Gangway! by Brian Garfield Donald E. Westlake Page A

like everbody else."
        "Oh, Mama," Ittzy said.
        Mama took a firmer grip on his ear and headed for the door.
        

CHAPTER SEVEN
        
        Gabe watched Ittzy's mother lead Ittzy toward the door. "Maybe I ought to go touch him too."
        Vangie said, "Why?"
        "If a fellow wants to be in New York and finds himself stuck in San Francisco, what kind of luck would you call that?"
        "Better than the fellow deserved," she said. "You finished eating?"
        Gabe looked at all his empty plates. Four of them. "I believe I am."
        The red-haired cop, McCorkle, was dragging the kicking and howling moustachioed guy out. Ittzy and his mother were gone. The crowd was separating into smaller excited knots of people, everybody talking at once. Vangie said, "I hope there's enough in that wallet to pay the bill for all this."
        It was something he hadn't thought to investigate. He fumbled the wallet open anxiously.
        It was all right. There were two five-dollar greenjackets in the wallet. He paid the supper tab and still had five dollars and fifty-five cents, of which minus-$4.45 belonged to him.
        This wouldn't do. He was going to have to get himself in motion; he couldn't spend the rest of his life living off this girl's ingenuity. "Let's get out of here."
        "Where to?"
        He was trying to think but it was no good. The heaps of food with which he'd filled himself had replenished most of what he'd lost on the river, but it didn't make him any more alert and wide-eyed. Seasickness took a lot out of you.
        "I need sleep before I can start making plans. Let's check out those hotel rooms of yours."
        "Right," Vangie said. Leaving the table, they threaded a path through the crowd and emerged onto the street.
        It was dark. A cold breeze swept past them, stirring tendrils of fog. Gaslights were encircled by vague misty halos and the people who went by were sinister moving shadows. Gabe shivered. "Which way?"
        "We'll try up here first."
        The climb made New York's Washington Heights seem like a molehill by comparison. What idiot had decided to put a would-be city on the side of a cliff? Out here in the West they just didn't know how to do anything right.
        "Where are you from anyway?"
        "You mean where was I born?" Vangie asked. "On Mission Street in a second-story flat across the street from the church."
        "Mission Street where?"
        She looked at him as they crossed an intersection. "What do you mean where? Right down there." She pointed down the hill behind them.
        "You mean you were born in San Francisco?"
        "Of course."
        He did some rapid arithmetic. Well, it was possible after all. The gold had been discovered in 1848; they must have started building this excuse for a city right after that. That was twenty-six years ago.
        "It isn't there any more," she said.
        He was beginning to puff from the climb. "What isn't?"
        "The place where I was born. It burned down in the fire of fifty-four."
        Which narrowed things down to a six-year span. So she wasn't younger than twenty, and she wasn't older than twenty-six. Gabe began to feel fiendishly clever.
        But she shattered this feeling. "I'm twenty-four, if that's what you're trying to figure out."
        "Did I ask?" he demanded. "Did I?"
        "How old are you?"
        "What difference does that make?"
        "Well, I just asked. You don't have to throw a fit." She stopped so abruptly that he banged into her. He looked up at a bulky five-story building. Vangie said, "Let's try this one."
        Gabe headed for the porticoed door, but Vangie dragged him back by the sleeve. "Not that way. Come on."
        Around the side of the building. Past dark windows and a rubbish pile. Finally she turned and pulled open a door that Gabe wouldn't have seen in the dark alley.
        A dimly lit