“Yeah.” This time, Bruce’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. His job was destroying peace-and destroying places like this. After a moment, he went on, “It’s gonna heat up again. You didn’t hear that from me-I’ll call you a liar to your face if you say you did-but it is.”
She nodded. The news shocked her less than she wished it would have. With the way the Russians kept coming forward, how else could you stop them than by…dropping things on them? “How bad will it be?” Daisy asked after a hundred yards or so.
“Well, it won’t be good,” he said, and then it was his turn to ride along in silence for a little while. Finally, he went on, “You can hope that, when it’s all over, there’ll be enough people left to pick up the pieces.”
“And enough pieces left that are worth picking up?” Daisy asked.
He nodded. “Uh-huh. And that, too.” Perhaps to keep from having to say anything more, he deftly used one hand to take out a packet of Luckies, to put a cigarette in his mouth, to replace the packet, and to light the Lucky with a Zippo. The other hand stayed on the handlebars and kept the bike going straight.
Daisy made a small, needy noise. Bruce passed her the packet and the lighter. Her bicycle wobbled a little while she got the smoke going, but only a little. She blew out a gray stream. “That’s very nice,” she said. “Smoother than the Navy Cuts I usually get.”
“Jesus, I hope so!” he said. “I’ve had some of those. You can file your teeth on the smoke from ’em.”
“Some people like them strong,” Daisy said. She didn’t herself, or not particularly; she bought Navy Cuts because they were cheap.
“You’ve got that right,” Bruce said. “One guy at Sculthorpe-one of your RAF fellas, not an American-smokes those, uh, darn Gauloises. God, but they’re foul! I think there’s something about them in the Geneva Convention rules against poison gas.”
Daisy nodded. “They’re poisonous, all right. The first few months after the war, demobbed soldiers would bring them into the pub. They’d clear out the snug faster than anything this side of a polecat.”
“We’d say ‘this side of a skunk,’ but you don’t have skunks over here, do you?” McNulty said.
She shook her head. “No. I saw one, though, at the Norwich zoo. A very neat black-and-white beast, about the size of a cat. It wasn’t doing much, not that I recall.”
“They mostly go around at night. If you leave them alone, they’ll do the same for you. If you don’t-watch out! You wouldn’t believe how much they stink.”
“I suppose not.” Remembering the Norwich zoo made Daisy remember that all the animals in it, including the handsome little skunk, were probably dead now. So were all their keepers. That was what happened, or a tiny bit of what happened, when an atom bomb ripped the heart out of a city.
She didn’t care to remember things like that. She concentrated on the unblemished countryside here instead. It was pretty when you concentrated on it instead of taking it for granted the way she usually did.
Pretty soon, they rolled through the twin villages of Great and Little Walsingham. Added together, they didn’t come close to a thousand people. Bruce McNulty exclaimed at some of the half-timbered houses. “Those things must have been here four or five hundred years!” he said.
“Of course.” She looked at him. “And so?”
He laughed. “It’s not of course to me. San Francisco wasn’t anything till a hundred and fifty years ago. It wasn’t a city till a hundred years ago. There’s nothing like this where I come from.”
“We must seem as strange to you as you do to us,” Daisy said.
“Now that you mention it, honey,” he answered, “yes.”
Wells-next-the-Sea lay another four miles north. It wasn’t quite next-the-sea, or even next to the sea. The harbor had silted up, so the little town lay a mile inland. A narrow-gauge railroad took people to the beach, though.
Daisy and Bruce didn’t have it to themselves, but it wasn’t crowded. They spread out towels and lay down on the soft yellow sand. A Royal Navy corvette went by not far from shore, fast enough to kick up a big white wake. “He’s got a bone in his teeth,” Bruce said. “That’s what they say, isn’t it?”
“That is what they say,” Daisy agreed. “Are you a naval personage, too?”
“Mm, I have a navel,” he said, and she made a face at him. More thoughtfully, he continued, “I wonder if he’s hunting a Russian sub or something.”
“Just what we need!” Daisy remembered how the U-boats had almost starved England into submission during the last war. There had been sinkings in the Atlantic and North Sea this time, but not nearly so many.
Gulls wheeled overhead, squawking shrilly. The sun was warm-not hot, but at least it wasn’t pouring rain. She enjoyed the company. Bruce put his arm around her. She enjoyed that, too. She wished the moment could last forever.
Then he leaned over and kissed her. She kissed him back. It was her first real kiss, her first kiss that meant anything, since the end of 1944. She wondered how she’d ever gone so long without.
6
A car door slammed on the street in front of Aaron Finch’s little rented house in Glendale. He looked out the window to make sure, then nodded to himself. “They’re here, all right,” he said. “Such fun.” If he didn’t sound delighted, it was only because he wasn’t.
“Fun!” Leon said. Aaron’s son was just past two. He didn’t notice tones of voice very well yet.
Ruth Finch did. “You be nice-you hear me? I don’t want any trouble,” Aaron’s wife said.
“Hey, I don’t start trouble. That’s Marvin,” Aaron said, on the whole truthfully.
Truthful or not, he didn’t placate Ruth. “You may not start it, but you finish it,” she said. “That’s all you Finches.” She knew the family she’d married into, sure as hell.
The doorbell rang. Muttering under his breath about the family he’d married into, Aaron went to open it. Roxane Bauman was Ruth’s first cousin. Her husband, Howard, got enough work as an actor to keep food on his table but not enough to be a household name.
Or he had, before the war with the Russians started. His politics, and Roxane’s, weren’t just pink. They were Red, or as near as made no difference. He’d had to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Since then, and since the bombs started falling, people got much less eager to cast him.
Some of Aaron’s relatives owned similar politics. And Marvin had Hollywood connections, though he’d burned through most of them. Aaron was a Democrat, but he let it go at that.
Well, if Ruth had to put up with Marvin, he supposed he could smile at Roxane and Howard. Which he did. “Good to see you,” he said, waving them in. “What’s new?” Right then, he thought he was a better actor than Howard Bauman at his finest.
“Same old thing,” Howard said. He was good-looking in a not particularly Jewish way, and had a thick head of brown hair combed straight back. His nose-small and straight enough to make Aaron wonder if he’d had it fixed-twitched. “Something smells good.”
“It’s a tongue,” Ruth said. “The butcher had some nice ones.”
“Mother still makes them, too,” Roxane said. Her mother was Ruth’s mother’s younger sister. Unlike Ruth’s mother, Fanny Seraph-you couldn’t make up a name like that-was still alive. She spoke more Yiddish and Byelorussian than English, but she managed. And, considering everything that had happened, she was a hell of a lot better off here than she would have been in the Old Country.
By the way Roxane said it, though, only someone fresh off the boat would bother with Old Country food. But Howard said, “Hey, I love tongue.” That took the edge off it. How many square meals had he eaten lately? Not so many as he would have wanted, Aaron guessed.
“Can I get you a beer or fix you a drink?” he asked.
“Beer works,” Howard said. His wife shot him a startled look. So did Aaron; Bauman usually drank martinis, often in heroic doses. But he explained, “Beer goes with tongue.” Aaron had to nod-it did.