigger than the snapping of a twig. It took me a minute to realize it must have been that gun I gave him.

“I said to myself, he must have got two rattlesnakes, not just one. Or else he fired twice at the same one. But why’d he go over that way, when the place he saw the first one was on the opposite side?

“But I knew I was lying to myself, just trying to keep my courage up by talking to myself. Something was starting to scare me stiff, while I sat there, and I knew it wasn’t rattlesnakes; I was afraid to admit to myself what I thought it might be.”

Jones took a long breath and shivered. It was a minute or two before he resumed:

“I sat there and I waited, and perspiration came out on my face. I couldn’t take my eyes off that spot, where the cabin was located. It seemed to quiver in the heat-haze sent up by the meadow, the way an image does far off in the distance. Wisps of white steam began to trickle out of its seams here and there.

“I knew I was seeing things. I rubbed my eyes hard and stared for all I was worth. That only made the white tendrils come out more places. They were coming out all over the cabin.

“They darkened to dirty gray, then joined together in one big blur with orange teeth tearing at it. The next thing I knew the cabin was on fire. It had no windows, but the fire oozed out anyway, right through the clapboards, like orange water spilling out.

“Then all of a sudden I thought I heard a man screaming. Not a woman. It was a man’s voice. I’m sure of it.

“I jumped out of the car, then stopped where I was, shaking all over. I didn’t know what to do, whether to run down that way, or stay right where I was.

“Suddenly a tan roadster came bolting out from somewhere around the other side of the cabin, and went heaving along the dirt trail, and clawing at it, to get back up onto the road. I recognized it. It was Mark Claybourne’s roadster.

“The smoke from the cabin was climbing up high now, like a big swirling mass of black ostrich feathers. You couldn’t tell it was a man screaming any more. It was more like an animal. Like a horse I once heard locked in a burning barn.

“Then it stopped. I was glad it stopped; I couldn’t have stood another second of it. The black smoke took a corkscrew twist in itself, and went up higher still. But no more screams came.

“The roadster had turned my way and was bearing down on me. It stopped short with a swipe of its rear wheels, when I almost thought it was getting ready to crash into my car headon, and Greg Dwyer got out. He was alone in it. The gun I’d given him was in his hand.

“He’d stopped the roadster about twenty yards away. He came on the rest of the way on foot. Walking slowly, the way he’d gone into the trees, the way he’d gone down across the meadow. Slowly, but with a sort of springy knee-action, like when you’re slightly crouched.

“All of a sudden I saw his face. I knew then. I don’t know how I knew. I just knew. He was looking straight at me, with a terrible sort of directness. His stare was aiming at me. Concentrated on me. Not on the burning barn back there, not even on the car beside me, as if to make sure of getting away in it fast. His look was nailing down my face, like a target. Trying to hold it fast until he got to where I was. Or like a hunter, trying to creep up on something that he’s caught sleeping on its feet.

“I knew then.

“I jumped back in, like a flash. I flattened the starter and shot toward him. There was no time to turn the big job around. I crouched down low in the seat. He jumped aside, just inches from the front fender. Then he fired at me twice. And both times he missed. I think he was too close to hit me. There is such a thing you know. One bullet went out the other side of the car. The other tore through the roof.

“I grazed the tan roadster by the thickness of a coat of paint, but I managed to get safely by it. I kept going. I looked back and I saw him jump into the tan roadster again, and drive off the other way. Away from me. He didn’t try to come after me. He didn’t have to. That would take care of itself. He went the other way, like a man going to raise the alarm.

“I kept going. I’d gotten it. I’d gotten it just in the nick of time.

“I knew what those first two shots in the cabin were for, now. I knew what the shots at me on the road were for, too. His good name was involved. The good name of the two most important families in the town. Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion you know. What if this member of the clan or that one guessed the truth later? No outsider ever would; they’d hang together. What was a hired chauffeur’s life compared to the honor of Sheriff Carney and Town Councilman Asa Claybourne and Town Councilman Netcher, whose daughter was young Claybourne’s wife?

“I knew by heart what the story would be before I ever read a word of it in the papers, and when I first saw it in print days later and miles away, there it was just as I’d known it would be, word for word. Miss Amy had gone out alone into the country to readjust once too often. I’d followed her in the Packard when nobody was around, forced her into the cabin at gun-point.”

