twenty. I think I’m a little drunk, sir; but I have credit. Can we arrange
this?”
The bartender glowered; but there came a presence at Sander’s shoulder and:
“Charge it to Dublin” Allison Reilly said. Sandor looked about into Allison
Reilly’s small smile and very plain stare: they were about of a size and it was
a level glance indeed. “Want to step outside?” she asked.
He nodded, fright and temper and alcohol muddling into one adrenalin haze. He
followed that slim coveralled figure with the midnight hair those few steps
outside into the light, and the noise of the docks was sufficient to cool his
head again. He had, he reckoned, been paid off well enough, scammed by an
expert. He smiled ruefully at her when they stopped and she turned to face him.
It was not what he was feeling at the moment, which was more a desire to break
something, but good humor was obligatory on a man with empty pockets and a
Dubliner’s drinks in his belly. There were always her cousins, at least several
hundred of them.
“Does that line work often?” she asked.
“I’ll pay you the tab,” he said, which he could not believe he was saying, but
he reckoned that he could draw another twenty out of his margin account. He
hated having been trapped and having been rescued. “I have it I just don’t walk
the docks with much.”
She stared at him as if weighing that. Or him. Or thinking of calling her
cousins. “I take it that all of this was leading somewhere.”
She did it to him again, set him completely off balance. “It might have,” he
said with the same wry humor. “But I’m headed back to my ship. You got all my
change and I’m afraid Lucy’s accommodations aren’t what you’re used to.”
“Huh.” She looked in her pocket and brought out a single fifty. “Bradford’s. I
know it. It’s a class accommodation.”
He blinked, overthrown again, trying to figure if she had believed him anywhere
down the line, or what she saw in the likes of him. She might be setting him up
for another and worse joke than the last; but he wanted her. That was there
again worse than before, obscuring all caution and choking off all clever
argument Years of dreaming solitary dreams and looking to stay alive, barely
alive, which was all it came to… and one night in a silver bar and a high-class
sleepover. He had gotten hazardously drunk, he told himself, floating in an
overload of senses; and so had she gotten drunk. She was deliberately picking
someone like him who was a risk, because she was curious, or because she was
bored, or because Bradford’s was a Dublin hangout and one shout was going to
bring more trouble down on him than he could deal with. His hand was still
cold-sweating when they linked arms and walked in the direction she chose, and
he wiped his palm on his pocket lining before he took her cool, dry hand in his.
They walked the dock, along which gantries pointed at the distant unseen core,
towers aimed straight up beside them as they walked, and farther along aimed
askew, so that they looked like the veined segments of some gigantic fruit, and
the dock they walked unrolled like some gray spool of ribbon with a tinsel
left-hand edge of neon-lit bars and restaurants and shop display windows. Viking
dock had a set of smells all its own, part food and part liquor and part
machinery and chemicals and the forbidding musky chill of open cargo locks; it
had a set of sounds that was human noise and machinery working and music that
wafted out of bars in combinations sometimes discordant and sometimes oddly fit
It was a giddy, sense-battering flow he had never given way to, not like this,
not with a silver Dubliner woman arm in arm with him, step for step with him,
weaving in and out among the crowds.
They reached Bradford’s discreet front, with the smoked oval pressure windows
and the gold lettering… walked in, checked in at the desk with a comp register
presided over by a clerk who might have been a corporate receptionist. They