Hawks said, “Something happened. I don’t know how much it means.”

“You worry about it, Ed,” she said, her lower lip glistening. “In the meantime, you’re the only one left standing down there.”

Hawks sighed. “I’ll come up.”

Claire Pack grinned.

“Come over and sit by the pool with me,” she said when he reached the top of the steps. She turned away before he could answer, and walked slowly in front of him, her right arm hanging at her side. Her hand trailed back, and reached up to touch his own. She slackened her pace so that they were walking side by side, and looked up at him. “You don’t mind, do you?” she said gently.

Hawks looked down at their hands for a moment, and as he did, she put the backs of her fingers inside his palm. He said slowly, “No — no, I don’t think I mind,” and closed his hand around hers.

She smiled and said, “There, now,” in an almost childishly soft voice.

They walked to the edge of the pool and stood looking down into the water.

“Did Connington take a long time getting over his drunk the other day?” Hawks asked.

She laughed brightly. “Come on, now — what you mean is, why do I still let him hang around after his ferocious threats? Answer: why not? What can he do, really?” Her sidelong glance came up from ,a graceful turn of her head and shoulders, so that her hair flashed in the sun and her eyes were half veiled behind the glimmer of her lashes. “Or do you think I’m under his Svengali spell?” she asked with mock-horror that left her wide-eyed and with her lips in a scarlet, open pout.

Hawks kept his eyes steadily on hers. “No, hardly that.”

Her eyebrows blinked up and down pleasurably, and her mouth parted in a low, whispered laugh. She swayed her upper body toward him, and put her other hand on his ann. “Should I take that as a tribute? Al tells me you’re a hard man to get small talk out of.”

Hawks put his right hand around his own left wrist and held it, his arm crossed awkwardly in front of his body. “What else has Al told you about his work?” he asked.

She looked down at his arm. She said gravely and confidentially, “You know, if I get too close to you, you can always dive into — the pool.” Then she grinned to herself again, keeping her face toward him to let him see it, and, taking her hands away, sank down to lie on one hip in the grass, her head bent so she could watch the surface of the water. “I’m sorry,” she said without looking up. “I said that just to see if you’d jump. Connie’s right about me, you know.”

Hawks squatted angularly down next to her, watching the side of her turned-away face. “In what way?”

She put one hand down into the blue water and stirred it back and forth, silver bubbles trailing out between her spread fingers. “I can’t know a man more than a few minutes without trying to get under his skin,” she said in a pondering voice. “I have to do it. Measuring, I suppose you could call it.” Her face flashed toward him. “And you can call that a Freudian pun if you want to.” Then she had turned away again. A trail of splotched droplets on the pool’s satiny concrete coaming began to shrink in the sun. Her voice was reflective and hidden again. “That’s the way I am.”

“Is it really? Or is saying so just another part of the process? You say everything for effect, don’t you?”

Her face turned slowly, this time, and she looked at him with a faintly cynical undertone to her smile. “You’re very quick, aren’t you?” She pouted. “Are you sure I deserve all this concentration? After all, what good is it going to do you?” Her eyebrow arched, and she held that expression, her smile very slowly widening her lips.

“I don’t decide what should interest me,” Hawks said. “First something intrigues me. Then I study it.”

“You must have curious instincts, mustn’t you, then?” She waited for an answer. Hawks gave her none. She added, “In several senses of the word, I suppose.” Hawks continued to look at her gravely, and she slowly lost the vivacity behind her expression. She rolled over suddenly on her back, her ankles crossed stiffly, and put her hands down flat on her thigh muscles. “I’m Al’s woman,” she said up at the sky.

“Which Al?” Hawks asked.

“What’s happening to him?” she said, moving only her lips. “What are you doing to him?”

“I don’t know, exactly,” Hawks said. “I’m waiting to find out.”

She sat up and twisted to face him, her breasts moving under the loose top. “Do you have any kind of a conscience?” she asked. “Is there anyone who isn’t defenseless before you?”

He shook his head. “That kind of question doesn’t apply. I do what I have to do. Only that.”

She seemed to be almost hypnotized by him. She leaned closer.

“I want to see if Al’s all right,” Hawks said, getting up.

Claire arched her neck and stared up at him. “Hawks,” she whispered.

“Excuse me, Claire.” He stepped around her drawn-up legs and moved toward the house.

“Hawks,” she said hoarsely. The top of the swimsuit was almost completely off the upper faces of her breasts. “You have to take me tonight.”

He continued to walk away.

“Hawks — I’m warning you!”

Hawks flung open the house door and disappeared behind the sun-washed glass.

5

“How’d it go?” Connington laughed from the shadows of the bar at the other end of the living room. He came forward, dressed in a pair of printed trunks, his stomach cinched by the tight waistband. He was carrying a folded beach shirt over his arm and holding a pewter pitcher and two glasses. “It’s a little like a silent movie, from here,” he said, nodding toward the glass wall facing out onto the lawn and the pool. “Hell for action, but short on dialogue.”

Hawks turned and looked. Claire was still sitting up, staring intently at what must have been a barricade of flashing reflections of herself.

“Gets to a man, doesn’t she?” Connington chuckled. “Forewarned is not forearmed, with her. She’s an elemental — the rise of the tides, the coming of the seasons, an eclipse of the Sun.” He looked down into the pitcher, where the ice at the top of the mixture had suddenly begun to tinkle. “Such creatures are not to be thought of as good or bad,” he said through pinched lips. “Not by mortal men. They have their own laws, and there’s no gainsaying\ them.” His breath puffed into Hawks’ face. “They are born among us — car hops, dice girls, Woolworth’s clerks — but they rise to their heritage. Woe to us, Hawks. Woe to us who would pursue them on their cometary track.”

“Where’s Barker?”

Connington gestured with the pitcher. “Upstairs. Took a shower, threatened to disembowel me if I didn’t get out of his way in the hall, went to bed. Set the alarm for eight o’clock. Put down a tumblerful of gin to help him. Where’s Barker?” Connington repeated. “Dreamland, Hawks — whatever dreamland it was that awaited him.”

Hawks looked at his wrist watch.

“Three hours, Hawks,” Connington said. “Three hours, and there is no Master in this house.” He moved around Hawks to the outside door. “Yoicks!” he yapped twistedly, raising the pitcher in Claire’s direction. He pushed clumsily at the door with his shoulder, leaving a damp smear on the glass. “Tally ho!”

Hawks moved farther into the room, toward the bar. He searched behind it, and found a bottle of Scotch. When he looked up from putting ice and water into a glass, he saw that Connington had reached Claire and was standing over her. She lay on her stomach, facing the pool, her chin resting on her crossed forearms. Connington held the pitcher, pouring awkwardly into the two glasses in his other hand.

Hawks walked slowly to the leather-covered settee facing the windows, and sat down. He put the edge of his glass to his lips, and rested his elbows on his thighs. He put both hands around his glass, holding it lightly, and tilted it until he could sip at it. The lower half of his face was washed by reddish sunlight mottled with faint amber dispersions and glassy points of shifting light. The arch of his nose and the upper part of his face were under a curtain of shadow.