She signed out for him at the desk as though he was a ripped purse some cannon had torn off her arm. He swayed slightly as he waited for her. She shook hands like a fight manager with the desk lieutenant, the two detectives, and a patrolman who happened to be passing through, and she told them if she could ever line up any hard-to-get theater seats for them they were to call her at Job Justin’s office and she would handle it with joy. She took Marco out into the air of that freak night; a cold, cold night in mid-April that was just one of the vagaries that made New York such an interesting place to die in.

He was wearing a uniform overcoat and an overseas cap. He did not look so bad in the half light. Everything was pressed. There was just a little blood on his right sleeve from Chunjin’s face from when he had overshot with the second right-hand punch. Eugénie Rose called a taxi as if it were her own hound dog: it came to heel with a hand signal. She put Marco in first, then she got in and closed the door. “Just drive through the park,” she said to the driver, “and discard the conversation you’ve been hoarding up since the last fare.”

“I don’t talk to passengers, lady,” the driver said. “I hate people until they tip me and then it’s too late.”

“I think you should eat something,” she said to Marco.

“I love food,” he answered. “I always have but I can’t swallow very well any more.”

“We’ll try, anyway,” she told him and leaned forward to tell the driver to take them to the Absinthe House, a calorie and beverage bourse catering to some of the craftiest minds this side of the owl and the pussycat, on West Forty-eighth. She leaned back on the seat and looped her arm through his. She was wearing a dark blue polo coat, some firm, dark skin, some white, white teeth, egg-sized dark eyes, and white hair.

“It was very original of you to have the Police Department call so shyly and ask for our first date,” she said softly.

“They asked me who I would—who would be willing, and I just—I—”

“Thank you. Very much.” She decided they needed more air and started to open all windows, telling the driver, “Sorry about all this air, but it’s very important. Take my word.”

“Lissen, lady, while the meter is going it’s your cab arreddy. Go ahead take the doors off it gets stuffy.” Marco’s teeth began to chatter. He tried to hold them clamped shut because he wanted her to feel efficient about opening the windows, but he sounded like a stage full of castanets. She closed the windows.

“Let’s pick up a can of soup and go to your place.”

“Sure.” She gave the driver the changed destination.

“You think they’ll let me visit that fellow at St. Luke’s tonight?”

“Maybe first thing in the morning.”

“Would you come with me? It would keep me calm. I wouldn’t want to hit him lying down like that.”

“Sure.”

“I have to find out where Raymond is.”

“The newspaperman you told me about? Why not call his newspaper?”

“Yeah. You’re right. Well, sure. So let’s go to the Absinthe House if you’d rather do that. I feel better.”

“You know what I was doing when you had the police call me?”

“I could guess, if I wasn’t so tired, I give up.”

“Well, after you dropped me off and I got upstairs, and before I took my coat off, I telephoned Lou Amjac, my fiancé”—Marco came forward, alert and alarmed—“and he came over as soon as he could, which was instantly, and I told him I had just met you and I gave him his ring back.” She held up her naked, long fingers of the left hand, and wriggled them. “I tried to convey my regrets for whatever pain I might be causing him. Then, just then, you had the police call me with the invitation to go into the tank at the Twenty-fourth Precinct. I grabbed this coat. I kissed Lou on the cheek for the last time in our lives that I would ever kiss him and I ran. At the station house they told me you had beaten up a very skinny little man but that you were a solid type yourself, according to Washington, so I figured that if they were willing to go to the trouble to get a comment on you out of George Washington, you all must have had a really successful séance while you were in the poky, and I must say it was real sweet of General Washington with you only a major, and I hadn’t even known you two had met, but if those policemen were the tiniest bit puzzled about you, they could have asked me. Oh, indeed yes, my darling Ben—I would have told them.”

He glared at her fiercely and possessively, clapped an arm about her shoulders, and pulled her evocative mouth into his while the driver, intent upon estimating within two per cent the amount of the tip he would be paid, cleared one more stop light just as it changed, heading east on Fifty-fourth Street.

Twelve

AFTER DAYS OF WONDERFUL, DREAMLESS SLEEP upon the bed and breast of Miss Cheyney, Marco called The Daily Press early Monday morning and learned that Raymond was in Washington. He reached Raymond at the Press office in Washington a few minutes later. When he told Raymond he wanted very much to see him, Raymond invited him to dinner in New York that evening to help him rate a new cook, then, remembering, babbled the news. “I just remembered. Your own orderly. Yeah. Remember your orderly in Korea, the little guy who was interpreter on the patrol—Chunjin? That’s my new cook! Hah? I mean, would you ever have been able to anticipate that?” Marco stated that he would not have been able to so anticipate, and inquired as to what time Raymond would arrive from Washington for the tasting.

“Estimating the traveling time from Penn Station—and I believe you’ll find I won’t be more than five minutes off either way—I should arrive at the apartment at—say—six twenty-two.”

“Even if you have to wait out on the corner to do it.”

“I wonder if you’d mind calling Chunjin and telling him there’ll be an extra place for dinner? You’re probably dying to talk to him anyway. I know you old Army guys.”

“I’ll take care of everything, Raymond,” Marco said, and they both hung up.

Raymond opened the door.

“Chunjin isn’t here,” he said. “There’s no dinner to offer you.”

“Or you.”

“But I did find a note. It’s from him and it says you beat him up and that he’s now in St. Luke’s Hospital.”

“One thing is for sure,” Marco said. “There are plenty of sensational delicatessens in this neighborhood.”

“Why, that’s a marvelous idea!” Raymond said. He walked away from the door, allowing Marco to close it or not close it as he chose, and flipped open a telephone book across the square foyer. “I never seem to be able to think of it myself. And I love it. Pastrami and those pickles and that crazy rye bread with the aphrodisiacal seeds and maybe a little marinated herring and some pot cheese with a little smoked salmon and some of that indigestible sauerkraut they make out of electric bulb filaments and some boiled beef.” He began to dial. “On account of this I am absolutely grateful to you for getting Chunjin out of the way.”

“Ah, that’s all right,” Marco said. “Glad to do it.”

“The elevator man was singing the blues so I gave him five.”

“He sure can keep a secret. He just sang a second chorus for me and I gave him five.”

“What did you hit him for?”

“He was determined to play peacemaker.”

“What did you whack Chunjin for?”

“That’s all part of what I came to tell you about.”

“Hello—Gitlitz? This is Shaw. Right. Now hear this.” Raymond ordered food for ten, as one does when one calls a delicatessen situated anywhere on Broadway in New York between Thirty-fourth and Ninety-sixth streets, and told them where to send it.

“I’ve been in the hospital off and on quite a bit over the past two years.”

“Hospital? What was the matter with you?” Raymond opened a can of beer. The room was fragrant with the smell of furniture polish from Chunjin’s working weekend. Marco looked very thin, but no longer drawn. The Cheyney method of soul massage had elements of greatness. He was dressed in civilian clothes, and his face had a distant, inactive look such as a man about to practice a banquet speech alone in a hotel room might have. Eugénie Rose had him coked to the gills on tranquilizers.