She nodded again.
He smiled. “I shall also look forward with a great deal of pleasure to receiving your check for twenty-five thousand — the balance on the figure I quoted for my services.”
She turned her head slowly, looked up at him. “A moralist,” she said — “morbid — and mercenary.”
“Mercenary as hell!” He bobbed his big head up and down violently.
She looked at the tiny watch at her wrist, said: “It isn’t morning yet, strictly speaking — but I’d rather have a drink than anything I can think of.”
Druse laughed. He went to the buffet and took out a squat bottle, glasses, poured two big drinks. He took one to her, raised the other and squinted through it at the light. “Here’s to crime.”
They drank.
Pineapple
The man in the dark-brown camel’s-hair coat turned east against the icy wind. Near First Avenue he cut diagonally across the deserted street towards an electric sign: Tony Maschio’s Day and Night Tonsorial Parlor.
A step or so beyond the sign, just outside the circle of warm yellow light from the shop, he stopped and put down the suitcase he was carrying, produced a cigarette and a lighter. He stood close to the building with his back to the wind, flicked the lighter several times without producing a flame, then turned back into the wind and went on towards First Avenue.