“No,” Robin told him. “We’re just going in for a moment. May we leave the car here?”
He nodded. “I’ll have a boy park it for you, Ma’am.”
Her hand, holding a folded bill, slipped into his. “Just leave it where it is. We’ll be back in five minutes or so. If you have to move it, the keys are inside.”
In the lobby, no one appeared to notice the elegant couple and the bedraggled child. A large, smooth elevator decorated like the very best type of Victorian brothel carried them to the seventh floor. Barnes knocked at the witch’s door, but his knocks woke no response. “They must have gone somewhere,” he said. “Probably that’s why they left him with the clown.”
Robin leaned over the little boy, more imposing in her scented muscularity than his mother or any teacher had ever been. Her power made him sneeze. “Where does the clown live, Ozzie?” she asked. “You came from there, so you must know.”
He sneezed again, shaking his head, wiping his nose on his sleeve.
“Then he’ll have to come with us,” she said. “I won’t mind. Will you, Osgood?”
“We can’t take him into a lot of places, and if we stay long it’ll get too cold in the car.”
“Then we’ll not stay long. First I’ll drive you to a little spot I like very, very much. We’ll talk on the way, and your son will fall asleep, I’m sure, on the back seat. When we stop, you can cover him with your coat. We’ll go inside and I’ll have a sherry or perhaps two, and we’ll listen to the music. Before the car gets too cold, we’ll leave again and go to my apartment. There’s a spare bedroom, and you can carry him upstairs and put him on the bed. There’s a very nice restaurant nearby that will send up food and wine.”
Without saying a word, and much too quickly for her to protest or even step back, Barnes put his arms around her and kissed her. He had to raise himself on his toes to reach her lips, but he bent her backward until he was supporting her torso almost horizontally, crushing her big, firm breasts to his chest, his lips and tongue alive with passion at the gateway of her mouth.
At first she was too stunned to act; then for an instant Little Ozzie thought she was going to ram the long, sharp, crimson-lacquered nails of her thumbs into his father’s eyes. Then she moaned, a sound surprisingly deep and anguished, and threw her arms about him, pulling him to her until it seemed they both must fall with famished lips and grinding pelvises to the floor of the corridor.
As perhaps they would, if an elevator some distance away had not opened to discharge an elderly couple and a bellman. Belatedly, they straightened up instead, Robin’s lipstick smeared, much of it under Barnes’s mustache, her pillbox hat with the peacock’s feather lying on the carpet near the wall.
The elderly couple were much too well bred to notice anything; they walked by chatting of something neither would be able to recall five minutes afterward. Their bellman, however, smirked and offered Barnes a congratulatory wink.
When the elderly couple and their bags had disappeared into a room beyond the witch’s, Robin asked breathlessly, “Shouldn’t you at least tell me why you did that?”
“I don’t know,” Barnes said.
“Well, it was—different.”
“For me too.” Slowly, arm in arm, they walked back toward the elevator. “If you really want to know, it was because you said what you did. About going up to your apartment and having dinner. For my whole life I’ve been waiting for you to say that to me; and now that you have, I know someway that something’s going to take it away so it won’t ever happen, we won’t ever go there and eat that dinner.” He pushed the button.
“You’re a little frightening, Osgood. Do you know that?”
“Ozzie. Anyway, I wanted to get a piece of paradise, sort of a sample I could carry around for the rest of my life, before that something came along and took the rest.”
The elevator doors slid back.
“You are frightening, in a nice way. I feel—I don’t know—as if all of a sudden I’ve got this pet panther. But, Ozzie, it’s going to be just like I said. In fact, it’s going to be wonderful—we might not order the food at all.”
He grinned at her as they stepped out into the lobby. A man in a worn check suit was waiting near the registration desk. When he saw the suit, Barnes trotted over and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned around; he was long and lean, and at least half a head taller.
“Hello, Reeder,” Barnes said. “Put them up. I wouldn’t want to cold-cock you.”
“Shipmate! Hell, I’ve been looking all over for you. I want to give you your stuff back.” He fumbled in the pockets of the suit.
“Put ’em up,” Barnes said again. Robin Valor and Little Ozzie looked from one man to the other.
“Wallet,” Reeder mumbled. “Locker key.”
He held them out and Barnes slapped his hand, knocking them to the floor. Then he slapped Reeder with a quick forehand-backhand, the two slaps coming so close together they sounded like one.
“Don’t do that,” Reeder said. He lifted his fist and Barnes hit him under the jaw, sending him reeling against the registration desk. Joe the bellman, who had been in the act of picking up a guest’s luggage, dropped it and jumped between them. Barnes hit him with his left just above the belt, his fist driving into the cheap red uniform to the wrist. Joe doubled over and collapsed, his legs turned to rags.
Reeder hit Barnes on the cheek with a left and over the eye with a right, his fists flying like pistons. Barnes ducked and bored in with the hard, quick, smacking sounds a butcher makes tenderizing meat. Reeder staggered back, but the desk would not let him fall. For a moment Barnes’s fists fell against him like rain. His face seemed to melt under the blows, growing soft and darkly crimson as the skin washed away. Then he slipped down, and two burly men in dark suits grabbed Barnes’s arms from behind.
“Hotel security,” one of them told him; Robin Valor chopped the speaker’s thick neck with the edge of her hand. He turned slowly, as though half stunned, and she kicked him in the groin. Barnes whirled on the other man, landing
