The Damsel

One

Grofield opened his right eye, and there was a girl climbing in the window. He closed that eye, opened the left, and she was still there. Gray skirt, blue sweater, blond hair, and long tanned legs straddling the windowsill.

But this room was on the fifth floor of the hotel. There was nothing outside that window but air and a poor view of Mexico City.

Grofield’s room was in semidarkness, because he’d been taking an after-lunch snooze. The girl obviously thought the place was empty, and once she was inside she headed straight for the door.

Grofield lifted his head and said, “If you’re my fairy godmother, I want my back scratched.”

She jumped a foot, landed like a cat, and backed away to the far wall, staring at him. In the dimness her eyes looked as white as stars, gleaming with panic.

Grofield hadn’t expected that big a reaction. He tried to calm her, reassure her, saying, “I mean it. I’m stuck in this bed and my back itches like crazy. If you’ve got a minute while you’re passing through, you could scratch it for me.”

She said, “Are you one of them?” Her voice was scratchy with panic.

“That depends. Sometimes I’m one of them and other times it doesn’t seem worth the effort. I haven’t been one of them lately because I haven’t been well.”

The glitter was slowly fading from her eyes. In a more human voice she said, “What are you talking about?”

“Be damned if I know. Are we supposed to be talking about something?” He tried to sit up, but the wound in his back gave him a twinge. He grimaced and shook his head. “It gets worse,” he said. “Before it gets better, it gets worse.”

She came one hesitant step away from the wall. “You’re hurt?”

“Nothing, mon capitaine, a flesh wound merely. If only some Florence Nightingale would scratch my back, my recovery would be complete.”

“I’ll trust you,” she said, taking another step closer to the bed. “God knows, I have to trust somebody.”

“You wouldn’t talk like that if I had full use of my faculties.”

All at once she looked at the ceiling, as though afraid it might fall, and then again at Grofield. “Will you help me?”

“Will you scratch my back?”

Impatience was now replacing her departed panic. “This is serious!” she said. “A matter of life and death!”

“There is no such thing, but I tell you what. You scratch my back, I’ll save your life. Is it a deal?”

She said, “If you’ll let me stay here. For a day or two, just till it’s safe.”

Grofield smiled. “I’ve been lying in this bed for days,” he said. “I’ve got nobody to talk to, nothing to read, nothing to do. From time to time I get up and totter to the bathroom and totter back again. When I wake up from a nap, as now, my back is stiff where it was hurt and itches everywhere else. Three times a day the assistant desk clerk, an oily young man with a thick moustache and an offensive smile, brings me a tray of garbage and tells me it’s food and I eat it. Darling, if you will sometimes talk to me and at other times scratch my back, you can stay here forever. In fact, I’ll pay you to stay here forever.”

All at once she smiled. “I like you,” she said. “I like your attitude.”

“You’ll love my back.”

She came the rest of the way over to the bed. “Can you sit up?”

“Not yet. Every time I wake up, I’m too stiff to move. Maybe I can roll over.”

“I’ll help.”

He gave her his right hand. She tugged and he squirmed and soon he was over on his face, the covers all messed up. She said, “Aren’t you wearing anything?”

“I’m wearing the whole bed,” he said into the pillow. “Isn’t that enough?”

She rearranged the covers, pulling them back up to his waist. “It is now. What’s this bandage for?”

“My wound.”

She touched it, tentatively. His back was taped and bandaged high on the left side, near the shoulder blade. “What sort of wound?”

“Cupid’s arrow. I gazed into the smoky eyes of a lovely señorita, and the next thing I knew, Cupid gave me the shaft.”

“You’re in trouble, too,” she said.

“Not a bit of it. I have the world on a string.” He squirmed a bit. “Would you start scratching? Mostly around the bandage.”

She started scratching. “Bandages should be changed, you know.”

“A contortionist I’m not.”

She scratched his back in long, easy strokes. “You say you’re not in trouble,” she said thoughtfully. “You’ve been wounded some way—”

“Arrow.”

“Some way. You’re lying here all alone, you obviously don’t want a doctor looking at you, you aren’t leaving the room at all and — oh!”

“Oh? Keep scratching.”

“Sorry. I just realized what it must be.”

“What what must be?”

“Your wound. It’s a gunshot wound, isn’t it? That’s why you don’t want to let a doctor see it.”

