I said, “Still, he apparently made a point of getting acquainted with you in Pensacola. He followed you here. We can’t ignore him just because you think he’s a lightweight. It’s standard procedure, Doc, for an agent to act dumber and more scared than he is.”
“Well, I’m sure you’re mistaken.” She sighed, giving up the argument, and surveyed the room lazily. “Only one bed? Do we toss for it? I suppose I have to spend the night here, what’s left of it, and slip back to my room about dawn looking suitably mussed and made-love-to. Oh, dear, and when I think of the way I sneaked around trying to keep people from knowing about Harold and me!” She laughed. “Well, it’s going to be a refreshing change, being brazen about it. What happens afterward?”
I said, “In the morning, true love having blossomed during the wee hours, we head for Alabama on our way to Pensacola and home. Your home.”
“Why Alabama?”
“There’s no waiting period in Alabama. You just take a blood test and see the judge.”
She looked quickly but didn’t speak at once. Then she said, “I suppose that’s still necessary.”
“More than ever, I’d say. Now we have to see which one of them comes after you; and we’ve got to keep up the act for Mooney’s sake, if not for Kroch’s.”
“Harold lives in Pensacola, don’t forget. It will prove nothing if he follows us there.”
“The roundabout way we’ll drive, it’ll prove something,” I said. “Here are two things for you to keep in mind, Doc. One, like Orpheus and Eurydice, you don’t look back.” I grinned at her expression. “Don’t act so surprised. It isn’t polite. Us undercover types often read the classics to improve our minds when we’re not dealing with murder and mayhem. Some of us do, anyway. Don’t be an intellectual snob.”
She flushed slightly. “I didn’t mean... Well, maybe I did. Sorry.”
“You don’t look back,” I went on. “I’ll do the looking. You have no doubts, no suspicions. You’re just a lady in love, bringing home a brand-new husband—one you married on the rebound, true, but that just makes you more determined to show people it’s all perfectly lovely.”
“Well, I’ll try to look blissfully ignorant and... and inappropriately amorous.” She hesitated. “You said two things. What’s the other.”
I reached down deliberately and gave a jerk to the hem of her skirt. “Number two,” I said, “is, you keep your damn skirt down where it belongs.”
It brought a gasp from her. It brought her upright in the chair.
“Really...!”
I said, “I’m not an impressionable kid, but I’m not so damn ancient I don’t react to normal stimuli, Doc. Now we both know you have attractive legs, nice nylons, and a pretty slip. We both know, too, that you’re no longer quite the prim spinster lady you’ve been pretending to be. Well, whatever you learned from Mooney, please don’t try it on me, doll. In public, we’ll carry the lovey-dovey routine as far as necessary, but in private, like this, nix. You keep a reasonable amount of clothes on the body, and you keep them where they count.” I stared at her in a hard way. “That is, of course, assuming that you
want
to keep it strictly business between us.”
She was on her feet now, tugging her suit straight and buttoning her blouse with hands that weren’t quite steady. “I’m sorry...!” Anger choked her briefly. “I’m very sorry if I’ve... disturbed you, Mr. Corcoran! It’s late and I’m tired and just a bit tight; I didn’t realize I was straining your self-control. It wasn’t deliberate, I assure you!”
“Maybe it wasn’t,” I said. “And then again, maybe it was. You don’t look to me like a dame who shows a guy the view past the tops of her stockings without knowing it, drunk or sober. I don’t quite follow the reasoning behind the tempting display, but it doesn’t look like any gambit I read in the copy of Capablanca you so kindly lent me.” I drew a long breath. “What I’m saying, Doc, is that if you want me to keep this love-and-marriage stuff on a business basis, you keep it that way, too. If you want to play, we’ll play, and you’ll find yourself flat on your back with your dress up and your girdle down so fast it’ll make your head swim. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”
It was pretty crude; but the whole unbuttoned, inviting leggy bit had been too far out of character for me to let it pass unchallenged. A woman who, alone, would read about infinity fully dressed without a hair out of place wasn’t going to lounge untidily and suggestively about a man’s room without some purpose. The notion that came to mind was so crazy I had to check it out, even at the cost of being rude.
