She poured more brandy. By speaking quick I held my drink down to a size suitable for a man who has work to do. Hers was as large as before. We drank, and she offered me cigarettes in a lacquered box—slender cigarettes, hand-rolled in black paper.
I didn’t stay with mine long. It tasted, smelt and scorched like gunpowder.
“You don’t like my cigarettes?”
“I’m an old-fashioned man,” I apologized, rubbing its fire out in a bronze dish, fishing in my pocket for my own deck. “Tobacco’s as far as I’ve got. What’s in these fireworks?”
She laughed. She had a pleasant laugh, with a sort of coo in it.
“I am so very sorry. So many people do not like them. I have a Hindu incense mixed with the tobacco.”
I didn’t say anything to that. It was what you would expect of a woman who would dye her dog purple.
The dog moved under its chair just then, scratching the floor with its nails.
The brown woman was in my arms, in my lap, her arms wrapped around my neck. Closeup, opened by terror, her eyes weren’t dark at all. They were gray-green. The blackness was in the shadow from her heavy lashes.
“It’s only the dog,” I assured her, sliding her back on her own part of the bench. “It’s only the dog wriggling around under the chair.”