“Hand-picked by Maud Hinkle herself, no doubt.” I pulled the other tuft of white hair from my temple. It went into the case on top of the plastiderm gloves (wrinkled thick blue veins, long carnelian nails) that had been Henrietta’s hands, lying in the chiffon folds of her sari.
Then there was the downward tug of stopping. The Honorable Clement was still half on my face when the door opened.
Gray and gray, with an absolutely dismal expression on his face, the Hawk swung through the doors. Behind him people were dancing in an elaborate pavilion festooned with Oriental magnificence (and a mandala of shifting hues on the ceiling.) Arty beat me to door close. Then he gave me an odd look.
I just sighed and finished peeling off Clem.
“The police are up there?” the Hawk reiterated.
“Arty,” I said, buckling my pants, “it certainly looks that way.” The car gained momentum. “You look almost as upset as Alex.” I shrugged the tux jacket down my arms, turning the sleeves inside out, pulled one wrist free, and jerked off the white starched dicky with the black bow tie and stuffed it into the briefcase with all my other dickies; swung the coat around and slipped on Howard Calvin Evingston’s good gray herringbone. Howard (like Hank) is a redhead (but not as curly).
The Hawk raised his bare brows when I peeled off Clement’s bald pate and shook out my hair.
“I noticed you aren’t carrying around all those bulky things in your pocket any more.”
“Oh, those have been taken care of,” he said gruffly. “They’re all right.”
“Arty,” I said, adjusting my voice down to Howard’s security-provoking, ingenuous baritone, “it must have been my unabashed conceit that made me think that those Regular Service police were here just for me—”
The Hawk actually snarled. “They wouldn’t be that unhappy if they got me, too.”
And from his corner Hawk demanded, “You’ve got security here with you, don’t you, Arty?”
“So what?”
“There’s one way you can get out of this,” Hawk hissed at me. His jacket had come half open down his wrecked chest. “That’s if Arty takes you out with him.”
“Brilliant idea,” I concluded. “You want a couple of thousand back for the service?”
The idea didn’t amuse him. “I don’t want anything from you.” He turned to Hawk. “I need something from you, kid. Not him. Look, I wasn’t prepared for Maud. If you want me to get your friend out, then you’ve got to do something for me.”
The boy looked confused.
I thought I saw smugness on Arty’s face, but the expression resolved into concern. “You’ve got to figure out some way to fill the lobby up with people, and fast.”
I was going to ask why but then I didn’t know the extent of Arty’s security. I was going to ask how but the floor pushed up at my feet and the doors swung open. “If you can’t do it,” the Hawk growled to Hawk, “none of us will get out of here. None of us!”
I had no idea what the kid was going to do, but when I started to follow him out into the lobby, the Hawk grabbed my arm and hissed, “Stay here, you idiot!!”
I stepped back. Arty was leaning on door open.
Hawk sprinted towards the pool. And splashed in.
He reached the braziers on their twelve foot tripods and began to climb.
“He’s going to hurt himself!” the Hawk whispered.
“Yeah,” I said, but I don’t think my cynicism got through. Below the great dish of fire, Hawk was fiddling. Then something under there came loose. Something else went Clang! And something else spurted out across the water. The fire raced along it and hit the pool, churning and roaring like hell.
A black arrow with a golden head: Hawk dove.
I bit the inside of my cheek as the alarm sounded. Four people in uniforms were coming across the blue carpet. Another group were crossing in the other direction, saw the flames, and one of the women screamed. I let out my breath, thinking carpet and walls and ceiling would be flame-proof. But I kept losing focus on the idea before the sixty-odd infernal feet.
Hawk surfaced on the edge of the pool in the only clear spot left, rolled over on to the carpet, clutching his face. And rolled. And rolled. Then, came to his feet.
Another elevator spilled out a load of passengers who gaped and gasped. A crew came through the doors now with fire-fighting equipment. The alarm was still sounding.
Hawk turned to look at the dozen-odd people in the lobby. Water puddled the carpet about his drenched and shiny pants legs. Flame turned the drops on his cheek and hair to flickering copper and blood.
He banged his fists against his wet thighs, took a deep breath, and against the roar and the bells and the whispering, he Sang.
Two people ducked back into two elevators. From a doorway half a dozen more emerged. The elevators returned half a minute later with a dozen people each. I realized the message was going through the building, there’s a Singer Singing in the lobby.
The lobby filled. The flames growled, the fire fighters stood around shuffling, and Hawk, feet apart on the blue rug, by the burning pool Sang, and Sang of a bar off Times Square full of thieves, morphadine-heads, brawlers, drunkards, women too old to trade what they still held out for barter, and trade just too nasty-grimy, where, earlier in the evening, a brawl had broken out, and an old man had been critically hurt in the fray.
Arty tugged at my sleeve.
“What… ?”
“Come on,” he hissed.
The elevator door closed behind us.
We ambled through the attentive listeners, stopping to watch, stopping to hear. I couldn’t really do Hawk justice. A lot of that slow amble I spent wondering what sort of security Arty had:
Standing behind a couple in a bathrobe who were squinting into the heat, I decided it was all very simple. Arty wanted simply to drift away through a crowd, so he’d conveniently gotten Hawk to manufacture one.
To get to the door we had to pass through practically a cordon of Regular Service policemen who I don’t think had anything to do with what might have been going on in the roof garden; they’d simply collected to see the fire and stayed for the Song. When Arty tapped one on the shoulder, “Excuse me please,” to get by, the policeman glanced at him, glanced away, then did a Mack Sennet double-take. But another policeman caught the whole interchange, and touched the first on the arm and gave him a frantic little headshake. Then both men turned very deliberately back to watch the Singer. While the earthquake in my chest stilled, I decided that the Hawk’s security complex of agents and counter agents, maneuvering and machinating through the flaming lobby, must be of such finesse and intricacy that to attempt understanding was to condemn oneself to total paranoia.
Arty opened the final door.
I stepped from the last of the air conditioning into the night.
We hurried down the ramp.
“Hey, Arty… ?”
“You go that way.” He pointed down the street. “I go this way.”
“Eh… what’s that way?” I pointed in my direction.
“Twelve Towers sub-sub-subway station. Look. I’ve got you out of there. Believe me, you’re safe for the time being. Now go take a train someplace interesting. Goodbye. Go on now.” Then Arty the Hawk put his fists in his pockets and hurried up the street.
I started down, keeping near the wall, expecting someone to get me with a blow-dart from a passing car, a deathray from the shrubbery.
I reached the sub.
And still nothing had happened.
Agate gave way to Malachite:
Tourmaline:
Beryl (during which month I turned twenty-six):
Porphyry:
Sapphire (that month I took the ten thousand I hadn’t frittered away and invested it in The Glacier, a perfectly legitimate ice cream palace on Triton—the first and only ice cream palace on Triton—which took off like fireworks; all investors were returned eight hundred percent, no kidding. Two weeks later I’d lost half of those earnings on another set of preposterous illegalities, and was feeling quite depressed, but The Glacier kept pulling them in. The new Word came by):