about it, then vanished as if afraid it had been seen.
'They said I'd die if I talked to anyone.' Her hand moved up and covered her mouth. 'I'm tired of being scared,' she said. Her head drooped forward, nodding gently to the soft sobs that seemed to stick in her chest.
What's the answer? How do you tell them they won't die when they know you're lying about it because they're marked already?
I got up and walked to her chair, looked at her a second and sat down on the arm of it. I took her hand away from her face, tilted her chin up and ran my fingers through the snow piled on top of her head. It was as soft and as fine as it looked in the light and when my fingers touched her cheek she smiled, dropped her eyes and let that beauty come through all the way, every bit of it that she had kept hidden so long. There was a faint smell of rubbing alcohol about her, a clean, pungent odor that seemed to separate itself from the perfume she wore.
Her eyes were big and dark, soft ovals under the delicate brows, her mouth full and pink, parted in the beginning of a smile. My fingers squeezed her shoulder easily and her head went back, the mouth parting even further and I bent down slowly.
'You won't die,' I said.
And it was the wrong thing to say because the mouth that was so close to mine pulled back and everything had changed. I just sat there next to her for a little while until the dry sobs had stopped. There were no tears to be wiped away. Terror doesn't leave any tears. Not that kind of terror.
'What did they want to know about Berga?'
'I don't know,' she whispered. 'They made me tell everything I knew about her. They made me sit there while they went through her things.'
'Did they find anything?'
'No. I... I don't think so. They were horribly mad about it.'
'Did they hurt you?' I asked.
An almost imperceptible shudder went through her whole body. 'I've been hurt worse.' Her eyes drifted up to mine. 'They were disgusting men. They'll kill me now, won't they?'
'If they do they've had it.'
'But it would still be too late for me.'
I nodded. It was all I could do. I got up, took the last smoke out of my old pack and tapped the butt against my knuckle. 'Can't I take a look at that suitcase of hers?'
'It's in the bedroom.' She pushed her hair back with a tired motion. 'The closet.'
I walked in, snapped on the light and found the closet. The suitcase was there where she said it was, a brown leather Gladstone that had seen a lot of knocking around. I tossed it on the bed, unfastened the straps and opened it up. But nothing was in there that could kill a person. Not unless a motive for murder was in a couple old picture albums, three yearbooks from high school, a collection of underwear, extra-short bathing suits, a stripper's outfit and a batch of old mail. I thought maybe the mail would do it, but most of them were trivial answers from some friend to letters she had written and were postmarked from a hick town in Idaho. The rest were steamship folders and a tour guide of southern Europe. I shoved everything back in the suitcase, closed it up and dropped it in the closet.
When I turned around Lily was standing there in the doorway, a fresh cigarette in her mouth, one hand holding the robe closed around her waist, her hair a white cloud that seemed to hover about her. When she spoke the voice didn't sound as though it belonged to her at all.
'What am I to do now?'
I reached out and folded my hand over hers and drew her closer to me. The fingers were cold, her body was a warm thing that wanted to search for something.
'Got any place to go?'
'No,' faintly.
'Money?'
'Just a little.'
'Get dressed. How long will it take?'
'A . . a few minutes.'
For the briefest interval her face brightened with a new hope, then she smiled and shook her head. 'It... won't do any good. I've seen men like that before. They're not like other people. They'd find me.'
My laugh was short and hard. 'We'll make it tough for them just the same. And don't kid yourself about them being too different. They're just like anybody else in most ways. They're afraid of things too. I'm not kidding you or me. You know what the score is so all we can do is give it a try.'
I stopped for a second and let a thought run through my head again. I grinned down at her and said, 'You know... don't be a bit surprised if you live a lot longer than you think you should.'
'Why?'
'I have an idea the outfit who worked you over don't really know what they're after and they're not going to kill any leads until they get it.'
'But I... don't have any idea...'
'Let them find that out for themselves,' I interrupted. 'Let's get you out of here as fast as we can.'
I dropped her hand and pushed her into the bedroom. She looked at me, her face happy, then her body went tight and it showed in the way her eyes lit up, that crazy desire to say thanks somehow; but I pulled the door shut before she could do what she wanted to do and went inside opening a fresh deck of Luckies.
The gun was still there on the floor, a metallic glitter asleep on a bed of faded green wool. The safety was off and the hammer was still back. All that time in the beginning I was about a literal ounce away from being nice and dead. Lily Carver hadn't been fooling a bit.
She took almost five minutes. I heard the door open and turned around. It wasn't the same Lily. It was a new woman, a fresh and lovely woman who was a taller, graceful woman. It was one for whom the green gabardine suit had been intended, exquisitely molding every feature of her body. Her legs were silken things, their curves flashing enough to take your eyes away from the luxury of her hair that poked out under the hat.
It wasn't a worried or a scared Lily this time. It was a Lily who took my arm and held it tightly, smiling a smile that was real. 'Where are we going, Mike?'
It was the first time she had said my name and I liked the way she said it.
'To my place.' I told her.
We went downstairs and out on Atlantic Avenue. We played a game of not being seen in case there were watchers and if there were they weren't good enough to keep up with us. We used the subway to go home and took a cab to the door. When I was sure nobody was in the lobby I took her in.
It was all very simple.
When we got upstairs I told her to hop into the sack and showed her the spare bedroom. She smiled, reached out and patted my cheek and said, 'It's been a long time since I met a nice guy, Mike.'
That strange excitement seemed to be inside her like a coiled spring. I squeezed her wrist and she knew what I was saying without having to use words and her mouth started to part.
I stopped it there.
Or maybe she stopped it. The spring wound tighter and tighter, then I let her go and walked away. Behind me the door closed softly and I thought I heard a whispered 'Good night, Mike.'
I started it that night. At three-thirty the word went out in the back room of a gin mill off Forty-second and Third. Before morning it would yell and before the night came again it would pay off. One way or another.
Wherever they were, whoever they were, they would hear about it. They'd know me and know what the word meant. They'd sit and think for a little while and if they knew me well enough maybe they'd feel a little bit sweaty and not so sure of themselves any more. They couldn't laugh it off. With anybody else, perhaps, but not with me.
Wise guys. A pack of conniving slobs with the world in their hands and the power and money to buck a government while they sat on their fat tails, yet before morning there wouldn't be one of them who didn't have a funny feeling around his gut.
This time they had to move.