For a moment Jones paused, looked intently at the detective, then resumed his story.

“Claybourne had happened to pass by that way in his roadster. He was the hero of the piece. (You see, his family had a good name to uphold too; they pulled plenty of weight in their own right.) He’d glimpsed the pea-green coupe standing there, and the Packard not far off, both empty. He hadn’t thought anything of that, thought Miss Amy’s husband must have joined her in the second car.

“But when he reached town he ran into Greg Dwyer himself, already uneasy and asking if he’d seen her. Claybourne told him what he had seen. Now thoroughly alarmed, the two of them had turned around and gone back together. They got out and separated. Dwyer went one way, looking for her, Claybourne the other.

“It was Claybourne who reached the cabin, unarmed, and trying to save her as any man would have, paid for it with his own life. The two of them were cremated alive; the murderer’s bullets had only crippled them. The coroner’s inquest established that fact. Dwyer was luckier. The two shots fired at him, when he tried to intercept the fleeing fiend, both went wild. But he’d gotten a good look at him. He’d seen who it was.

“I kept going. I crossed the State line before I ran out of gas. Then I ditched the Packard near some railroad tracks. They pointed north, that was all I cared about. I followed them on foot a while, and then I hopped a freight when it slowed for a crossing.”

Wanted, Dead or Alive, that’s how the official wording goes. They had me either way. I knew I didn’t have a chance. Dead I couldn’t talk. And alive all the talking I could do would be to scream myself to death in some other blazing shack they’d take me to and lock me in. Persons unknown, in the dead of night. It was just a matter of time; then, or a little later. Well, I settled for a little later, and the world’s been very good to me on the time I borrowed.

“And this is the little later now; tonight, in a big Spanish city, miles from there, years from then. But this is it just the same.”

He looked at Freshman and smiled wryly: “Long speech, huh? Lots of breath wasted.”

Freshman shook his head slowly, as if he couldn’t explain it himself.

“You know, it’s funny — but I believe you. It wasn’t the words you used. I could almost see it reflected all over again in your eyes while you told it; the horror and the fear came back again. It’s easy to lie with the mouth, but it’s awfully hard to lie with the eyes.”

“Thanks, anyway,” Jones said indifferently. Then he added, “I kind of like you. Too bad we couldn’t have met otherwise.”

“I kind of like you, too,” Freshman admitted. “It won’t get you anything but I do. I like you better than any guy I was ever sent out to bring back to justice.”

Jones said, “And there’s no liquor on the table either.”

With a blare of trumpets Crazy Rhythm burned out its brakes and squealed to a stop, like something coming around a fast curve. Jones returned to the table again.

“How’s your fan mail coming?” Freshman asked drily.

Jones chuckled. “This showed up in the last delivery. She paid off — the one I was telling you about.” He took out a sheaf of request-notes, all received during his last three-bagger, extracted one of them from the rest, and deftly palmed it across the table to Freshman, keeping it hidden under his hand. “Don’t let her see me showing it to you.”

Then he added: “You better reread it to me. I don’t trust the waiter, and there was a drum solo going on while he was trying to tell it to me in my ear.”

It was in Spanish, meaning he would have had to get it second hand in any case. The note read:

Jones nodded. “Yeah, that’s what the waiter said.”

Freshman passed the note back to him without comment.

Jones refolded it, placed it in his pocket.

“I suppose that’s out?” he said, very casually.

“Did you ever hear of three on a blind date?” Freshman replied. “And brother, you’re not going anywhere alone tonight.”

Jones nodded, as though that was the answer he’d expected.

“What’s the legal method in Tennessee, chair or rope?” he asked after a while, as though they’d changed subjects in the meantime. “I don’t mean what am I going to get, I mean what have they got down on paper, that you’re supposed to get, if you had lived that long?”

Freshman took a long time. When he finally answered, that wasn’t the question he answered at all.

“Tell her okay,” he said. “I’ll walk over there with you.”

Jones crooked his finger and a waiter sidled over.

“Tell whoever gave you that note—”

The waiter said, “Oh, the lady’s gone long ago. She told me to wait half an hour after she left before giving it to you. She also made me promise not to tell you what she looked like, in case you asked. She gave me twenty pesetas not to. But if you really want to know, and if I put my mind to it real hard, I think I would be able to—” He kept looking down at Jones’ hand, as if expecting another twenty pesetas to show up in it.

