Survival... ZERO!

is it?'

'Ten bucks.'

'Maybe I'll buy glasses.' She looked up and gave me a gummy smile.

I said, 'How many?'

'Enough to get slopped. Makes me feel young again, y'know?' She spit on the sidewalk and hunched her shabby coat around her shoulders, her eyes peering at me. 'Sure, you know. Boy like you knows too damn much.'

When she had shuffled off I started toward the corner, then stopped midblock to watch a convoy of Army trucks

ramble by, escorted by a pair of prowl cars with their flashers on, each giving a low growl of their sirens at the intersections as they went through the red lights. There were four jeeps and thirty-eight trucks, each filled with suddenly activated and annoyed-looking National Guardsmen. It hadn't been since the summer encampments that the city had seen one of these processions. I was wondering what excuse they were going to give the public if the public bothered to ask.

Overhead a cool northeast wind suddenly whistled through the TV antennas on the rooftops and swirled down into the street, picking up dust and papers along the curbs and skittering them along the sidewalks. Hell, I thought, it's going to rain again. Maybe it's better that ?way. People don't like to come out in the rain and if they don't they can't ask questions.

Someplace Velda was roaming around the area doing the same thing I was doing only from a different direction and she could do it just as fast. And right now tune was our enemy.

I shoved the bar door open and inched past the uglies with their scrapes, the virgin-hair muttonchops and shoulder-length curls. They were the boys. The girls weren't any better. They smelled better, except the smell was artificial and I wondered if it were to enhance the little they had or cover up what they lacked. One idiot almost started to lip me until I squeezed his arm a little bit, then he whited out and let me go by with a sick grin his old man should have seen if he had chopped him in the mouth ten years ago when there was still hope for him.

Velda had called to say she had canvassed the neighborhood with no results so she was going back into the barnacle she had rented and keep a watch on Lippy's old apartment.

The other call was from Renee Talmage. 'Mr. Tape Recorder,' she said, 'please tell Mr. Hammer that I am going to be waiting ever so impatiently for him in Dewey Wong's restaurant on Fifty-eighth Street, snuggled against the wall close to the window where all those lovely men will know I'm waiting for someone and perhaps not try to pick me up. And Mr. Tape Recorder, tell him that Dewey says he will stay open very late just to make sure Mr. Hammer gets here.'

I hung up and looked at my watch. It was one twenty-five. Outside the phone booth the uglies were making time with the idiots. In New York, the uglies are the longhaired idiot guys. The idiots are the short-haired ugly

girls. It isn't easy to tell one from the other. One ugly didn't realize it, but he was kissing another ugly. In a way he was lucky. The idiot he was with was even uglier.

So I said the hell with it and grabbed a cab up to Dewey Wong's and got around the corner of the bar, sat down next to her and told beautiful Janie who was filling in for her old man behind the bar to bring me a rye and ginger.

'Pretty isn't she?' Renee asked.

'A mouth waiting to be kissed,' I said.

'Dewey seems pretty capable.'

'Ever since he's been colonialized,' I told her.

'Colonialize me,' Renee said. A little half laugh played around her mouth and her eyes were full of sparkles.

'Now?'

She lifted her glass in a challenge, the big black pupils inside all those gold flecks watching me closely. Carelessly, she said, 'Why not?'

I let my hand run up the bare leg that was crossed over the other one until my fingers had the top of her bikini pants under their tips and said, 'Ready?'

Her glass went back to the bar top very slowly, every movement deliberate and slow to make sure nobody was watching. Even the smile was unsure of itself. 'You're crazy, Mike.'

'I could have told you that.'

'Take your hand out of my pants.'

'I'm not done yet,' I said. I took a drink of my highball. Janie grinned and turned away to serve another customer. At least she knew what was happening.

Almost pathetically, Renee said, 'Please?'

'You wanted to be colonialized,' I told her.

'But not in front of all these people.'

'Tough,' I said. She felt my fingers curling around that silly little hem they build into bikini pants. I wondered what color they were.

'I know a better place to find out,' Renee told me.

I'm an old soldier. I grew up watching Georgia Sothern, Gypsy Rose Lee, Ann Corio and the rest on the stage of the old Apollo and Eltinge theaters and got my lessons in basic female anatomy from the best of them. There's never been a shape or size I couldn't slam into one category or another no matter what part I was looking at and get clinical about it at the same time. Women are women. The female counterpart. They're supposed to be

something special, intelligent, loving, pneumatic, sexy as hell, incredibly beautiful, with that little thing they're instinctively supposed to do that can make a man turn inside out. Hardly any fit the pattern. Oh, I knew some.

Now I knew another.

She just stood there in the middle of the room and let the funny little smile do the teasing while she unzipped slowly and let the dress fall in a heap around her feet.

'Better?' Renee asked.

I nodded. But casually, because she still hadn't caught up to Georgia Sothern. That one could really take off her clothes. She used to do it to 'Hold that Tiger,' but that music would sound silly these days. 'You're doing fine,' I told her.

'Can I have a drink?'

I tasted my own highball and loosened my tie. 'If that's what you need to uninhibit yourself, baby, the bar's right behind you.'

She lifted herself on tiptoe, nothing on but a flesh-colored bra and bikini pants with other colors dominating the sheer mesh, and grinned at me like she was running all the plays. 'Like?'

'I like,' I said.

She hooked her thumb in the top of those bikini pants and pulled them down a bare inch. A little tumble of dark hair spilled out over the top. 'Like?' Her voice was provocatively inquisitive.

'I like,' I said again.

She took off her bra. She spilled out there too, full and high, heavy breasted with round, square-tipped, demanding nipples emerging from their even darker cores.

'Still like?' she asked. I watched her eyes drift down me, all stretched out on my own damn couch. For a second she was puzzled.

I said, 'I'm a leg man, kid.'

Then she grinned again and took off those flesh-colored bikini pants.

Naked women are pretty. Damn, but they're pretty. Any size, any shape you look, and when they're built like all those pinups we used to have on the inside of locker doors and the kind they plaster up in garages to keep your mind off the repair bills, they can con you into anything.

And Renee knew what I was thinking. 'For real?' she asked.

'You must be one hell of a business asset,' I said.

'William never saw me like this.'

'Why not?'

She twirled around, picked the drinks off the bar and handed me another one. 'He never put his hands inside my pants,' she said.