Black Alibi (14 page)

“And you’d like it, I know you would.”

“Sure,” Clo-Clo said readily. “Where’d you say it was again?”

“Copenhague. I told you three times.”

Clo-Clo was having trouble with this. She knew the names of most of the principal countries, Eng land, France, Spain, like that. You picked them up around town. It was either a country she had never heard of, or it was an utter lie. She decided it was an utter lie, since there couldn’t be many more countries than England, France, Spain. It was time to get going. The shows would be out soon. Her second leg shifted down and lined up against the first. There was only one more thing that had to leave the chair now.

He noticed finally that her entire figure was about to leave him, just as her attention already had some time before. He thought it was because his hospitality was remiss. He looked a little huit, stopped offering her his heart and soul. He called the barman over. “Another for the lady.” He’d already told her he didn’t like to see her drink. He’d already started in trying to change her around.

“No, I’ve got to go,” Clo-Clo said. She was off the stool now, and he couldn’t get her back. Every move in these breakaways had to be carried out craftily like that, to accomplish them successfully. Now if he reached for her to hold her, she’d just have to step quickly backwards. “I’ve got a date.”

“But this is one now you’re having with me.”

“Sure, but I’ve already had it, it’s over now. So long.”

“But I want you to marry me.”

“Day after tomorrow.”

She was two stools away now. The barman cut in sidewise toward her, said in a rebuking undertone, “What’s your hurry? He’s buying good and steady, what do you want to break it up for?”

“Give me my commission,” she said out of the corner of her mouth. “Come on, or I’ll tell him you insulted me. And you know what that’ll mean; the mirror behind you, all the glasses on the shelves—”

“You little bandit,” he said bitterly. Their hands touched briefly across the top of the bar.

“I can go to Robles’ just as well, I don’t have to come in here. You’re not losing money on me.”

Her late host tried to reach her with a persua. sive sweep of his arm. She knew enough to stay back beyond reach of it. “Come here a minute, Clo-Clo. Little Clo-Clo, don’t leave me like this. We were just beginning to get along so well.”

“I know, but time’s up now.”

He wavered toward the entrance after her, both arms out. “I wanted you to marry me. I wanted to take you out of this.” He seemed undecided for a minute whether to cry maudlinly or fly into a rage.

She got out over the threshold backwards. “Keep him in there, Manuel.”

Manuel just gave her a dirty look, for cutting short what had been a profitable session.

Her recent escort stood there in the lighted entrance, looking out after her. “You’re a fine one,” he called resentfully.

“You better go back to your ship, mister, and get some sleep. Marry the girl in the next port you come to, instead. After all, we’re all alike.”

She moved on down the narrow, crooked, poorly lighted street, swinging her bag jauntily at her side, a long-legged dryad in a tight black satin skirt. She glanced back once and he was leaning up against the side of the door, with his face burrowed into the right angle of his upthrust arm,
crying
because he’d lost her, after looking for her half around the world. Probably it was just the alcohol alone. How could you tell when it was real and when it wasn’t, anyway, this love stuff?

“Maybe I should’ve at that,” she dismissed him with an unconcerned shrug. “Who knows, maybe if I could see ahead, I’d be sorry that I didn’t.”

Around the very next corner a sudden confrontation occurred. He stopped short, came back to her. “Oh, it’s you, is it?”

“Have we met before?” Clo-Clo asked with polite uncertainty.

“Have we met before!” he scowled. “You were coming back in five minutes, and I sat up there alone waiting for you all the rest of the night, like a fool! The whole hotel staff was laughing at me behind their hands, when I had to walk out in front of them by myself the next morning!”

Clo-Clo shoveled her hands ingenuously toward him. “I couldn’t find the room again, when I tried to get back to you. There were so many halls and turns, I got lost. Was it my fault?”

“You know what you are? You’re a cheat. A false alarm.”

She touched the underside of his chin lightly with one finger. “Don’t be sore. Look at all the fun you’d already had out of me by then, anyway. You told me so yourself. You shouldn’t be a hog.”

