“I understand you, believe me.”
He finished his drink in a long swallow and went to the kitchenette, where he poured himself another, larger than the first. Glass in hand, he kept moving around restlessly, as though something about the apartment bothered him. He opened the closet and looked in at her clothes. She had only brought three suitcases from Paris. He went for his hat, which he had dropped on the table by the door, and put it out of sight in the closet.
“You can use my car,” she said, “or if you like I will drive you. Then you can have the car. By the time the police are told it is stolen, two weeks will be gone. Three weeks, four, whatever you say.”
He turned and watched her, but it seemed to her that he was listening to something else.
“I know,” she said. “How can you believe me? I know your name but I have no intention of telling the police. This is not my affair. My passport has been forged, you see. That will be a difficult thing to prove to you, but I believe I can do it if you will listen to me. Please listen, for the love of God.”
“Put something else on,” he said. “The cop saw that suit. And that jerk Melnick-as soon as he can talk he’s going to mention the twelfth floor. Put on a wrapper or something. Some goddamn curlers in your hair.”
She gave an elegant half shrug. “You heard nothing that I said.”
“Later,” he said impatiently.
She stood up. “Must I really put in curlers?”
He grunted. “You look too good the way you are. That’s what they’ll remember. I want you to look like a slob.”
She made a little grimace, her eyebrows going up. She took a negligee out of the closet and started for the bathroom. “Curlers. Very well. But when you see me next, you will be sorry.”
“Huh-uh,” McQuade said, shaking his head.
She stopped. “What does that mean?”
“I want you out where I can see you. You might decide to wave a towel out the bathroom window.”
“I do not wish to be a heroine. I wish to exist.”
“Get it through your head, kid: I’m taking no chances. When a cop’s involved they still use the chair in this state.” He snapped his fingers. “Get into action.”
She gave another tiny shrug, using her eyebrows as much as her shoulders. “Michele,” she told herself aloud, “do as he says.”
Tossing the negligee on the sofa, she unfastened her earrings and put them on the coffee table beside the keys to the Chevrolet. She unfastened the inner catch of her suit jacket and shrugged it off. She was wearing a half-slip and a low-cut bra. The bra was nothing but crossed ribbons and two fragments of transparent fabric.
She was reasonably objective about herself, she believed. She knew she had faults, some of them severe, but they were mainly of a moral nature. Physically she was satisfied with the way she looked. Her breasts she knew to be excellent, though they were the despair of her dressmaker, who liked his clients to look like slender young boys. Reaching behind her, she unfastened the little double hook and the bra fell to the floor.
She was facing McQuade. He watched her, his head lowered. She continued to undress, without self-consciousness or coquetry, trying to hold his eyes so she could judge his reaction. She could not make mistakes. If she misjudged him to the slightest degree, she was finished. So far he was a puzzle to her. When he moved, with the power and grace and some of the sullenness of a big cat, he gave off a kind of electricity that agitated her nerve ends and left her feeling charged and unsure of herself. He was attractive, certainly, one of the most attractive men she had encountered in a long time. If she had met him casually she would have made no attempt to look beneath the surface, for it wouldn’t have mattered. She would have put him down as a handsome animal who might or might not be worth a little attention, depending on her schedule at the time. Life had taught her one big lesson-never to commit herself to anyone. The only person she could be completely certain of was herself. And now with McQuade, she had to make up her mind what steps to take, how best to reach him, then back her judgment to the limit. She had seen that he could think and act quickly, but how good would a story have to be to fool him? In Michele’s view, anybody who chose to make his living as an armed robber had to be a little stupid. There were easier and safer and more satisfying ways of earning money. And there were moments when he seemed stupid, or at least not interested in making the necessary connections. But she had the nagging feeling that this was a manner, a style which he had decided to affect because he considered it suitable to his profession.
Now she stood before him naked.
Her dressmaker, poor darling, would have been appalled, but she could see that McQuade found nothing wrong with her appearance. His mouth was no longer taut at the corners. He took out a cigarette and lit it, all without looking away from her. Perhaps, after all, she thought, things were going to be all right. She picked up the negligee.
“Is that all you’ve got?” he said.
“To sleep in? I sleep in nothing. It is easier.”
She drew on the negligee. It had no fastenings except the belt at the waist. She cinched it in tightly. She could tell from his eyes that they would have sex, probably soon. But she saw something else: it made no difference. If he felt it was necessary he would still kill her.
The phone rang. He did not jump; he had good nerves, she noticed. But the flesh around his eyes contracted. There was no question about it. Big and handsome he undoubtedly was, but when he wanted to he could look very mean.
The phone rang again. He motioned to her and she picked it up.
“Hello.”
“Michele,” a man’s voice said. “What progress?”
“Ah, cheri,” she said. “I wished for you to call. For tonight I fear I must beg off. The noise, the rushing about, it has given me a headache. I must go to bed with my bottle of aspirin.”
“Anything wrong?” the voice said quickly. “If there is I can send somebody. Say yes or no.”
“No. Call me tomorrow. But I am truly sorry. It came on all at once, like the ceiling falling.”
“You know, of course, that there isn’t much time.”
“I think of nothing else. But it will arrange itself. Now I must hang up. Forgive me. My head.”
She put the phone back. “A man I met,” she said quickly. “I said perhaps I could take dinner with him. Now what are you thinking, with that face like a hurricane? That he will come to see if I am with another man? If he does, shoot him.”
He held her eyes a moment longer. “Don’t try to pull anything.” He drank. “Come on, put that junk in your hair.”
“You won’t like the way I look, believe me, like the Statue of Liberty.” With her drink, she made believe she was holding a torch. “No,” she suggested, “why not wash it instead? That would be better.”
She watched him thinking about it. “OK. Wait a minute. You still look like something in a magazine.”
There was an open box of powder on the chest of drawers. He spilled some of it down the front of the negligee. Then, with the burning end of his cigarette, he put a hole in a conspicuous place. The negligee had cost her seventy-five dollars at a Fifth Avenue store, a fact it would have been unwise to mention.
“And more lipstick,” he said. “Really smear it on. You’ve been hitting the bottle all day. You’re so plastered you can’t walk straight.”
“Plastered? Oh, I see. Drunk. It will be difficult. I have never felt less so.”
She unscrewed her lipstick and took it to the bathroom mirror while he watched critically from the doorway.
“Put it on crooked.”
She bore down heavily on one side. The lipstick slipped and left a red smear on her chin. By the time she was finished she had changed her appearance very much for the worse.
“Plastered,” she said darkly, eyeing her reflection. “Now I am repulsive enough?”
“Get to work on your hair.”
He stayed in the doorway while she washed and rinsed her hair. She was toweling it briskly when the doorbell chimed.