I’ve got one.

But the man stayed where he was and kept his hand on the back of the empty chair until the woman lifted her eyes slowly and fixed him with a flat stare of contempt that sent him away shaking his head.

The waitress moved by, stopped at the woman’s table and spoke; she was indicating Kendig with a dip of her head; and the woman got up from her table and came toward him. She had a supple spider-waisted little body and short dark hair modeled to the shape of her Modigliani face.

She let him have his look before she said, “You’ll know me again.” Her voice was cool, low in pitch—more smoky than husky. She pulled out the empty chair and sat down. He guessed she was thirty-five; she was attractively haggard. “You’re Murdison?”

“Could be.”

“Maddox said you want to hire a plane.”

“Do you work for a charter outfit or are you just taking a survey?”

“Neither. I fly my own airplane.”

That made him readjust his thinking. She’d taken him by surprise and he rather enjoyed that. It didn’t happen to him very often.

“I’m Carla Fleming,” she said. “It’s Mrs. Fleming.”

“Jim Murdison.”

They shook hands across the table—rather like pugilists before the bell, he thought. “Did Maddox fill you in?”

“Round trip to Saint Thomas, two or three weeks between, and very private. When do you plan to go?”

“Early October, I think. I can’t fix a date right now.”

“If you expect me to hang around waiting my time comes pretty high, Mr. Murdison.”

“All right,” he said. “The way we’ll do it, you’ll fuel up and draw your overseas papers at Miami International. File a flight plan to Charlotte Amalie. You fly out at not more than four thousand feet until you’re off the screen of their radar control. Then you swing down to the old landing field at Coral Key. You know it?”

“I know where it is. I imagine it’s pretty overgrown.”

“It’s serviceable.”

“Then I pick up you and a lady.”

“And fly us to Charlotte Amalie. Your flight plan will check out—you’ll be about an hour late, that’s all.”

“And the same number coming back?”

“That’s right, ma’am.”

She watched him with direct amusement. “It won’t be cheap, Mr. Murdison—since I don’t know what we’ll be carrying.”

“I’m not smuggling anything.”

“I hear you saying it.” She was poised, neat, confident; she knew how to sit and what to do with her hands and she was sitting there working out exactly how high she could bill him before he balked at the price. “I fly a Bonanza,” she said. “Executive charters generally run fifty cents a linear mile—that’s for the plane, not per passenger. But this will run you more than that.”

“How much more?”

“Half again. Seventy-five cents a mile. And you’re paying for the two trips I’ll have to make empty. Two round trips, that’s about forty-four hundred miles. Thirty-three hundred dollars, Mr. Murdison.”

“I didn’t say I wanted to buy your airplane.”

She smiled. “If you want a better price why don’t you try one of the commercial outfits down in Miami? Actually I think the airline fare to Saint Thomas is about sixty dollars.”

“Three thousand,” he said, “in cash.”

“That’s agreeable but I get two hundred a day for me and the plane while I’m waiting for you in Miami.”

“All right,” he said. “Be there on October third. Where do you usually lay over?”

“There’s a motel called the Flamingo a few blocks from the airport gate.”

“Fine. Check in with the desk every two hours after noon on the third.”

He dipped the fingers of his left hand into the flat wallet inside his jacket, extracted the envelope from it and put the envelope on the table. “That’s five hundred. I’ll give you another fifteen hundred when you pick us up at Coral Key and the rest when you pick us up at Charlotte Amalie for the return flight.”

“I guess that’s fair enough. If you’re making any deals with Maddox about papers you’ll have to do that personally with him—I don’t want to know anything about it.”

“I didn’t say anything about papers, Mrs. Fleming.”

“So you didn’t.” She put the envelope in her handbag; snapped the clasp shut and put the bag on the floor by her feet. “Now you may buy me a drink. Scotch mist, with Dewar’s.”

At half-past one he was in her apartment without quite being sure why. “There was a Mr. Fleming,” she said. “He’s a nice guy. One day we just decided neither one of us would be worth looking at across a breakfast table for the next thirty years.”

But she was vulnerable; it was evident in the way the apartment looked. It was a very personal place, she’d made it hers. The furniture looked Mexican: pale wood, very heavy with thick comfortable cushions. There were a couple of wicker armchairs with Indian patterns dyed into them. She had Navajo rugs on the walls and they looked as if she’d had them for a long time; the lower edges were frayed where cats had sharpened on them. The single painting was a limited-edition Georgia O’Keeffe reproduction. She had an air race trophy on an end table and the LP jackets by the stereo were thoroughly used clues to a taste in music which was catholic but not undiscriminating: she had Toscanini but not Fiedler, Ray Charles but not Bob Dylan, Sgt. Pepper but not the Stones, MJQ but not Brubeck.

The two cats were alley-bred grey tigers, aloof and athletic. They inspected Kendig. One chewed his finger. He let them prowl, not making a fuss over them. A little corner of his mind was pleased that there was a little flap cut into the screen at one of the windowsills so that the cats could come and go. And she didn’t baby-talk them. “They do care whether you like them or not,” she said, “but they’re too dignified to let it show.”

When he kissed her she drew back and smiled to show she was willing but not serious.

They were not touching but he could feel her warmth and the rhythm of her breathing. She got up from the bed, trailing her fingers along his arm, and he lay staring at the ceiling until she came back from the loo. Her dark eyes were heavy with sleep; she gave him a soft-lipped kiss and he felt a pang of weary sadness. She sat up then, hair tangled around her face; she offered him a cigarette but he shook his head, withdrawn.

“You’re a feline sort of man. I don’t mean that unkindly.” She touched her lips to his hair and lay down against him. “I’m a feline sort of girl. But sometimes you just need somebody.”

“Yes.”

“Usually it’s enough to be in the air. That’s the only real freedom I know—being in motion in three dimensions.” She switched off the light. He thought of leaving but hadn’t the desire to, nor reason to. Then she said, “Two strangers rutting in bed. But it’s not as sad as it might be.”

“No.”

“You just talk a blue streak sometimes, don’t you.”

She was fast asleep when he went down to his car. In the predawn half-light the furnace reddened and charred the sky: like a landscape out of Dickens. She lived on the steep side of the hill that led up toward Vestavia. In the shadows he stole the front license plate off a Buick; the owner probably wouldn’t notice its absence for a long time and then he’d chalk it up to accident or vandalism and the likelihood of its being reported to the police was remote. He mailed a letter to Ives and threaded the streets; by breakfast time he was a hundred miles toward the Georgia line. He ate in a truckers’ café. It was when he returned to the car that he saw the glint of metal in the back seat.

It was a woman’s compact the color of brass, mottled finish, monogrammed CJF in an engraved scroll. He opened it and saw himself in its round mirror but he couldn’t find anything particularly feline about the face. When he snapped it shut it left a little powder on his fingers. He twisted to smudge the prints and dropped it into his pocket. Impulse or calculation? He wondered which had made her leave it there. She hoped he’d bring it back to her. Well he’d see her in Miami.