. . . The bottom of Jenny’s suitcase appeared to be innocent, but what tests might they subject it to? Probably none, but it was better to be on the safe side. Mary wet the end of a towel, wrung it, heard with horror a brisk tap on the door.
Would they come at night like this? Of course they would; she could scarcely expect a solicitous call first. How was she going to explain the suitcase emptied on the bed? She thought she had seen a cockroach? A tarantula, an iguana? Would they accept her statement that Jenny’s oblivion was the result of liquor and nothing else?
Mary walked to the door, determined to be militant (How dare you disturb me at this hour?), and opened it on Daniel Brennan.
Her reaction was so great that she simply stood there, staring at him, holding the doorknob as if it were a lifeline.
“They told me someone had called,” said Brennan, “and as I don’t know anyone else in the hotel I figured it could only be you and that you weren’t calling just to say goodnight.” His gaze slipped past Mary, towel forgotten in one hand, to the motionless girl in the bed and then the piled clothing beside the open suitcase. “Is Jenny—is everything all right?” The pitch of a man’s voice accomplished what Mary’s urgings had not: Jenny gave a sudden enormous snore and was silent again. “Oh, everything’s fine,” said Mary, unbearably rebellious all at once at the battering her nerves had taken in the last half-hour, “except that Jenny’s drunk and somebody put cocaine in her suitcase.”
A beginning flicker at the corner of Brennan’s mouth died at once. At the hollow sound of feet on the wooden stairs he stepped quickly inside the room, closing the door behind him as Mary’s grip fell unresistingly away. He didn’t waste time on incredulity. “What have you done with it?”
Mary told him. For just a second she thought bemusedly that this had happened before, and then she remembered that the other time it had been Owen St. Ives entering her room at the Casa de Flores. She said, “I don’t know what they do in situations like this. Dogs . . . or is that only with marijuana? Anyway, I thought I ought to sponge the suitcase.”
“It’s not a bad idea. Here, I’ll do it while you shake out the clothes,” said Brennan. “Have you got any cologne?”
Mary gave him Jenny’s, not asking whether this was for faster-drying purposes or to mislead any sniffers. In the mirror over the desk she caught a glimpse of Brennan’s absorbed activities with the towel and her own housewifely gestures with Jenny’s clothes, for all the world as if she were snapping laundry just off the line. Lurid scene in a Juarez hotel room, she thought, and didn’t realize that she had given the beginning of an unstrung laugh until Brennan, straightening and discarding the towel, studied her and said abruptly, “What you need is a drink, in case you aren’t aware of it. Let’s put this stuff back and go down to the bar.”
“But I’ve got a—” began Mary, and looked blankly around her: in her hasty packing she had left the Bacardi at the Casa de Flores. Instantly, the prospect of getting even briefly out of this room which at one point had seemed to close in on her, of sitting down with something long and mild and savoring her first cigarette since after dinner, was infinitely desirable. And impossible. She said, “I can’t leave Jenny.”
“I don’t know why not,” said Brennan, practical. “She isn’t going to miss you.” He moved over to the other bed, said Jenny’s name experimentally, bent to lift one of her eyelids and look at the returning pupil. He had a strangely professional air.
“Based on my unfortunately vast experience with a nephew who visits me in his cups, she’s all right,” he said, “and I can’t imagine her waking up for at least a couple of hours. You’re the one in need of attention.” He glanced down again at the sleeping face, his own curious. “How on earth—?”
“She seems to have an allergic reaction to alcohol,” said Mary. She located her handbag and, at the bathroom mirror, inspected her total pallor and commenced some swift repairs. There was no comment from beyond the door, but she made it to herself. Allergic—and unaware of it by age eighteen, living what could hardly be called a cloistered life? Or had she thought she could get away with it, just this once? Diabetics, long familiar with their condition, had been known to make rare, cautious departures from their regimes.
The brandy seemed ironic—she and Daniel Brennan with theirs, Owen St. Ives and Jenny sipping the same liqueur probably not far away. Her saying just now, “I can’t leave Jenny,” was a kind of echo of her insistence to St. Ives: “I’ve got to let Jenny know that I’m going.” Almost like following steps in a shadow ballet.
Jenny stayed stubbornly at the heart of everything —but she was safe now that the pin had been pulled from Brian Beardsley’s grenade and he was undoubtedly gone from Juarez.
There was hotel stationery in the desk, and although Daniel Brennan looked a little amused at this precaution Mary wrote, “Downstairs at the bar— have me paged there if you want me” and added the time and propped the sheet against the mirror, which was the first thing Jenny would see across the room if she opened her eyes and took in her surroundings.
(Where, incidentally, was the note which Owen St. Ives was so sure he had left for Mary, and which would have spared her those long minutes of nearpanic? Why, for that matter, hadn’t he said a firm, “No, thanks,” to that interfering waiter, or even overridden Jenny’s request for brandy? She was smitten with him, and would have been obedient.)
“You keep going away,” observed Brennan pleasantly, holding the coat which Mary had picked up distractedly.
“Yes,
