Night Crossing

Morgan spotted the two girls as soon as he boarded ship. They were in boots and miniskirts. They were leaning on the railing, waving farewells, shouting things to a group of young men on the pier. They spoke an English that was not quite English, and then one of the girls, the blonde one, called out something in Danish. Of course. The vessel was crossing from Harwich to Esbjerg.

He looked at them more closely. The fact that they were Danish--or at least one of them was--made them more exciting. Maybe it was just that he had been working in England too long. They were, he decided with no effort, magnificent, each about as long as the other, the (continued on page 182)Night Crossing(continued from page 123) one fair-haired, the other dark, not really dark, but darker, both with lean, chiseled, greyhound looks that started with their toes and went right up miles of legs to their immaculate profiles. There was something fresh and new and unused about them and he wondered automatically what he could accomplish on a one-night crossing and he tried to decide, for pleasure, which one he would pick if he had a choice. It was not a simple decision and he was still mulling when he saw an older woman approach them. Perhaps she was not all that older, but next to the two thoroughbreds, everybody looked older and a little brown at the edges. The woman said something to them. The girls made faces at the young men on the pier, faces the woman could not see, and they shrugged and trooped dutifully ahead of the woman toward the entrance that led to the staterooms.

Morgan stepped back a little and watched them pass. Now he could see the blue eyes, deep, rich blue, and the high coloring and the high, planed cheekbones. They had the look of models who had not yet started modeling, the freshness, purity; everything that one day would be familiar and owned by the world but which now was reserved for those lucky enough to have them pass in vision.

The older woman glanced at Morgan as she walked behind the girls. She might have been attractive herself at one time, he thought, but the face now was tight and the mouth was pursy with disapproval. The eyes were hostile and whatever she might have had below the face was lost in a shapeless, heavy tweed suit and a boxy cape.

But the girls. He wanted to reach out to touch them as they passed. The way one touches a piece of sculpture.

Presently, he picked up his bag and went toward his own stateroom. He was again musing over which one he would choose when he passed an open cabin door and he saw the three of them unpacking. He nodded; a matey gesture. The older woman closed the door. Not a slam. Just a deliberate, definite, positive closing.

His own stateroom, he saw, was just a little way beyond. He entered, leaving the door open. An invitation. To either one. He'd given up; he could make no choice.

He put his bag on a small table, opened it and took out a bottle of Scotch. He poured himself a drink. He drank it still standing by the table. He poured a second drink and sat down. He sat and wanted a cigarette. He had quit, but now he wanted one; it seemed the time to have the drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He wanted to sit and smoke and think about the girls. He was 32 and he had imagination to spare.

• • •

There is something about a ship departure, Morgan thought, leaning against the rail and looking clown at the wharf, something almost forgotten these days. All airports are bores, dreary, antiseptic when they aren't filthy. There's no feeling of getting away, no matter how much the airline people dress it up, give you booze quickly and parade pretty girls in front of you. You go into a container--who was it who called it like getting into a tooth-paste tube?--and you don't breathe fresh air until you get where you're going.

But a ship is something else, even a tub that does nothing more than make a night crossing over a piece of water between Britain and Denmark. The smell of the sea and the sounds and the animation.

He watched the people on the dock and he thought it might be pleasant if someone were there to wave goodbye to him and, as though it were his own thoughts speaking to him, he heard her say, "You look so lonely."

He tried to guess, in the instant before he turned to her, whether it was the blonde or the other one. He knew it was one of them, and he guessed the darker-haired because of some distant memory of his childhood, when he thought darker-haired girls were bolder. Then he looked, saw he was wrong and felt a flood of relief that he was wrong, because at that moment there was no one else he would have wanted to be there.

"Only because it's a ship," he said, looking at the clear, immaculate eyes, the flaxen lashes, the bronze cheeks, the lips without lipstick.

"Because it is a ship?" She looked puzzled. She had almost no accent.

It was incredible, he thought. He'd almost forgotten how the Scandinavians speak English.

