Then I went back to the window again and watched.
The beads blinked just once. Then they stayed on again, as evenly as before. She’d seen. She’d got it.
I went over and ate with Job, downstairs in the back, like I did every night. I was more cut off from her there, right in the same house, than I was back in my own quarters. Back there, at least, I could see the rooms she was in from the outside.
“It’s like a funeral out there,” he told me with a jerk of his head toward the swing doors. “Chills the food before you even set it down.”
I didn’t answer. That’s a hell of a word to come up tonight of all nights, I thought. I only hope it’s the wrong one.
“You haven’t eaten much,” he told me when he got up to scrape the plates off into the pail. Then he added, working away at it, “She didn’t either, tonight. Scarcely touched nothin’.”
This time I shot him a look, a long sharp-pointed one, to see if there was any meaning hidden in the hookup he’d just made between us. There didn’t seem to be any; he would have answered the look if there had been. I think. They always look to see where the thrust lands when they’ve made one. It must have been just a coincidence, like Jordan’s laughter at the moment of passing the palm grove.
I got up and shoved my chair back and went back where I belonged. This was about a quarter to nine. We had about three hours, now. Two hours net, deducting the ride in.
I was nervous. I’d never been so nervous before. All the little lines across the flats of my hands were wet and shiny, and no matter how many times I dried them off, they’d come back slowly wet again. It wasn’t fear of those two — Roman and Jordan — as much as it was a fear for her; that I mightn’t be able to get her out of there in time; that she’d suddenly be held fast, immovable; that I’d lose her; I guess that was it. A sort of love anxiety.
I walked around and around; how I walked around! There should have been dust coming up under my heels, the tracks I made.
Nine-thirty, quarter of ten, ten. Two hours left, one hour net.
Then suddenly it rang and nearly took the top of my scalp off. Job’s voice: “Bring the car around, Scotty. Right away.”
This was it. She must have rigged up something, found some way of — I smashed my cigarette out and ran downstairs and almost backed the car out without clearing the door out of the way first.
I got over there fast, almost too fast to stop in time.
Just as I drew up the light flashed on over the house entrance and the door opened, and she came out. She was in evening dress, white and long and glossy, and she had all her diamonds on. Everywhere they’d go, there was a diamond, and he hadn’t left any place out. It was like a mass of living quartz coming toward you through the electric-light rays.
My insides all went down. I thought, There’s something wrong. That’s not the way she’d dress to make a quick run for it with me. My God, she’ll light up the whole road into town like a flare.
Her face was frozen; she didn’t know me. I held the door for her, and she passed me by and got in.
“Look out. They’re right behind me.”
Roman came first, bulky and perfumed up with hair tonic. A white silk scarf folded fiat around his neck, but without any topcoat over it. He thought they could be worn by themselves.
And then there was a stage wait and I heard him complain, “What’s Giordano doing?” And when he gave him his real name, his pre-prosperity name, like that, he was out of humor about something — but not necessarily with Jordan himself. I’d already learned that sometime back.
“Checking his bullets, I guess,” I heard her say with soft-breathed bitterness.
Then the rattlesnake came out, erect on its tail; the height of a man, and slim, and deadly.
They sat on each side of her, and I closed the door without meeting her eyes and hopped in.
Roman said, “The Troc, Scotty.”
That was one of his places.
I took them at his pace, not hers, and the stars throbbed a little with it. I kept my eyes off the mirror. It wasn’t as tough that way. I just watched the road sizzling toward us, like water lathering out of a broken hydrant.
None of the three said anything. They didn’t say anything for almost three quarters of the way in.
Then finally Roman remarked, “You’re quiet tonight.”
She said, “I feel that way.”
Jordan said, “Maybe she didn’t want to come in with us tonight, Ed.”
But she didn’t answer.
Roman said, “Didn’t you?”
“You already asked me that back at the house,” she said. “I came. I’m here. What more is there?”
And after that they didn’t say anything more for the final quarter of the way in. Quiet drive.
We got to the Troc with its peppermint-striped awning stretched out to the edge of the sidewalk and blue lights shining under it. The doorman, a big Bahama buck named Walter, who looked even blacker in the blue light than he was, knew who Roman was and practically got down on two knees and kowtowed.
She didn’t have a chance to say anything to me. She had to alight before them, and they brought up the rear, walling her in. I watched her go in. Her white dress looked blue now, and the beautifully sculptured skin of her back looked like marble with a faint bluish tinge to it.
Everything was blue around that entrance. Even my heart.
I drove around the corner and parked there, just out of sight. I didn’t know what to do. The side of the place lined the side street I was on, but there were no openings along that wall, no windows, it was just blank stucco.
I kept walking down as far as the corner and casing the entrance from there, along the frontal building line. People kept coming in all the time. No one left. The place was only hitting its stride.
Once a waiter came out and stood there a minute with Walter. I thought maybe she’d sent some message out to me. I started down toward the two of them, to make sure he wouldn’t miss me, if that was it. He looked at me coming along — the waiter — and then he turned around and went in again. So he must have just wanted a breath of air.
I turned and went back. I already knew you couldn’t see into the place from out front — there was too much depth of entryway — so I didn’t even try.
Eleven came, and then eleven-ten. Eleven-twenty, and then eleven-thirty. I stood there by the car and I kept whacking at the glossy surface of it with my open hand. It smarted, but not half so bad as just standing there helpless, watching the time go by. Maybe that was why I did it.
Suddenly there was a shiny flash down at the corner, where there’d been only dull reflected blue light until now, and she was coming running toward me. She was just in her bare dress. I mean she’d left her head scarf and evening bag and all the rest behind her in there.
I hurried her the last few steps with my arm curved to her back. “Quick!” she panted. “Don’t talk now! Just let’s get away from here.”
She jumped into the front seat, and I was already under the wheel.
We tore away from there.
“How much time have we?”
“Twenty minutes.”
“I couldn’t leave the table any sooner. I would only have had to come back again. They picked one right in a line with the entrance, damn it. They would have seen me come out of the powder room and go for the door; they were both looking that way.”
“Then how did you—?”
“Someone came over and sat down with us just now. They rearranged their chairs to make room. That turned them partly the other way.” She reached down into the top of her dress. “Here, take this,” she said.