Instead, Jones laid it arrestingly on his arm, shut him up.

“Don’t try too hard,” he said. “I like it better this way.” And to Freshman, when the waiter had gone off again, “It’s a farewell performance. It’s a one-night stand if there ever was one. And that’s how one-night stands should be; no names, and not even any faces.”

A human being dies just once. A night club dies each night. And it’s just as brutal to watch.

Freshman watched the place die.

The crowd thinned first; that was its life-blood draining away. Each time the band played there were fewer on the floor. Until there were just three couples left. And then two. And then none. Nobody wanted to be the last couple on the floor; it was supposed to be bad luck.

The pink spot went out. That died and was gone. Then somebody pulled a switch and a whole circuit of marginal lights went out while shadows took over where they’d been. That was blindness setting in.

A new kind of music replaced the old. Pails clanked and brushes rasped, and all of a sudden there were a new set of dancers moving slowly around the floor; old and ragged and down on their hands and knees. Yesterday’s dancers, coming back like ghosts, to a place where they’d once worn bright colors and paint and been straight and young; just like today’s would come back on some tomorrow.

One of them picked up a bit of ribbon-bow someone had dropped, and looked at it a minute, then tucked it away in her rags.

All the tables were jammed together now, and up-ended back-to-back. The legs of the upper layer stuck stiffly up in the air. That was rigor mortis developing.

Jones said good-by to his men. They didn’t know it was goodby; they thought it was just good night. He gave Freshman the wink, to let him understand what he was doing.

Jones had posted himself beside the exit where they’d have to pass him on the way through to the street, and said good-by to them one by one as they came by.

And each one, misunderstanding, just said good night and thought he’d see Jones again tomorrow.

“Take it easy, Bill.” And he put his hand on his shoulder a minute, pushed down hard. “Keep blowing ’em hot and fast, now.”

“ ’Night.”

“Buzz, take care of this for me, will you?” He handed him his gold cigarette-case.

“What’s the idea?”

“I don’t want to carry it around where I’m going. You can give it back to me next time you see me.”

One of them called back from the street entrance:

“You coming?”

“Don’t wait for me,” Jones answered, and the walls made it echo like a death knell.

He turned to Freshman.

“And that’s the end of my fellows and me.”

Freshman scrutinized him, closely.

“You wanted it that way. You didn’t want ’em told.”

“I still want it that way.” Jones looked around at the night club’s remains, cold in death.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said distastefully, “before they bury us with it.”

It was the deadest hour of the night. It would be light in an hour, but in the meantime the darkness seemed to have redoubled itself, as if realizing it had a deadline to work against.

The towns of Spain never sleep altogether, but Barcelona was as close to a complete lull right now as it ever got, twenty-four hours around the clock.

You could hear a taxi-horn chirp three blocks away. You could hear a straggler trying to whistle up somebody all the way down at the next corner.

The stars were out in full array; cruel, glinting Spanish stars, with something fierce and revengeful in their brightness.

“Do you want to take a cab there?” Freshman asked him.

Jones tilted his face.

“Let’s walk it. The air smells good.”

“And any time you can say that in Spain, you better say it,” his custodian grunted. “It ain’t often.”

It was in the residential sector up past the Rambla — “uptown” you might have called it, at least away from the city’s heart; concrete apartment houses with funny rounded edges, and private homes nestled in their own shrubbery behind high iron railings.

There wasn’t a sound here. Not a car on the streets.

“How we doing?” Freshman asked at last.

They stopped by a light, and Jones took out the note and consulted it for verification.

“One-twenty-six,” he said.

There was a sudden metallic clash, knife-sharp, almost at their very feet. The sound made them both jump slightly. The complete silence had magnified it out of all proportion. They both started, looking around.

“There it is, over there.” Jones went and picked it up, brought it back. A doorkey.

Freshman was looking up. “And this is the house. That window up there just closed. I saw it move.”

It was a six-story flat, bone-white in the starlight, flush with the Street; night-blind, not a light showing.

“Well—” Jones said dubiously. “Here goes!” He half turned to leave, as if he expected Freshman to wait out there on the sidewalk.