"Because it is a ship you are lonely?" She shook her head. "I don't understand."

"I would never consider having anyone see me off on a plane," he said. He looked at her wide mouth and at the cleft on her chin.

She pondered for a moment, her eyes opening slightly, very slightly, but making him think how they would respond to other stimulation, and then she nodded slowly and gravely, as though he had said something profound.

"Of course," she said. "It is a different thing with a ship."

"A viking thing," he said, seeking a bridge.

She nodded slowly. "Yes," she said.

A man shouted from the pier. "Gudrun!"

She looked down and her face came open into a smile, all of her face, and he wondered what it would do to him if ever she smiled like that at him.

She had, he thought, a face for expression and a face that had had experience in expressing itself. It was mobile, practiced--and then he told himself to cut that out.

"Where is Lili?" the man called up from the pier.

He was young, Morgan saw with a small pang. Perhaps 22, 23. Morgan felt old.

"With the keeper," Gudrun called down. "What does it matter?"

"You'll both be back?" the young man asked.

"Who knows?" Gudrun said. "And what does that matter?"

"It matters," the young man said.

"Then we shall never be back," she said. "Not to you." Something went out of her voice.

"You're right," the young man said quickly. "It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter at all. Not at all."

"Then perhaps we shall be back," Gudrun said, and something was still absent from her voice.

The ship's whistle blew and Gudrun smiled again, another smile altogether, the smile one gives to a salesperson or a doorman, and yet there was more between her and the youth on the pier than that. Morgan knew that and he didn't know how he knew it. What they had spoken was a kind of code and the young man said the wrong thing and it sent her uptight.

The vessel moved away slowly from the pier and the young man waggled a finger and he could not altogether keep the unhappiness from his face; he looked very young at that moment and Gudrun nodded back, as impersonally as she had smiled that second time.

"Do you make many departures?" she asked Morgan.

"Yes."

"Do you enjoy to do it?"

"I suppose so."

"Don't you know?"

"I guess not."

"Then why do you do it?"

"It's my job." He could see the young man on the pier walking away, his shoulders slumped. He looked at her. She was leaning with her back on the rail. The young man no longer existed for her. It seemed suddenly chilly.

"What is your job?" she asked.

"I'm a newspaperman. Why is it better not to matter?"

She looked at him and frowned. "But you should know that."

She smiled at him, still another smile from her repertory, this one neither great nor wholly indifferent, and she walked away rapidly and he watched the (continued on page 194)Night Crossing(continued from page 182) long legs in the boots and then he went to the bar.

He was going to Denmark, so he ordered aquavit and beer, although he knew the Danes didn't often drink aquavit before meals, the way everybody else who drank aquavit did. On the third drink, he recalled there had been two things that hadn't mattered. He kicked that around.

• • •

He watched them eat. The old bromide: You could tell how a woman would be in bed by the way she ate. Nonsense, of course. But it would have been marvelous if it were not nonsense. Because they ate.

The dining room had the usual Danish table with the cold food and you were told to go back as often as you liked and they went back often and ate as though they had just discovered food; and when they finished with the courses in the proper order, the cold fish, the cold meats, they went to the tureens at the end of the table and filled a plate with meatballs and potatoes and they went through that and he watched them, bemused and perhaps a little pootled with the aquavit and beer, and he thought that what they were doing was an act of beauty, a homage to food, obeisance to the rite of eating.

The older woman, the one Gudrun had called the keeper, was with them, and she was not a bad consumer herself, but she lacked gusto. She ate neatly and fully and with a kind of quiet satisfaction, as though she were defeating something, hunger perhaps, but with no zest. They were all three filling a need, but it pleased Morgan to believe that the need the two girls were satisfying was rather more complicated than that of their keeper.

Not once did Gudrun look at him. Not even when she went to the long table for another helping of something or other. Total concentration, he thought. Or maybe she had walked away from him the same way she had from the poor boy on the pier.

