interpretation, a necessity to finish it again, regardless of consequence. But an agile and wiry porter came from the side and sprang onto that broad back, locking his arms around Terry's throat. He staggered under the additional weight, kept going more slowly. A dock guard trotted in to intercept him, and whaled him mightily across the belly with his billy club, an approach that reduces ninety-nine out of a hundred men to the immediate level of ferocity of an Easter bunny. But he was whamming a triple layer of muscles trained to the hardness of interwoven cordovan. Terry grasped the club, stopped, planted his heels, made a swinging motion like a hammer throw. The guard had the thong around his wrist. Somebody had shut off the music. I heard the brisk snap of bone as the guard went rolling across the cement. While stopped, Terry evidently decided to remove the minor annoyance on his back. He broke the hold on his throat, took the man's wrists, bent abruptly forward, a deep strong bow, a yanking leverage of the arms which sent the little brave one through the air to sprong into the wire mesh fifteen feet away and rebound. All the people had backed away from the fence. Merrimay, to my absolute and total astonishment, stood her ground, the knowing smile in place.
As I started to aim, the burly chap who'd been knocked loose on the conveyor and had ridden it all the way down got to Terry, clapped a hand on a bull shoulder, spun him and hit him with great enthusiasm, squarely in the mouth.
The people aboard and ashore were strangely silent. I could hear some little kids crying. Men were converging on the action with varying degrees of haste and caution. Terry hooked the burly optimist in the middle, doubling him into slow-motion collapse. A guard bounced a billy club off the sculptured blond curls. Two baggage handlers hit him high and low. Two hands from the ship were competing to hit him in the face. And then the cautious ones came diving in. Some went staggering back, rubber-legged One went down and started making unsuccessful efforts to get up. Terry was erect for a moment more, and somebody had snatched off the hairpiece. His skull glistened, and I heard the tock when the club rapped it. He melted down from view, and turmoil ended. They began getting off him, moving back, fingering their faces and looking at their hands for blood. A dock guard bent over Terry, gathered the limp arms behind him, clicked handcuffs on him. Overhead, on the Sun Deck, the same cracked voice was yelling, 'Get a doctor! Quick! Get a doctor!'
The fat man stood beside me. He was looking down at the snubbed.38 still in my hand. I shoved it down into the holster until it clicked in place. The fat man said, 'I don't know anything about anything, and I got terrible eyesight.' He moved away from me, walking briskly.
Everybody aboard and ashore had suddenly become noisy, telling each other what they had seen. And, of course, everybody had seen something quite different. The last of the casualties were up on their feet, some of them leaning on friends. Terry began rolling from side to side, and they plucked him up and stood him on his feet, trickles of blood coming from fresh welts on the hairless skull. He went along, docile, one holding each arm. After about ten steps he suddenly began leaping, writhing and kicking, and began a terrible, spine-chilling, open-jawed howling. 'Haaooo Haaooo Haoooo.' It stilled the crowd sounds.
He tore loose from one man. The other was hanging on and being spun around. A third trotted up, timed the spinning, and clopped him on the skull again. Terry went down to his knees. They yanked him up and led him away to some structure beyond the customs shed. He stumbled along, head bowed and wobbling from side to side. The crowd noise had started up again. A dock guard walked to the blond hairpiece, bent over it, stared curiously at it. He reached to pick it up, pulled his hand back, wiped the hand on his thigh. It gave the crowd the release of laughter, semi-hysterical. The guard took the billy club and scooped it up, holding it at arm's length, balanced atop the club. He acknowledged laughter and applause with a little bow toward the ship, then toward the fence, and marched off just as, with the timing only accident can achieve, the PA system began the Colonel Bogie March.
I looked at Merrimay. She looked up at me, slipped the glasses back on, made a little shrug of query, palms extended. I made a circle of thumb and forefinger, and she nodded and turned and began walking to the place where it had been agreed Meyer would meet her as soon as he had cleared through customs.
The last of the baggage was being trundled in. The chain was dropped and the herd started down the gangplank in their cruise hats and salt-water burn. I went quickly back to Stateroom Six. It was nine o'clock.
She looked up as I came in, all the questions written on her face.
'No sweat,' I said. 'He got off okay. No reception committee.'
'That's what I figured. Sweetheart, what was all the roaring going on out there?'