“Don’t be in a hurry,” Freshman let him know, turning with him. “I’m going in with you. I’ll do my waiting upstairs, outside the flat door itself. There’s such a thing as a back way out, you know.”

“Help yourself,” was all the bandsman said, noncommittally.

An iron-ribbed glass outer door opened at hand-pressure. An inner, wooden door required the key. It opened easily. They went up a flight of tiled stairs, Freshman letting Jones take the lead. Night lights were burning on each of the successive floors they ascended to. They stopped at the fourth.

“There it is, up that way,” Jones whispered. “Forty, forty-two, forty-four—”

“I’ll take you right up to it,” Freshman said adamantly.

“It’s open,” Jones said. “I can see the black running down the edge of it, from here.”

“All right,” Freshman said when they’d arrived in front of it. “I’ll knock off here. You’re on your own from here on in.”

Jones just stood there. Then he looked down.

“My garter came undone.”

“You’re just stalling,” Freshman said with a skeptical grimace. “Are you afraid to go in there?”

“No, I’m not. Look at it.” He planted one foot against the wall, caught at a dangling strip of elastic, refastened it. “Been dragging half the way over here.”

“Then why didn’t you fix it before?”

“I was afraid to bend down too suddenly with you keeping your hand in your pocket.”

“Maybe you were right,” Freshman admitted. “Let’s get it straight. I know there are things you could do. Take my advice, don’t do them. The balconies in front. I can beat you down to the doorway from here, and I’ll just shoot from there. Or if she has a gun in there, don’t try to borrow it. I’m a professional. You’re just an amateur. I’m telling you for your own good, Jones. The only way you’ll leave is by this same door you’re going in now.”

Jones straightened the shoulders of his coat uncomfortably.

“I don’t feel like a man going in to his last date. I can’t get from one mood into the other. Maybe it’s because you’re with me.”

“Come on back, then. No one’s making you.”

“I’d better go. This is the last one I’ll ever have.”

Freshman looked at his watch.

“Four forty-two on the nose,” he said. “I’ll give you until five. When you hear me rap on the door, come on out. If you don’t, I’ll come in and get you, handcuffs and all, right in front of her.”

Jones straightened his tie. Then he reached for the doorknob, widened the already-open door, and stepped into the engulfing darkness beyond.

The door closed after him, this time fully.

There was nothing. Just blackness. It was like being executed already, and in the other world.

Then a soft voice said, “You?”

“Me,” Jones answered.

A moment’s wait. Then the voice came again.

“You took so long.”

“Where is the light? I can’t find it.”

He felt in his pocket for his lighter, then remembered that he’d given it away.

She must have guessed his intention.

“No, don’t. I don’t want any.”

“But I can’t see my way.”

“There is no further need to. Your way is ended. You are here. I have always dreamed of it this way, ever since I first saw you.”

“But I can’t see you.”

“I have seen you. I know you well. I have seen you night after night. My heart doesn’t need any lights.”

“But what about me?”

“You have seen me, too. You have seen me many times and well. Are you afraid I am ugly? I assure you I’m not. Are you afraid I am old?”

“No,” he said politely. “No.”

“Then give me your word. No matches, no lighter, please. You will spoil the mood.”

“All right, I promise,” he said.

“Who is the other one, waiting outside?”

“Oh, you saw him? A friend.”

“You did not trust me? You were afraid to come here alone?”

“I couldn’t get rid of him. He — manages me. He’s afraid to leave me out of his sight, day or night.”

“Oh,” she said. “An artist’s representative. I understand. Come closer. Don’t just stand there.”

“But I’m afraid I’ll stumble over something. I can’t even see where I’m putting my foot.”

“Just move slowly forward from the door. There is nothing between us. And you will finally come to me.”

Bodiless hands found his in the dark. Ghost-hands, soft as silk, light as moths. They linked with his, then drew him gently forward.

And this, he thought, is my last night of freedom in this world.

Freshman blew cigarette-smoke in the emptiness of the hall. He turned his head a little, and looked at the inscrutable door just behind his shoulder. Then he turned away again. He was feeling extremely tired of standing still in one place.

Finally he heard the street-door open, floors below. Someone started to come up the stairs. He’d been afraid of this all along.

“Now what do I do?” he wondered, uneasily.

He could pretend he was waiting to be let in; turn around and face the door expectantly.

