stood on thick carpets, under fancy lighting, everything white and gold, where
the foyer door shut out the gaudy noise of the docks. She paid, and got the room
card, and grinned at him, took his arm and led the way down the thick-carpeted
hall to a numbered doorway. She thrust the card into the slot and opened it
It was a sleeper of the class of the bar they had just come from, a place he
could never afford—all cream satin, with a conspicuous blue and cream bed and a
cream tiled bath with a shower. For a moment he was put off by such luxury,
which he had never so much as seen in his life. Then pride took hold of him, and
he slipped his arm about Allison Reilly and pulled her close against him with a
jerk which drew an instinctive resistance; he grinned when he did it, and she
pushed back with a look that at once warned and chose to be amused.
He took account of that on the instant, that in fact his humor was a facade,
which she had seen through constantly. It might not work so well—here, with a
Dubliner’s pride, on a Dubliner’s money. He reckoned suddenly that he could make
one bad enemy or—perhaps—save something to remember in the far long darks
between stations. She scared him, that was the plain fact, because she had all
the cards that mattered; and he could too easily believe that she was going to
laugh, or talk about this to her cousins, and laugh in telling them how she had
bought herself a night’s amusement and had a joke at his expense. Worst of all,
he was afraid he was going to freeze with her, because every time he was half
persuaded it was real he had the nagging suspicion she knew what he was, and
that meant police.
He steadied her face in his hand and tried kissing her, a tentative move, a
courtesy between dock-met strangers. She leaned against him and answered in kind
until the blood was hammering in his veins.
“Shouldn’t we close the door?” she suggested then, a practicality which slammed
him back to level again. He let her go and pushed the door switch, looked back
again desperately, beginning to suspect that the whole situation was humorous,
and that he deserved laughing at, even by himself. He was older than she was;
but he was, he reckoned, far younger in such encounters. Naive. Scared.
“I’m for a shower,” Allison Reilly said cheerfully, and started shedding the
silver coveralls. “You too?”
He started shedding his own, at once embarrassed because he was off balance in
the casualness of her approach and because he still suspected humor in what with
him was beginning to be shatteringly serious.
She laughed; she splashed him with soap and managed to laugh in the shower and
tumbling in the bed with the blue sheets, but not at all moments. For a long,
long while she was very serious indeed, and he was. They made love with total
concentration, until they ended curled in each other’s arms and utterly
exhausted.
He woke. The lights were still on as they had been; and Allison stirred and
murmured about her watch and Dublin, while he held onto her with a great and
desperate melancholy and a question boiling in him that had been there half the
night
“Meet you again?” he asked.
“Sometime,” she said, tracing a finger down his jaw. “I’m headed out this
afternoon.”
His heart plummeted. “Where next?”
A little frown creased her brow. “Pell,” she said finally. “That’s not on the
boards, but you could find it in the offices. Going across the Line. Got a deal
working there. Be back—maybe next year, local.”
His heart sank farther. He lay there a moment, thinking about his papers, his
cargo, his hopes. About an old man who might talk, and fortunes that had shaved
the profit in his account to the bone. Year’s end was coming. If he had to, he
could lay over and skim nothing more until the new year, but it would rouse
suspicion and it would run up a dock charge he might not work off. “What deal at