“Now let’s talk about you.”

She said, “The police are looking for you, I bet.”

Grofield considered his answer. She didn’t seem particularly displeased at the thought of his being wanted by the police, and she was in any case in some kind of a jam herself that evidently didn’t include phoning the cops. So it was time to give her a story that would satisfy her and would also keep her quiet later on, in case her own troubles got her mixed up with the law. Grofield took a deep breath and said, “You’re right. The police are looking for me.”

“I thought so. What did you do?”

“I followed Love,” he told her, “wherever it would lead me.”

“You’re going off into that crazy talk again,” she said.

“No, I’m not. It’s the truth. I was living in New York, and there I met a woman. A woman as beautiful as she was fickle, as amorous as she was treacherous. She was a Castilian from Mexico City, alabaster skin and ebony hair, married to a man twenty years older than herself, but a powerful political figure in this country. This woman — I dare not speak her name — she and I had a whirlwind affair while she was in New York, and when she returned to Mexico I couldn’t help myself, I followed her. We couldn’t keep away from one another, and in our passion we were careless.”

“He caught you,” she said. She sounded just a bit breathless.

Grofield smiled into the pillow. Women prefer to believe a romance every time, and this one was no exception. “You’ve guessed it,” he said. “He returned home unexpectedly, we—”

“In his house? What were you, crazy?”

“An interesting comment. We must discuss your past very soon.”

“Never mind that,” she said, and playfully slapped him between the shoulder blades. “Tell me what happened.”

“It’s simply told. He came in, we were in bed, he ran to the dresser and pulled out a gun. I went racing down the hallway, my clothes in my arms, and he shot me in the back as I was going out the front door. I managed to get to a friend of mine, someone I knew from New York who was visiting down here, and he got me to a doctor and then checked me into this hotel. But then his vacation was up and he had to go back to the States. And now it seems the husband has sworn out a warrant against me for burglary and assault, so the Mexico City police are after me.”

She stopped scratching and said, “What are you going to do?”

“Don’t stop. I don’t know what I’ll do. My tourist visa, all my papers, I left behind in my lady’s bedroom. My friend lent me some money before he left, but once it’s gone, I don’t know. I’ve just been lying here, waiting to get better. Once I’m healthy again, I can decide what to do next.”

“Maybe you can take refuge in the American Embassy.”

“Hardly. I’m not wanted for political reasons. As far as the Mexico City police are concerned, I’m nothing but a common burglar, a housebreaker.”

“Well,” she said, “misery loves company, so we ought to get along just fine.”

She’d swallowed the story whole. Grofield grinned at the pillow and said, “What about you? What brought you climbing through my window just in time to scratch my back?”

“Oh, it’s a long story,” she said. “It really doesn’t matter.”

“Fair’s fair. I told you my troubles, now you tell me yours.”

“Well... I’m just afraid I’ll start crying again if I talk about it.”

Grofield twisted half-around in the bed and looked up over his hurt shoulder at her. She did look sad, very small-girlish. “You’ll feel better if you talk it out,” he said. It was the kind of bushwah line that seemed appropriate under the circumstances, just as the tale of the cuckolded politico had seemed the appropriate kind of bushwah story to tell.

It apparently worked, because she said, “All right, I will. I owe you that much.”

Grofield relaxed again, facing front, resting his cheek on the pillow.

The girl said, “My troubles are all about love, too, but a different kind of love from yours.” She sounded very puritanical, very disapproving, when she said that. “I love a boy who has no money at all,” she said, “and my aunt wants me to marry a man I can’t stand.”

Could that possibly be legit? Grofield turned his head and looked up at her again, and her face was as guileless as a choir boy’s. “Things like that don’t happen,” he said.

“You may think it’s funny,” she said, and now her lip had started to tremble, “and I don’t blame you if you laugh, but after all, it’s my whole life.”

“All right, all right. I’m not laughing.” Grofield subsided, giving her the benefit of the doubt. After all, even cliches come true every once in a while.

“I know it sounds silly,” she said. She’d stopped scratching his back now and was massaging it instead, which felt even better. “I’m so young and all, I suppose I sound foolish. But I do love Tom, and I don’t love Brad, and that’s all there is to it!”

“I’m for you,” Grofield said. He was getting sleepy again.

