“Okay.” Ruth stopped. “No, it’s not okay. The nerve of that SOB!” That was about as close as she ever came to really cussing.
“Uh-huh.” Aaron went to the phone and dialed the Blue Front warehouse. He got the switchboard girl. “Hi, Lois, it’s Aaron. Put me through to Mr. Weissman, will you?”
“Hang on a second,” she said.
After a few clicks and pops, a man’s voice came on the line: “Weissman here.”
“Boss, it’s Aaron. I’m sorry, but I’ll be late today. Some mamzer went and swiped my car.”
“Gevalt!” Herschel Weissman said, which was just what Aaron was thinking. “Okay. Try and get in as soon as you can, will you? Looks like things are finally picking up a little.”
“Alevai omayn. I’ll do my best. Thanks. ’Bye.” Aaron reached for the phone book to find the number for the Glendale police. That one he didn’t have memorized. He got transferred to a sergeant in the robbery detail.
That worthy took his name and address and the car’s license number and description. Then he said, “Well, Mr. Finch, we’ll do the best we can.” His voice trailed away on the last few words.
“What do you think my chances are?” Aaron asked.
A pause. A sigh. “I’ll tell you, they aren’t great,” the sergeant said. “These stolen cars, most of the time they don’t get left on the street.” He figured the Nash was in one of those garages, too.
“Okay,” Aaron said, though it wasn’t. “Let me know if you find it, that’s all.” He hung up, then checked the phone book for another number.
“Now who are you calling?” Ruth asked.
“Yellow Cab.” Aaron didn’t even think about Glendale’s creaky bus system. It didn’t deserve thinking about, either. Nor did walking, not in weather like this, not when he was going to be doing hard physical work all day. Maybe tomorrow, if it cooled down some.
“You could call Marvin and Sarah,” Ruth suggested. “A cab’s expensive.”
“No, thanks. This won’t be too bad-it isn’t that far.” He dialed for the taxi. “Besides, a cab just costs me money. If I go and call Marvin, I guess he’ll be there, yeah.” Marvin often found himself “between projects,” as he put it. But…“He’ll cost me aggravation, though, and he never lets me forget when he does me a favor.”
The cabbie showed up ten minutes later. “Yeah, I know where Blue Front’s at,” he said when Aaron told him where he needed to go. He eyed Aaron’s shirt. “Looks like you know where it’s at real good.”
“You might say so,” Aaron answered. “I would’ve gone there on my own this morning, only somebody took off with my car.”
“Ouch! That stinks, buddy,” the cab driver said as he put his Plymouth in gear. “It’s all that riffraff from Los Angeles, is what it is. Them bums, they’d steal the paint off a stop sign if they could work out how to pry it loose.”
Aaron had come to the same conclusion himself. It sounded uglier the way the cabbie put it. Well, he couldn’t do anything about that. All he could do was lean back in the seat and let the other man get him to work.
–
Daisy Baxter found herself humming a silly love song as she cleaned the toilets after closing time at the Owl and Unicorn. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d done that. After thinking for a moment, she couldn’t remember ever doing it before.
She didn’t need long to figure out why she was humming it, either. Before, she’d been getting through the days one after another. What else were you supposed to do-what else could you possibly do-when, with the war as good as won, they told you your husband would never come home again?
She’d pulled into a shell after they told her Tom was dead, pulled in and done her best to close off the opening between herself and the outside world, the world of feeling. If she didn’t feel anything much at all, she wouldn’t have to feel quite so empty.
“I didn’t even know how empty I felt,” she said, as if someone standing behind her in the small, smelly space had claimed she did. But after a while, you didn’t just get used to something-or to nothing-you started taking it for granted without knowing you were.
One kiss from Bruce McNulty had changed all that. It had suddenly given her a standard of comparison. Before, she’d had only the emptiness. Now, she could see that caring about somebody else, and having somebody else care about you, was better than not.
She laughed at herself as she washed her hands with strong soap under the hottest water she could stand, and then did it again. Like Lady Macbeth, if for different reasons, she never felt she could get them clean. As she dried them, she laughed again. It all sounded like something out of a soppy, sentimental film.
But why did soppy, sentimental films so often turn out to be hits? Surely because they showed something people wanted to find in their own lives, even if they didn’t very often.
Daisy was walking up the stairs to the flat when the deep-throated rumble of bombers taking off from Sculthorpe made her stop and cock her head to listen. Even from two or three miles away, the noise could rattle her fillings. It surely woke some of the people in Fakenham lucky enough to have already gone to bed.
“Luck, Bruce,” she whispered. She didn’t know he was flying one of those Superfortresses, but that was the way to bet. And if he was, what kind of devastation did the big plane carry in its bomb bay? B-29s flying out of Sculthorpe had been striking targets in Eastern Europe-for all she knew, in Russia itself-since the early days of the war. She’d listened to McNulty and other pilots talking with a few, or more than a few, pints in them.
They talked more than they should have. Some of the stories they told chilled her blood. How could you do-that-to a city and sleep at night or look at yourself in a mirror afterwards? But then, most of these pilots had bombed Germany and Japan in the last war. They had bigger and more terrible bombs now, but how different was it in principle?
“Different enough,” she said, there on the stairs. She’d seen what the Russian A-bomb did to the outskirts of Norwich. The army and police made sure nobody from outside got closer than the outskirts. That told her what she hadn’t seen was bound to be worse than what she had.
One bomb. One city. That was all it took. One bomb had been plenty to rip the heart out of Paris. Norwich, smaller to begin with, was pretty much gone.
She cleaned her teeth and got into bed. It was still too early for her to need to huddle under blankets and quilts with a hot-water bottle at her feet. Her long flannel nightgown hadn’t changed, though. She smiled to herself as she got comfortable. One of these times, with Bruce, she might lie down on this bed wearing nothing at all.
She took that thought into sleep. Her dreams were warm, warm enough to wake her for a little while. But she soon slept again. Minding the pub would have worn out a mechanical man, let alone a flesh-and-blood woman.
In the wee small hours, she woke once more, this time from a dream full of howling dogs. The howling didn’t fade, though, after her eyes opened in the dark bedroom. It rose and fell, rose and fell, wailing like a damned soul.
“Oh, bloody hell! The air-raid siren!” Daisy said as she hopped out of bed and hurried for the stairs. The Russians had dropped that A-bomb on Norwich. And they’d struck Sculthorpe with ordinary high explosives-conventional bombs, people had taken to calling them, as if they were cozy and normal. Stalin’s flyers knew where the planes that tormented them came from, all right.
Now they were hitting Sculthorpe again, or the air-raid wardens thought they were. Daisy tried not to break her neck on the pitch-black stairs. If the Russians missed, or had to dump their bombs in a hurry because fighters were on their tails, some might come down on Fakenham. You wanted to be down in the cellar in case that happened.