She stared at me for a moment, her eyes furious, her pale lips tightly compressed; then she laughed. It was a surprising laugh, for her, a real laugh, a woman’s laugh... soft and throaty and triumphant.
“Corcoran,” she murmured, “you’re bluffing like hell!”
I looked at her sharply, and everything changed, as it does. It had been a long, complicated night, but everything was suddenly very plain and simple and I realized at last who—behind all the doubletalk and drinking and fancy acting—had actually been seducing whom.
“You’re bluffing!” she breathed.
“Don’t count on it,” I said stiffly.
“You’re bluffing!” she whispered. “You talk big but you won’t... won’t touch me. You don’t dare!”
It had been a long time since I’d done anything because somebody dared me, but I’d already been strong-minded once that night, and I could see no good reason for it here. To be sure, Mac had warned me to be diplomatic, but under the circumstances it was a little hard to say where true diplomacy lay.
I reached out and took her glasses off for the second time that night. This time I really looked at her. The face was all right, once you started looking at it as the face of a woman instead of a genius and made allowance for the lack of lipstick. The eyes were fine without the glasses, a little bold but also, I was glad to see, a little scared, as if she didn’t quite know what she was getting herself into besides a bed. Well, that made two of us.
I said, “The reception was poor at first, Doc, but now I read you loud and clear. Brief me. Do we lead up to the subject with a little breathless talk about love, or do we simply adjourn to the bed, approximately five feet away.”
She licked her lips. “Let’s not be hypocritical. You’ve probably gathered I’ve heard quite enough talk about love. I vote... I vote the meeting be adjourned as specified, before...” There was a shaky little pause... “before the lady loses her nerve!”
I woke up to hear her crying in the darkness beside me. I didn’t ask why. Presumably she was crying in a general way for lost innocence and shattered illusions. It’s a common complaint.
Presently she whispered, “Are you awake, Corcoran?”
“Yes.”
“Did I wake you?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I’m sorry,” she breathed. “I... it’s just so cheap and dirty, that’s all.”
“Thanks,” I said. “All testimonials gratefully accepted.”
“I didn’t mean you. I just meant, well, life in general.”
“What you really meant was that for years you’ve been saving yourself for a great, sweet, tender passion like in the movies, and now you find yourself lying in a hotel bed in your underwear beside a strange man you don’t particularly like.”
She said, “Don’t be sarcastic, damn you.”
“Don’t swear,” I said. “I’ll do the swearing around here. You’re the intellectual type, remember?”
She laughed bitterly. “I don’t feel very intellectual. I don’t suppose I’d look very intellectual, either, if you could see me. The funny thing is, I don’t think I even really know why I did it, why I badgered you into... well, into bed, damn it. And I’ll swear all I want. To hell with you, Corcoran.”
“For a girl who didn’t know why she was doing it, you did it pretty well.”
“I suppose I was really... I guess I was deliberately desecrating a shrine that had been sacred to a false god, if you know what I mean.”
“Desecrating,” I said. “Shrine. Such fancy words to use in bed at four in the morning... Ouch.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Your false god throws a mean punch. Do you feel like telling me? Just what did he do to bring the heavens crashing down?”
She started to speak sharply and checked herself. Then she was silent for a little. At last she laughed in the darkness and said, “You’re being sarcastic again, but your description is pretty accurate, unfortunately. But when a woman is fool enough to wait until thirty to learn about sex and love, I guess she’s asking for a major catastrophe. It was like a dream at first. I’d never experienced anything like it. I’d never experienced much of anything along those lines. He brought me flowers. He bought me little presents—perfume, stockings, lingerie. He... he made me feel like a woman, Corcoran. He even made me feel like a beautiful woman. It had never happened to me before.”
Her frankness was a little embarrassing, even in the dark. I said, “Buy yourself a lipstick and it could happen again. You’re not really nauseating, you know.”
“Thanks,” she murmured. “Thanks for the charming compliment, charmingly phrased. I’ll treasure it always.”
“No charge,” I said. “Let’s get to the point where he lowered the boom.”
“It was a Friday, I think,” she said. “Yes, I’m sure it was a Friday, the end of the week, at ten in the morning. I had an appointment. I was still seeing him, well, professionally too. They were laughing,” she said in a flat voice.