“My aunt took me away on this so-called vacation,” she went on, “to get me away from Tom. And now Brad’s down here, too, and my aunt is talking about us getting married right away, right here in Mexico City, and I absolutely refuse to do it. It got so bad, my aunt locked me in my room, because she knows all I want to do is get back home and be with Tom.”

“So you tied sheets together,” Grofield said drowsily, “and climbed down them to my window.”

“Yes.”

“But the sheets are still there, hanging out the window. Your aunt will look down, and she’ll know you’re here.”

“She won’t believe I stayed here. That’s why I want to stay, don’t you see? She’ll call the police and everything, hire private detectives, have the airport watched, and all the rest of it. She and Brad both. But if I wait here a day or two until they’re sure I’ve slipped out of their grasp, then they’ll stop looking so hard and I’ll be able to get away. Also, I’ll have to wire Tom to send me some money.”

“I thought he was broke.”

“He can get some, enough for plane fare for me.”

“Good for Tom.” Grofield closed his eyes and gave himself up to the pleasure of having his back massaged. “Stouthearted Tom,” he mumbled, “he’s true-blue.”

“He’s the man I’m going to marry,” she said, sounding young and delicious and determined.

“Right.”

“You go to sleep if you want,” she said. “Sleep’s what you need now, while you recuperate.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “No, no, I won’t be sleeping. I just woke up.” Besides, something was bothering him. Wasn’t there something she’d said, something when she’d just come in, something...” Something that didn’t connect with this Tom-Brad-aunt story, something...

“Go on and sleep,” she said soothingly. “Rest. Relax. Sleep. I’ll be here.”

Grofield was as relaxed as a puddle of ketchup, but still that something was tugging at his brain, until all at once he thought: Are you one of them?

That was it, that was what she’d said. Are you one of them, that was the sentence. It didn’t make any sense with the aunt story, not a bit of sense. He ought to ask her about that, but somehow speech would take too much effort. In fact, thinking was taking too much effort. Not that he was going to sleep, it was just—

He opened his eyes and knew at once he’d been sleeping, but he had no idea for how long. A minute? Five hours?

He was lying on his back now, staring up at the ceiling. He was abruptly, electrically, immediately awake, as though some sudden noise had jolted him from sleep.

He looked around the room, raising his head from the pillow, and saw the girl standing at the foot of the bed. She had taken his suitcase from the closet, had put it on the rack at the foot of the bed, and had opened it. It stood open now, and she stood on the other side of it, looking at him.

He said, “What have you done?”

“I was going to hang your clothes up,” she said. “I saw your suitcase on the closet floor, and nothing on the hangers at all, so I thought I’d empty the suitcase, let your clothes hang their wrinkles out.”

“You’re too kind,” Grofield said bitterly.

She reached down into the suitcase and held up two handfuls of money, American currency. “Maybe you’d better think of a new story to tell,” she said.

Two

Grofield said, “I wear money.”

“That isn’t funny,” she said. “That isn’t at all funny.” She threw the double handful of bills back into the suitcase.

“I thought it was pretty humorous,” Grofield said. “Not a knee-slapper maybe, but surely worth at least a chuckle, a little smile, a—”

“Oh, stop it. You had me going, I admit it, you had me feeling sorry for you, thinking you had this fantastic romantic adventure, and now you’re in desperate trouble, all for love, and all the rest of that malarkey.”

“I was rather fond of that story, myself,” Grofield admitted.

“Well, you’d better try for a better one,” she said.

Grofield considered, and wondered if it was time for the truth. Sometimes the best way to hide the truth is to tell it at a time when your listener expects a lie — a variant on The Purloined Letter. Having already rejected the truth as a lie, the listener is later more likely to misinterpret any inadvertent slips or unforeseen clues that might arise.

This seemed like such a moment, so Grofield smiled a cunning smile and said, “I stole it.”

“I’ve already guessed that part of it. The question is, where?”

“From a gambling casino on an island off the coast of Texas. You see, I’m an actor, and it’s impossible to make ends meet these days as an actor in the legitimate theater. Unless you’re willing to peddle your integrity to the movie and television people, there’s nothing for it—”

“What on earth,” she said, “are you talking about?”

“Acting,” he said. “Do you realize that in my peak year so far I earned a miserable thirty-seven hundred dollars from acting?”

