Free The Annihilators by Donald Hamilton Page B

kissed again, rather formally this time, a little self-conscious in our nudity, although we were both adults who’d been here before. We separated briefly so I could turn out the table lamp. In the sudden semidarkness, broken by shafts of light from the city outside, we proceeded to the bed and entered it with careful dignity; but that dignity did not endure beyond the first tentative contacts between our unclothed bodies. It’s not really a very dignified act.

7
    In the morning I woke up early in my own room next door, having slipped out of the lady’s warm bed, regretfully, in the middle of the night after the hotel was asleep. I found that I was feeling very hungry and not particularly guilty about taking advantage of the situation—whatever the situation might be—to help a troubled woman break her sacred marriage vows. It did occur to me that my period of mourning hadn’t lasted very long; but Elly would have told me not to be silly. She wouldn’t have expected or wanted me to honor her memory with everlasting continence.
    The small fourth-floor dining room or coffee shop—according to the placard posted in the elevator, there was a big formal restaurant on the roof, but it functioned only in the evening—had glass walls facing a sheltered patio open to the sky, with a good-sized swimming pool; but at our present altitude of seven thousand feet, in the middle of winter, the green wind-ruffled water held no attraction for me or, apparently, for anybody else. A couple of doves were foraging, undisturbed, in the tiled pool area. I was a little surprised to see them in the center of a city of fourteen million people. Unlike its big cousin, the pigeon, the dove is usually a country bird at heart.
    The place had just opened, and there wasn’t much breakfast business being transacted yet; but one couple from the tour was established at a table by the wall. I’d noticed them before, not only because they were the youngest members of the group except for Ricardo Jimenez—somewhere in their thirties—but because they were dressed to be noticed. The girl was wearing big yellow boots, a wide, flounced, flowered peasant skirt, and a man’s striped shirt with the tails out, bound around the middle by a handsome silver concha belt. Her dark brown hair was frizzed all over her head, dandelion fashion. I wondered if it was still called an Afro if the wearer wasn’t African. If you looked hard you could see that, in spite of the wild getup, she was really rather an attractive young woman, in a sturdy, healthy way.
    The man; lean and dark and a few years older, was imitating a Navajo chief or his own idea of a bearded Navajo chief—to the best of my knowledge the only one in captivity. He wore jeans and a blue velvet tunic of some kind; and he was hung all over with silver, some of it wrapped around massive gobs of turquoise. It was presumably the genuine stuff, no Japanese imitations need apply, since he could afford it. His name was James Wallace Putnam, of the Chicago Putnams; and he could probably even afford to let his wife (the relationship was legal and her name was Gloria) get her hairs bent one by one, by the best hair-benders in the business, if she so desired.
    I couldn’t help wondering, as one does, what they were trying to prove by their unconventional getups. Well, it was her hair and his jewelry, and if they simply thought they looked great that way, it was a fairly innocent self-deception compared to some.
    “May I join you, Mr. Felton?”
    I looked up, and there she was in her nice beige suit, looking neat and intellectual and totally untouched, even a little old-maidish; but I had an impulse to kiss her good morning that was strong enough to scare me. It was a very simple psychological phenomenon, of course. Whatever her motives, she had caught me at a bad time and made it good, very good. Now the orderly psyche wanted to make the whole untidy, confusing business nice and neat and call it love. I was