Knife at My Back

by Lawrence Lariar

“I’m not complaining,” I said.

  “You’re really nice,” she smiled. “What are you drinking?”

  “Drambuie. It sits well after a big meal.”

  “A man of discernment.” She cased me slyly, weighing me with her wise eyes. “You don’t find many Drambuie drinkers on a boat like this. I would have judged you a Scotch and soda man.”

  “I didn’t think it showed.” I lifted her glass and sniffed it. “You fooled me, too. I would have called you the Manhattan type. Instead, you’re sipping Aquavit. Scandinavian ancestors?”

  “I love the Swedes.” She laughed. “I also love Aquavit because it warms me and excites me. But Aquavit is a kind friend the morning after. It’s important to have kind friends, don’t you think?”

  “Some of my best friends are kind,” I said. I ordered the drinks and laughed it up with her. What the hell, she was still doing things to my knee. “Tomorrow night I’m going to switch to Aquavit.”

  “My hero,” she said. She said it with a deep regret.

  She had a way of saying things that made me jerk to a stop and look her over carefully, as though she was showing me something new and different all the time, like a slow strip tease. The words were warm sometimes. And then ice cold, like a bottle of fizz water in the face. Like the way she just said, “My hero.” She could be talking to a salesman about his vacuum cleaner. She could be telling a marbles champion he was a great boy. Still, when she got rid of it, her eyes came alive and she smiled at me and showed me another angle of her personality. She could boil a man with those blue-green eyes.

  She downed the Aquavit in a gulp, before the waiter left the table.

  “Put the next one in a tall glass, Johnny,” she said. “All the way to the top.”

  “With ice, Miss Yorke?”

  “Pour it over the ice, Johnny.” She smiled up at him, and he stood there enjoying himself by just being near her. She had the easy, guileless friendliness that would win her comrades all over the world, especially among the boys. We were only a few hours out of New York and she was already calling the bar waiter by his first name and he was liking it fine. She had the manner of a dignified whore when she looked at a man. She did flips with her eyes, warming him up by just a long straight glance, aided and abetted by the quick smile that spelled everything and maybe nothing to the marauding male. Volumes have been written on the subject of masculine wolves, yet nobody has analyzed and recorded the predatory woman, the fevered females like this one, who nibbled at the waiter with her eyes as he stepped away to the bar for her drink.

  I said, “Nice boy, Johnny.”

  “He’ll do,” she said, with a quiet smile. “He has the makings of a perfect waiter.”

  “Perfect? He’s itching to serve you.”

  “Watch your language,” she said evenly.

  “Watch your eyes,” I said. “Johnny is only a boy. He may get ideas.”

  She paused while lighting her cigarette. She turned my way and stared hard at me, trying me on for size, not angrily, not petulantly, but with curiosity. She licked her lower lip and pretended to remove a stray thread of tobacco. Her knee dug deeper into mine under the table. “You’re clever,” she said. “I like clever little men, Mr.—?”

  “Hemingway,” I said. “Ernest Q. Hemingway.”

  “A little joke man,” she said. But she was laughing out loud for a change. And I liked what honest joy did to her face. She certainly had a mouthful of elegant choppers. When she smiled, it was the moon coming out of the clouds. Drunk? She could have been a bit high. She was drunk enough to let her hand drop on mine. Her hand was cold.

  “I like you, Mr. Ernest Hemingway. Do you mind?”

  “Not when you smile.”

  “Will you tell me your name now?”

  “Conacher,” I said. “Stephen H.”

  “A nice name.” She nodded. The waiter came with a tall glass. She rolled it slowly in her delicate fingers and then sipped it and closed her eyes on it. “A good, honest, hardworking name. What do you do, Steve?”

  So now it was Steve. And ten minutes later it was Jane. Jane Yorke. I told her that I was a businessman, on my way to San Juan to investigate a site for a new shoe factory. She listened to my line of guff as though I was dropping great pearls of wisdom. She discussed the advantages of Puerto Rico for business. And she knew her way around down there. She had been down to the Caribbean often, on this cruise and that. She was a travel agent from Boston who believed in her own merchandise, and that was why, once a year, she took her favorite trip—a boat ride to San Juan on the SS Rico. She had been all around the world, from the fjords of Norway to the coast of Africa. Yet this was the big kick for her—San Juan in January. It didn’t make sense. But I let her talk.