“What about this money here?” she demanded, pointing at the suitcase.

“Sixty-three thousand dollars. A bunch of us knocked over that gambling casino, and that’s my share.”

“Gambling casino,” she said contemptuously. “Off the coast of Texas. So how do you wind up here?”

“It’s a long story,” he said.

“By the time you’re done making it up,” she said, “I suppose it will be. The last story you were Casanova, this time you’re Robin Hood. Who are you going to be next time, Flash Gordon?”

“You mean you don’t believe me?”

“Of course not,” she said.

Grofield hid a grin with a look of mock distress. The fact was, everything he’d just told her was true. He really was an actor, and a moderately good one, tall and lean and darkly handsome, usually cast as the evil brother or weak son or charming knave. But his attitude toward movies and television kept him limited to the poverty-stricken arena of legitimate theater. Happily, he had an outside source of income, a second profession, from which he made a great deal of money indeed.

He was a thief. In company with small groups of other professionals like himself, he took large amounts of money from institutions, never from individuals. Banks, armored cars, jewelry stores, factories, these were the targets. Once or twice a year he went in on a job like that, and made enough to support himself in style while working as an actor.

He’d gotten into this second profession almost by accident, seven years before. He’d been in summer stock, with a repertory company in Pennsylvania. The company was going broke, and four of the guys started talking, as a gag at first, about “knocking over a liquor store or a gas station.” Gradually it became less a gag and more specific; a supermarket in a suburban area forty miles away. And then it wasn’t a gag at all, and they were actually doing it, wearing masks, toting prop guns loaded with blanks, traveling in an old Chevy with mud smeared on the plates, all of them feeling the butterflies they knew well as stage fright. They got forty-three hundred dollars, and they weren’t caught.

For a year after that, Grofield went back to starving the honest, safe way, and never talked about the supermarket robbery at all. But one time, trading anecdotes with an old buddy from Army days, Grofield told him what had happened, and the guy laughed and offered Grofield a spot driving the car in a jewelry-store heist. It turned out he was a pro at this sort of thing.

That was number two. By number three, Grofield was a pro himself.

This last one, the sixty-three thousand in the suitcase, had been job number twelve, and the damnedest one of the lot. It had been set up by a guy named Parker, with whom Grofield had worked a couple of times in the past. Off the Texas coast there really was an island with a gambling casino on it. The syndicate boys on the mainland were upset about this casino, since they didn’t own it and couldn’t control it, so they’d financed Parker to rob the place on condition he and his partners wreck it while there. Parker had brought in Grofield and a couple of other guys, and then the job had gotten complicated. By the time it was over, Parker and Grofield were the only ones left, down in Mexico City with the proceeds of the job, Grofield with a bullet in his back. Parker had fixed him up first with a doctor and second with a hotel room, had split the money in half, and had gone back with his half to the States, leaving Grofield to recuperate on his own time.

A boring interval, until now. But now he had this girl to focus his interest on, and to bamboozle. Having told her a cutdown version of the truth in such a way as to convince her it was a lie, he now switched stories abruptly, making a sandwich of lies with the truth hidden away in the middle. “I don’t suppose there’s any reason you should believe me,” he said ruefully.

“Right as rain,” she said.

“But believe me,” he said, “I’m only trying to protect you.”

“Protect me? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“If I were to tell you the truth,” he said, “you’d be in as much danger as I am. The men who shot me play for keeps. If they thought you knew what was going on, they’d kill you as quick as look at you. We’re safe now, because they don’t know I’m here, but who knows what could happen tomorrow, or the next day?”

“What are you up to now?” she demanded.

“Please believe me—”

“I wouldn’t believe you on a stack of Bibles.”

He sighed. “It’s better that way, better you don’t know.”

“Oh, stop—”

A sudden knocking at the door shut her up as though she’d been switched off. She got wide-eyed again, with a return of her earlier panic, and whispered shrilly, “It’s them! They’re looking for me!”

Grofield pointed at the window. “Up the sheet,” he whispered. “I’ll play dumb.”

She nodded and ran to the window.

There was more knocking at the door, and a voice called in an American accent, “Hey! Anybody home in there?”

Grofield called, “Just a second, just a second.” The girl was on her way out the window, in a swirl of gray skirt and tanned legs. Grofield shouted, “The door’s unlocked. Come in.”

