"Barney," Doc's voice commanded. "Barney, make yourself breathe. Force it." He beat down hard on Barney's chest.

Barney opened his mouth to scream when the pain, like cymbals in a tunnel, banged through him to the tips of his fingers.

"Good," Doc said, relieved. "You know you're alive when you feel pain. That's the only way you know. Dumb bastard. Don't talk. Just keep breathing."

"Doc," Barney said.

"Shut up, you stupid fuck. Breathe hard."

"Doc. Denise is dead."

"I know that. This isn't Hispania. You're in Harlem. In my clinic."

"She's dead, Doc."

"Keep breathing."

Barney breathed. And Doc Jackson's face disappeared into the lights above and Barney smelled hospital smells and then it was the smell of the Puerta del Rey waterfront, like a sewer beneath the sun, fermenting.

"How can you be here?" Was Barney talking? Was Doc answering? Who was answering?

"Keep breathing."

It was Denise who was talking. Oh, what a beautiful sunny day. What bright colors the women beneath the window were wearing. Oh, how beautiful if you could forget the smell, which you did when you had been there long enough and didn't think about it.

"The whole country knows why you're here, Barney," she said in her pleasant sing-song way.

Barney leaned against the window sipping a cup of rich black coffee. His hair was touseled and he wore a pair of striped undershorts and a shoulder holster with a long-barrelled .38 police special.

He waited to look around, because he knew that when he did, his heart would jump and he would want to sing when he saw her again. He was so happy he could have blown his brains out.

He had stalled headquarters for three weeks to stay in Puerta del Rey after a routine assignment was finished. It had to do with shipping and the CIA had flooded the area, taking no pains to disguise its presence. El Presidente Caro De Culo, the dictator of record, had been served notice not to interfere with banana shipments.

De Culo had received the notice, responded favorably, and the surface network of the CIA left the island with as much ostentation as it had arrived.

Not Barney. He had concocted a tale about a fictitious group seeking to overthrow De Culo, and the CIA left him there for a report. When the report was completed, he was to leave.

The report story had kept him afloat in Hispania for three weeks now. Three beautiful, glorious weeks.

"The whole country knows what you're doing, Barney. You haven't bothered to keep it much of a secret."

Some people said Denise had a raspy voice, but they didn't really appreciate the soft timbre tones flowing from her exquisite throat. They didn't know Denise.

Early on the regular assignment, Barney had been detailed to escort the vice-president of a large American fruit-shipping firm to a plush brothel and see that he returned with most of his money. More important, he had been told, was to see that the executive didn't get carried away with the little leather whip he liked to use. Mainly, it had been an assignment to smooth over whatever wrath the executive's perversions incurred.

It was not a pleasant assignment. But it was not a pleasant business. And the executive was a major figure in the banana triangle. So Barney had brought him to the house, had whispered a word of caution in the right places and the right girl followed the executive up a red carpeted stairway.

And then, for the first tune, he had heard Denise's voice. "Don't you want someone?"

She was beautiful, breathtakingly beautiful, even though she dressed herself plainly, almost as though to hide her ripe, shapely body. And her face. Unadorned by makeup or jewelry, it possessed all of the finest features of every race on earth, blended together in unobtrusive perfection.

Her eyes were faintly almond shaped, colored light gray with sparks of blue and brown. Her skin was golden, slightly darker than Arabia, but lighter than Africa. It hinted of sunlight and moonlight at the same time, of Europe and the Orient. There was Indian in her, too, apparent by her prominent, strong bones and shapely lips, red and full and curving playfully at the corners.

She repeated her question, almost taunting. "Don't you want someone?"

Barney looked at her, let his gaze rise from her neat red leather shoes, up the bare legs, across the simple knit dress, and met her eyes. He smiled. "No, nothing. I'm here on business."

"What is your business?" she asked.

"Looking out after perverts, like the one upstairs."

"Yes, we know him. There is no worry. The girl can take care of herself. She is very well paid. There is no need for you to wait here, disturbing the other guests."

"I'm not leaving without him."

"I could have you thrown out. But I know you people would come back. Everyone knows your organization is here in numbers. Why don't you take one of the rooms upstairs?"

"I don't want one of the rooms upstairs."

Her smile of gentle condescension did something to Barney's gut. "Well, agent whoever-you-are, there really isn't too much I can do to stop you from standing here in the middle of the reception room and annoying the guests. Would you care for something to drink while you're ruining my business?"

Barney shrugged his shoulders uncomfortably. The other island girls he had known were different-giggling, pretty birds who teased and played and fluttered away. This one had a strength that unnerved him. It filled the room. It commanded.

"The bar is behind the staircase."

"I'll have coffee. Where's the kitchen?"

"I'll make it. Come with me."

They walked through a door into the rear of the building. Two uniformed maids playing cards suddenly jumped from their chairs and erupted in a geyser of excited and nervous Spanish.

"They're not used to seeing me here," Denise said. Neither was the cook who spilled hot soup on himself or a busboy who almost dropped a tray.

"Leave us alone," she said quietly, and the kitchen became vacant hi an instant.

"I hate agents, policemen, assassins, extortionists, soldiers, and pimps," she said. She made the coffee from fresh ground beans in a copper pot.

Barney sat on a cutting board, dangling his legs, feeling his butt getting moist from recently butchered meat. He didn't care. He was watching Denise. For some reason, the sight of this woman making coffee was more thrilling to Barney than a forty-girl chorus line of nude beauties.

"You know, I don't find you at all attractive," she said.

"You don't appeal to me either."

Then they laughed. Then she served the coffee.

They talked a lot that night, Denise about the financial problems of payoffs, the difficulty she had in selecting bed partners, Barney about the boredom of his business, only kept interesting by its stakes, his success with women which somehow was never success, and the state of Hispania which neither of them cared very much about.

With the dawn, Barney left to escort the executive to a hotel and then a conference. They walked through streets of almost naked children. "One drop of nigger blood," the executive said, "and it destroys a race."

"I guess they become perverts," Barney said. He could see the executive contemplating a complaint to his superiors.

He returned to the whorehouse and Denise Saravena for three beautiful weeks.

One night, she said: "Barney, I want your baby. I could have it if I wanted without telling you. But I want you to know when we make love that I'm trying to conceive your child."

Barney didn't know why he couldn't speak. He tried to say something, anything, but all he could do was cry, and tell her that he could never be a father to her baby because he wasn't going to be around much longer. He wanted their baby to have a father.

Then Barney said that they were going to get married very soon because he did not want to do it without marriage anymore.