“Who was laughing?”
“I came into the office a little early. I really wanted to be late to show him... Well, I just wanted to stroll in casually a few minutes late. You know, so it wouldn’t look as if seeing him was very important in my life. But when I got out of the elevator it was still a few minutes early. I just couldn’t help myself. I’d seen him the night before but I still couldn’t help myself. You know how it is.”
“Sure,” I said. “I know how it is. I guess.”
“The reception room was empty. I started back there and heard them. They were talking about me in the examining room, Harold and the nurse, or receptionist, an obvious, well-developed little blonde in one of those white nylon uniforms, you know the kind I mean, the kind that are practically transparent, worn over something pink, always. Miss Darden was the way I knew her, the way he’d always referred to her, but now he was calling her Dottie. The way they were talking made the relationship between them absolutely clear. They’d come to an understanding long ago. You know. She was so sure of herself and of him that she wasn’t even jealous; his extracurricular activities merely amused her. Do I have to tell you exactly what they said about me? What he said?”
“No,” I said, “but in fairness you’ve got to remember that there aren’t many things a man can say to one woman he’s sleeping with when discussing another. He’s practically got to make it sound as if the only reason he has anything to do with the second dame is for money, influence, or laughs.”
“Laughs!” she breathed. “How did you know? It was a hilarious joke they shared. I was. Something to titter about together while waiting for me to arrive so they could greet me looking very sober and professional. I want to vomit when I think of it, Corcoran. I was such an idiot about him. It was as if I’d been hypnotized to do mad things and couldn’t help myself... And then to hear them
laughing!
I wanted to kill myself.”
“Instead of which,” I said, “you marched right down and said you’d take the crazy assignment you’d refused earlier. The idea of having the U.S. government arrange a whirlwind love affair for you, and provide a husband you could get rid of after he’d served your purpose, suddenly looked real good. It was a way of telling Dr. Harold Mooney he hadn’t hurt you a bit; it was a way of showing him he wasn’t the only bird in the bush.”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course.”
“My chief kind of wondered what made you change your mind,” I said. “I wondered myself, a bit. You didn’t look like somebody who’d take on a job like this just for kicks. Well, now you’d better get out of here before the place wakes up.”
I switched on the light and looked at her. She sat up and hastily pulled up a strap of the pretty slip she’d retained while shedding the rest of her clothes—a present from Mooney, the romantic flowers-and-lingerie dispenser, I guessed, now. I wondered if it had given her some kind of perverse satisfaction to wear his intimate gift to bed with another man. Her bare shoulders were square and strong-looking, but smooth and white.
“Well, you don’t have to stare!” she protested, blushing.
I grinned. “Now she gets modest,” I said.
“Now
what are you doing?”
“My hair—”
“What do you want to do, spoil the effect after we’ve gone to all this trouble to make it authentic?”
She glanced at me quickly. After a moment she smiled. “Oh, is that what we were doing? I didn’t know.”
I said, “Well, you don’t want to look as if you’d been doing research in the Library of Congress, Doc. If Handsome Harold is lurking outside, you want to confirm his darkest suspicions, don’t you? Just pull on your skirt and blouse, stick your feet into your shoes, make a bundle of everything else, and dash for the stairs. Call me the minute you reach your room, so I’ll know you’re okay. The coffee shop opens at six. I’ll meet you there for breakfast.”
A minute or so later she was standing at the door rather uncertainly, hesitating to show herself outside like that, disheveled and not completely dressed. The funny thing was, she looked kind of young and pretty with her severe hairdo tumbling about her face and the color of embarrassment in her cheeks.
“Corcoran?”
“Yes?”
“I want you to know it wasn’t premeditated. I had every intention of keeping you at a very proper distance. Please believe me.”
“Sure,” I said.
If she wanted to lie for the sake of her self-respect, I wasn’t going to argue; and maybe she’d just happened to be wearing pretty stuff under the tweed tonight, even though it did seem like kind of a coincidence.
“It was seeing him and hearing him trying to tell me about misunderstandings in that smooth, patronizing way. I just had to do something to erase, well, certain memories. I hope you’re not disgusted or... or offended.”
“Offended?” I said. “Don’t be silly, Doc. It beats the hell out of chess.”