“I wasn’t out for fun,” he let her know aggrievedly. He reached. “C’mere, you. I’ve got something coming to me.”

Clo-Clo did the back-step again. “No you haven’t,” she laughed. “That was then, this is now. No long-term credit extended.” She shifted around to the opposite side of an octagonal advertisement kiosk, saw to it that it stayed between them.

“C’mere, or I’ll come over there and get you. You’re coming with me if I have to drag you by the back of the neck.”

She just laughed, flirted her handbag out toward him at the end of its strap.

He saw that threatening wouldn’t work, he tried bribery. “C’mere, he coaxed, “I’ll buy you a drink.”

She made a face at him. “I’ve just had a drink.” Return engagements, she knew by long experience, were no good. Never any good. Not with her, anyway. There was always a redoubled vigilance on the part of the investor, remembering how he had been given the slip the first time, and she found it twice as hard to get away. Fool them once and then stay away from them was the best policy.

He held out both hands toward her, appealingly. “Ah, come on, won’t you? I like you. I can’t help it,
moma
, there’s something about you that’s gotten to me. You’re so hard to pin down. First you’re here, and then you’re not here.”

“Isn’t it the truth, though?” she laughed. “And now take a good look, I’m not here.”

She glanced back once, a wholly precautionary measure to make sure that he wouldn’t rush after her and try to take her by surprise, and he was still standing there forlornly where she’d left him, in the middle of the sidewalk. Looking after her sort of wistfully, as though hoping she’d change her mind. She really must have made an impression on him, she reflected indifferently. As for her, she already couldn’t have told what he’d looked like very precisely, although she’d just left him.

She took a look into the Select from the outside first. It was a little bit slow tonight in there, for some reason, so she decided on the Tabarin instead. It always paid to reconnoiter first. After all, even the best of places had its off-nights, and once you’d sunk your own twenty centavos into a grenadine, you couldn’t get it back again.

The Tabarin was brimming over. She retouched herself at a mirror panel in the lobby and went sauntering in.

You couldn’t demand a cut in these swell places. You had to be glad if they’d let you in at all.

The barman looked her over, got her immediately. “Take the one on the end,” he said, just as she was about to come to rest on one of the coral leather stools. “I want the middle left clear for paying customers.”

She shifted acquiescently, at the same time letting him know pertly: “Don’t let it worry you, I don’t expect to be on it very long.”

An unaccompanied, rather insipid-looking youth with a needlepointed mustache came up the steps out of the dancing room, stood up to the bar, and gulped a quick drink between pieces without taking the time to sit down.

He felt the eye flash and turned to look at her, glass in hand. She smiled, blew a slender wand of smoke at his face. It didn’t reach, but there was no mistaking her aim, she’d pointed it with her mouth. He must have had someone waiting for him in there. He turned away again as though he hadn’t seen her; just a trifle more priggishly than was necessary. He threw down a coin, went back again, just as the next tango got under way.

The barman cautioned her, as soon as he’d gone, “Now listen, nothing too raw, understand? Leave off this smoke-ring stuff. Watch your manners.”

“How much are you charging to give lessons in deportment?” she asked wearily. “Who dolls the place up more, me or that dead-fish face you frighten them away from your bar with?”

“There are worse faces than mine,” he grunted.

“You’ve been looking at people upside down.” It wasn’t really a wrangle, they understood one another too well. Just idle repartee while they were both killing time.

She would have gone back to the Select after all, only she’d already invested her twentyfive centavos here and she was going to cash in on it.

Somebody else came up the steps from the lower level, presently. This time it was a somewhat portly, dignified-looking gentleman of uncertain years, whose florid mustache was just beginning to whiten at the tips. He carried himself erect enough, and his skin had a healthy coppery tint to it, as though he spent a great deal of time in the open, but just now he wore a harassed expression, as though he had been greatly bored, was wishing he was anyplace but here. He threw away the mangled remnants of a cigar and stepped up to the bar.

“Could you tell me—” Then he became aware of Clo-Clo, muffled the rest of it.

The barman said, “Where that page is standing, senor.”

