“They don’t taste strong,” he said, and with a sinking heart cast a glance at the bartender who was mixing up another small glass of expensive froth… and second one for him, which was a foul trick, and one they could pull in a place like this.
“Love them,” she said when the bartender came back and set both down. She picked up hers and sipped. “A local delicacy, just on Viking and Pell. You come all the way from Wyatt’s, do you? That’s quite a distance for a smallish ship. What combine is that? I didn’t hear you say.”
“WSC.” He was close to panic, what with the bill and the questions which were hitting into areas he wanted left alone. Misery churned in his stomach which the frothy drink did nothing to comfort. “I run margin, wherever there’s room for a carrier. I’m close to independent. But Dublin fairly well runs her own combine, doesn’t she? You go the whole circle. That’s independent.” He talked nonsense, to drag the question back to Dublin, back to her, staring into her eyes and suspecting that all this was at his expense, that some kind of high sign had just been passed between her and her bearded kinsman who had strayed through the door and out again. Possibly someone was waiting outside to start trouble. Or she was going to have her amusement as far as frustrated him and walk off, leaving him the bill. He was soberer after this one more drink than he had been when he came in here, excepting a certain numbness in his fingers, and while she looked no less beautiful, his desire was cooled by that sobriety, and by a certain wry amusement which persisted in her expression. He put on a good face, as he would do with a curious customs agent or a dock-side dealer who meant to bluff his price down. He grinned and she smiled. “None of the chatter means anything to you,” he said. “What questions am I supposed to ask?”
“You buy me a drink,” she said, and set hers down, half-finished. “You don’t buy anything else, of course, being wiser than some stationers I know, who don’t know how far their money goes. Thank you, Stevens. I did enjoy it. Good luck to you, finding crew.”
The bartender, operating on his own keen reflexes, was headed his way in a hurry, seeing who was leaving and who was being left to pay. Sandor saw that with his own tail-of-the-eye watch for trouble, felt in his pocket desperately and threw down what he had as Allison Reilly headed for the door and the lighted dock. He was off the stool and almost with her when the voice rang out: “You! You there, that’s short.”
Sandor stopped, frozen by that voice, when in another place he might have dodged out, when in ordinary sanity he would not be in that situation. The military officers had looked up from their drinking. Others had. He felt theatrically of his pocket. “I gave you a twenty, sir.”
The bartender scowled and held out the palm with the chits. “Not a twenty. Demis and a ten.”
Sandor assumed outrage, stalked back and looked, put on chagrin. “I do beg pardon, sir. I was shorted myself, then, next door, because I should have had a twenty. I think I’m a little drunk, sir; but I have credit. Can we arrange this?”
The bartender glowered; but there came a presence at Sander’s shoulder and: “Charge it to Dublin” Allison Reilly said. Sandor looked about into Allison Reilly’s small smile and very plain stare: they were about of a size and it was a level glance indeed. “Want to step outside?” she asked.
He nodded, fright and temper and alcohol muddling into one adrenalin haze. He followed that slim coveralled figure with the midnight hair those few steps outside into the light, and the noise of the docks was sufficient to cool his head again. He had, he reckoned, been paid off well enough, scammed by an expert. He smiled ruefully at her when they stopped and she turned to face him. It was not what he was feeling at the moment, which was more a desire to break something, but good humor was obligatory on a man with empty pockets and a Dubliner’s drinks in his belly. There were always her cousins, at least several hundred of them.
“Does that line work often?” she asked.
“I’ll pay you the tab,” he said, which he could not believe he was saying, but he reckoned that he could draw another twenty out of his margin account. He hated having been trapped and having been rescued. “I have it I just don’t walk the docks with much.”
She stared at him as if weighing that. Or him. Or thinking of calling her cousins. “I take it that all of this was leading somewhere.”
She did it to him again, set him completely off balance. “It might have,” he said with the same wry humor. “But I’m headed back to my ship. You got all my change and I’m afraid Lucy’s accommodations aren’t what you’re used to.”
“Huh.” She looked in her pocket and brought out a single fifty. “Bradford’s. I know it. It’s a class accommodation.”
He blinked, overthrown again, trying to figure if she had believed him anywhere down the line, or what she saw in the likes of him. She might be setting him up for another and worse joke than the last; but he wanted her. That was there again worse than before, obscuring all caution and choking off all clever argument Years of dreaming solitary dreams and looking to stay alive, barely alive, which was all it came to… and one night in a silver bar and a high-class sleepover. He had gotten hazardously drunk, he told himself, floating in an overload of senses; and so had she gotten drunk. She was deliberately picking someone like him who was a risk, because she was curious, or because she was bored, or because Bradford’s was a Dublin hangout and one shout was going to bring more trouble down on him than he could deal with. His hand was still cold-sweating when they linked arms and walked in the direction she chose, and he wiped his palm on his pocket lining before he took her cool, dry hand in his.
They walked the dock, along which gantries pointed at the distant unseen core, towers aimed straight up beside them as they walked, and farther along aimed askew, so that they looked like the veined segments of some gigantic fruit, and the dock they walked unrolled like some gray spool of ribbon with a tinsel left-hand edge of neon-lit bars and restaurants and shop display windows. Viking dock had a set of smells all its own, part food and part liquor and part machinery and chemicals and the forbidding musky chill of open cargo locks; it had a set of sounds that was human noise and machinery working and music that wafted out of bars in combinations sometimes discordant and sometimes oddly fit It was a giddy, sense-battering flow he had never given way to, not like this, not with a silver Dubliner woman arm in arm with him, step for step with him, weaving in and out among the crowds.
They reached Bradford’s discreet front, with the smoked oval pressure windows and the gold lettering… walked in, checked in at the desk with a comp register presided over by a clerk who might have been a corporate receptionist. They stood on thick carpets, under fancy lighting, everything white and gold, where the foyer door shut out the gaudy noise of the docks. She paid, and got the room card, and grinned at him, took his arm and led the way down the thick-carpeted hall to a numbered doorway. She thrust the card into the slot and opened it
It was a sleeper of the class of the bar they had just come from, a place he could never afford—all cream satin, with a conspicuous blue and cream bed and a cream tiled bath with a shower. For a moment he was put off by such luxury, which he had never so much as seen in his life. Then pride took hold of him, and he slipped his arm about Allison Reilly and pulled her close against him with a jerk which drew an instinctive resistance; he grinned when he did it, and she pushed back with a look that at once warned and chose to be amused.