  Because I knew she was lying.

  “Where will you stay in San Juan?” she asked.

  “The Caribe Hilton.”

  She chuckled. Her laugh was low and soft, husky and provocative. When she laughed, her knee added depth and meaning to her hilarity. Her knees were on a direct circuit to her good humor. She dug them into mine. The big glass of Aquavit was almost gone now. And something veiled and distant and dreamy crept into her eyes.

  “An excellent hotel, Steve. But I know a nicer one. A little place called Thaler’s, out beyond Santurce.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Later, perhaps. We have a long, long trip ahead of us.”

  “So we have.” I began to wonder what would happen if I slipped my hand down on her knee now. She was almost asking for it. She had her head back against the cushioned wall. She was closing her eyes and breathing deeply, listening to me, but not acting at all anxious to play it wide awake. So I kept talking about the boat, the state of the sea, and the benefits of Aquavit. I was getting her straightened away in my mind. But it would be easier in a stateroom. So I snaked my hand under the table and dropped it gently on her knee. I felt her tighten a bit under the pressure. But she relaxed when I began to find my way along her thigh.

  I let my fingers wander. Around and about us, the madcap sounds of alcoholic revelry still buzzed and hummed. The little groups and knots of people came alive as individual pictures, to be treasured and relished in the memory of every first-tripper on a cruise boat.

  A tableau: In the corner of the bar, two middle-aged gents lifted their glasses high. They were toasting two ladies of the same era, on the loose and anxious for romance. Dames? These were the borderline frustrates. These were the round-heel types, the matrons whose figures merited a flash of attention from all aging wolves on the prowl. They sipped and laughed, cackling their high good humor to the beams.

  A tableau: At a side table, two women sipping Benedictine and brandy, a mother and daughter combination. The younger female toyed with tatting, her delicate fingers working away at needlepoint while her eyes roved the crowd, yearning for some marauding male to take her away from her mother. Or wishing, perhaps, for the old girl to find herself a bedmate and leave the daughter to her fate. Yet nothing dramatic would happen to these two. The tatting would grow in direct proportion to the girl’s frustration.

  A tableau: At the bar, a few of the ship’s officers, allowing their eyes to wander among the tables, casing and measuring and estimating the available females. The purser, the ship’s doctor, and another one of the higher-ups in the gold braid department; these three were on the loose and setting themselves up for future dalliance with whatever type of quail came their way.

  A tableau: At a corner table, the girl with the ballet-type slippers, laces high on elegant gams, trim and beautifully crossed to display her charms. She was a cute doll, dark and pretty, with sleepy eyes and little make-up, the kind of wren who might be made with a slam at the cultural dialogue. She showed her legs with careless abandon, her knees up and the smooth rich lines of her calf accented by the black crisscrossed laces. She sipped a tall drink,
letting the glass linger at her lips while she arched her head and made sly and introspective passes at the males around her. She did not blink as the purser dislodged himself from the bar bunch and made his way toward her and beamed as he came. He was a loose-jointed sailor, this purser, with washed-out, girlish eyes, the eyes of a pansy, sick eyes that were given an air of respectability by the uniform he wore.

  A tableau: The man who watched the purser advance to the doll’s table. He sat a few tables beyond her, a surprising traveler. He burned the doll with his deep-set eyes. He had broad, heavy brows, a junior John L. Lewis, no older than forty, but with a frame that spelled power and youthfulness; heavy in the chest and broad in the shoulders. I recognized him at once. He was Ira Garel, one of the upper echelon gang bosses, the man who had the reputation of a Capone and the charm of a movie character play-acting at drawing room scenes. Garel was bigger than big ten years ago. He had allowed himself to pale and fade in the public press. But in private life, wherever he moved, his identity shone through because of the character who always walked beside him.

  Strom!

