She unlocked a door with a key. Here was the tunnel, low-ceiled, narrow, and damp. It stretched into darkness. She took a battery light from a hole in the wall and by its flashing beam led them underground for what felt to Scully to be a distance of two city blocks. By the twists and turns and breaks in the walls, he surmised it was actually a right-of-way constructed through a series of connected cellars.

She unlocked another door, took his hand again, and led him up two flights of stairs into the conventionally furnished parlor of an apartment with high windows that offered views of the Chatham Square El station flooded in sunlight.

Scully had been in the dark so long, he found it hard to believe that daylight still existed.

“Thanks for the rescue, ma’am.”

“My name is Katy. Sit down. Relax.”

“Jasper,” said Scully. “Jasper Smith.”

Katy threw down her bag, reached up, and began removing hatpins.

Scully watched avidly. She was even prettier in the daylight. “You know,” he laughed. “If I carried a knife as long as your hatpins, the police would arrest me as a dangerous character.”

She gave him a cute pout. “A girl can’t wear her chapeau all crooked.”

“It doesn’t seem to matter if a girl wears a cartwheel or a little ding-dong affair, she always nails it down with hatpins long as her arm. I see you are a fellow Republican.”

“Where’d you get that idea?”

Scully reached for the ten-inch steel pin she was removing and held it to the light. The decorative bronze head depicted a possum holding a golf club. “ ‘Billy Possum.’ That’s what we call William Howard Taft.”

“They’re trying to make a possum like a teddy bear. But everyone knows that Taft is no Roosevelt.”

She stuck all four pins in a sofa cushion and tossed her hat beside them. Then she struck a pose, with her strong hands on her slim hips. “Opium is the one pleasure I can’t offer you here. Would you settle for a Scotch highball?”

“Among other things,” Scully grinned back.

He watched her mix Scotch and water in tall glasses. Then he clinked his to hers, took a sip, and leaned closer to kiss her on the mouth. She stepped back. “Let me get comfortable. I’ve been in these clothes all day.”

Scully searched the room quickly, thoroughly, and silently. He was looking for a rent bill or gas bill that would show whose apartment it was. He had to stop when the El clattered by because he couldn’t hear her coming back from the bedroom. It passed, and he looked some more.

“Say, how you doing in there?” he called.

“Hold your horses.”