She walked towards the only unbroken streetlight on the block, tottering a little because she was unaccustomed to high heels. When her ankle buckled, she looked back at the sidewalk with an irritated, accusing frown, as though she had tripped over something. That was when she noticed him.

It occurred to the young man that she might think he was following her, and the last thing he wanted was to frighten her, so he put his hands in his pockets and began to whistle to show that he wasn't trying to sneak up on anybody or anything. It was the theme from The Third Man,a film she had seen one afternoon when she'd gone into a second-run movie house to get out of the rain. She hadn't liked it all that much, particularly the sad ending where this Italian actress just walked right on past Joseph Cotton, who loved her. She knew that people thought films with sad endings were more 'artistic' than those with happy endings, but she went to the movies to shake off the blues, and she wanted them to make her feel good.

The young man stopped whistling when it occurred to him that she probably listened to the eerie tales of The Whistleron the radio, so the last thing that would put her at ease would be some man whistling in a dark street. She gave him a real surprise when she reached the streetlight and turned on him. "You better not try anything!" Her voice was reedy with tension. "This is an Italian neighborhood!"

He held up his palms in surrender. "Whoa there, ma'am," he said in a moist, toothless voice, like that western sidekick, Gabby Hayes. "You ain't got no just cause to go chucking a whole passel of I-talians at me." But she didn't find that funny. The streetlight directly overhead turned his eyes into gashes of shadow beneath vivid brows; only the tips of his lashes shone, mascara'd with light, as he smiled and said in his stammering Jimmy Stewart voice, "Look, I'm... I'm just terribly sorry if I frightened you, Miss. But I want you to know that I wasn't following you. Well, yes, yes, I wasfollowing you, I suppose. But not on purpose! I was just, sort of, well... walking along. Lost in daydreams. Just... just lost in daydreams, that's what I was. Look, why don't I just... just... turn around and go the other way? It's all the same to me, 'cause I'm not going anywhere special. I'm just... you know... sort of drifting along through life."

She still didn't smile, although it was a pretty good Jimmy Stewart, she had to admit. She continued to stare at him, tense and angry, so he made a comic little salute and walked up the street, away from her. Then he turned back. "Excuse me, my little chickadee, but you said something that tickled my cur-i-osity." He dragged out the syllables in the nasal, whining style of W. C. Fields. They were talking across a space of perhaps ten yards, but it was well after midnight and the background growl of downtown traffic was so distant that they could speak in normal tones. "Pray tell me, m'dear. Why did you warn me that this is an I-talian neighborhood. Just what has that-as the ancient philosophers are wont to wonder-got to do with anything?" W. C. Fields tapped the ashes from his imaginary cigar and waited politely for her answer.

She cleared her throat. "Italians aren't like most city people. They have family feelings. If a woman screams, they come running and beat up whoever's bothering her."

"I see," W. C. drawled. "A most laudable custom, I'm sure. But one that would be pretty hard on a fellow unjustly accused of being a mugger, like yours truly." She smiled at the W. C. Fields, so he kept it up. "You are, I take it, a woman of I-talian lineage?"

"No. I live here because it's safer. And cheap."

He chuckled. "You've told me more than you meant to," he said in his own natural voice.

She frowned, and the steep-angled light filled her forehead wrinkles with shadow. "What do you mean?"

"You've told me that you live alone, and that you don't have much money. Now, I wonder if you'd be kind enough to tell me one other thing?"

"What's that?" she asked, still cautious, although the first spurt of adrenaline was draining away.

"Is there someplace around here where I could get a cup of coffee?"

"Well... there's a White Tower. Four blocks down and one over."

"Thanks." His eyes crinkled into a smile. "You know, this is a strange scene. I mean... really strange. Just picture it. Our heroine descends from a bus, right? She is followed by a young man, lost in vague daydreams. She suddenly turns on him and threatens to Italian him to death. Surprised, bewildered, dumbfounded, nonplussed, and just plain scared, he decides to flee. But curiosity (that notorious cat killer) obliges him to stop, and they chat, separated by yards of sidewalk that he hopes will make her feel safe. While they're talking, he notices how the overhead street lamp glows in her hair and drapes over her shoulders like a shawl of light. ...A shawl of light. But her eyes... her eyes are lost in shadow, so he can't tell what she's thinking, what she feels. The young man asks directions to a coffee shop, which she obligingly gives him. Now comes the tricky bit of the scene. Does he dare to invite her to have a cup of coffee with him? They could sit in the Whitest of all possible Towers and while away a few hours of this stifling hot night, talking about... well, whatever they want to talk about. Life, for instance, or love, or maybe-I don't know-baseball? Finally the drifter summons the courage to ask her. She hesitates. (Well, come on! What young heroine wouldn't hesitate?) He smiles his most boyish smile. (I'm afraid this ismy most boyish smile.) Then the girl— Well, I'm not sure what our heroine would do. What do you think she would do?"

She looked at him, mentally hefting his intent. Then she asked, "Are you an Englishman?"

He smiled at her abrupt non sequitur. "Why do you ask?"

"You sound like Englishmen in the movies."

"No, I'm not English. But then, you're not Italian. So we're even. Well... I'meven. Even-tempered, even-handed, and even given to playing with words. But you? You, you're not even. You're most definitely odd."

"What do you mean, odd?"

"Oh, come on! Accepting an invitation for coffee with a total stranger is pretty goshdarned odd, if you ask me."

"I didn't say I'd go for coffee with you."

"Not in words maybe, but... say, which way is this White Tower of yours, anyway?"

"Back the way we came."

"Four blocks down and one over, I believe you said."

They walked down the street side by side, but with plenty of space between them, and he kept up a light trickle of small talk, mostly questions about her. She liked that, because nobody was ever interested in her, in who she was, and what she thought or felt. She told him that she had been in the city only six months, that she had come from a small town upstate, and that she had a job she didn't like all that much. No, she didn't wish she'd stayed in her hometown. Oh sure, she got the blues sometimes, but not bad enough to want to go back there. At the next corner, she turned unexpectedly in the direction of the all-night coffee joint, and their shoulders touched. They both said "Sorry", and they walked on, closer now, but she was careful not to let their shoulders touch again as they approached the White Tower, a block of icy white light in the hot night.

It was pretty full, considering the late hour. The air-conditioning had attracted people driven off the street by the heat. In the booth next to theirs, a young couple fussed over three kids wearing pajamas and unlaced tennis shoes. The baby slept in the woman's arms, its mouth wetly pressed against her shoulder. The other two made slurping noises with straws stuck into glasses of pale tan crushed ice from which the last bit of cola taste had long ago been sucked. Among the refugees from the heat wave, the boy recognized several night people by the way they hunched defensively over the cups of coffee that represented their right to stay there. They were his sort of people: the flotsam that collects in all-night joints; the losers and the lost; those on the drift, and those who'd been beached; nature's predators, nature's prey.