“What the hell’s taking her so long?”

“Keep your drawers on,” someone called.

“Get her out here so she can miss and I can collect,” the man with the wet pants shouted. The men were amusing themselves with their yells and a dozen obscene suggestions about what she was doing in the bathroom, carping back and forth and watching the narrow door at the end of the hot dance floor until some voices grew truly angry. At this point the door of the ladies’ room opened and Colette stood in it, holding the knob demurely, taking her time. She did not walk to the window, but went instead to the bar and ordered a Coke. When the bartender pushed a sweating bottle toward her, she shook her head.

“What’s wrong?”

“I want it with ice, in a glass.” She smiled politely, as though she was at the Hilton in New Orleans, facing a well-groomed bar back instead of a smelly little man wrapped in a spattered canvas apron. He found a tall glass on a pine shelf, put some ice cubes in it, and shoved it at her. “There,” he said between his teeth.

“I want it,” she said delicately, straightening her back like a fashion model, “with finely crushed ice.” She dragged out the word finely. Several men hooted like mill whistles.

“She can bitch as good as she can shoot,” a voice yelled.

The bartender looked quickly out the window toward the matches and began to say something, but didn’t. He found a clean bar towel and beat the ice cubes into fine powder with a rusty claw hammer, then poured them into her glass. “Here you go,” he said stiffly. “Swig it and shoot.” Paul and Etienne looked at each other with narrowed eyes. Colette took her time with the drink, walked over to the window, and asked for the field glasses, studying the matches for a full thirty seconds.

“Get on with it,” someone yelled.

She gave the glasses back to their owner, a ruddy, whiskered man who had a bite out of his left ear. “These are pretty good,” she told him. “Where did you get them?”

“Found them on a dead man,” he said, looking at her hard.