  Strom was the figure seated at Garel’s elbow. For over fifteen years, the police of every major metropolis in the land had sought to pin a rap on the henchman of the great Garel. But after a long try the game was abandoned, for Strom had as much savvy as his intellectual boss—and twice as much murder in his heart. He violated all the stock pictures of the gang killer, however. Strom looked as gentle as an itinerant preacher, and twice as delicate. He was a short, slender man who wore horn-rimmed glasses on the bridge of his long and classic nose. His figure was hunched in the way that a scholar’s body bends and strains under the weight of long hours of study and reflection. He had delicate hands, now engaged in fiddling with a straw, through which he sipped a glass of ginger ale. He leaned slightly toward his master, who talked with him in an intimate and relaxed way. But Garel’s eyes were glued to the doll with the black ballet slippers. He was watching the purser at her table, as keenly as I watched him.

  A tableau: At my table, the eager private dick and the soft and yielding subject at my side. She was still giving me the business with her knee, still murmuring to me, her breath heavy with the Aquavit. She rubbed me gently, sighing when my fingers wandered on her silken shank.

  “A little man with a purpose,” she said sleepily, her eyes still closed. Then her hand was over mine, on her thigh. And she was nipping me with her long nails. Not hard, but with enough pressure to sting. “A little man with soft hands,” she was saying. “Soft hands and a bad sense of timing.”

  “I could say the same about your knees.”

  “So you could.” She did not release my hand.

  The feel of her fingers was more caressing now. She smiled up at the ceiling. Her eyes were only half open. She seemed lost in some secret landscape of her own devising. Drunk? Really stewed? It would be hard to tell until she got up.

  “Are your knees strong enough to hold you?” I asked.

  “My knees are the strongest part of me, Steve.”

  “And your legs?”

  “Steady.”

  “Steady enough to make my stateroom?”

  She let the silence build for a while. Then she brought her head down and opened her eyes and proved that she was not half as drunk as she could be. She drained the dregs of the big glass of Aquavit. She was smiling when she finished. Her white smile showed a row of small and predatory teeth. She examined her wrist watch, her full lips arched in a wry curve.

  “Only eight hours out at sea,” she said softly. “And on the make for a man.” She continued to address the hands on her watch. “You’ll probably think I’m the ship’s whore. The proverbial easy gal.”

  Proverbial? This doll was something out of The Perfumed Garden. What I thought about her had been predetermined. You don’t just walk up to a dame and sit down next to her in a ship’s bar and begin rubbing knees with her and trying for a quick throw. You don’t go strolling through the lounge and spot a broad like Jane Yorke and tell yourself. “This is a fancy piece.” Things like that happen in the fairytale adventures of paper detectives; the hot quick survey of the dame, the neat, glib approach, and after that the pass, complete with mattress gymnastics. Me, I’m not geared for that kind of quickie. I’m short and nondescript and as handsome as the next guy, in a broken-nosed sort of way. But nothing special, mind you, nothing that would attract a smooth, slick morsel of femininity like Jane Yorke.

  What happened was that I had been tipped off about her in the office of Carson Scott, the little old man who wanted me to find his daughter, Nancy. Scott had the lowdown on Jane Yorke, complete with a decent picture of her, a close-up that I had with me, down in my cabin, plus a typed description of her background. All this, and the verbal breakdown old man Scott gave me. “If you find Jane Yorke,” the old goat said, “you must prepare yourself for a clever woman. Jane has led an odd sort of life. She is an adventuress who has been involved in all sorts of peculiar projects. She has dabbled in the theatre, in literature and in painting, attracting a fantastic coterie of men around her. You must remember that Jane has a way with men. She can be bought with a glass of liquor or a kind word, if what I hear is true. She is what you might call a genuinely loose woman, and I understand even psychiatry gave her up a long time ago. But Jane is clever, Conacher. Always remember that. She is as elusive as the proverbial eel.”

