She looked the part, too, Johnny thought; the snug-fitting scarlet sheath that encased the full curves of her body matched the brilliance of her lips, the only touch of color in the pale ivory features. Her blue-black hair was drawn straight back in an artfully careless chignon upon the nape of her small neck, and in the spotlight her bare arms and shoulders were dazzling. Altogether an extremely sophisticated simplicity, Johnny reflected.
He took another swallow of the heavy dark rum in the glass on the table before him. He felt fine-light, loose, and liberal. Consuelo had commented a bit pointedly upon the array of glasses upon the table each time she returned to it, but Johnny's mood had soared too high to be blunted. It had been a pleasant evening, and he had plans for its remainder.
He glanced around the quiet room. The girl was in the final moments of her last show, and she had really enlisted her audience. The slim dark men and their women-slender and fiery or plump and placid-sat entranced. Dark heads bowed in evoked remembrance. There must be no happy gypsies, Johnny mused; the songs delivered in the throbbing voice bitterly lamented unrequited love and tearful farewell.
When Consuelo finally curtsied to the room the applause was not overloud, but on the way back to Johnny's corner the scarlet sheath was delayed at table after table for a word of commendation. Johnny was on his feet with her chair withdrawn when she reached him, and she sank into it gratefully.
“You do that well,” he told her seriously. “The accompaniment could have been a little bit better.”
“The accompaniment is as good as the voice,” she replied indifferently, accepting the cigarette he offered her.
“Who does your arrangements?”
“A legacy from my ex-husband.” She smiled, a self-mocking smile of the lips but not the eyes. “I shouldn't say it like that, really, because they're exceptionally good arrangements, and the material itself is timeless.”
“You do them well,” he said for the second time.
The full lips thinned, and he could see the line of her jaw. “Once I dreamt that I would be the best. The greatest.” She smiled, in self-disparagement. “It seems so simple when one is young. Yet I came closer than most; I had the energy, and the ruthlessness.” The smile turned wry. “I had little voice, actually, but I persevered. I found a whisky-soaked, hunchbacked wreck of a man with a genius for musical arrangement, and I married him. In more sober moments he worked with me, hand-tailoring the arrangements to what voice I had. With him I just possibly might have made it to the top, but then he discovered a girl with a real voice who challenged the drunken artistry in him-”
She spread her hands, palms up. “The story of my life, senor. He left me flat. At my age I know it should be difficult to think of myself as in a backwater, yet I find that it is so. I sing here, and I wait. I tell myself that something will happen some day that will again push me out into the mainstream of life.”
She looked over at the bar as Johnny sat in silence. “You must have charmed Manuel, that he is not here to escort me.”
“I'll deputize,” Johnny announced.
“To the tenement steps only, then,” she warned him. She looked significantly at the empty glasses on the table. “I mean no offense, but I have no need for a rum cavalier.” She rose to her feet. “I'll speak to Doug, the manager, and then we can leave.”
Johnny watched appreciatively the tic-toe of her hips beneath the tight material of her gown as she crossed the floor to the manager's office. He felt a fine inner glow, and he did not think it was rum-induced.
“There's a taxi at the front door,” she told him as she returned to the table and picked up her bag. In the cab she favored him with the same self-mocking smile he had seen previously. “This is really quite an occasion. My brother does not permit club patrons as escorts, even for a once-married sister. He is old-fashioned. You are only the second so favored. Do you know Rick Manfredi, the gambler?”
“I know who he is.”
“He impossible, I suppose, but fun, in a way. The little boy type. Difficult to explain if you don't know him. You might like him.”
“Sure,” Johnny said carefully, and they rode in silence through the narrow, dirty streets. Consuelo leaned forward to speak quickly as the cab pulled into the curb in front of the tenement. “You won't need to get out. I'll run right on up.
“I can't leave you out here on the street,” Johnny said in his most reasonable voice. “Manuel'd come after me with his dullest knife if someone jumped you on the stairs.” He handed the driver a bill. “I'll walk you up.”
“Then hold the cab, at least!” she warned him. “You'll never get another in this neighborhood this time of night.”
“Occupational hazard,” he told her, and took her arm. In the light of the lower stairway he could see a faint dimple of amusement in an ivory cheek. In the narrow stairwell he relinquished her arm, and she walked up steadily ahead of him. He was not unaware of the landscape immediately before his eyes as he climbed.
“It keeps me fit, this stair climbing,” she announced, and with no warning broke into a run in the middle of the fifth floor stairway. She fled light-footedly up the balance of the steps and across the hallway, and when Johnny belatedly arrived at the door of 5-B she was looking out at him coolly over the chain latch. “Good night, Johnny,” she said with only a touch of breathlessness after her run. “You can start testing the occupational hazard.”
In the room shadows behind her he could make out little more than the shape of her features, but there was no mistaking the mocking lilt in her husky voice. “Now you're a playful little jigger, aren't you?” he grumbled, reaching inside and securing a handhold on the end of the chain latch bolted to the door. He bent his wrist, and with a scree-e-e the metal came free of the door with half a panel of wood attached. He dropped the piece, and it jangled lightly as it fell to the end of the chain. He stepped inside and closed the door behind him.
“It seems a little juvenile to scream,” Consuelo Ybarra said cautiously in the silence that had fallen.
“That's what I thought, too,” Johnny agreed, and reached for her. In the room's half light he was watching her feet, wary of the inch-long high heels, and the full-armed slap delivered from the near-darkness surprised him and rocked his head on his shoulders. He whistled and stepped back to wait for the ringing in his ear to die out. “You sure Manuel did the fightin' in this family, kid?” he asked her, shuffling closer as she backed away.
“Have a care!” she warned breathlessly, and fell victim to the left arm feint as the right hand caught and spun her. He boosted her aloft easily as he turned to the bedroom doorway, and before she could struggle he had shot-putted her eight feet to the center of the bed. She bounced high and came up in a twisting roll as a hand flashed into her bosom and emerged with a glint of steel. “I will teach you that I am not a whore,” she said calmly. “When I get off this bed, I will kill you.”
His wrist slap sent the knife spinning as he dropped down beside her. “When you get off this bed, girl, you're welcome.” His hands came down upon the tensed vitality of her bare shoulders, and it was only seconds before the shoulders relaxed. He rolled her over swiftly and pried off her high-heeled shoes.
“You are one big fool!” she murmured languidly, marveling. “So much importance you attach to this?” She lifted an arm lazily. “The zipper is under here…”
She stirred in the crook of his arm as he lay at peace in the perfumed darkness, and he turned his head. “Cigarette?”
“It is not important.” Her voice was quiet, relaxed.
He half raised himself on an elbow. “Put on the light. I want to see.”
“No light,” she said immediately. “It's not decent, between strangers. And you are old enough to know that all cats are gray.”