I built a pair of them, whiskey and ginger ale heavy with ice, and set them on a coffee table. Camille didn’t take long. She came back in a few minutes, changed into a black skirt and sweater, with a fistful of papers in her hand and laid them out on the table in front of me. “There they are. I’ve noted physical characteristics and reactions to the interview along with my personal reflections, and if it can help... I’m glad.” She picked up her drink and sat down opposite me.
The notes were impersonally objective, recording what her eyes saw and her ears heard. They described the interviewees well right down to the shape of their heads and the tone of their voices. In places that seemed like simple doodles she explained the meaning of the characters there, what might denote intelligence or lack of it, or what might mean to her a personality trait not suitable for a Belt-Aire employee.
Each one I went over in detail, trying to make a description fit Louis Agrounsky, but none came up. If he had ever been face to face with Camille Hunt it wasn’t acknowledged there.
It took an hour. She said nothing, merely refilling my glass when it was emptied, occasionally handing me a page when I took one out of sequence, letting me digest every word she had written until I threw the last page down in absolute disgust and leaned back in the couch with my eyes half closed.
“Hell,” I said, “it’s another blank.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault, kid.”
“Is it something you can talk about?”
“No.”
“Does it involve Belt-Aire?”
“I don’t know. It involves Doug Hamilton’s death but I don’t know how.” I looked up at her. “How well did you know him?”
“Very impersonally. He was employed by the head office. We... worked together as part of personnel requirements, but I knew little about the man. When we got the contract and he was assigned to investigate our employees, I had lunch with him twice, helped him with the files and accepted his recommendations. Personally, I found him rather ordinary. He was very efficient in his work though.”
“He made one mistake. The big one.”
Camille got up from her chair, picked up our glasses, and filled them again. Then she sat on the arm of the sofa and held one out to me. “The papers said he was involved in an accident. Two detectives came to ask me questions and a pair of nice young men who were polite but determined in finding out all I knew about Mr. Hamilton.”
“And?”
“I answered their questions as directly as they were put. They didn’t seem quite as determined as you. What really happened to him?”
“Killed, sugar. I know how, but not why.”
“And this Louis Agrounsky?”
I shrugged. “A name. Nothing more. It’s ended here now.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Why?”
The fragrance of her perfume was a gentle thing like flowers in the night. Gently, her fingers touched my face and I felt her lips touch my hair. “Because I won’t see you again.”
“Afraid of the fly, spider?”
“I haven’t had time to weave him into my web.”
My fingers hooked into the soft texture of her hair and I brought her face down close to my own. “It wouldn’t do you any good, baby. I could always break loose.”
“It would be a great fight.”
“Would it?”
“Not really,” she said. “You’d win in the end.”
“I always do, kitten,” I told her.
She smiled, her mouth wetly pink and inviting, offering itself to be taken. I touched her lips with mine, the warmth of her a subtle radiance I couldn’t resist, a quiet ember that flamed into a wild heat stirred by the frantic quest of her tongue.
The glass fell from her hand and tinkled in fragments on the floor. Almost in slow motion, she tumbled from above me into my lap, a tremulous abandon hardening her body into firm complexities of muscular curves that rose and fell under my hands, quivering with each touch.
Her voice was a demanding sob, whispering to me, her breath a sweet thing that was at one with her lips as she reached out for me and when I held her face in my hands and looked at her there was a wetness to her eyes like a beggar’s plea and she said, “Tiger... now... please.”
Camille Hunt was an animal in her own right, a wonderful, primitive thing suddenly released from the constraints of civilized bondage and her own hands stripped her naked in her yearning for fulfillment. Her skin had the glossy texture of satin, tanned by the sun and striped with ribbon bands of a bikini. The swell of her breasts and hips, the hollow of her stomach and the luxuriant sweep of her thighs burst upon my sight like the clashing of great cymbals and I reached out and let my fingers bite into the resilient flesh and dragged her down beside me.
And suddenly time seemed to disappear, events jumbled themselves into a kaleidoscopic pattern that had no meaning at all and the only sounds were the short breaths of savage desire, the sigh, the gasp of success and the moaning demand of even greater achievement until it all was finished like a parachute collapsing over inert jumpers who have known the thrill of the free fall and lay in the pleasure of survival.
I looked at my watch, shook her awake and felt the edge of anger gnawing at myself for letting any time out of my grasp at all. Outside the day had turned into night and the lights of cruising cars threw a brief glow against the windows that bore the trickling stains of a light rain.
“Camille...”
She turned in my arms, her voice drowsy. “Tiger?” she said softly.
“Have to go, doll.”
“Don’t.”
“No choice.”
Her eyes came open, the sleep still in them. Very gently she smiled up at me. “My web isn’t very strong, is it?”
“Too strong.”
The tips of her fingers crossed my mouth. “I know,” she told me. “Will you ever come back?”
“Like the moth to the flame.” I got dressed quickly, found a blanket in her bedroom and threw it over her and watched while she tucked it under her chin with a contented grin.
“You got the job,” she laughed and closed her eyes.
Someday I was going to find out when Ernie Bentley slept. He had a wife at home but he never seemed to make it there. Something going on in his test tubes or under his microscope was always too fascinating for him to leave. Any industry in the world would be glad to give him a top-ranking position in their organization, but he preferred the setup Martin Grady offered him and the freedom of unlimited experimentation every scientist hoped to achieve.
He came out of the darkroom with copies of Louis Agrounsky’s pictures and handed me several. “I’ll mail copies to Newark and the other centers,” he said. “I may even have a few leads myself. A character like this one isn’t going after nominal employment with a background like his.”
“For instance?”
“Some of the places that deal with subminiaturization components. It’s been fairly well developed for the practical purposes of rocketry, but there’s no end to the field in sight. Eventually they’ll wind up with power units as big as the head of a pin. I know a few people who have put out papers on the subject and there might have been correspondence between them.”
“There’s only one catch, Ernie... Agrounsky deliberately left his field and disappeared. He hasn’t shown up.”
Ernie shook his head in disagreement. “He still won’t take anything small. His mind won’t work that way. No matter what he does, he’ll have to emerge.”
“That first breakdown he had could have been just that — the first,” I reminded him.