Once the other girl, Lili, looked up and her eyes fell upon him and he nodded his head and he could not say whether she returned the nod or whether her head moved only because she was putting food into her mouth.

The keeper scarcely looked around.

The dinner was leisurely, the sea smooth and the engines reassuring; there was a hum of passengers talking and there was laughter. Morgan felt quite alone suddenly and a little sorry for himself. There were other girls in the room, some of them, it seemed to him, unattached; and ordinarily, he would have had some ideas, some vague plans. But he was so taken with Gudrun and Lili and the way they looked and with the fantasies they wove in him that he did not seriously survey the other talent.

It was so intriguing and frustrating that he was lost in hopeless reverie until, suddenly, he saw the keeper say something to the girls, touch a napkin daintily to her lips and then get up to leave.

The girls lit cigarettes and themselves scanned the room. Morgan sat up straighter and looked at them, hoping he would fall into their line of sight; then, perhaps because of the drinks and the force of the thinking that had gone on within him, he got up and walked to their table. He planned to nod and smile and, if he were rebuffed, continue on out of the room.

They were talking to each other as he approached, their heads leaning over the table in conspiracy, but then they looked up and Gudrun smiled, a clear, unconstricted smile, and he gestured toward the chair that had been vacated by the older woman and he was delighted when both girls, not just Gudrun, nodded.

"And how is the journalist?" Gudrun asked.

She almost purred, he thought; she was like some sleek animal that had eaten well. The pleasure was on her skin.

"Whoever invented aquavit should be decorated," he said. He felt lightheaded. He had drunk a great deal, but he had not felt it until just now.

"I'm sure he has been. But for Danish aquavit," Gudrun said. "The Swedish stuff is swill."

"I am here, too," Lili said. Her eyes were full on Morgan.

"This is my sister, Mr. Journalist," Gudrun said. "Her name is Lili. It is a lovely name."

"Morgan," he said.

"What Morgan?" Lili asked.

Her eyes remained gravely on him. He had the feeling he was in some way being assessed.

"It's Morgan what," he said. "Morgan Evans."

"Welsh," Lili said.

"Way back. American now," he said.

"How did you know that?" Gudrun asked her sister

"Those are two Welsh names," Lili said.

Morgan was experiencing a charming conceit that Lili's eyes had weight and that they were leaning on him. Aquavit had never affected him this way before.

Gudrun nodded. "That's right. There was a Welsh one once." She laughed.

It was a reminiscent sound and for a reason Morgan could not understand then, it was a sensual sound, a very sensual sound.

"I remember now," Gudrun said. "He had a first name for a last name, too. And his skin was white."

"Except his hands and from the neck up," Lili said.

The two sisters looked at each other.

"It's that way with all Englishmen," Gudrun said.

"The Welsh are not English," Lili said.

"Whatever. The whole island. All of them. Even the Irish. Such marvelously high coloring and then the whitest skins in the world," Gudrun said.

Morgan's head was going into orbit. He was hearing words that added up to something, he didn't know quite what, and he didn't want to show he didn't know.

"Would you girls like a drink?" he asked.

"We don't have any money," Lili said. "That's how they managed to get us home."

Morgan tried to digest that. "Maybe I should phrase it differently. May I buy a drink, several drinks?"

"Of course, we understood that," Gudrun said. "But then we would like to buy you a drink, several drinks. And we do not have the money." She turned to Lili. "Do you suppose we could just sign a chit for it?"

"No," Lili said. She was looking at Morgan again.

"Please," Morgan said.

"But we are becoming chums," Gudrun said. "Chums share and share alike. Everything."

"I'm on an expense account," Morgan said.

"Oh, in that case, fine," Lili said. "When you can shaft the establishment, you do it. It is a pleasure."

"It is almost a duty," Gudrun said.

Morgan flagged down a waiter and asked the girls what they would likes When they said aquavit, he asked for a bottle to be put on the table. He saw that the girls liked this largess and he asked for three bottles of Carlsberg beer and the girls smiled comfortably. Now they were truly chums, knowledgeable chums, on the same wave length and everything was easy.

