“Yes, please.”
The American soldiers were shooting dice without any apparent enthusiasm. When Ilse walked across the room their heads swiveled in unison, and their eyes moved up and down her back, taking a thorough but polite inventory of her long dark hair and slim bare legs. Then they sighed and returned to their game. They had lined up beer bottles along one side of their table, and the dice cubes made tinkling sounds as they rattled against this backstop. One looked about thirty-five, a sergeant of the career breed, neat, hard and knowing, with short black hair, and a blunt uncompromising face, tanned the color of old leather, and lighted by a pair of cold pale eyes. The other soldier was younger, barely out of his teens, a slim redhead with clean but unformed features, and a bushy, unexpectedly dark mustache. He seemed to be a little bit drunk, but his manner was alert and agreeable and expectant, the reaction of certain very young or very old people, Beecher thought, the kind who waited hopefully and cheerfully for life to fulfill its promises of excitement and mystery.
The waiter brought bottles of beer and a plate of sandwiches to Beecher’s table. Ilse returned looking attractive and tidy, with her face clean and her hair combed, and the white raincoat belted snugly about her waist. But there were blue smudges of fatigue under her eyes.
As they ate and drank, she asked: “What must we do now?”
Beecher had been thinking about this. It had occurred to him that Ilse could check into a hotel, since no one had known that she had been on the flight from Mirimar to Rabat. “We’re going to get some sleep first,” he said. “After you’ve finished eating, go to the Grand Hotel. It’s just down the block. When you get to your room ask the desk clerk to phone here. It’s the Café Rouge et Noir. Don’t use my name. Let’s see, make it Norton. Ask for Mr. Norton. Tell me your room number, and I’ll join you. I can’t take a chance on registering. But I can go up to your floor without any trouble.”
“Yes, Mr. Norton,” she said, and then smiled shyly. “I shouldn’t be making jokes.”
“You didn’t make much of a one,” he said, and patted her hand. “All set?”
She squared her shoulders. “I’ll try my best,” she said seriously.
After she had gone Beecher ordered another beer. When the waiter left he became aware that the sergeant was staring at him thoughtfully, a frown drawing a deep crease down the middle of his forehead. Beecher looked away and sipped his beer, but he realized the sergeant was still watching him; he could almost feel the cold pale eyes boring at him across the dim room.
His heart began to race. He twisted in his chair, and raised the glass so that it partially concealed his face. It’s nothing, he thought, trying to calm his straining nerves. I’m burned from the sun, beat-up and filthy. Naturally he’s curious. And he’s wondering about Ilse. Why did she leave? And why am I sitting here? The inevitable speculations of a soldier on leave with time to kill.
Beecher stared at the telephone booth, which was up front beside the zinc-topped bar. Was something wrong? Was she having trouble getting into the hotel? He remembered, and the shock of it made his hands tremble, that Ilse’s passport wasn’t in order. It hadn’t been stamped when she’d left Spain, of course. And it didn’t have a Moroccan entry date. The hotel clerk might not bother to check this; normally, all he’d want was a glance at her picture and name. But supposing he was one of those nosy, bespectacled ferrets you had the bad luck to run into occasionally? Cold little men, whose pleasure was sniffing through credentials and documents, on the one-in-a-thousand chance of finding some piddling mistake — a blotted word or an incorrect date. Beecher felt sweat start on his forehead. He could almost see the man at work, neat and clean in a blue suit with a pocketful of pens and pencils, sucking on his teeth, and ranging through Ilse’s passport like a hound dog in a tangle of thornbushes and honeysuckle.
“Hey, Mac!”
Beecher’s hand shook, and a trickle of cold beer ran down his wrist.
“Yes?” He turned and looked at the sergeant.
“You an American?”
“That’s right.”
The sergeant nodded complacently. A tough pleased smile broke on his blunt hard face. “I figured as much,” he said. “The redhead here agreed with me for a change.”
The young soldier smiled and raised his glass to Beecher. “I knew you weren’t French, anyway.”
“And damn well no Arab,” the sergeant said, with a heavy accent on the first A. “Where you from in the States?”
“New York,” Beecher said.
The sergeant moved his glass in a slow circle on the top of the table. He frowned again, his cold eyes lighting with interest. “What you doing over here?”
This was par for the course, Beecher thought, trying to control his nerves. A GI reflex. Where you from? Whadda you do? Been in this dump long? He made an effort to steady the smile on his lips. “I’m just a tourist,” he said.
“You’ll be glad to get out of gook land and back to New York, I bet.”
“That’s right,” Beecher said.
“New York, there’s a great furlough town,” the sergeant said, shaking his head.
“They’re all good,” the redhead said amiably.
“What do you know?” The sergeant jabbed the redhead’s shoulder with the heel of his hand. “I’m talking about wartime. That’s when you know if a town’s any good. In New York now, they gave us tickets to plays, I mean plays on a stage. Hell, we’d go into the USO on Broadway, and there was a chick passing out tickets.” The sergeant sipped his beer, but looked intently at Beecher over the rim of his glass. “Funny thing,” he said, wiping his lips. “I got a notion I seen you somewhere before.”
The redhead groaned and pressed his hands against the sides of his head. “Oh no! Here we go! Step right up, folks, the show is just starting. Sergeant O’Doul, the mental marvel! He can make a frigging IBM machine holler Uncle. Try him, folks. The serial number of anybody in the company. Joe DiMaggio’s 1946 batting average. What he had for breakfast eight years ago! Go ahead, folks, he’s never wrong.”
Beecher smiled with an effort. “Maybe we met at one of those plays in New York, Sarge.”
“I don’t think that was it.”
Beecher saw that there was a newspaper on a chair at their table. It was the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune. To distract him, he said, “Mind if I look at your paper? I’ve been out of touch for a day or so.”
“Yeah,” the sergeant said, nodding slowly. He seemed to be taking an inventory of Beecher’s soiled clothes and sand-stiffened hair. “Go ahead, I already read it. But I wish I could pin you down, mister. No offense meant, understand. But I got this thing about faces.”
When Beecher picked up the paper, he realized that both soldiers were watching him curiously. Anger streaked through him like a bitter flame. What right did they have to stare at him? With their booze and money and sloppy American superiority, they felt free to patronize anybody who wasn’t as loud and boorish as they were. The anger was like fire burning away his strength. He felt helpless and old and vulnerable. They were suspicious of him, he knew; they saw his weakness and fear, and to their peasized brains this meant something wasn’t kosher. Unless you got drunk and pounded the bar and called the natives gooks and wogs you had no right to pretend you were an American.
“You want a drink?” the sergeant asked him. “Have one on us, eh, Mac?”
“No, but thanks anyway,” Beecher said, and returned to his own table, making a deliberate effort to walk slowly and casually.
The crisis in France was headlined on the front page of the Tribune. A minister had resigned in protest over the defeat of his proposals to stabilize the government’s position in Algeria.