Pretty soon the alley mouth lightened up a little ahead of me. Not much, but at least it became the color of pewter or slate, instead of coal-black, from the reflection of the niggardly lights along the lengthwise lane that ran past its foot. I slowed as I got near it and started to pay myself out by hand spans along the wall.
When I’d fitted myself into the corner line again I did the same thing I’d done back at the doorway, let the rough edges of my profile overlap past it.
This time there was a catastrophe.
A voice growled right into my ear — or should I say into my questioning nose, since my ear was still back behind the wall — “¿Hasta que hora nos quedamos aqui?”
I thought it was said to me, it was so close and unexpected. I punched my outward shoulder back against the wall in a half turn-around and stayed there as flat as a wet three-sheet that’s just been pasted up.
I’d glimpsed the outer edges of his figure, and it wasn’t good; it was in police uniform.
I couldn’t move for a minute, and before I’d had a chance to the situation bettered itself a trifle. Very little, but at least enough to show that the challenge hadn’t been a direct one to me. A second voice answered his: “Hasta que lo cogimos.”
So there were a pair of them there, keeping the alley covered. I might have known it was too good to be true. Evidently they’d been silent all along and just made those couple of desultory remarks in time to keep me from stepping around the corner onto their toes. I couldn’t understand why she hadn’t tipped me off, but maybe they hadn’t been here yet when she went out herself; had been posted only after the last time she’d come in.
They didn’t say anything more. They were bored at the assignment and not in a conversational mood. Once I heard shoe leather creak as one of them shifted weight. I was afraid even the machine oil would give me away; I was so close to them, even that was a liability. But I guess it had too much else to compete with.
I ebbed back a cautious step, feeling my way behind me with arched foot. Then another. After the third I was a little safer; I turned and went, face forward, in retreat. But very quiet, very tenderly.
I was stuck. Stuck good, and I knew it. There might be an upper outlet to the alley, but if there was and they’d posted men at one end, they’d almost certainly have them posted at the other end too. If they hadn’t, they needed to have their heads examined.
Before I could decide what to do about it; in fact, before I’d even recovered the full distance back to my original doorway and that degree of safety at least, the sack I was in closed up even tighter.
There was a tread coming toward me from the recesses of the alley, and when I forced my eyes I could discern movement against the blackness, or rather of it, as a figure sought to detach itself and come forward into visibility. A feat which it could not accomplish, no matter how it narrowed the distance between us; there was not enough light to let it. But someone was astir and bearing down on me, and I was going to be pinned between the two: the lookouts around the corner and this oncoming unknown quantity. There was no break in the walls on either side for me to slip into; it had overspanned the entry to Midnight’s house and was already on my side of it, crowding me before it into an everlessening zone of immunity, before I’d discovered it.
I went over to the opposite wall, then back to the first again, in a sort of floundering uncertainty. The difference was only of a pace or two across, and both were equally barren of aid for purposes of evasion. It was a good rattrap to be in. The only thing I didn’t do was make the mistake of falling back toward the alley opening again; down there the odds against me were double.
It came on. I’d started forward to meet it now rather than stand still. It seemed to me to have a straggling ring to it that indicated a casual approach rather than an intentional one. In other words, it was coming down this way at random and not because it knew I was there. If I kept going, head low, I might be able to barge past and break through to the other side of it before I was stopped, I figured.
The margin of anonymity between us melted away as we came together, and suddenly we were full abreast, and at another pace I would have been safely to the rear.
It was a girl again. A whiff of sachet in my face and the flirt of a skirt against my leg as I crowded past told me that. This town seemed to be alive with female night prowlers.
Her arm had found the opening under mine — I don’t know how — at the instant of passage, and I suddenly found myself locked there in a reversed arm link of companionship, one of us facing one way; the other, the opposite. I would have had to tow her backward after me, full weight, if I’d tried to keep going at that moment.
She said, “¿Como le va, mariner?”
I still could hardly see her in the gloom, even with both our elbows entangled. She seemed to be willing to take me sight unseen.
She said something about a drink, I think it was. I got the word copita. Did I have the price of a drink, I suppose.
That gave me an idea. I quit trying to wrench her limp arm off mine and let her have it back the long way around, around the back of her own neck. “Okay,” I said hurriedly, “you want a drink? Walk close to me like this... No, lean up closer... That’s it, snuggle up against me. Now walk down this way with me, just past the corner.”
She seemed to have a single phrase of English on tap. Who didn’t down there? God knows where she’d picked it up. “You serrit,” she said chummily.
“Keep talking,” I said. “Keep talking a lot.”
“You serrit, you serrit, you serrit,” she said obligingly.
I could hardly walk; I was practically carrying her on my right side, she was leaning over so. She had a big celluloid comb arrangement sticking up, and that worked swell; it screened one whole side of my face. The side they were on.
“What do you want, wine or rum?”
“You serrit.”
“That’s good,” I drawled approvingly. “Here’s the turn.”
We practically took the skin off their faces, we passed them so close. She was on that side, luckily. There were two of them, despondently holding up the wall there. One in cop’s uniform, one in mufti.
I was swinging her from side to side as we went by, as though one or both of us had already had more than enough.
She knew them both. She had to show off. Maybe that was good, too, for all I knew.
“Hello,” she said airily over her shoulder. “Look what I’ve-got. See?” It sounded as though she stuck her tongue out and gave them the raspberry. They must have been kidding her about slipping, previous to this.
I grinned widely with that side of my face. When I grin, all the skin goes back and folds up. That leaves less face to be inspected. They hadn’t been in the original party in the car, anyway.
We were well past them now, doing a slow sway from side to side.
They hollered out something after us about dientes. I think it was meant for me. To hang onto my gold teeth, probably.
I kept her with me until we got as far as I was going on the transverse. Then all of a sudden she had nothing but air around her, and it kept getting wider every minute.
“See you some more,” I said, and pitched my thumb back the way we’d just come.
She wasn’t one-phrase in Spanish, whatever she was in English. She sent up a shower of epithets that rained down all over, from one end of the block to the other. It reminded me of a water main bursting in the street behind me. Only one carrying vocabulary instead of water.