The smaller one had the perfidious gait of a dancer; each step flirting with the ground, lingering for seconds like a lover’s hands, at other times leaping fleetly away as does a scandalized society dame. A light shone briefly, and the smaller one whirled away into the shadows, the light snatching in vain at the shape. The taller was slow, and the sudden illumination showed a girl, her silhouette distorted but unmistakably feminine. Before one could even begin to examine the topography of her features, she had vanished. For that was how she moved: silent, with impossibly subtle movements. A watcher could not tell that she moved until she blinked, and by then she would be gone. But as the men neared a street lamp, the shadows suddenly vanished, their route ominously unknown.
The smaller man paused in the pool of light cast by the oil lamp at the crossroads. He pulled a cigar out of his breast pocket and clenched it between his teeth, searching his other pockets for matches.