  There it was again. Proverbial! The proverbial eel? I watched Jane and listened to her and wondered about her, still close enough for me to feel the perpetual motion movements of her silken knee down there, under the table. She was dressed in a tweed skirt, the bottom part of a neat and decorous ensemble. But up on top, the white blouse was geared for a thousand masculine whistles. She looked clean and neat and tidy and respectable, until you dropped your eyes to her full and elegant breasts, a masterpiece of eye-appeal. The blouse was cut respectably low and in a formal pattern, but teasingly unbuttoned on the top level. Accidental? I judged that open neck to be as accidental as the way she was burning her eyes into me.

  “Have another glass of that Scandinavian stuff,” I said.

  “You haven’t answered my question, Steve,” she said. “You’ve been miles away in the last few minutes, out there somewhere, over the ocean.”

  “So I have. At times like this, I’m jet-propelled in the head.”

  “Times like what?”

  “Meeting a strange, wonderful-looking woman like you.”

  “How nice you are.” She smiled. “And what a cute way to change the subject. I asked you a little while ago whether you thought me easy.”

  Her frankness was a shot in the head. She asked the question and licked her pretty lips over it and you didn’t mind her honesty, somehow. Jane Yorke could say much worse and get away with it. She was as smooth and poised as a minor Tallulah Bankhead, and twice as pretty.

  “I don’t know you well enough, Jane.”

  “You’ll know me soon. Will you tell me then?”

  “Is it that important?”

  “Maybe it is. Maybe I like you.”

  “Wait here,” I said. “Give me twenty minutes?”

  “Anything, Steve.” She laughed. “Provided you order me another glass of Aquavit.”

  I ordered her drink. On the right side of the lounge, against the row of small and colorful scenes of the Caribbean, a bevy of staid passengers sat around in sober attitudes. This was the older set, the squat and middle-aged and serious travelers. And among them, making small talk with a broad and beefy matron, was my cabin mate, a certain Mr. J. L. Quirk.

  They were sipping ginger ale and discussing the state of the weather outside. I shook hands with the dowager and Quirk introduced her to me.

  “Mrs. Carrington,” Quirk said, on his feet and making the small talk with fluttery embarrassment. “My cabin mate—Mr. Conkor.”

  “Conacher,” I co
rrected. “Stephen Conacher.”

  “We were just talking about the waves,” Mrs. Carrington said. “Have you seen any of the officers? Do you think it will let up? The storm, I mean.”

  “Not until we pass Hatteras,” I said, feeling like a world traveler. “The bounce will be gone tomorrow.”

  “What a quaint way of putting it,” the old biddy said. She was a woman of fifty or so, well powdered and rouged to give her the appearance of youth, but the varnish did nothing for her. Something resembling a motherly attitude seemed permanently stamped on her face, a look of well-meaning concern for everything and anything that might cross her optics. She sighed and sipped her glass of ginger ale. “I’m not a very good sailor, I’m afraid. I shall probably sit right here all night and wait until the sea calms.”

  “I can get you some Dramamine,” Quirk offered, on his feet and alive with concern.

  “I’d rather not, thank you,” Mrs. Carrington said. “I find I’m allergic to the drug.”

  “That’s a shame,” Quirk sympathized. “I hear it does wonders.”

  They could have kept up this sparkling repartee for at least five hours, if I gave them the chance. But I decided against it. I was sitting alongside Quirk, and leaned in and said, “Can I see you alone for a minute?”

  “Alone?” he asked. He was shocked and puzzled by my strange request, bowing from the waist to Mrs. Carrington and promising her to return immediately. He had a tremulous smile, the kind of permanent grin you get from waiters and professional menials. But Mrs. Carrington seemed to like it. She watched him soulfully all the way across the lounge. And she was still casting sly and jerky glances our way when I pulled Quirk up short behind a potted palm.

  “I have a favor to ask of you, Mr. Quirk,” I said.

  “Please,” he answered, holding up a hand. “Call me Jacob, for the Lord’s sake. It’s much more friendly.”

  “Okay, Jacob.” I felt like giving him the Scout grip to seal the bargain. But he was beaming at me gaily when I dropped his first name into the dialogue, as pleased as a small boy in a closet full of lollypops. “And you,” I said, “can call me Steve.”