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Enrique knew all the advertisements by heart. They had not changed in the fifteen months that he had been away at war; they must still be using the same discs in the broadcasting station, and still the siren had deceived him and given him that thin, quick prickle across the scalp that was as definite a reaction to danger as a bird dog stiffening to the warm scent of quail.

He had not had that prickle when he started. Danger and the fear of it had once made him feel empty in his stomach. They had made him feel weak as you are weak with a fever, and he had known the inability to move; when you must force movement forward by legs that feel as dead as though they were asleep. That was all gone now, and he did without difficulty whatever he should do. The prickling was all that remained of the vast capacity for fear some brave men start with. It was his only remaining reaction to danger except for the perspiring which, he knew, he would always have, and now it served as a warning and nothing more.

As he stood, looking out at the tree where the man with the straw hat sat now, on the curb, a stone fell on the tiled floor of the porch. Enrique looked for it against the wall but did not find it. He passed his hands under the cot but it was not there. As he knelt, another pebble fell on the tiled floor, bounced and rolled into the corner toward the side of the house and into the street. Enrique picked it up. It was a smooth-feeling ordinary pebble and he put it in his pocket and went inside the house and down the stairs to the back door.

He stood to one side of the door and took the Colt out of the holster and held it, heavy in his right hand.

“The victory,” he said very quietly in Spanish, his mouth disdaining the word, and shifted softly on his bare feet to the other side of the door.

“To those who earn it,” someone said outside the door. It was a woman’s voice, giving the second half of the password, and it spoke quickly and unsteadily.

Enrique drew back the double bolt on the door and opened it with his left hand, the Colt still in his right.

There was a girl there in the dark, holding a basket. She wore a handkerchief over her head.

“Hello,” he said and shut the door and bolted it. He could hear her breathing in the dark. He took the basket from her and patted her shoulder.

“Enrique,” she said, and he could not see the way her eyes were shining nor the look on her face.

“Come upstairs,” he said. “There is someone watching the front of the house. Did he see you?”

“No,” she said. “I came across the vacant lot.”

“I will show him to you. Come up to the porch.”

They went up the stairs, Enrique carrying the basket. He put it down by the bed and walked to the edge of the porch and looked. The Negro who wore the narrow-brimmed flat-topped straw hat was gone.

“So,” Enrique said quietly.

“So what?” asked the girl, holding his arm now and looking out.

“So he is gone. What is there to eat?”

“I am sorry you were here alone all day” she said. “It was so stupid that I had to wait until it was dark to come. I have wanted to come all day.”

“It was stupid to be here at all. They brought me here from the boat before daylight and left me, with a password and nothing to eat, in a house that is watched. You cannot eat a password. I should not be put in a house that is being watched for other reasons. It is very Cuban. But at least, in the old days we ate. How are you, Maria?”

In the dark she kissed him, hard, on the mouth. He felt the tight-pressed fullness of her lips and the way her body shivered against his and then came the stab of white pain in the small of his back.

“Ayee! Be careful.”

“What is it?”

“The back.”

“What of the back? Is it a wound?”

“You should see it,” he said.

“Can I see it now?”

“Afterwards. We must eat and get out of here. What have they stored here?”

“Too many things. Things left over from the failure of April. Things kept for the future.”

“The long-distant future,” he said. “Did they know it was watched?”

“I am sure