The siren was a steady howl that seemed to fill the room. Quick! Anita said. Fly low. You don’t want to silhouette against the sky.
Even as she spoke the room was emptying and there was no body on the floor.
She hesitated for a moment, looking at the two of them.
Someday you’ll tell me what this is all about?
Someday, said Blaine. And thanks.
Any time, she said. We parries stick together. We have to stick together. They’ll smash us if we don’t.
She swung toward Blaine, and he felt the touch of her, mind against mind, and there was suddenly the sense of fireflies in the evening dusk and the smell of lilacs drifting in the softness of a river fog.
Then she was gone and the door was closing and someone was hammering at the front.
Sit down, Blaine said to Harriet. Act as naturally as you can. Unconcerned. Relaxed. We were just sitting here and talking. Godfrey had been with us, but he went into town. Someone came and he rode into town with them. We don’t know who it was. He should be back in an hour or two.
Check, said Harriet.
She sat down in a chair and folded her hands in her lap sedately.
Blaine went to the door to let in the law.
TWENTY-TWO
Belmont was beginning to close up. All the houses, as they drove past, had been tightly shuttered, and in the business district, as they drove into it, the shop lights were going out.
Up the street a block or two, the marquee of the hotel still gleamed brightly in the dusk and just this side of it was a flashing sign that proclaimed the Wild West Bar still was willing to take on a customer.
“I don’t think,” said Harriet, “that we fooled those police too much.”
Blaine agreed. “Maybe not. But we had them stopped. There was nothing they could find.”
“I thought for a while they would pull us in.”
“So did I. But you sat there making gentle fun of them. That was hard to take. They were glad to get away. They must have felt like fools.”
He motioned at the flashing bar sign. “Maybe we should start with that.”
“As good a place as any. Likewise, about the only place there is.”
The bar was empty when they came into the place. The bartender had an elbow propped and was idly dabbing with a cloth at imaginary wet spots.
Blaine and Harriet hoisted themselves onto stools opposite the man.
“What’ll it be?” he demanded of them.
They told him.
He got glasses and reached for bottles.
“Little slow tonight,” said Blaine.
“Almost closing time,” said the man. “They don’t stick around. Soon as it gets dark folks get under cover. Everyone in this town.”
“Bad town?”
“No, not especially. It’s the curfew law. This place has got a tough one. Patrols all over the place and them cops are tough. They really make it stick.”
“How about yourself?” asked Harriet.
“Oh, I am all right, miss. The boys, they know me. They know the circumstances. They know I got to stick around just in case a late customer, like you, drops in. From the hotel mostly. They know I got to get the place tucked in and turn out the lights. They give me extra minutes.”
“Sounds tough, all right,” said Blaine.
The barkeep wagged his head. “For your own protection, mister. Folks ain’t got no sense. If it wasn’t for the curfew, they’d stay out to all hours where anything could get them.”
He stopped what he was doing.
“I just happened to think,” he announced. “I got something new. You might like to try it.”
“Like what?” asked Harriet.
He reached back and got the bottle, held it up to show them.
“Something new,” he said. “Straight out of Fishhook. They picked it up some outlandish place. Sap of a tree or something. Probably loaded with a lot of hydrocarbons. I got a couple of bottles off the factor at the Trading Post. Just to try, you know. Thought there might be some folks who might like it.”
Blaine shook his head. “Not for me. God knows what is in it.”
“Me, neither,” said Harriet.
The barkeep set the bottle back regretfully.
“I don’t blame you folks,” he said, giving them the drinks he’d made. “I took a nip of it myself. Just to test it out, you see, because I’m no drinking man.
“Not,” he added, quickly and parenthetically, “that I have anything against it.”
“Of course not,” Harriet sympathized.
“It was funny tasting stuff,” he said. “Not bad, you know. Not good, either. Had a musty tang. You might get to like it if you had a drink or two.”
He stood in silence for a moment, with his hands planted solidly on the bar.
“You know what I been thinking?” he demanded.
“Not the least,” said Harriet.
“I been wondering all this afternoon if that factor down at the Trading Post concocted that stuff up himself. Just as a sort of stinking joke, you see.”
“Oh, he wouldn’t dare.”
“Well, I imagine you are right, miss. But all of them factors are funny sorts of jerks. Folks don’t have much to do with them — socially, at least — but even so they manage to know more of what is going on than anyone in town. They must be listening all the time, for they have all the latest gossip.
“And,” said the barkeep, laying emphasis upon this horrid crime and this social failing, “they don’t never tell you nothing.”
“Ain’t it a fact,” Harriet agreed, enthusiastically.
The barkeep subsided into brooding silence.
Blaine took a wild shot in the dark. “Lots of folks in town,” he said. “Big doings?”
The barkeeper settled down into solid conversational stance and his voice dropped to a confidential level.
“You mean you ain’t heard about it?”
“No. Just got in town a couple of hours ago.”
“Well, mister, you won’t believe this — but we got a star machine.”
“A what?”
“A star machine. It’s one of them contraptions that parries use to travel to the stars.”
“Never heard of them.”
“No reason that you should. The only place they’re legal is in Fishhook.”
“You mean this one is illegal?”
“Couldn’t be no more illegal. The state police, they’ve got it down in the old highway shed. You know, the one on the west edge of town. Maybe you drove by it coming in tonight.”
“I don’t remember it.”
“Well, anyhow, it’s there. And then, on top of that, who should show up but Lambert Finn.”
“You don’t mean the Lambert Finn?”
“No one else. He’s up there, in the hotel right now. He’s going to have a big mass meeting out by the highway shed tomorrow. I hear the police have agreed to haul out the star machine so he can preach about it, with it standing there, right out in plain sight of all the people. I tell you, mister, that will be something worth your while to listen. He’ll spout more brimstone than you ever heard before. He’ll lay it on them parries. He’ll take the hide clean off them. They won’t dare to show their faces.”
“Not many of them around, most likely, in a town like this.”
“Well,” the bartender said, drawing out the word, “not many in the town itself. But there’s a place just a ways from here, down by the river. A place called Hamilton. It’s all parry. It’s a new town the parries built. Parries from all over. There’s a name for a place like that — I should know the name, but I can’t remember it. Like the place they used to keep the Jews in Europe.”
“Ghetto.”
The bartender smote the bar with a disgusted hand. “Now, why couldn’t I think of that? Yes, mister, that’s the word. Ghetto. Except in the old days it was in the poor part of a city and now its out in the country, in the poor part of the country. That land down by the river don’t amount to shucks. No place to build a town. But them parries like it down there. Long as they don’t bother no one, no one bothers them. Long as they stay in line, we leave them alone. And we know where they are, and they know we know. Any time things start going wrong, we know right where to look.”