Eagle Eye by Hortense Calisher

here. “Let’s ask him.”
    “Back of the kitchen, there’s one,” the butler said. Hired for the day. He looked like an old prizefighter. Tight in the blazer, worn. What was it like to stand by, not listening? The man took Maureen’s champagne glass as she went.
    “Get off the ice.” The girl Dina, at his elbow, whispering it.
    “What do you mean?”
    “What I said. This is our trick, Fred’s and mine. She’s going to ask us home. For the night.”
    As the two women he’d spoken to before ambled to the drink table, holding out their glasses, Dina turned her back to them, facing him, dug a steel finger in his rib, swept a small salver’s contents into her pouch, already open, then took a second look at the little tray, pinched that too, and stared up at him like a sprung cat.
    He’d never seen it done before. Common occurrence. Way his knife must have gone. Made the party seem closer. “Thought Freddie was coming here.”
    “Fred, to you. No, he won’t make the rounds. Only in the park. I’ll call him where he waits, tell him to meet us there. He’s like—you know—still in ambush … You came out pretty good, didn’t you?”
    The party was more crowded now, people coming in through doors of rooms still unknown to him. Anybody in ambush, would have to be careful here. He couldn’t see his parents anywhere. Buddy was always hard to find in a crowd. From here, the terrarium couldn’t be seen. “How’d you know I was in?”
    She shrugged. “Dime a dozen. Wait and see. You got a place?”
    He nodded.
    “Don’t crowd us then, see. Maybe you can turn a trick here.”
    “Maybe.” Now that she was closer, he smelled the cold, leathery odor of people who bedded outside or anywhere, of himself two nights ago. He could only smell it because he was here. “Does Freddie—Fred—trick in the park?”
    “Trade, you mean? You wouldn’t say that, he was here. He’d knock you off.” Suddenly she perked her tam; the two women were passing. “He makes his own kind of rounds,” she said airily. “You thinking of it? You don’t look right for it. You don’t know how, you might knock somebody off for good.” She shivered. The steel finger went in his ribs again. Her trick, maybe. “Lay off then, huh?”
    People thronged around them. “What are you going to do? At the Breitweisers?”
    “Take a bath. Sleep. Be in a house.” She crossed her arms and clutched her shoulders. “If I can get him in a house. We got kicked out of my residence club. I snuck him in. Oh, all the girls do it; these days a management winks. But Fred … sometimes he’s still pretty animal. They threw us out.” She looked up at Bunty. “Not sex, you know. No, no, no—if you want the sad truth. But hotels are no good to him, even flophouses. He always makes for the park. To jobhunt from there, it’s hard. And I dunno, nine to five gets harder, the longer you don’t. So I figure, get him in a house. Get that organized.” She bent, cleaning the nail of her mid-finger with that hand’s thumb. “Felipe could cook up a storm, once. Felipe’s Fred. Maybe that intended of hers will get him a union card. She says bakers aren’t the same as foodhandlers but she’ll try.” She smiled suddenly, walked over the table, took up a loaded tray and held it out to him. “So lay off.”
    “Guess you couldn’t go back to Lindenhurst.” A statement of kinship. Nobody he knew could.
    “You kidding? I knew a German girl from there, once.”
    He saw how green he was.
    “Fred and me both come from the Coast, we worked a spa there. I did. Oh on the up-and-up, in the sauna, a receptionist even. I got him on as a poolcleaner. An elegant joint. Only when the customers saw me with a Chicano, my share of the tips stopped. So Felipe and I worked our way east.”
    His eyes unfocused, over the devotion of women. And on Maureen, wending her way back to them. A man stopped her, in the cocktail way. She was bantering with him. But even from here it