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the elevator Fisher held out one hand. ‘Come on—give!’
    Red gave him two one-thousand-dollar bills. ‘Wrap Gertude in mink,’ he suggested. ‘And start checking railroad stations.’
    ‘What are you going to do?’
    ‘Pack,’ Red said.
       
    The door creaked. He didn’t look toward it, but he knew who was there. He knew Mumsie was looking at him. He kept his eyes on the window and pretended to be alseep. Beyond the barren, brown hills the Sierras were like ghosts of mountains.
    There had been mountains in Mexico—great, towering cones of mountains. There had been plateaus patched crookedly with cane fields and there had been the lacy hem of the warm blue sea in Acapulco Bay. The lock clicked. Mumsie’s soft footsteps went away. He closed his eyes, remembering:
       
    There was a little cafe named La Mar Azul, half a block from La Marina Hotel in Acapulco. It faced the plaza and on Saturday nights it was a fine place to sit and drink beer and listen to the band. Then it was very crowded. But on other nights it had plenty of room. Red used to drop in and sit there, watching the domino players, listening to the click of the ivory pieces and the soft voices, hearing the loud speaker on the theater around the corner. Late at night, when he lay in his hot room on the sixth floor of the hotel, the brassy music of the speaker was bad. But he didn’t mind it in the cafe.
    The cafe was open to the world. Kids kept threading their way between the tables, trying to sell lottery rickets and postcards, or offering to shine your shoes for ten centavos. They bothered Red a lot at first. After a while they took it for granted he was not a tourist. So they let him alone.
    And after a while the little boys who wanted to show you the town for fifty centavos gave him up as a bad job too. That first week, when he wandered through the hot little town, they were always at his heels, pleading, smiling, tugging at his coat. But presently he could walk unmolested. He used to move slowly through the dusk, past the open-air markets where you could buy a pair of huaraches for a peso and a hat for ten centavos, where you could get a meal for a tostan from a woman squatting by her charcoal brazier.
    It was very hot that time. In the afternoons Acapulco slept. On the long crescent of beach to the south the people drowsed under yellow and green umbrellas. A few brown kids paddled in the warm water. No one swam much. Red did. He liked that water, so heavy with salt you could lie for hours on top of it, clean and blue and warm. You could lie and watch the odd cloud patterns on the bleached sky.
    He had been there three weeks when he saw Mumsie. He was in La Mar Azul and she came along the street and stood in front of the place, staring in as though searching for someone. She flicked Red with a glance. Her gaze moved to the empty table near him and she walked slowly to it and sat down. She put her hands on the table and looked at them.
    Red wasn’t the only one there who saw her. Every man in the place relaxed his attention from the game he was playing and watched her. There was a good reason. She was a slim, lovely little thing with eyes too big for her face and the serene look often seen on nuns. She wore a white linen dress and a hat of fine straw, as pale as her hair. The players gave her more warm looks from their dark eyes, shrugged and went back to their games. A lone woman, but an American. So that made it all right. Americans were odd. In Acapulco you saw so many of them you got used to their peculiarities.
    Red didn’t speak to her that night. He wanted to. He wanted to smile at her and move to the chair across the table so that he could see the color of her eyes. He thought they must be blue—pale blue like the sky over the bay.
    But they weren’t blue. Red found that out the next night. The loud speaker on the front of the theater was braying and across the plaza some guy was keeping his hands on the horn of an automobile. The