'Somebody got off drunk. A drunk dropping parcels, picking up two and dropping three more, that's real comedy.'
The big pot had kept the coffee reasonably hot. Arturo had provided a generous little flagon of brandy, and she had lowered the level of it an inch or so. I had the inner trembles from thinking of how narrowly Terry had missed getting his hands on Merrimay, so I laced mine generously.
From time to time we heard loud happy Italian passing by in the corridor and on deck. The cleanup squads. She had wiped her mouth clean of the pinkness.
She turned my wrist and looked at my watch. 'I'm lost without my little heart watch. I keep looking at my empty wrist all the time. It kept wonderful time. I got it at a discount place. Ninety bucks. It retails for a hundred and seventy-five.' She leaned and stroked my arm, widened her big green eyes at me. 'Gee, what a break you're getting, huh? Just me in these dumpy clothes, and not even a penny in my purse for luck. Poor McGee. And I've got whole racks and drawers full of the most darling clothes, and anyway forty pairs of shoes--that's my vice, buying shoes--and more perfume than a store, and I can't go near it. I suppose Ans'll sell it. Or go try to recruit a girl my size. Oh, I forgot for a minute. You said they'll probably knock him off too, and Frankie Loyal.' She closed her eyes, shook her head, tapped her temple with a stubby forefinger. 'I must be losing my mind! When the cops get that letter, nobody is going to have time to do anything. It's weird, you know, thinking I'll be the only one that got away. Just on account of you're so terribly smart, T... T.... Darling, would you forgive me? It's kind of insulting. I know, but you told me your front name and I know it starts with a T but I can't seem to remember it.'
'Travis. Trav.'
'Okay, I'll never forget again. Travis like travel. Because we're going to travel, baby. Far and wide. Do you know how good for you I'm going to be? You don't even know the half t. What kind of a place do you hide me out in in Lauderdale? Cute, maybe? I don't really care if it's a shack or a car or something. You know something, honey? I feel like kid when summer vacation starts. I got to have a new me. But you have to like it or I won't use it. I was thinking of one. I want to see if you like it What I was thinking, first name should have like the same sound I'm used to. You know, so I'll answer. So I thought Nel. There aren't many Nels around, and it is kinda quaint. Then for a last name I thought of the store names along Bay Street because we met there. And how about one of those with a hyphen in the middle? That hyphen stuff has always churned me up. So tell me if you like this. Miss Nel Cole- Thompson.'
'Just great,' I said. I divided the last of the coffee. She wanted just a touch of brandy and I took the rest.
She came around behind me, and dug her fingers into the muscles near the nape of my neck. 'Trav, dear, you're just all knotted up. It's all this tension that's making you seem so cross. Let your head hang loose. Breathe deep and let's see.'
She struggled diligently, digging and prodding and rubbing.
'No use,' she said finally. She came around me, slid onto my lap, arm around my neck. She kissed my ear, huffed a little blast of warm breath into it. 'What we're going to do, we got plenty of time. Del... I mean Nel is going to relax you her way. All you do, is you just lie down and close your eyes tight.'
'Too much chance of Arturo not being able to make his arrangements stick.'
She shrugged, sighed, got up. 'Okay. But when we get where we're going, sweetheart, we're going to have us what they call acres of afternoon, and you can believe it. You're going to get so relaxed you won't know or care who you are any more. Me too.'
She paced for a little while, looked at my watch again, then curled up on the bed, propped on the pillows, and prattled on and on about her childhood in Austin, Minnesota.
As I listened, I could not help relating her to the theory Meyer had propounded in the small hours. She could blithely accept the abrupt disappearance of Ans Terry from her life forever after seven years of his ownership because she was the 'I' and Ans was the 'Not-I,' hence merely an object, and when any object lost its utility to the 'I,' it could be discarded without a backward glance. Of late he had lost his utility as a pleasure object, and I had moved in to fill the void. The fourteen victims were forgotten the moment she felt assured she could escape punishment. Her tears for Vangie had also been without concession to the tradition of mourning a friend, because Tamie too had been an object, something that had hung on a wall of one of the rooms of her life, and were life to take her back into that room, she would miss Vangie the way one might miss a mirror that had always hung in a certain spot. If one became associated with an object that could inflict pain when displeased, one merely took the precaution of pleasing the object.
Probably she thought she was treating me in a very special way by telling me the details of her childhood,