So easy that Lili dropped her eyes. It was as though she had come to a conclusion.

So easy Morgan felt the impulse to ask Gudrun, "What was it that didn't matter?"

She wrinkled her brow and he thought for a moment he had trespassed and that he had spoiled something, but then her forehead cleared and he knew that it was only that she had forgotten.

"The boy on the pier," he said.

"Oh," Gudrun said. She shook her head. She fished a cigarette out of her bag and Morgan lit it for her. "He means Geoffrey," she said to Lili. "He was a fool. He took it all so seriously. He thought it meant something." She shrugged. "It means something, of course, or it would not happen, but it does not mean what he wanted it to mean."

"What meant something?" Morgan asked. Then, because he thought again he might be pushing, he said, "Forgive me, it's the newspaper reporter in me."

"Because we balled," Gudrun said, shrugging again. "He thought it meant I cared for him. And then he thought Lili cared for him, because she balled with him, too. It did mean something, of course. It meant pleasure. But he forgot the rules."

"Poor thing," Lili said.

"When he was watching her with someone else--who was it, Lili? the Englishman, he had a title--and he should have been watching, that's part of the scene, he wasn't watching the right way. Lili is rather marvelous and when she goes off, it's like the world is coming apart and it's something to see, but he was so damned jealous he spoiled it."

"He was very young." Lili said. "I think this was his first group, his very first. It might even have been his first time."

Now it was making sense and Morgan found himself more fascinated than ever, naturally, and he thought he would play silent, because he wanted to hear it. He wanted to hear it from those perfect faces.

"You know about that," Gudrun said to him.

"He was a bore," Lili said. "I rather liked him at first, he has such a marvelous body, but then he became a bore. He called me all the time for a date alone."

"No sense of propriety," Gudrun said.

The waiter arrived with the chilled bottle of aquavit in a plastic cooler and the beer and the glasses. He poured the aquavit and the girls and Morgan poured their own beer.

The girls raised their glasses and skoaled and drank down the aquavit and then some of their beer. Morgan did the same.

"Ah," Gudrun said. "It has been a long time."

"No sense of propriety," Morgan said in a judicious voice.

"None at all, I promise you," Gudrun said. "He didn't realize that a couple never does it alone. That means a relationship."

"And that's altogether another thing," Lili said. "You know that."

Morgan nodded. He refilled the aquavit glasses.

"It was all such a bore," Gudrun said. Then her eyes widened. "Lili, do you suppose that it was Geoffrey who wrote to Poppa?"

"I never thought of it," Lili said. "That little monster."

Morgan drank off his aquavit and took a mouthful of beer. "Tell me about it," he said.

"We have been living in London," Gudrun said. "We have lived there quite a little while. Almost a year, in fact. Chelsea."

"A little street," Lili said. "Just off the King's Road." She raised her glass and skoaled Morgan, who quickly poured himself another drink and the three of them drank.

"We even had working papers," Gudrun said. "I worked in a little boutique. I sold and I modeled. We were having a ball. Lili was learning interior decorating with a darling boy. A fag, of course, but so talented."

"The group scene," Morgan said.

"Of course. No attachments. No getting hung up on one boy and the heartache. Just marvelous sex all the time and everybody chums and no quarreling. We just had fun and nobody owned anybody else--ugh, what a word, to be owned--until someone brought Geoffrey along. He flipped over me and then over Lili. It must have been Geoffrey."

"I liked him so much at first. Not a private liking, just to have him in the group," Lili said.

"He is a nice boy. Good-looking as all hell. And built beautifully," said Gudrun.

"It's like a complicated dish," Lili said, leaning closer to Morgan and putting her hand on his. "It always tastes good and one is happy with it and one doesn't try to separate the ingredients and one is so happy, always so happy, and then by chance some new spice is added and it's the same superdish, except it's quite a different dish and it is really super. Geoffrey was the new spice. All the girls wanted first crack at Geoffrey, not that he was better than anybody else, but no one had had him before."