The door swung violently open and bounced against the wall. Three of them came in, stocky hoods with thick faces and worried expressions. They looked forty ways at once and one of them came over to stand beside the bed, look down at Grofield, and say, “You seen a girl in here?”

“In here? Only in my dreams, friend.”

“Whadaya doin, layin there? You drunk?”

“Sick. I got gored by a bull.”

“Tough. Get ya in the privates?”

“Good God, no. My back, by the shoulder.”

He laughed. “You was goin the other way.”

“Sane men do.”

The other two meantime had searched the room. It hadn’t taken long. They opened the closet and bathroom doors, glanced inside, shut the doors again, then looked behind the armchair and under the bed and that was that. One of them went over to the window and leaned out and looked up, and Grofield hoped the girl had had sense enough to go all the way up and back into the room upstairs, and haul the sheet in after her. Apparently she had, because the guy brought his head back in, looked at the one who talked, and shook his head.

The talker looked back to Grofield. “The reason we’re here,” he said, “is because there’s a crazy dame loose.”

“A crazy dame?”

“Yeah. You know, coo-coo.” He made circles beside his head.

Grofield nodded. “Got it,” he said. “Off her wonk, you mean.”

“That’s it. We’re supposed to deliver her to her father in South America, only she got away from us.”

“South America,” said Grofield.

“She got away from us,” the guy repeated, meaning that was the part of the sentence he wanted Grofield to think about. “She hung a sheet out the window. We figure she came down the sheet, in your window here, and out of the place. You been right here all day?”

“Right here,” said Grofield. “Only I’ve been asleep most of the time.”

“How come when we knocked you said just a second, just a second? What were you doin?”

“Coming back to bed. I’d just been to the head.”

“So what?”

Grofield looked coy. “Underneath here,” he said, “I’m all nudey.”

“Is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“So you figure she must of gone through the room while you were asleep.”

“If she came through, it was while I was asleep. I haven’t seen anybody since lunch, and that was the desk clerk when he brought the food up.”

“You wouldn’t of seen this girl, and she told you a crazy persecution-complex story, and you believed it, would you?”

“Not me.”

“Yeah.” The guy reached out all at once and yanked the covers off Grofield, who shouted, “Hey!”

“That’s okay,” said the guy. “Just checkin.” Satisfied, he flipped the covers back up over Grofield again. “Take care of yourself,” he said, and to the other two, “Come on, boys.”

“I don’t think I liked that,” Grofield said.

One of them stopped by his suitcase, which was closed again but still out in plain sight. He seemed as though he might be thinking about opening it, just out of idle curiosity. Grofield said, loudly, “I think you three are a bunch of bastards, if you want to know.”

The two silent ones both looked mad, but the talker laughed and said, “That’s okay, we don’t mind. See you around.”

At least the other one wasn’t thinking about the suitcase anymore. All three of them walked over to the door, and Grofield watched them with a face that showed nothing but outrage.

At the door, the talker turned and said, “Keep away from the bulls, buddy.” He laughed, and followed the other two out, and shut the door behind him.

“Ha, ha,” said Grofield sardonically. He shifted position till he could use his right arm to lever himself up, and managed to get into a sitting position by the time those long tanned legs came swinging in the window again.

The rest of the girl followed, landing gracefully on hands and knees and popping right up again. “I want to thank you,” she said.

Grofield said, “I don’t like those guys.”

“They’re dreadful, terrible, awful.”

“On the other hand,” Grofield went on, “I don’t think I like you a hell of a lot either.”

“Me? Why, what did I do?”

“Just answer me one thing. Which one of those three was your aunt?”

She blushed. “Oh,” she said. “The lie, you mean.”

“The lie, I mean, right. Your aunt, and Brad, and Tom, that sterling cast of characters.”

She made embarrassed faces, embarrassed gestures. “I didn’t know what to do, what to say. I wasn’t sure I could trust you.”

“You’re getting a whopper ready,” he said, “I can tell the signs.”

“No, I’m not. Really.”

“Cross your heart, honey. You forgot to cross your heart.”

“Now, don’t be nasty,” she said. “Besides, what about you? You told a pretty big whopper yourself.”

“Only to protect you, only to keep you from getting in even worse trouble than you already are.”

“Oh, if you think I believe that—”

“Why not? What’s wrong with it?”

