Digby said, “But what are the unusual reasons you’re anti-communist?”
“They’re not radical enough for me,” Quint told him. And then, so he wouldn’t have to top his own gag, said, “Pardon me, I see a girl I wanted to talk to.”
Laughing inwardly as the other stared after him, Quint followed Marylyn Worth out onto the terrace.
When she saw him she smiled brightly and said, “What’s so funny?”
He told her, chuckling.
Marylyn finished her glass of champagne cocktail and put it down on the stone barrier that surrounded the terrace. She said, frowning, “You’ll get a reputation as a bolshevik yourself, if you talk like that, Quentin. And that certainly wouldn’t do your career any good.”
Quint grinned down at her. “I haven’t heard that term, bolshevik, for a long time. You’re old fashioned, Marylyn, but I’ll tell you something about the articles that I do. Already the type person who believes that anybody who doesn’t belong to the Birch Society is a communist, has branded me one. Contrarywise, the type person for whom I really write knows that not only am I not a communist stooge but could never become one. It’s an intellectual impossibility for me.”
“Well,” she said, smiling up at him, “That’s a relief.”
He grunted at that, and said sourly, “However, I am not prejudiced. Some of my worst friends are communists.”
“Oh, you fool.”
How it happened, he didn’t later have the vaguest idea, but suddenly she was in his arms. Her breasts pressed against him, her eyes blinking her own amazement.
“Why… Quentin…” she said inanely. The way a spinster science teacher, somewhere in her late twenties, or early thirties, would react to suddenly being caught up in a man’s arms. Far back in his consciousness he was amused by the scene.
However, he bent and kissed her squarely and thoroughly. Her mouth, he decided, hadn’t known a great many kisses. She reacted to the stimulus of his own mouth upon hers as an unpracticed girl would react, or an older woman, past the years of romance.
“Why… Quentin…”
“Why, Marylyn,” he mocked her. “How long have you wanted me to kiss you?”
“Why, what a thing to say.” She looked up at him, blinking.
“See here,” Quint said, keeping his voice serious. “What was the name of that town in Nebraska you said you came from?”
“Why, Border.”
“Stop saying
“I… I didn’t have much time for boys when I was going to school,” she said lowly. “And, besides, my parents were very strict.” She made no effort to extricate herself from his embrace.
He said, “Are you telling me, pet, that at your age and with your looks and figure, I’m the first man…”
“Quentin Jones, I said no such thing. And don’t be so condescending with me. Why I’ve had loads of beaux…”
“Beaux!” he laughed. “Where did you get this terminology?” He smiled down at her. Gave her another peck of a kiss. “And where do you get that faint trace of accent? I thought you were two hundred and two percent Mid- Western American.”
“You’re joshing me. Do I have an accent? My grandmother was German. She raised me. You could cut her German accent with a butterknife.” She took a breath and added, wistfully, he decided, “I’m sorry if I’m old- fashioned.”
He said, and was sorry the minute it was past his teeth, “Next you’ll be telling me you’re a virgin.”
She held the silence for a moment, then said, “I… I guess I’d better be getting along, Quentin. You were right, earlier. School does start in a few days and I’ve got things to do.”
Chapter Two
Quint Jones groaned in excruciating anguish. He picked up his coffee cup. It was empty. For a moment his face brightened. He could get up, go out into his efficiency kitchen and get himself another cup. If the pot was empty, better still, he could take all the time involved in making another. Anything to get away from…
But then he realized he was already drowning internally in coffee. There was no escape in that direction.
He reached for one of his pipes. A shell briar he’d bought a few months ago in Gibraltar. But then he realized that he had a pipe lit, that he’d just put into the ash tray a moment ago. His tongue was already raw from smoking. He put the shell briar down, and groaned again.
He stared at the sheet of glowing white paper. What was the old gag about the writer who went snow blind from staring at a sheet of white paper in his typewriter? He was trying to get into the swing of his morning stint. He had to turn out three columns a week, running between five hundred and a thousand words per column. It didn’t sound like much. It was.
For one thing, he’d got beyond the point where he could just dash off any old crud with a twist of humor in it. A gag article. When he’d started this column deal, up in Paris, on one of the American papers with a special European edition, he could get by with a few cute bits of business about the tourists, about some newly opened nightclub, or some visiting celebrity. But the thing had mushroomed, and now he was being carried in hundreds of papers throughout the world. With several hundred fishy eyed editors—he could see them clearly, just by staring up into the corner of the room—to please, each column had to be a veritable masterpiece of wit and wisdom, the so- called Quentin Jones touch, the Mort Sahl-cum-Jules Fiffer of the newspaper columnists.
He groaned again, got up from his chair and stared dismally out of the window. His apartment was on the eighth floor of a building one block off Avenida del Gen-eralisimo Franco, about a mile south of Paza de Castilla and in a section considered on the absolute outskirts of town by most of the expatriate set. He’d chosen the place deliberately. Traffic moved fast enough on Generalisimo that he could have his little Renault down to Avenida Jose Antonio smack in the middle of the city, in ten minutes. On the other hand, drunken friends weren’t inclined to think of his apartment as an oasis for a final drink after being thrown out of the last bar, two or three o’clock in the morning. Too far to go. They dropped in on somebody nearer.
Down below was Paco’s bodega. At this time of the morning, espresso coffee, now all the thing in Madrid as it was in Italy, was the rush item, but if there was anything Quint didn’t need, it was more coffee. Come to think of it, though, maybe the thing to do would be to go on down to Paco’s and have an anis, or possibly a cana, the Spanish word meaning short beer. He had already turned to reach for his beret, before getting hold of himself. That way lay disaster. One beer, and the morning’s work was over before it even got under way. They’d turn up some excuse to have another. There was always an excuse in Madrid to have another.
He went back to the table where’d he’d set up his portable and groaned as he sat down before it.
How about knocking out a few pieces on One World Government? He’d never dealt with the subject to any extent. He could use some of the things Nicolas Ferencsik had said the night before.
He jabbed absently at a couple of the typewriter keys. In fact, he could make a column out of the argument between Ferencsik, that Russian defector and the ex-Nazi, Stroehlein. Report it more or less verbatim, and try to get in a few bits of business and possibly some snide remarks.
Why snide? What was wrong with the idea of a world-wide government? The United Nations taken to the extreme. Surely, if man lasted long enough, and failed to blow himself up, sooner or later the human race would get around to a World Government. Probably not in Quint Jones’ lifetime… but someday.
He jabbed at a couple of more keys, unthinking. He might make it a short series of columns on the subject.
Whatever had happened to that guy up in Paris who had renounced his American citizenship and proclaimed himself the first Citizen of the World? What was his name? Gary something or other. For a while he got a lot of publicity. Made up a passport of his own, which nobody would recognize, of course. His instincts had possibly been
