Her face caught fire for an instant. "The Board of Health don't go away just because you can read their dirty minds."

"So take him out," the counterman snarled.

Malloy suddenly decided he had played hard to get long enough. This was his first chance to get in with the Jockeys. From what he had heard, they had some kind of underground set-up to help their own in business and the arts. He needed that help.

"Let's lope," he said, pushing his chair back and leaving silver on the table for the drink and a tip.

He touched the girl's lacquered arm and steered her toward the door.

Behind him, the floor fell in.

Ripping, tearing, rendering, splintering, crashing, crushing, reverberating bedlam!

Of course, it couldn't have been the floor caving in, Malloy thought as he turned to see a great hole where the floor had disappeared.

The hole was where the table and chair he had been using had stood a moment before.

Flapping at the sides of the cave-in were innumerable thicknesses of linoleum, and between each one an incredible accumulation of filth and debris—O. Henry candy bar wrappers, a cover from a Collier's, a booklet on the new Packard ("Ask the Man Who Owns One"), a newspaper article on Flo Ziegfield's girls (stop thinking in slogans), but mostly just dirt—dust, webs, lint, filth. There had been no boards under the table; the ends of the exposed boards weren't freshly broken but old and rotted porously smooth. Only the linoleum and the dirt had supported the table for years.

Malloy edged closer and saw some broken sticks lying on a jagged pile of coke standing out black in the darkness far below.

The redhead pulled him back from the edge, her fingers digging into his biceps, writhing with a strange passionate intensity, as if she were trying to knead him into a layer for a pie.

"With you're a REAL Jockey, He, a REAL Jockey, a REAL ONE. Truth! I'm going to take you to the Commissioner, He, the Commissioner in his saddle."

Somehow, uncertain, yet surely, Malloy was dimly pleased at this.

"Don't say it," the fat man remarked, glancing up for an 

 Prev. P 11/19 next