She stopped and turned to him with a glad cry. “Would you?”
Vince had never before felt like a knight-errant, but there’s a first time for everything. “Damn right I will!” he cried, and shook his fist.
The girl had stopped weeping to beam at him, and now she stopped beaming to frown and look doubtful. “But why would you?” she wanted to know. “You don’t even know me.”
Vince tried to put it into words, and it wasn’t all that easy. “A girl like you,” he started. “A girl as good-looking as you — to punch a girl in the eye—” He stopped, took a deep breath, and shouted, “He can’t do a thing like that, that’s all!”
“Do you really mean it?” she demanded.
“Of course I mean it!”
“He’s gone home,” she said. She reached out and touched his arm and she must have been carrying a load of static electricity because the touch of her fingers on his arm jolted him to his soul. “He’s gone back to his apartment,” she went on. “I’ll take you there.”
“I’ll show him!” cried Vince.
“My car is down here,” said the girl. “In the parking lot.”
He went with her three steps, then stopped. “My suitcase,” he said. “Wait, I’ll only be a minute.” She waited, and he ran back, to discover that an agitator with a Bible had taken up a stance on the sidewalk next to his bag, and a crowd had gathered around to punctuate his appeal with good-natured obscenities, and it took Vince a couple minutes to worm his way through the Philistines to the suitcase and back. “Are you saved?” cried the agitator, and Vince shouted, “I’m going to be!” and ran back to the girl who looked like Spring.
She led him to the parking lot and to her car, which not surprisingly turned out to be a Mercedes-Benz 190 SL which, while not the hottest car on the road today, is the hottest one that isn’t actually on fire.
They got in the car and she drove. She wasn’t crying anymore, but looking furious and determined, and as they snaked through the cabs she told him one or two things. “His name is Archer Danile,” she said. And a minute later: “I’m Anita Merriweather.”
“Vince,” he told her.
She nodded and was silent and sneaked between a cab and a truck and shot through a red light and made a right turn without taking her foot off the accelerator. “We were out tonight,” she said all at once. “And we got into an argument. He was drunk, and he hit me.”
“The bastard!” Vince cried. The girl’s wild driving didn’t scare him, it exhilarated him. This was all he’d been missing in Modnoc. Action and adventure and romance, and the feeling of adrenalin coursing through him and his pulse pounding and he was, by God, a bloody knight errant.
She drove and drove and then stopped, and they were on East 63rd Street between Madison and Park Avenue, which is what you call a ritzy address. They got out of the car and went into a building, and they were in a square little place that was mainly marble. The street doors were behind them, another set of doors was ahead of them, and the square metal bank of mailboxes and doorbells was to their right.
“When he asks who it is,” she said, “I’ll answer. He’ll let me in. Then we can go up and you can take care of him.”
“Right,” Vince said. He clenched his fists and hunched his shoulders and knew he could lick the world.
The girl — Anita — pressed a button and a minute later a blurry voice said, “Who’s there?” and she leaned close to the mouthpiece to answer, “Anita.” And a buzzing sound came immediately from the door.
They went in and there was a wide long room like a hall, with a mirror and a table and a vase full of flowers and a self-service elevator. They zoomed up to the eleventh floor and down the hall, and Vince waited beside the door, out of sight of the peephole, while Anita rang the bell.
Click went the peephole, and click again, and then the door opened, and Anita walked in. Vince followed.
The door led to a hall, which went away to the left, to the living room. Anita walked down the hall and Vince followed, and there didn’t seem to be anyone else in the apartment at all, which was ridiculous.
Anita turned around to frown in puzzlement at Vince, and her eyes widened and she cried, “Behind you!”
Vince turned. This Archer Danile had been behind the door, which was now closed, and he was coming grinning down the hall toward Vince. He was tall and blond and Greek-goddish, which is to say somewhere between Apollo and Bacchus. And Vince looked at him and knew he had better smite the first blow, because there might not be a second.
So he stepped forward to the grinning Greek god and punched him square in the nose. And Archer Danile went, “Uck!” and half-turned, and leaned against the wall. His profile was plain before Vince’s eyes, all manly nose and manly jaw, and Vince snapped another fist out, lacing across the manly jaw, and Danile went “Urk!” again, and fell down.
“Hit him!” cried Anita. “Hit him!” More strange words to come from the mouth of a girl who looked like Spring.
“Quite enough,” Danile said clumsily. He was sitting on the floor, looking at the opposite wall, and trying quite unsuccessfully to smile. “Quite enough,” he repeated, just as clumsily. “You’ve already broken my jaw.”
“Your jaw?” Vince had been standing there, fists clenched, waiting for Danile to get up and rejoin the fray. Now he eased the taut fingers and leaned forward to look at Danile’s face. It did seem different now, he noticed, a trifle unbalanced. The jaw seemed to be a bit too far to the left.
“You’ve done it this time, Anita,” said Danile, still trying to smile and still looking across at the opposite wall. “You’ve really done it this time.”
“Well, look what you did to me!” The girl pushed past Vince and leaned forward, pointing at her eye.
Vince all at once felt left out. The two were comparing wounds, and Vince didn’t have any interesting malfunctions worth mentioning. Not only that, but the romance and high adventure were quite rapidly leaving this whole episode. The whole thing was suddenly a disappointment. For one thing, it hadn’t actually been a fight he’d had with Archer Danile. He’d punched the man twice, knocked him down, and broken his jaw. And he didn’t even know him!
For another thing, he didn’t even know Anita Merriweather. He’d been walking along, minding his own business—
She was tugging him by the elbow. “Come on,” she was saying. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“You’ve done it this time, Anita,” said Archer Danile mildly.
Vince allowed her to lead him from the apartment and down the hall to the elevator and down the elevator to the first floor and out the door and into the Mercedes-Benz 190 SL.
“You’ll have to come home with me,” said Anita.
“Okay,” said Vince. He had given up thought for the duration and was simply letting things happen.
Anita jumped on the accelerator as though it were Archer Danile’s head, and they shot away from the curb and down the street.
After one or two blocks, Vince’s mind began once more to work. And, Vince’s mind being what it was, the first thing he thought of was sex.
Sex with Anita Merriweather, that was. If anything was obvious in this green world, it was that Anita Merriweather wasn’t part of the greenery. That is, she wasn’t green. To put it simply, she was unvirginal. It was plain, that is, that she was not a virgin.
Because, of course, she’d been living with that guy. Right? Of course. There wasn’t any question. And besides, she was rich, and everyone knew what the rich did. Even more often than the poor. And with more people. And started younger.
And besides that, she had invited him to her place. Which meant only one thing. He had beaten up her old boyfriend for her, and he was on his way to get his reward. And his reward would be — Anita.