"Those kids! What'll they think up next?"
"They're a menace. They ought to be arrested."
Sirens screamed at a rising pitch as two motor-police, their
rocket-assist jets full on, came whizzing toward us after the coupe.
But the black flower had become a thick fog obscuring the whole street.
The motor-police switched from rocket assists to rocket brakes and
swerved to a stop near the smoke cloud.
"Are you English?" the girl asked me. "You have an English accent."
Her voice came shudderingly from behind the sleek black satin mask.
I fancied her teeth must be chattering. Eyes that were perhaps blue
searched my face from behind the black gauze covering the eyeholes of
the mask. I told her she'd guessed right. She stood close to me. "Will
you come to my place tonight?" she asked rapidly. "I can't thank you
now. And there's something you can help me about."
My arm, still lightly circling her waist, felt her body trembling. I
was answering the plea in that as much as in her voice when I said,
"Certainly." She gave me an address south of Inferno, an apartment
number and a time. She asked me my name and I told her.
"Hey, you!"
I turned obediently to the policeman's shout. He shooed away the small
clucking crowd of masked women and barefaced men. Coughing from the
smoke that the black coupe had thrown out, he asked for my papers. I
handed him the essential ones.
* * * * *
He looked at them and then at me. "British Barter? How long will you be
in New York?"
Suppressing the urge to say, "For as short a time as possible," I told
him I'd be here for a week or so.
"May need you as a witness," he explained. "Those kids can't use smoke
on us. When they do that, we pull them in."
He seemed to think the smoke was the bad thing. "They tried to kill the
lady," I pointed out.
He shook his head wisely. "They always pretend they're going to, but
actually they just want to snag skirts. I've picked up rippers with
as many as fifty skirt-snags tacked up in their rooms. Of course,
sometimes they come a little too close."
I explained that if I hadn't yanked her out of the way, she'd have been
hit by more than hooks. But he interrupted, "If she'd thought it was a
real murder attempt, she'd have stayed here."