Just before the door closed after him he took another brief look at her. The page turned and entered after him, probably to be on hand in case he required a whisk broom or hairbrush.

He emerged and headed back toward the dancing room, but not without throwing still one more quick look in her direction.

“Technique a little rusty,” Clo-Clo thought with a chuckle. “Probably has had a wife since the last time he tried it.”

She put Out her cigarette, got up, sauntered over to the page, drink in hand. The barman looked like the kind that would empty it out on you behind your back, if you left it unguarded, to get you out of the place.

“How’d you do just now?” she inquired with ready camaraderie.

The boy’s eyes rounded enthusiastically. “A whole solid peso for doing nothing! He just looked at himself in the glass, asked if I knew who you were, and asked me about how old I would take him to be!”

“Ricardo, you’re on duty,” the barman warned disapprovingly.

“So am I—from now on,” Clo-Clo said to herself, drifting back to her original perch again. She’d found out all she wanted to know.

She gambled on it and waited patiently, although if she had turned out to be wrong, the time wastage would have been irretrievable. But she was usually right, and she turned out to be this time too. Two tangos later he had come back again.

He advanced halfway to the bar, took a good hard look at her, then made an abrupt turn and went in the same doorway as previously.

“He didn’t come back here to go in there, he came back to see if I was still out here,” she told herself knowingly.

She snapped her fingers authoritatively to the barman, to show she was on the warpath, not idling any more. “Put a little more water in this.” She wanted to dilute the grenadine dye as much as possible.

He handed it back to her with a lethal scowl. “What’re you trying to do, make it last over the week end?” He didn’t guess what she was up to, or he would probably have frustrated her intentions by purposely delaying to return the denatured drink to her.

As it was, she got over to the door, glass in hand, just a bare second before it reopened. She was standing there saying something to the page as her quarry sought to pass in back of her. He would have made it without grazing her, but she moved her elbow back into him as he tried to. The elbow of the hand holding the drink. The glass turned neatly and the grenadine-water went down the side of her dress.

She let him show all the dismay. He showed enough for two. She was good-natured about it. He flung out a handkerchief, dipped one knee, and patted at it all the way down.

“Things like that will happen. I assure you it’s nothing, senor. It’s my fault, I shouldn’t have been in the way.”

“You must come over here and at least let me buy you another one.”

She shook her head with sad indifference. “It’s not much fun drinking alone.”

He glanced out toward the dancing room. “I-I’ll sit with you for a minute. My family’s in there, and I have to get back.”

He was taking an awful chance, in Clo-Clo’s opinion, but that was his lookout, not her own. She settled herself demurely beside him, on the same stool as before.

“Champagne for the senorita. Pol Roget.”

The barman was all smiles for her now. He even scraped, trotted out the two French words he knew, reserved only for champagne buyers. “Monsou. Madamasella.”

“To a lucky accident.”

“To a delightful accident,” Clo-Clo improved on it.

They became acquainted by leaps and bounds. He began to smile more and more often. The smiles became grins. The grins became gusts of hearty laughter. Once or twice he glanced behind him, in remembered caution.

“Don’t you think the music is a little too loud out here?” he suggested finally. Since he had just come from where it was actually playing, he seemed to have developed unusual sensitivity all at once. But then maybe in there there hadn’t been anybody he considered worth listening to.

Clo-Clo had no fault to find with this point. “Yes it is, it makes it hard to hear what one is saying,” she agreed.

“Barman, is there some other place around here where we can get further away from the music, be a little more secluded?”

“There is a little private room, looking out on the rear terrace, if the senor and lady would like to try that. Straight back at the end of the corridor there.”

“Send in another bottle, and something to eat.” Then, as an afterthought, he came back a step, leaned toward the barman confidentially. “Anc in case anyone happens to be looking for me, I have gone out to get a breath of air for a minute.” He put something in his hand. “
That
way.” He pointed in the opposite direction to the one. they were about to take.

“Hit me on the back again,” he pleaded in a strangled voice. “I can’t help it, I laugh until my throat closes up—” The rest of it was lost in an exhausted cough. He continued to shake, wiping the excess water from his eyes.