“I wouldn’t,” she told him, “I wouldn’t believe a word you said to me.”

“Honey, I feel exactly the same way about you.”

They faced each other, both somewhat irritated, both displaying more irritation than they felt, both thinking desperately. Until Grofield, seeing how identical they were being, suddenly burst out laughing, and a second later she started laughing too. She sat down on the edge of the bed and laughed, and Grofield leaned forward over his knees and laughed, and they kept on that way a while and gradually subsided into friendly silence.

Grofield finally broke it, saying, “I could use a drink. How about you?”

“Desperately.”

“I’ll get us a bottle and some ice,” Grofield suggested, and reached for the phone.

“Don’t let anybody know I’m here!”

“Don’t worry about a thing. The desk clerk is madly in love with my money. You hungry?”

“Starved, as a matter of fact. Excitement always makes me hungry.”

“The life you live, I’m surprised you’re not fat as a horse.”

“What do you know about the life I live?”

“It includes those three aunties of yours, doesn’t it? Any life that includes that trio is bound to be exciting. And probably short.” Grofield picked up the phone. “I’ll get us food,” he said.

Three

“Aaahh,” she said in contentment, and smiled, and patted her lips with the napkin, and pushed the tray away across the table. “That was good.”

“I could use a fresh drink,” Grofield told her. “And then we’ll talk.”

“Right. Then we’ll talk.”

In the last half hour, since he’d made the call for food and drink, they’d said practically nothing to one another, both accepting this as a sort of time-out. She’d insisted on hiding in the closet while the desk clerk, grinning evilly beneath his moustache, brought in the huge tray of food, and since then she’d sat demurely at the writing table across the room, packing it in like an infantryman after a forty-mile hike.

Now she got to her feet, gathered up their two glasses, took them over to the bottle of scotch and the ice bucket on the dresser, and made fresh drinks. She came back and sat down on the edge of the bed, handed Grofield his glass, and said, “Who goes first?”

“Names first,” he said. “We might as well have something to call one another. My name’s Grofield, Alan Grofield, and that’s straight.”

“Hello, Alan Grofield. I’m Ellen Marie Fitzgerald, and that’s also straight.”

“It sounds straight enough. What do they call you?”

“Elly, mostly.”

Grofield practiced raising his left arm. It was feeling better and better, and was only really bad immediately after sleep. “Let me,” he said, “let me run down what I know about you, Ellen Marie, and then you see if you can tell a straight story to fill in the blank spaces.”

She smiled, looking pert, and said, “I love to be the center of attention.”

“The hell you do. That Gale Storm bit doesn’t suit you, honey.”

Her smile got a bit more honest. “Circumstances are against me,” she said. “But go ahead, tell me my story.”

“Right. You’re a young girl, good-looking, unmarried, from the northeastern part of the United States. A city, somewhere between Washington and Boston, but probably neither of those. Maybe New York, but I’ll take a stab at Philadelphia. Okay so far?”

Her smile had faltered, and now was turning sour. “Are you very clever,” she asked him, “or are you a part of this somehow? Do you already know everything?”

“I knew nothing,” he told her, “until you came in my window. And that’s straight. Surely it shouldn’t have been that tough to tell you were a big-city girl from the northeast. I doubted it was New York, because when I told you I came from New York you didn’t ask me what part. People always ask strangers from the same city what part of the city they live in. Boston and Washington both would probably have left some trace of accent in your speech, and you have none, so that left Philadelphia.”

“And Baltimore,” she said. “And Wilmington. And Trenton. And Buffalo. And Cleveland.”

He shook his head. “Big city. And not Baltimore because Baltimore is Pittsburgh, and you aren’t from Pittsburgh.”

She laughed and clapped her hands, a return to the girl-child style. “You’re wonderful,” she said. “You’re delightful. I believe you now, you looked at me and guessed I came from Philadelphia.”

“But not your three aunties,” Grofield said, gesturing at the door. “They’re New York, the three of them, and they’re professional hoods, and your background shouldn’t cross theirs anywhere. So. A rich girl from Philadelphia is being held prisoner by three New York hoods in a respectable middle-income hotel in Mexico City. Fine so far?”

“As nicely put as anything I’ve ever heard. And I know what you do for a living. You write those paragraphs called ‘The Story So Far’ in front of serial chapters in the magazines.”

