“Okay, Kiriako. I’ll take it slow.”
“You and your buddy, go cool off in the bar.”
Karras and Recevo stepped off. Karras smiled at the men and gave one to the brunette as he walked away. Tsondilis helped Brown Suit up, gave him a cloth napkin to wipe the blood from his mouth. The orchestra went into a Guy Lombardo number, and things began to slow down.
Lois Roman met Karras and Recevo at the bar. They ordered more drinks, and drank them slowly and quietly as the place thinned out. After about fifteen minutes, Recevo shook himself into his topcoat.
“I’m going to drop Lois off,” he said. “I’ll swing back in about fifteen, pick you up.”
“All right.”
“Here.” Recevo slipped a couple of cigarettes into Karras’s suit pocket.
“Thanks for watching my back, buddy.”
“No problem.”
“So long, Lois.”
“See ya, Pete.” She planted one on his cheek, and she and Recevo went out the side door.
Karras smoked one of the Raleighs and drank down half of his beer. It was only him at the bar now, and Steve Nicodemus, kind of slumped over at the other end.
“Oh, what the hell,” said Karras.
He picked up his beer, walked down to the end of the bar, had a seat next to Nicodemus. Nicodemus looked over, tried to focus, did it enough to recognize Karras. He straightened up a little, pushed at the knot of his tie.
“Pete.”
“Steve. Buy you a drink?”
“Sure, why not. I’m havin’ bourbon, straight up.”
“Hey, Johnny!” said Karras. “A shot of Old Blue Springs neat, for Steve, here.”
“The house rotgut is okay by me.”
“Relax, Steve, it’s on me.”
Johnny Kavakos served the whiskey. Karras put fire to a cigarette.
“How’s your mom and dad?”
“You know. They’re okay, I guess.”
Yeah, Karras knew. He had seen Steve Nicodemus’s mother several times on the street since the war, gray hair pinned up, silent, wearing black. Always wearing black.
“My mother,” said Nicodemus, “she misses him all the time, you know. She can’t get her baby boy out of her mind. Goddamnit, Pete, I miss him, too.”
“I know it, Steve. I think about him every day.”
Nicodemus tried on a weak smile. “I used to smack him all the time, remember? It was to make him tough. Because he wasn’t tough, see? He never wanted to hurt anybody or anything. He only wanted to go to Griffith, watch the Nats, or listen to the ballgames on the radio when they were away. When he went into the service he was kind of excited about it, ’cause he figured it was just another chance to play a little ball. He could have drawn desk duty, too, if he hadn’t been such a good shot. A marksman, is what they called him. So they gave him a carbine instead of an M-1. A carbine — what is that, anyway, some fuckin’ toy?”
“It’s a light gun, all right,” said Karras, who could think of nothing else to say.
“And then they landed him and all the others on that beach at Anzio. Soon as he hit the beach, they got him. I bet he never even fired his weapon. He caught a bullet, right in the mouth.”
“Steve—”
“But Billy, like I say, he wasn’t tough. When you guys were kids, you used to rumble with them nigger boys from Bloodfield, remember? He’d make some excuse, tell you he had to come home, help me work on some soapbox I was buildin’ in the alley. Shit, Pete, there wasn’t any soapbox. Billy just didn’t want to fight. That’s all it was. He just plain didn’t want to fight. So what’d they do? What’d those motherless bastards do? They gave him a carbine and dropped him on a beach. A goddamn, fuckin’ carbine.”
“I know it, Steve. It’s tough, buddy. It’s tough.”
Nicodemus’s shoulders began to shake. A thread of mucus dripped from his nose and settled in his brown moustache. Karras put a cocktail napkin in Nicodemus’s hand.
“Yeah,” said Nicodemus, wiping the napkin across his face, “I used to smack him around. It was to make him tough, that’s all it was. But if he was here right now, I’m tellin’ you, I’d never lay a hand on him again. If Billy walked through that door right now—”
“All right, Steve. Forget it.”
“You’re right. I gotta just forget it.” Nicodemus tilted his head back, let the bourbon drain from the shot glass and down his throat. He closed his eyes, set the glass down on the bar. He smiled a funny little smile then, without an ounce of happiness in it at all. “Must be nice, to be able to afford good whiskey.”
“I’m doing okay.”
“Yeah, you and that Italian boy, you guys are doin’ all right. The Greek community around town, they’re all talkin’ about how good you and your Italian friend are doing. Real interested, like. They’re talkin’ all about it, Pete.” Steve Nicodemus stared at Karras, kept the stare fixed.
Okay, here it comes: Why was it my brother on that beach, and not you? Why did Billy have to go out like that, and not you — a guy rousting immigrants for loan-shark money and running muscle or the protection racket. Why’d my brother Billy have to die, a guy with a heart as wide as a mile. Why him, and not a guy like you?
Karras stabbed out his cigarette. “I got to get goin’, Steve. You take care.”
“Sure, Pete. Say hello to Eleni for me. Thanks for the drink.”
Karras left money on the bar, went down to the other end and found his topcoat on a stool where he had left it. He looked back at Nicodemus staring straight ahead, his hand around the empty shotglass. From across the room, he could see that Steve Nicodemus had begun to cry. Karras looked away, said goodnight to Johnny Kavakos behind the bar, nodded to Jerry Tsondilis at the door. He stepped out to the street, walked to the Mercury idling at the curb. He got inside.
“I’ve been out here ten minutes,” said Recevo.
Karras settled into his seat. “I was talkin’ to Steve Nicodemus.”
“How’s he doin’?”
“You know.”
“Yeah.” Recevo lowered the volume on the radio. The two of them sat there for a minute or so, not speaking, not hearing the tune. Recevo said, “You wanna know somethin’? I was scared over there, Pete.”
“What?”
“I never told you this. But on Guadalcanal — when things really got out of control — man, I was just plain scared.”
“We were all scared.”
“But I was scared frozen, buddy. One day, when they ordered us to go over this hill... well, there was this Jap machine-gun emplacement on the other side. All the guys that had gone before us had bought it. We could see them droppin’ from where we were. When I got so close to my own death that I could smell it, I just froze up. I made a promise to myself that if I ever got out of it, got back home, that I’d do anything to live to a ripe old age. In the war, I found out that I was just like anybody else, Pete — so afraid, like everybody else. So goddamned afraid to die.”
“But you made it. You got over that hill and you made it home.”
“Yeah, I made it. But I found a few things out about myself that I didn’t like.” Recevo swallowed hard. “How about you? What was it like that day when you killed all those Japs?”
Karras shrugged. “I just... hell, I don’t know. It’s funny, Joe, but I knew that it wasn’t my day. I think you know when it is. And I knew that it was just not my day.”
Recevo put the shifter in gear. He checked the rearview, then looked over at Karras.
“How’d Billy get it, anyway?”
“He took a bullet in the mouth.”
“Those guys at Anzio really took a beating.”
“Yeah,” said Karras. “They caught hell on that beach.”