This romantic lark is a departure from Hack’s usual hardboiled style. It’s a memory piece loosely based on an episode during his brief stint with the Merchant Marines when he had a 24-hour pass in a strange city spent with three women he met on the dock. The reality was that they were sex workers who gave him his first case of syphilis that resulted in the insanity which plagued him in his later years, and the night concluded with the women stealing Hack’s wallet and pushing what they thought was his lifeless body into a canal. It ended happily, with the syphilis eating away the facts of the evening from his brain until he now regards it as one of his most cherished memories.