Grofield grinned. “My secret is out. But don’t tell anybody.”

“I promise. Are you done with me?”

“Not quite. You escaped from the hoods, but you didn’t call the cops, which means it isn’t a straight kidnapping job. You’re in on something crooked, in other words.” Grofield reached out to the bedside table with his good arm, got his Delicados, and lit one. “Now,” he said, “it’s your turn.”

“What kind of cigarette is that?”

“Mexican.”

“Well, it smells awful. Put it out. Here.” She lifted a corner of her sweater, and a pack of Luckies was tucked into the waistband of her skirt. She tossed it to him, saying, “Light us each one.”

He did so, and said, “To repeat, now it’s your turn.”

“My turn?” She smiled brightly, doing her child routine again.“You mean now I tell you what I know about you?”

“Not yet, Ellen Marie. First you—”

“I wish you wouldn’t call me that. My friends call me Elly.”

“I’m glad for them. Whenever you go into your act, like Ginger Rogers in The Major and the Minor, I’ll call you Ellen Marie. Fair enough? Now, tell me your tale of woe.”

“I’m not sure I’m going to talk to you at all.”

Grofield gestured with his thumb at the door again. “Those three thugs are a lot tougher than any auntie, little girl. You need help to keep clear of them. In fact, you need this room.”

“You wouldn’t throw me out.”

“Not if I know what I’m involved with. But I don’t go in blind, that stupid I’m not.”

She bit her lip and looked worried. “I suppose you’re right,” she said at last. “I suppose I’ve got to let you know the truth.”

“It would be a change.”

She puffed nervously at the cigarette, and then said, “Did you ever hear of Big Ed Fitzgerald?”

“Big Ed Fitzgerald? No, I can’t say I have.”

“He tries to keep out of the limelight, avoid publicity, but the papers have written about him a few times. Particularly when he had to go give evidence in front of that Congressional committee.”

“Oh? Who is this guy?”

“He’s... well, he’s what they call a kingpin.”

“A kingpin.”

“In the underworld,” she explained, being very earnest now, like a brand-new schoolteacher. “He’s very important in organized crime in Philadelphia.”

“Oh,” said Grofield. “Ah. And this Big Ed Fitzgerald is related to you, is that it?”

“He’s my father.”

“Your father.”

She shook her head and waved both hands, expressing confusion. “I didn’t know it myself,” she said, “until three years ago, when the committee called him. I just thought he was a building contractor. But he’s a lot more than that. He’s in the rackets up to his neck.”

The last sentence sounded terrible in her mouth, and Grofield winced. “Very graphic,” he said.

“Sorry. But he is. He’s a kingpin, it said so in the papers.”

“The aunties are his boys?”

“Oh, no. They work for someone else, a... competitor of my father’s. Someone who’s trying to—”

“Don’t say it. Trying to muscle in?”

She smiled and nodded. “That’s right. My father’s having a meeting with them in Acapulco on Friday and—”

“You mean like that Apalachin meeting a few years ago.”

“But this time they’re meeting outside of the country, which is a lot smarter.”

“Right.”

“Anyway,” she said, and gestured vaguely, “anyway, they kidnapped me. They’re trying to use me to force my father to go along with what they want. So that’s why I’ve got to stay here until Friday, and then get down to Acapulco to meet him, so he’ll know I’m safe.”

Grofield motioned at the telephone. “Why not call him now? Why wait till Friday?”

“Because I don’t know where he is now. He’s incommunicado somewhere, because it would be too dangerous for him right now. These other people might try to kill him.”

“So today’s— What day is today?”

She seemed surprised. “You don’t know what day it is?”

“Honey, when you just lie around in bed forever, one day begins to look pretty much like another.”

“Oh. It’s Tuesday.”

“Tuesday. And you have to be in Acapulco by Friday.”

“On Friday. I wouldn’t dare get there early.”

Grofield nodded. “All right,” he said, “I think that part’s probably the truth. Acapulco on Friday.”

“What do you mean, that part?”

“Because the rest is pure greasepaint, honey. I remember when Edward Arnold used to play Big Ed Fitzgerald all the time. And didn’t Broderick Crawford do it once or twice? Sheldon Leonard was always the heavy, and—”

Abruptly she got up from the bed. “I don’t think you ought to make fun of me. I’m all alone, I’m helpless—”

“Oh, come on!”