Or he could pretend he was just leaving and make a false start toward the stairs as the intruder went by, then double back later to his present position.

In the end he did neither one. His profession emboldened him. It was his business to be standing stock-still in a strange hallway, in a strange house, in the middle of the night. He just stood there as he was, alongside the door, and put the burden of explanation on the other party.

It was a man. Middle-aged or better. He was not drunk, but there was wine on his breath, and his eyes were smoky from it.

He reached the landing and moved straight ahead. For a moment Freshman had an uneasy premonition he was making for that very same door. But he went on toward the foot of the next flight, and turned there, to go up.

He looked at Freshman as he went by.

“Evening,” he muttered.

“Evening,” Freshman answered, and looked him squarely in the eye.

The man glanced at him again, this time from a slightly higher level, as he started up the final flight. Then he nodded, in comradely understanding, as if he had solved it all to his own satisfaction.

“Afraid to go in and face her, eh? I used to be that way, too. Why don’t you do like I do now? Why don’t you take off your shoes first just outside the door? That way they never hear you. Otherwise, you’ll stand out there in the hall all night.”

He winked sagely, and he trudged on up out of sight.

I must remember that, thought Freshman. I may need it ten years from now.

He looked at his watch. Four forty-four and a half.

In the room, darkness and two whispering voices.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m looking for a cigarette. I gave my case away. I have none with me.”

“Reach behind you. There is a table. To your left. On it a box of them. Your fingers will find it.”

“They have. I’ve got it.”

Something loosely dangling, like a chain-pull, gave a smothered plink.

“Do not touch the lamp. You promised me.”

“I won’t. I didn’t know there was one there.”

“The box will play a tune, as the lid comes up. Do not be alarmed when you first hear it—”

She had spoken too late. A startling bell-like note had already sounded, and his fingers gave an involuntary jump away from it before he could control them. They struck pottery, there was an agitated swirl, and he could feel the lamp going over. He clawed at it, got only a handful of loose chain, and then that was snaked away from him.

There was a dull thud from the floor, without breakage, but followed by a blinding flash — or what seemed like one. It stayed on, however, in all its intensity, rocking a little, that was all. It glared upward through the upside-down shade, full into their faces, like a spotlight trained from the floor at their very feet.

Two livid satanic masks were the result, floating around without shoulders or bodies or background.

He could only see the one opposite him, not the one she saw.

There was dawning stupefaction on it.

It deepened instant by instant.

It became consternation.

It became unutterable horror.

She started to shake her head. She couldn’t articulate. She could only shake wildly. As if in denial of this trick her eyes were playing upon her. He righted the lamp. The light broadened, naturalized, swam out about the room now as it should have.

He turned to see if that would moderate the stark terror that seemed to have engulfed her. It didn’t. It augmented it, as if the more of him she could see, the greater became her unreasoning terror.

She gave a startled leap to her feet, as if the divan were afire. But it was he she was looking at. He remained with one knee crouched on it, half-sitting, half-standing.

She tried to scream. She couldn’t articulate that either. He saw the cords of her neck swell out, then contract again. No sound came. Her larynx was paralyzed with horror.

She kept shaking her head, as if her only salvation, her very sanity, depended on denying what had taken place, and believing in her own denial.

She took a tottering step, as if to turn and flee. Instead, she clawed at the table the lamp had originally been on. A drawer leaped out from it, and her fingers groped inside. There was a flash as they knotted, swept high up over her head. The light exploded along a gleaming knife blade in her hand.

He was too transfixed to move in time; she would have surely had him.

The threatened blow never fell. Instead it crumpled, seemed to disintegrate into a swaying lurch that rocked her whole body. The knife fell, loosened from her fingers. Her hand dropped, limp, and clutched at her heart.

With the other she pointed, quivering, toward the opened drawer, as if asking him to help her. A bluish cast had overspread her lips.

She was trying to whisper something. “Heart-drops — quick!”

He turned and dredged a small vial from the drawer. Then before he could turn back and reach her with it, a swirl of violently agitated air rushed past him, as when something goes over.

When he turned back to her, the fall had already completed itself. She lay there still, one hand vaguely reaching toward her heart.

He picked her up and put her on the divan. He felt for her heartbeat.

He couldn’t find it; it had expired.

