"Still, let's try to bluff it out."
They pressed through the edges of the crowd, ignored, for the watchers concentrated upon the figures diving and turning and stamping their feet on the earth in the center of the ring, clad in feathers and little else, skins shining and polished by sweat in the bubbling light of the ghastly blue flares. Spotwood shouldered off to stand a fair distance away, and Koven found a slight break in the crowd and crouched down on his haunches, stabbing a cigarette into his mouth. From the rear of the circle a young girl appeared, very beautiful, with a tuft of feathers at her hip, and her breasts oiled and glowing like metal cones. Koven gathered this was Chemin, for the name passed on many tongues. A circle of male dancers closed around her.
Koven kept his head straight front, but moved his eyes in their sockets, so that he could see Bruschloss, backed up by two men with thick shoulders standing directly behind. The trio blurred almost out of sight at the edge of Koven's line of vision. Bruschloss sat bent forward, his rolled belly heaving, and the sweaty, stubbled skin of his face looking rotted in the blue light. He followed each movement of the dancer Chemin with obscene concentration, but Koven, switching his eyes front, had the unpleasant feeling that the two burly companions were scrutinizing him.
Chemin's dance became less sexual for a few moments, became the sort of dance you might almost expect to see on a photovision variety hour; a dance without specific meaning.
Abruptly the palms of Koven's hands felt wet.
He lurched to his feet and searched the crowd for Spotwood. The crowd seemed intensely quiet during Chemin's performance. Each man had his eyes riveted to the flying hands and undulating body of the girl in the center. Koven inched his way free of the crowd, still keeping watch on the dance. He just broke from the edges as Chemin disappeared into the darkness from which she had come, and pairs of males and females, with sharp, biting cries, began again the ritual.
With a throbbing in his nerves that always came when he was very close to something he worked for, Koven cut around a series of huts in time to see the girl Chemin disappear into one of them. Looking left and right, seeing no one except the crowd at the rear of the hut forming this edge of the ring, he eased out the pistol and stepped through the hangings.
Chemin sat with her head resting wearily on her arms, as if the dancing had drained her last reserve of energy. The light scuff of Koven's shoes on dirt caused her to whip her head up, and he realized again how attractive she was, in spite of the perspiration filming her body and the tired haggardness of her features.
"Don't make a single sound," he warned. "I'll fire."
Gradually the spasmodic quivering in her throat subsided. "You are the new man here with Spotwood," she said, frightened.