“What about you? I suppose you were going to tell me the truth!”

Grofield grinned and shook his head. “Not a bit of it. I’ve got three beauties lined up to tell you, one after the other, each with an all-star cast.”

“You just think because you’re an inveterate liar everybody else is, too.”

“No. Just you.”

She opened her mouth to say something else, something angry, but the door opened at the same second and the three hoods came back in, all of them holding guns. The talker smiled in a smug way and said, “Hello there, Miss Fitzgerald. You kind of got lost.” He looked at Grofield and made clucking sounds and said, “And you tell lies. We got to do something about that.”

Four

Grofield said, “All you people go home. The party doesn’t start till five, I don’t even have the ashtrays out.”

The talker shook his head and said, “You are a very funny man. I wanna keep you with me all the time, to make me laugh when I’m blue. You well enough to walk?”

“A little,” Grofield admitted. “Like to the potty and back.”

“Like to the elevator and up. Get your clothes on.”

One of the others, silent till now, said, “Maybe we just bump him, it’s simpler.”

The talker looked long-suffering, and shook his head. “And we got the hotel full of cops,” he said. “Very bright.”

“Maybe he fell out the window. Dizzy from being sick and all.”

“You’re dizzy. Dead is dead, the hotel is still full of cops. A sick guy, bedridden, what’s he doing over by the window?”

Grofield said, “Tell him. I’m on your side.”

The talker looked at him. “Then why don’t you get dressed?”

The girl said, “Shall I turn my back?”

“Maybe you’d better. Underneath here, I’m horribly scarred.”

She made a face and turned around.

Grofield got out of bed slowly, feeling weak but capable of movement. The stiffness that came after sleep had worn off again by now, but he still had no strength. His trousers seemed to weigh a ton, and his fingers were thick and slow-moving and prey to trembles.

The talker said, “You’re very slow, pal. You’re making me get second thoughts about the window.”

“I’m out of practice,” Grofield told him. He could feel perspiration beading his face, trickling down his sides, coating his chest and back. The shaking in his fingers had spread up his arms now, and exertion had set waves of dizziness rolling behind his eyes.

The girl said, “Let me help him.”

“Fine.”

She buttoned his shirt for him, put his shoes on and tied the laces, got his arms into his jacket sleeves, and draped his tie around his neck. “There,” she said. “You’re beautiful.”

“But I’ve got to leave the ball at midnight, right? Or all this stuff turns back into ermine and silk.” He felt lightheaded and foolish, like a drugged prince in a story of palace intrigue in a Carpathian duchy. Background music circled around his head, an unlikely blend of Berg and Debussy. His clothing felt heavy enough to be a prince’s uniform, complete with sword buckled at the waist.

“Come on,” said the talker. He took Grofield’s elbow, not gently.

Grofield deeply regretted his physical condition. He was in trouble now, black trouble, of a source and purpose he didn’t understand, and he should be at his most alert and alive for it. Instead, he was woozy and stupid, reeling at the edge of a grave, surrounded by gorillas who might at any time get the notion to shove him on in. Standing, walking, moving his body, he was far more aware of his weakness and vulnerability than when he’d been lying comfortably in bed.

He was being walked now toward the door, and all at once a single thought came pure and clear in his head and he said, “My suitcase.” He half-turned toward it, still being tugged the other way by the hand at his elbow.

“You won’t need it. You can come back for it.”

There it was, halfway across the room, on the rack at the foot of the bed. It was shut, but not locked.

Grofield heard the girl say, “I can carry it for him,” and that pleased him, but then the talker said, “I said he don’t need it. It stays here to show the chambermaid he hasn’t moved out. Saturday, he can come back for it.”

“You’re a bastard,” she said, and even though he was woozy Grofield understood it was the word Saturday that had stung her, and that it had been meant to sting her. So it was true, as he’d supposed, that she had to be somewhere on Friday. Acapulco? Maybe.

The talker was saying now, near Grofield’s ear, “You don’t need it for nothing, do you? We already got your toothbrush from the bathroom, and you’ll be in bed all the time anyway, so what difference does it make?”

Grofield retained sense enough to nod. “It doesn’t matter,” he said, and they led him out of the room and left the suitcase behind.