Too panic-stricken to believe the evidence of his own senses, he snatched up the mirror-lined cigarette box, strewing its contents all over the floor. Then he held the inside of the lid to her lips. It was unadulterated horror. A miniature waltz started to play, there in front of her face. But the mirrored surface remained unclouded.

She was dead.

He whispered hoarsely aloud.

“She’s dead. My God, she’s dead!”

He didn’t know what to do. He was so stunned at the suddenness of it, its inexplicability, that he sat there numbed, beside her, for a moment or two.

He picked up the knife after awhile, looked at it, dazed. Then he looked over at the door.

He rose at last, started to go toward it, to open it, to call to Freshman.

Then he stopped short, stood where he was, knife in hand.

He looked at it. Then he looked at the door. Then he turned his head and glanced at her, where she lay in new death.

At last he went back to her.

He tested her one last time for signs of life. She was gone irremediably. Nothing could ever bring her back again. He picked up the heart-drops and put them into his own pocket.

Then he crouched over her as he had been before, one knee resting on the divan, half-sitting, half-standing. He raised the knife high overhead.

After a moment he shut his eyes, and the knife in his hand drove downward and he felt something soft and thick stop it, at the hilt.

He left it in her, and got up from there without looking. He went toward the door. This time he didn’t stop. He didn’t walk in a very straight line; he swayed, as though he were a little unbalanced himself.

He swung the door back. All the way back, flat against the wall, so there was a good unobstructed view of the room.

Freshman was standing there, a little to one side. The detective’s head started to swing around toward him. He didn’t wait for it to finish.

“I’ve just killed her, Freshman,” he said in a strangely steady voice. “You’d better come in here.”

This time it was Jones doing the hanging around waiting outside the door. For just a moment or two, perhaps, but waiting alone, unguarded, just the same. Standing straight and stiff as a cigar-store Indian, his back to the room, the way Freshman had been before. He could hear Freshman moving around inside. He didn’t look in to watch what he was doing. He kept his head turned the other way.

Freshman finished at last. He came out and carefully closed the door after him.

“I notice you didn’t stir, did you?” he commented. “You had plenty of chance to make a break for it.”

“Are you kidding?” Jones answered. “You could have dropped me with a shot straight down the stair-well from up here.”

“Are you sure that’s the only reason you stayed put?” Freshman asked drily. “Come on, let’s go,” he said.

They went down the stairs together and out into the street. They walked a preliminary block or so, until Freshman could flag a cab. Then they both got in. Not a word was said by either of them.

“Downtown,” was all Freshman said to the driver.

That could mean either the main police headquarters or Jones’ rooms at the Victoria, to wait for the following evening and the boat for New York. Either one was downtown from Valencia Street.

Jones didn’t ask him which one it was going to be. Freshman didn’t tell him. Spanish custody, or American. Leniency or lynch-law.

Jones kept telling off each intersection as they crossed it. You could tell he was doing that by the way his head gave a little side-turn each time. He was breathing kind of fast, though he was only sitting still in a taxi. His forehead glistened a little each time a streetlight washed over it. Finally he turned in desperation and stared into Freshman’s face.

“What are you going to do about it?” he said hoarsely. “Why didn’t you report it in from there?”

Freshman didn’t answer. He kept looking straight ahead, as if he were made of stone.

“I’ll tell them, if you don’t!” Jones panted. “I’ll holler it from the cab window.”

“Now I’ve heard everything,” Freshman murmured.

They hit the Plaza de Catalunya, the big light-frosted amphitheatre. And there the two eventual directions split. Until then they’d been identical, you couldn’t tell one from the other. But now the giveaway had to come. The hotel was just offside, a few doors to the left. Headquarters was further down the Rambla.

The driver slowed and glanced around at Freshman.

“Which way now, senor?” Almost as though he knew of the decision that had to be made, but he couldn’t have. It was just that this was a traffic hub, a wheel from which spokes shot out all over town.

“Para un momento,” Freshman said.

They came to a dead halt.

The meter went pounding on. So did Jones’ heart.

“Two murders now, one here, one back home,” Freshman said, as though he were talking for his own benefit.

He’d taken out the pair of dice Jones had given him earlier in the evening, was tossing them up and down in his hand, knocking them together. The left, not the gun hand. “But they don’t stack up alike, do they?”