"He picked me," Gudrun said. "And everybody watched. Nobody did anything else but watch. We always watch with someone new. But you know that."

"Yes," Morgan said, wondering where he had been all these years.

"And it was beautiful," Lili said. "He loved my sister beautifully. And we all thought it was because it was for the first time. But it wasn't that at all. He broke the first rule. He cared for her."

"So stupid," Gudrun said. "It turned me right off."

"Then he fell in love with me."

"Really so," Gudrun said. "Much more than me." She took out another cigarette. "And you could see it. When anyone else was balling Lili, you could see it. And he didn't want to do it with the other girls and that's naughty. It's more than that. It's rude, wouldn't you say?"

"Yes," Morgan said.

"I can understand jealousy," Gudrun said reflectively. "With a beau. If you have a beau and that's the way it is and you dig that scene. We have some couples who are married and who love each other. But that has nothing to do with balling. I mean, if Geoffrey felt all this for Lili and he saw her flirting and making a private date with someone else, a private date, I could understand."

"But I would never do that. I've never done anything except with the group, once we got together," Lili said.

"But to get so jealous and make such scenes just because she was balling," Gudrun said. "What in the world did he think we were all there for?"

"He was so very young," Lili said.

"He wasn't that young," Gudrun said. "He was just stupid and a bore and he should never have been asked in the first place."

"And you believe he wrote to your father?" Morgan asked.

"I don't know who else would," Lili said. "Poppa was quite happy with our being in London. We live in a very small town in Denmark, in Jutland, and he felt this was our chance, And then, suddenly, we received this letter, telling us we had to come home, that he would cut off our allowance; and even if we were working, we were not earning anything near enough to live on, not the way we like to live, and then Hannah arrived. Out of the blue, she arrived."

"Your friend?"

Gudrun emptied her refill in a swallow. "Friend? Ugh. She was our companion, almost a governess. She was raised with us and she used to always watch us. Poppa is wealthy, quite wealthy, and Hannah always took care of us, even though she is not all that older than we are, were, but she was always so strict. That is why we were so happy to go to London. We couldn't wait to get away from her and we were so happy there, such lovely people, and then someone told on us to Poppa and there Hannah was with her long face."

Gudrun shivered. "It took us right back to our childhood. Hannah always was finding us somewhere, doing something we should not be doing. The only thing different this time was that she didn't take us home pulling our ears."

"So now we have to go home," Lili said. "What a bore."

"I have a feeling it was Geoffrey," Gudrun said. "The little stinker."

"So stupid," Lili said. "It was so good for all the chaps and so good for us, so healthy, and no one's feelings ever got hurt and there were no broken hearts and nobody was lonely. It was a family, a lovely family in which each one gave pleasure to the others, and now it is over."

"It is over only for us," Gudrun said. "What is tonight?"

"Thursday," Morgan said.

"That would be Ann's flat. With her wonderful hi-fi."

"You did it every night?" Morgan asked, thinking of all the time he had been in London.

"Oh, no, not every night," Lili said. "Three or four times a week." She chuckled. "We could have balled every night, but we had to think of the boys. Most of them had jobs."

"They had to get back their strength," Gudrun said.

Lili giggled. Then she said, "Damn it."

"Yes," Gudrun said. "Damn it. We could have been at Ann's tonight, instead of on this stupid boat. And I feel so much to do it."

"It happens in Denmark, too, I would imagine," Morgan said, looking from one to the other, his mind filled with pictures.

"I suppose so," Gudrun said. "But we don't have contacts in Denmark and if we make a mistake, Poppa will hear about it and I don't know what he would do then. Poppa is very proper and he thought it was scandalous what was going on, but, in any case, it was in another country. He would be much angrier if we tried to do it right under his nose, so to speak."

"And there would be no group in our little village," Lili said sadly. "I am sure there are many in Copenhagen, but Poppa would not let us live there."

"It is so silly," Gudrun said. "It's so silly, because it is all so pure and it harms no one. I wish Poppa would just watch it once himself. He would see how pure it is."

