“Where they gonna billet us, sir?” Muldoon asked.
“Just off of Fountain Square, not far from the watch factory,” Szymanski answered. “We’re taking over a hotel that hasn’t been bombed to smithereens: the three-story red brick building over there.” He pointed.
“Fountain Square? Yeah, I been there.” Sergeant Muldoon chuckled. “It’s a triangle, and it ain’t got no fountain. Great little place.”
“Give me a choice between a hotel an’ the places we been stayin’ at in Chicago, an’ I ain’t gonna carry on a whole lot,” Mutt said. “Nice to lie down without worryin’ about whether a sniper can pick up where you’re sleepin’ and blow your head off without you even knowin’ the bastard was there.”
“Amen,” Muldoon said enthusiastically. “ ‘Sides which-” He glanced over at Captain Szymanski, then decided not to go on. Mutt wondered what that was all about. He’d have to wander over to Fountain Square himself and see what he could see.
Szymanski didn’t notice Muldoon’ s awkward pause. He was still looking westward. “No matter what they do and what kind of armor they might bring up, the Lizards would have a tough time forcing a crossing here,” he observed. “We’re nicely up on the bluffs and well dug in. No matter how hard they pasted us from the air, we’d still hurt their tanks. They’d have to try flanking us out if they wanted to take this place.”
“Yes, sir,” Muldoon said again. The brass didn’t think the Lizards would be trying to take Elgin any time soon, or they wouldn’t have sent the company here to rest and recuperate. Of course, the brass wasn’t always right about such things, but for the moment no bullets were flying, no cannon bellowing. It was almost peaceful enough to make a man nervous.
“Come on, Lieutenant,” Muldoon said. “I’ll show that there hotel and__” Again, he didn’t go on; he made a production of not going on. What the devil had he found over by Fountain Square? A warehouse full of Lucky Strikes? A cache of booze that wasn’t rotgut or moonshine? Whatever it was, he sure was acting coy about it.
For a Midwest factory town, Elgin looked to be a pretty nice place. The blasted plants didn’t make up a single district, as they did so many places. Instead, they were scattered among what had been pleasant homes till war visited them with fire and sword. Some of the houses, the ones that hadn’t been bombed or burned, still looked comfortable.
Fountain Square hadn’t been hit too badly, maybe because none of the town buildings was tall enough to draw Lizard bombers. God only knew why it had the name it did, because, as Muldoon had said, it was neither square nor overburdened with fountains. What looked to be a real live working saloon greeted GIs with open doors-and with a couple of real live working MPs inside those open doors to make sure rest and recuperation didn’t get too rowdy.
Was that what Muldoon had had in mind? He could have mentioned it in front of Szymanski; the captain didn’t mind taking a drink now and then, or even more often than that.
Then Mutt spotted the line of guys in grimy olive drab snaking their way down a narrow alley. He’d seen-hell, he’d stood in-lines like that in France. “They got themselves a whorehouse goin’,” he said.
“You betcha they do,” Muldoon agreed with a broad grin. “It ain’t like I need to get my ashes hauled like I did when I was over in France, but hell, it ain’t like I’m dead, neither. I figure after we got our boys settled in at the hotel, maybe you an’ me-” He hesitated. “Might be they got a special house for officers. The Frenchies, they done that Over There.”
“Yeah, I know. I remember,” Mutt said. “But I doubt it, though. Hell, I didn’t figure they’d set up a house a-tall. Chaplains woulda given ’em holy hell if they’d tried it back in 1918.”
“Times have changed, Lieutenant,” Muldoon said.
“Yeah, a whole bunch of different ways,” Daniels agreed. “I was thinkin’ about that my own self, not so long ago.”
Captain Szymanski’s was not the only company billeted at the Gifford Hotel. Along with the beds, there were mattresses and piles of blankets on the floor, to squeeze in as many men as possible. That was fine, unless the Lizards scored a direct hit on the place. If they did, the Gifford would turn into a king-sized tomb.
When things were going smoothly there, Mutt and Muldoon slid outside and went back to Fountain Square. Muldoon gave Daniels a sidelong look. “Don’t it bother you none to have all these horny kids watch you gettin’ in line with ’em, Lieutenant?” he asked slyly. “You’re an officer now, after all.”
“Hell, no,” Mutt answered. “No way now they can figure I ain’t got any balls.” Muldoon stared at him, then broke up. He started to give Mutt a shot in the ribs with an elbow, but thought better of it before he made contact. As he’d said, even in a brothel line an officer was an officer.
The line advanced steadily. Mutt figured the hookers, however many there were, would be moving the dogfaces through as fast as they could, both to make more money and to give themselves more breathers, however brief, between customers.
He wondered if there’d be MPs inside the place. There weren’t, which probably meant it wasn’t quite official, just winked at. He didn’t care. As his foot hit the bottom of the stairway that led up to the girls, he noticed nobody was coming downstairs. They had a back exit, then. He nodded. Whether this crib was official or not, it was certainly efficient.
At the top of the stairs sat a tough-looking woman with a cash box-and a.45, presumably to keep the wages of sin from being redistributed. “Fifty bucks,” she told Mutt. He’d heard her say that a dozen times already, all with the exact same intonation; she might have been a broken record. He dug in his hip pocket and peeled greenbacks off a roll. Like a lot of guys, he had a pretty good wad of cash. When you were up in the front lines, you couldn’t do much spending.
A big blond GI who didn’t look a day over seventeen came out of one of the doors down the hall and headed, sure enough, toward a back stairway. “Go on,” the madam told Mutt. “That’s Number 4, ain’t it? Suzie’s in there now.”
Anyway, I know whose sloppy seconds I’m gettin’,Mutt thought as he walked toward the door. The kid hadn’t looked like somebody with VD, but what did that prove? Not much, and who could guess who’d been in there before him, or before that guy, or before the fellow ahead ofhim?
The door did have a tarnished brass 4 on it. Daniels knocked. Inside, a woman started laughing. “Come on in,” she said. “It sure as hell ain’t locked.”
“Suzie?” Mutt said as he went into the room. The girl, dressed in a worn satin wrap, sat on the edge of the bed. She was about thirty, with short brown hair and a lot of eye makeup but no lipstick. She looked tired and bored, but not particularly mean. That relieved Mutt; some of the whores he’d met had hated men so much, he never could figure out why they’d lie down with them in the first place.
She sized him up the same way he did her. After a couple of seconds, she nodded and tried a smile on for size. “Hello, Pops,” she said, not unkindly. “You know, maybe only one guy in four or five bothers with my name. You ready?” She pointed to a basin and a bar of soap. “Why don’t you wash yourself off first?”
It was a polite order, but an order just the same. Mutt didn’t mind. Suzie didn’t know him from Adam, either. While he was tending to it, she shrugged the wrap off her shoulders. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath it. She wasn’t a Vargas girl or anything, but she wasn’t bad. She lay back on the narrow mattress while Mutt dried himself off and got out of the rest of his clothes.