When Jones moistened his lips and tried to say something, Freshman cut him short with a chop of his hand.

“Save your breath, I’m way ahead of you. You don’t have to give it to me. I’ll give it to you. This is a Latin country. They’re lenient toward crimes of passion. Anything with a woman in it, and love, and jealousy. On the books, you could get death. But you won’t. You’re popular here — almost an idol. And the public influences judges and juries. Because judges and juries are part of the public, themselves.

“You’d get twenty years; maybe even only ten. With time off, with the public rooting for you, you could be out in five. With the bankroll waiting, to take up where you left off. And even if you got the rope here, that would still be a lot better than the lynching you’re afraid you’ll get back there.

“Those odds aren’t bad. You don’t have to be much of a gambler to take them. You’re betting on almost a sure thing.”

“Isn’t there one thing you’re overlooking?” Jones panted. “I didn’t do the other one. I did do this.”

“I’m not overlooking anything,” Freshman let him know harshly. “Not a single damn thing, from beginning to end! You’re the one overlooking something. And that’s that possession is nine-tenths of the law. I’ve got you and they haven’t.”

Jones shut up, and his head canted down upon his chest, in admission of defeat.

Freshman gave a flick of his wrist, and the dice shot out of his hand and hit the asphalt outside the window. And bounced, and rolled, and finally lay still.

“Call that shot,” he ordered.

“Two,” Jones answered wanly, without lifting his head.

A big gasoline tank-truck rumbled by, and they vanished, kicked out of the way like gravel.

“Only God will ever know if you called it right or not,” Freshman mused.

He leaned forward and banged the glass with his knuckles.

“Straight on down,” he said. “To the Barcelona General Police Headquarters. I want to turn this man in.”

Jones gave a sigh so deep that it was almost like three years of accumulated fear and misery rising up and drifting out of him, leaving him for good.

Going up the steps Freshman stopped and shoved his hand at him.

“Just a minute. Give me the heart-drops. I’ll carry them from now on. The first thing they’ll do is search you.” He dropped the vial into his own coat pocket.

They went inside. He twisted Jones’ arm around behind his back, held it gripped that way from then on.

They saw the man they were supposed to see, the higher-up. Freshman knew how to work it. He showed his credentials.

An effusive Spanish greeting, complete with genuflections, was elicited.

“Ah, a fellow professional. At your service, Senor Freshman. What can I do for you?”

Freshman read from the jottings he’d made back there. “In the Apartment Forty-four in the house at One-twenty-six Valencia Street, there is a woman lying dead with a knife in her heart. The divorcee Blanca Fuentes, former wife of an industrialist, age twenty-seven, no living relatives. Better send somebody over there.

“This man has already admitted to me he did it. He gave himself up to me at the door. They were alone together in the room. Although I have a warrant for his extradition, he belongs to you.”

“You will have to waive that, senor. He cannot leave Spanish soil now.” He raised his finger. “Officers!”

Two policemen sprang forward. Jones changed hands.

They started to drag him out of the room between them. He dragged very easily, almost gracefully, muscles all relaxed.

Then suddenly he thought of something, balked. “Just one word more,” he begged. “Just let me have one word more with him.”

They brought him back beside Freshman again.

“I just thought of something,” he said in English. “How did — how did you know I was carrying those heart-drops away with me in my pocket? I took them out of the drawer before I let you into the room.”

“You damn fool,” Freshman slurred, so low no one else in the room could have caught it even if it hadn’t been in English. “What makes you think I wasn’t down on one knee at the keyhole the whole time, from first to last?”

“Thanks,” Jones breathed gratefully as they led him away to be booked for murder. You could hardly hear it. He said it more with his eyes and the expression on his face than with his voice.

Freshman came down the steps of the police station again a few minutes later, alone.

He reached in his pocket for a cigarette, and found the little vial of heart-drops. He switched his arm carelessly sideward, straight across his own body, and chucked it away.

In the hotel rooms late the next day Nunez was packing up Jones’ belongings, under the watchful scrutiny of Freshman. The valet kept shaking his head mournfully from time to time.

“I miss him,” he murmured. “This was the time I always woke him up. He always woke up with a grouch. I miss that, too.” He sighed deeply. “I used to swipe little things from him while he lay sleeping. Cigarettes, change from his pockets. I’d gladly put them back again, if I could only have him sleeping there again.”