Lili giggled again. "I would like to see Poppa watching it."

"I wouldn't care who was watching," Gudrun said. She sighed softly and closed her eyes. "I can see them all this minute. Ann is putting on the strobe. That's Ann's kink. She likes the strobe. Not too long, it sends you up, almost like pot, but for a little while."

Lili nodded as she, too, saw what her sister was seeing and Morgan refilled their glasses and felt quite old.

In the end, he asked, "Is it possible that you could escape from the keeper tonight?"

The girls looked at each other and smiled, and then Lili shook her head. "It would be marvelous, wouldn't it?"

• • •

Morgan was not exactly certain when it was that he finally climbed into bed. He knew he was in a more excited condition than if he were actually going to have sex. He had a writer's mind and he made writer's pictures and he felt unluckier than he had ever felt before.

He thought of his assignment to Copenhagen. It had seemed an amusing idea when the head of the London bureau had suggested it. Right up his alley, his boss said, then and there coining forever a new phrase.

Everybody in the world knew that the laws against pornography had been rescinded in Denmark. And all the reports about the pornography fair held in Copenhagen had it that almost all the customers were foreigners; that the Danes were not that interested in the books and films and magazines and devices.

Was that true? Morgan's boss wanted to know. Was easy access to every type of pornography the kiss of death? Because you didn't have to buy it under a counter, because it was there to inspect openly, like boxes of detergent or cans of soup on a market shelf, did that rob it of its appeal?

That was Morgan's assignment and it had seemed a marvelous lark, except that at the moment, it didn't seem so at all.

He lay in his bed and he thought of Gudrun and Lili in London, Ann's flat it would have been tonight, and while he had no right and he knew he had no right, he felt a kind of agony. It was nothing less than that, agony. There had been perfume he had not smelled. There had been wine he had not drunk.

He didn't hear the door open. He saw a thin line of light from the corridor outside. Then the light got wider, narrowed, and he sat up in bed, the light was gone and he reached out to the wall switch and started to say something, ask something, when he felt a finger on his lips.

It was a gentle touch. A very gentle, commanding touch. He smelled perfume. He began to tremble. And the finger then was removed and was replaced with lips.

It was a gentle kiss. A very gentle, companionable, introductory kind of kiss. The kiss of a friend, for starters, a kiss that stated the ground rules: It wouldn't matter, there was no love, no commitment, just a pleasure of each other, and he fell back in bed, his heart tripping. She was away from him for a moment and he heard a soft rustling sound as she removed whatever it was she was wearing. Then she was in bed next to him and she took his face in her hands with the gift of another kiss that said something quite different and yet somehow, in a larger sense, the same thing. It said that while it didn't matter one way, it was going to matter a hell of a lot in an entirely different way.

Which one was it?

He knew he could not ask, he could not call out a name. Without knowing why, he knew that it was a new rule, made between them for that night.

He touched her face with his fingers and tried to see with them; he touched her breasts and her body and he tried to see with his hands. Gudrun, he fancied, had larger breasts than Lili, who, it seemed to him, was slightly slimmer. These breasts. Were they large? Compared with what? Then she was touching him with her fingers and then he didn't care which one it was, it didn't matter. That was the way it was; it didn't matter. He understood that fully now.

There was no speech between them, just a silent, concentrated application to the business at hand. Her face moved down his chest; she kissed him there and moved down farther.

It was a little while before she raised her head and it was only to adjust her position on top of him, and he now was in a state of total delight, he was being used, he was without will, he was an instrument being played upon, and far off, in some recess of his mind, he seemed to recall it was the woman's body that was supposed to be that.

He was more tense and more relaxed at the same time than he had ever been in his life. She did her things and made her moves and he felt the rising in her. It happened to both of them at the same moment; he lost control and her hands gripped his shoulders like two vises and he felt a sharp stinging pain on his right shoulder. Then her head fell upon him and he could feel her breathing subside slowly. She kissed him again with a third kind of kiss--friendship, gratitude--and she removed herself. Before he could say anything, he again felt the finger on his lips. She got out of bed and there was the rustling again and he knew he could not reach out to light the light, that would be like cheating at cards.

