He was a geologist; spent most of his time in South America, usually at high altitudes. My mother wouldn’t live up there. He was killed the next summer; a station wagon he was riding in went off the road into a gorge. My mother remarried a couple of years afterwards. Widower several years older than she was, partner in a Houston brokerage firm. He’s retired now, lives on a big place near Huntsville and raises Black Angus cattle. My mother died while I was at sea, during the Korean thing. She left me a little money; that’s when I bought the bar in Panama.”

“What happened to the bar?”

“It was put out-of-bounds for military personnel because of a couple of bad fights, so I sold it.”

”At a loss?”

“No. I was lucky. This live one was fresh from the States and didn’t know what out-of-bounds meant down there. I think he wanted to make it a fag hangout, anyway.”

“What did you do with the money when you got back to the States?”

“Lost most of it in Las Vegas.”

“Tell me about the tout business.”

I reached over and turned on the reading lamp on the night table. She looked at me questioningly. “What’s that for?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just got tired of talking to you in the dark. I wanted to look at you.”

“Why?”

“Tell me,” I said. I raised myself on an elbow and ran a finger-tip along the line of her cheek. “You’re beautiful. Is that it?”

“Don’t be silly.”

“I was never less silly. How about striking? Exciting? It’s a quality of some kind—fragile, elegant, cool, hard-boiled, and sexy—all at the same time. There’s no such combination? I was afraid not.”

She shook her head with exasperation, but she did smile. “Oh, for heaven’s sake. And I had some weird idea I was going to talk to you—”

“I am talking.”

“Like an idiot. Why the campaign; you’re already here, aren’t you?”

“Don’t be so cynical.”

“Turn out the light.”

I turned it out, and took her in my arms and kissed her. She came to me readily, and was as deftly and pleasantly co-operative as before. If that was the only way to achieve a calm and rational conversation, by God she was willing.

“What about the tout business?” she asked after a while.

“It was nothing,” I said. “You know how they operate. You’ve seen ’em by the dozens passing out their sheets at the entrance to racetracks—Clocker Joe, Stablehand Maguire, Exercise Boy—no imagination, competing with each other, and working for buttons. So I made a deal with this one; I’d put him in the big time for half the take. We set it up as a telegraphic service and I bought time on a Tijuana radio station to sell him—a real saturation build-up about the time Santa Anita was opening. Lot of spot announcements and a quarter-hour of hillbilly junk with a plug every minute or two.