Outside, the lights began to twinkle in the Plaza de Catalunya, the little side streets off the Rambla vanished one by one in a night-blue blanket, the guardian mountain Tibidabo stood out against the western glow. But the bed was empty. A pair of fresh white-kid gloves lay on it, ready for use.

Freshman went over to the door between the two rooms, looked out. They were all waiting in the outside room, the same as every other night, hanging around expecting to be fed.

“Blow,” he said curtly. “No supper tonight. The party’s over.”

They filed out, singly and in twos. Trumpet, and girl. Drums, and girl. Bass trombone and piano. And two girls that were nobody’s girls, but just there for the food.

They didn’t resent the brush-off. They all looked sort of sad. The last one to go turned, in the doorway, and raised her arm and gave Freshman a sort of half-hearted wave of farewell.

“If you should ever see him again, wherever he is, tell him good luck from Rosario.”

Freshman raised his own arm and gave her a solemn wave back.

The door closed. The party was over. The music was through.

He went back to the inside room and resumed his inventory.

Somebody knocked.

“See who that is,” he told the valet.

Nunez came back, his face chalky, his jaw hanging slack.

“What’s the matter? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I–I have just received a message from one,” Nunez faltered. “She must be one!” He crossed himself.

Freshman took the box from him, examined the giant white carnation. He tore open the enclosed note and read it:

An aficionada who has not the courage to come closer.

“Every night, for three weeks now,” the terrified Nunez quavered. “It must be flowers from the dead!”

Freshman sat down suddenly on a chair. He stayed there for several moments without saying anything. Then he got up again as suddenly and bolted out.

“I’ve got things to do!” he exclaimed. “I’ll be back. Don’t touch anything.”

He returned an hour later. Nunez was still hanging around, too unnerved by the shock he had received to loot the place and clear out, as he would have done under ordinary circumstances. He smelled strongly of Jones’ brandy, but he was cold sober none the less.

“It’s all right,” Freshman said. “I went down to headquarters and compared the two notes for handwriting. Then I went to the Club New York and cross-questioned the waiter. After that I went to a couple of other addresses, and talked to a couple of other people.”

“She — she is alive, senor?”

“If you mean the woman who’s been sending Jones these carnations every night for three weeks, she sure is. And she’s going to be sitting there tonight in the club big as life and wondering what became of him.”

“Then why are they still holding him? Why don’t they let him go?”

“Because the woman who invited him to Apartment Forty-four, One-twenty-six Valencia Street, is just as surely dead. She’s lying in the morgue right now. I just saw her with my own two eyes.”

Nunez shuddered, his eyes rolling in his head.

“These are two different women, amigo,” Freshman explained. “That’s the waiter’s dumbness, and my own carelessness in not comparing the two notes while he still had them both on him, and this damn Spanish indoor sport of sending mash-notes around night clubs by the dozen. The note wasn’t meant for him; it was meant for somebody else. Two different people, carrying on a quiet little flirtation of their own from table to table, for some weeks past.”

Freshman frowned thoughtfully. “I think what must have happened is, her admirer was sitting between her and Jones, and the waiter carried it to the wrong man. Instead of waiting to see that it had arrived safely, she grew timid and hurried away. Then the party it was intended for, also got up and left, thinking he’d been turned down.

“I don’t blame the waiter too much. He’s supposed to take orders for drinks, not play the part of Cupid.”

Nunez carefully folded a hand-painted French necktie. He signed ponderously.

“But why did my patron kill her? That part is what mystifies me. It was not like him. I know him, I worked for him too long. He has a heart of gold. He would not hurt anyone. He would give the shirt off his back—”

“That part isn’t going to make much sense to you,” Freshman admitted. “You see, he was already wanted for something like this back in his own country. And if he had to stand trial for murder, he wanted it to be here in Spain, and not—”

He didn’t finish it. He saw masked men, a burning barn, the screams of a roasting human being.

“I still don’t understand,” Nunez said helplessly. “Why commit a crime just because you want to be tried for it in some particular place? All you have to do is not commit it in the first place, then you wouldn’t have to be tried for it any place at all.”

“I knew you wouldn’t understand,” Freshman said, closing the last valise. “He does, though. And I do.” And then he added softly, “And I guess that’s just something between the two of us.