“Oh, I’m a lucky fella,” he said. “No one has to worry about l’il ole Arnold. Got some more good news this week. It was a big week for me, a giant of a week. I got a letter from Cornwall.”
“Oh, isn’t that nice.” Prissy. “That girl you told me about wrote you.” Palm trees. Adam and Eve in the Garden.
“Yep.” He flicked away his cigarette. “She just found out her husband got killed in Italy and she thought I’d like to know.”
There was nothing to say to this, so she kept quiet.
“Well, I won’t be seeing you any more, Miss Jordache,” he said, “unless you happen to be passin’ through St. Louis. You can find me in the telephone book. I’ll be in an exclusive residential district. I won’t keep you no longer. I’m sure you got a victory ball or a country club dance to go to. I just wanted to thank you for everything you done for the troops, Miss Jordache.”
“Good luck, Arnold,” she said coldly.
“Too bad you didn’t find the time to come on down to the Landing that Saturday,” he said, drawling it out flatly. “We got ourselves two fine chickens and roasted them and had ourselves quite a picnic. We missed you.”
“I’d hoped you weren’t going to talk about that, Arnold,” she said. Hypocrite, hypocrite.
“Oh, God,” he said, “you so beautiful I just want to sit down and cry.”
He turned and opened the door to the hospital and limped in.
She walked slowly toward the bus stop, feeling battered. Victory solved nothing.
She stood under the light, looking at her watch, wondering if the bus drivers were also celebrating tonight. There was a car parked down the street in the shadow of a tree. The motor started up and it drove slowly toward her. It was Boylan’s Buick. For a moment she thought of running back into the hospital.
Boylan stopped the car in front of her and opened the door. “Can I give you a lift, ma’am?”
“Thank you very much, no.” She hadn’t seen him for more than a month, not since the night they had driven to New York.
“I thought we might get together to offer fitting thanks to God for blessing our arms with victory,” he said.
“I’ll wait for the bus, thank you,” she said.
“You got my letters, didn’t you?” he asked.
“Yes.” There had been two letters, on her desk at the office, asking her to meet him in front of Bernstein’s Department Store. She hadn’t met him and she hadn’t answered the letters.
“Your reply must have been lost in the mail,” he said. “The service these days is very hit and miss, isn’t it?”
She walked away from the car. He got out and came up to her and held her arm.
“Come up to the house with me,” he said harshly. “This minute.”
His touch unnerved her. She hated him but she knew she wanted to be in his bed. “Let go of me,” she said, and pulled her arm savagely out of his grasp. She walked back to the bus stop, with him following her.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll say what I came to say. I want to marry you.”
She laughed. She didn’t know why she laughed. Surprise.
“I said I want to marry you,” he repeated.
“I’ll tell you what,” she said, “you go on down to Jamaica, as you planned, and I’ll write you there. Leave your address with my secretary. Excuse me, here’s my bus.”
The bus rolled to a stop and she jumped up through the door as soon as it opened. She gave the driver her ticket and went and sat in the back by herself. She was trembling. If the bus hadn’t come along, she would have said yes, she would marry him.
When the bus neared Port Philip she heard the fire engines and looked up the hill. There was a fire on the hill. She hoped it was the main building, burning to the ground.
VI
Claude hung on to him with his good arm, as Tom drove the bike down the narrow back road behind the Boylan estate. He hadn’t had much practice and he had to go slowly and Claude moaned in his ear every time they skidded or hit a bump. Tom didn’t know how bad the arm was, but he knew something had to be done about it. But if he took Claude to the hospital, they’d ask how he happened to get burned and it wouldn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out the connection between the boy with the burned arm and the cross flaming on the Boylan hill. And Claude sure as hell wouldn’t take the blame alone. Claude was no hero. He’d never die under torture with his secret forever clamped between his lips, that was for sure.
“Listen,” Tom said, slowing the bike down so that they were hardly moving, “you got a family doctor?”
“Yeah,” Claude said. “My uncle.”
That was the kind of a family to have. Priests, doctors, there probably was a lawyer uncle, too, who would come in handy later on, after they were arrested.
“What’s the address?” Tom asked.
Claude mumbled the address. He was so frightened he found it almost impossible to speak. Tom speeded up and keeping on back roads, found his way to the big house on the outskirts of the town, with a sign on the lawn that said, “Dr. Robert Tinker, M.D.”
Tom stopped the bike and helped Claude off. “Listen,” he said, “you’re going in there alone, you understand, and no matter what you tell your uncle, you don’t mention my name. And you better get your father to send you out of town tonight. There’s going to be an awful mess in this town tomorrow and if anybody sees you walking around with a burned hand it’ll take them just about ten seconds to come down on you like a load of bricks.”
For answer, Claude moaned, and hung onto Tom’s shoulder. Tom pushed him away. “Stand on your own two feet, man,” Tom said. “Now get in there and make sure you see your uncle and nobody else. And if I ever find out that you gave me away I’ll kill you.”
“Tom,” Claude whimpered.
“You heard me,” Tom said. “I’ll kill you. And you know I mean it.” He pushed him toward the door of the house.
Claude staggered toward the door. He reached up his good hand and rang the bell. Tom didn’t wait to see him go in. He hurried off down the street. Above the town the fire was still blazing, lighting up the sky.
He went down to the river near the warehouse in which his father kept his shell. It was dark along the bank and there was the acid odor of rusting metal. He took off his sweater. It had the sick smell of burnt wool, like vomit. He found a stone and tied it into the sweater and heaved the bundle out into the river. There was a dull splash and he could see the little fountain of white water against the black of the current, as the sweater sank. He hated to lose the sweater. It was his lucky sweater. He had won a lot of fights while wearing it. But there were times when you had to get rid of things and this was one of them.
He walked away from the river toward home, feeling the chill of the night through his shirt. He wondered if he really was going to have to kill Claude Tinker.
Chapter 6
I
With his German food, Mary Jordache thought, as Jordache came in from the kitchen, carrying the roast goose on a platter with red cabbage and dumplings. Immigrant.
She didn’t remember when she had seen her husband in such a high mood. The surrender of the Third Reich that week had made him jovial and expansive. He had devoured the newspapers, chuckling over the photographs of the German generals signing the papers at Rheims. Now, on Sunday, it was Rudolph’s seventeenth birthday, and Jordache had decreed a holiday. No other birthday in the family was celebrated by more than a grunt. He had bought Rudolph a fancy fishing rod, God knew how much it cost, and had told Gretchen that she could keep half her salary from now on instead of the usual quarter. He had even given Thomas the money for a new sweater to replace the one he said he lost. If the German army could be brought to surrender every week, life might be tolerable in the home of Axel Jordache.