Pepper stood holding the steps and tried to think about the following day, while Acey seated himself on the bottom step and began relating a story of his youth. He and a group of cronies caught a couple on the edge of town, beat up the boyfriend and chased him off and tried to make use of the dame. It was cold and damp and being extremely young nobody could achieve anything, the lady friend was crying and afraid and one by one the boys drifted off. Acey on his own tagged after her for a long time through the dirty backstreets, grabbing at her, swearing. He kept thinking he would make it, but nothing transpired until he had got her to her own house and there in the dark hallway he had his way up against the iron railing. In Acey's account the incident seemed extraordinarily thrilling and cheerful.
"So the mermaids won't escape me," said Acey. "I never let go and won't start now. What I have in the window is what's in the shop - fair dealing."
He had a darkly handsome face, bushy eyebrows, lively eyes, and a full mouth of excellent teeth. He looked very like an Italian. Except that his feet smelled.
"Good lord, what've they been doing," said Alev-tina. "All the folders are mixed up. Here, hold this lot for a bit."
She bent down and gave Acey a pile of papers and journals. Acey took it, scanned several papers, read to himself, lips moving, and counted the folders.
"I need two more."
Pepper kept holding the ladder and looked at his clenched fists. Tomorrow at this time I won't be here, he thought. I'll be sitting next to Acey in the cab. It'll be hot. The metal will just be starting to cool down. Acey will switch on the headlights, settle down more comfortably with his elbow out of the window and will start up about world politics. I'm not going to let him talk about anything else. Let him stop at every snack bar. Let him pick up anybody he wants, even let him make a detour to deliver somebody's repaired motorbike. But we're going to talk about world politics only. Or I could ask him about various cars, fuel consumption, accidents, murders of bribe investigators. He tells a good story, and you can never guess if he's telling the truth.
Acey drank another, smacked his lips, glanced at Alevtina's legs, and continued his narration, fidgeting and making expressive gestures, bursting out in delighted laughter. With a scrupulous adherence to chronology he related the story of his life, from year to year, month to month. The cook at a concentration camp where he'd done time for stealing paper (the cook had commented meanwhile: "Don't let me down, Acey, see you don't! ..."), the daughter of a political prisoner at the same camp (it was all the same to her, she was sure she was a goner anyway), a sailor's wife in some seaside town, who was trying this way of revenging herself on her tomcat of a husband for his multitudinous betrayals. A certain rich widow, from whom Acey had had to flee in the middle of the night clad only in his drawers, as she wanted Acey under her wing and force him to traffic in drugs and shameful medical preparations. Women he'd transported when he was a taxi-driver; they paid him in coin for each of their guests, and at the end of the night with their bodies. ("I says to her, what's all this then, nobody thinks about me, you've had four and I've not had one yet...") Then a wife, a fifteen-year-old girl whom he married on a special dispensation - she bore him twins and finally left him when he attempted to use her in payment for the use of his friend's lady friends. Women ... birds ... stinkers ... butterflies ... shits ... bitches... "So you see I'm no lecher," he concluded. "I'm just a man with a bit of spirit, not some gutless impotent."
He finished off the liquor, collected up the folders, and left without saying good night, scraping the parquet and whistling. Oddly bent forward as he was, he was surprisingly like a cross between a spider and a neanderthal. Pepper was looking helplessly after him when Alevtina spoke.
"Give me your hand, Peppy."
She sat down on the top step, put one hand on his shoulder and leapt down with a small shriek. He caught her under the arms and lowered her to the floor; for some time they stood close to one another, face to face. She kept her hands on his shoulders and he kept holding her under the arms.
"I've been thrown out of the hotel," he said. "I know," she said. "Let's go to my place, okay?" She was kind-hearted and warm and looked him in the eyes calmly, though without any particular assurance. Looking at her, one could imagine many kindly, warm sweet pictures and Pepper avidly flicked through them all, one after the other, and tried to imagine himself next to her, but was suddenly aware that it wasn't working. Instead of himself he kept seeing Acey, handsome and naked, economical in movement and smelling of feet.
"No, thank you," taking his hands from her. "I'll get by all right."
She immediately turned from him and set about collecting the leftovers onto a newspaper.