He saw the thin wedge of light widen, he tried to see the color of her hair, but he couldn't. He was alone, complete and drained.

When he awoke in the morning, he had a slight headache from the drinking. He opened and closed his eyes. It had been a fantastic dream. It had been something he had wanted so strongly that he had fantasized in his sleep and made so real he had believed it.

Only it seemed he could still smell a faint odor of perfume.

Aquavit and a powerful imagination.

He sat up and stretched. He got out of bed. He went to the washbasin and looked at his face. Eyes a little red. He rubbed his chin. Stubble. He brushed his teeth.

He saw his right shoulder. There was a scratch there. A scratch half an inch long.

He touched the scratch. He remembered the moment of stinging pain, when she had clutched him in her own time of joy.

It had been real. But which one of them?

He tried to remember whether there was any clue. But how could there have been? It didn't matter. That was the password, the code of conduct. He must count his blessings and remember what had happened and someday, at the time they all dreamed of, when he was past the newspaper part of his life, perhaps he could sit down and write about it, make it mean something.

He rubbed the lather onto his face. But which one had it been?

• • •

He was on his third cup of coffee when the three of them entered. They seated themselves. The girls nodded. Hannah turned her head to see whom they were gesturing to.

He looked across the dining room and tried to see whether there was anything different in their expressions, in the way they inclined their heads. God Almighty, there must be some clue there, some signal, neither of them was such a consummate actress that some small thing would not expose her. But, after nodding, they addressed themselves to their breakfast and there was nothing.

He had another cup of coffee and longed for a cigarette and watched them eat. Perhaps one would have a slightly larger, more robust, more enthusiastic appetite. Perhaps the one would steal a glance despite herself, make some connection.

Nothing. They both ate with equal heartiness and they talked between themselves and occasionally laughed and he tried to determine whether there was anything special in the laughter of the one or the other, some tiny bit of salaciousness, some little sound of satisfaction--or perhaps, on the other hand, of discontent, that one had had the trick and not the other.

Nothing.

He finished his coffee and he went out onto the deck without looking at them again. The coast line of Denmark was in sight.

• • •

The ship moved into the harbor and tied up at the pier. He went below to his stateroom and got his little bag. He looked at the bed. He still could catch a faint scent of perfume.

He had to stop thinking of this and start thinking about his assignment. Could what had happened be a part of the story? He thought not. He would save that for himself and for later.

He went back onto the deck. It was crowded as the passengers disembarked. He saw the three of them moving slowly toward the gangway. He stalled. Perhaps up close, he would see something, a flicker of an eye.

They were now waving to someone on the pier. An elderly man. He looked stern.

They moved slowly and then they were alongside him.

"Goodbye," he said.

They looked at him.

Their faces were innocent and pure and unused and their eyes were clear and untroubled and their expressions were friendly and casual and exactly alike.

He tried to identify perfume. The sea air was too brisk and he could make out nothing.

Gudrun held out her hand. "Goodbye, Morgan. It was pleasant to have talked to you, and thank you for the drinks."

He took the hand and scrutinized the face and again tried to detect perfume. Nothing.

"Goodbye, Morgan," Lili said, extending her hand.

He shook the hand and nodded to the empty smile.

They continued on, waving again to their father. Their companion, Hannah, in courtesy, in the European manner, held out her hand. He took it automatically, his eyes on Gudrun and Lili as they walked across the gangway.

He felt a slight sting in his hand. He released Hannah's and looked down at it. She was wearing a ring with a snake's head. The snake's tongue was extended, pointed.

By the time he looked up, she, too, was gone and there were a dozen people between them. By the time he got across the gangway and stepped onto the pier, the father and the three women were in the car and the car was moving off.

He stood still and felt a tingle in his shoulder and he watched the car go and then the people behind him made him move on.