“Oh, really?” she said mockingly.
“Laurence Olivier’s in it.”
“But there’s blood on this envelope, Pete. There’s a little blood on these tickets, too.”
Karras chuckled unconvincingly. “I know. I was showin’ them off to Nick Stefanos at the grill. You know how he’s always cuttin’ his fingers, slicing up those tomatoes of his—”
“That’s nice. That was real nice of you, Pete. Were you thinking of coming along?” Her tone was queer.
“You know me and plays... I thought maybe you and your friends might use ’em.”
“You’re right, my friends might like to go at that. But the truth is, I won’t be able to use them myself.” She dropped the tickets carelessly on the radiator. One of them slipped through a gap in the tubes and fell to the floor.
“Why, you got other plans?”
“Plans? Yes, I’ve got plans.”
Karras ran a hand along the curve of her hip. He put his cigarette to his mouth, dragged deeply. His exhale streamed toward the window, exploded as it hit the glass. He felt her tremble beneath his touch.
“What’s wrong with you, baby?”
Vera took a drink. Her teeth made a clicking sound against the tumbler. She set the glass down.
“I was just thinking, Pete. You know how I do. About the bomb.”
“That again.”
“Yes.”
“Well, what about it?”
“They say the reds have it now. Do you think they do?”
“Hell, Vera, I don’t know.”
“If they had it... if they had it and decided to use it, I mean... they’d drop it right here on D.C., wouldn’t they. D.C. would be the first place they’d send it, isn’t that right?”
“Christ,” said Karras.
Vera drew some smoke from her cigarette. The smoke dribbled from her lips. “You were over there, Pete, when they dropped that bomb.”
“So?”
“You know what it did.”
“It ended the war.”
“I’m talking about what it did. To human beings, Pete. To children. They say it turned them into little lumps of coal. Boiled their organs from the inside out—”
“Vera,” said Karras, speaking softly. “The bomb ended the war. That’s what it did. That’s what it did for me and all the other GIs who were lucky enough to make it home. And it couldn’t have come quicker. You know, after Leyte, they sent us back to Guam. Lambs for the slaughter, baby, keeping us fed and rested for the invasion of Japan. Towards the end we were out there on those troop ships, just waiting to go in. By then, most of us had been in combat, so in some ways it was worse than our first landing, because by then we knew what to expect. By then we had seen all that death. And we knew the Japanese would fight to the end — theirs and ours — on their own turf. Most of us figured we were never coming back alive. What I’m telling you is, I know everything I need to know about that bomb. That bomb, it took a lot of lives to save even more. And that’s all I need to know.”
Vera made a fist. She pressed it to the window, swirled it around in the condensation. The action opened a peephole through the fog to the outside. She stared through the hole.
“You ever see for yourself what those bombs do, Pete?”
“No.”
“Natalie has.”
“Natalie,” said Karras, with unmasked disgust.
“That’s right. She was on the Manhattan Project. She saw the films.”
“You’re talking about Trinity.”
“Not Trinity. Trinity was just sand and scrub and desert. I’m talking about another test they filmed, where they let one go near some ghost town or something.”
“Vera—”
“Natalie told me how it was. How this old town, it was standing there, still as a picture. And then there was a flash, and the town was just gone. Like a big wind had come along and flattened it all out, blown it all away. Like a big blowdown, Pete. There one minute and then just gone. I’m telling you, Pete, sometimes I stand here at night and look out this window, and I imagine that I see that flash, and then everything coming toward me, the cars, the buildings, the bodies, everything, coming at me at a thousand miles an hour in one big rush. And then nothing, Pete, not even black. Less than black.”
“Vera.” Karras turned her around. He took the cigarette from her hand and crushed it in the ashtray. He held her clammy, rigid body against his.
“I’m sorry to go on about it, Pete. It’s just that I’m afraid.”
“I know it, baby. So am I.”
But he wasn’t afraid. He knew that he should be, but he was not. In the end, Karras feared the image of himself as a useless old cripple more than he feared death. And for a moment, looking over Vera’s shoulder through the clearing in the steamed window, he began to visualize this thing that Vera spoke of, this maelstrom of sound and flesh and architecture, hurtling toward him in one screaming, final rush. And for that one crazy moment, Karras had the peculiar wish to see this blowdown for himself. He knew with certainty that it might be pure and absolute horror. But he had the feeling that it could be something beautiful, too.
31
Recevo blew into his open pack of Raleighs. A cigarette shot out of the deck. He pulled it free with his mouth, struck a straight match off the sole of his shoe.
“Nothing yet,” said Burke.
Recevo lighted the smoke. “That phone hasn’t jumped since the last time you asked, Mr. Burke.”
“That swish,” said Reed. “I knew we shouldn’t of sent him over to the Greek’s.”
Recevo sideglanced Reed, pacing the floor. “It’s only been since last night.”
“You’d think he would’ve called,” said Burke, “to let us know, at least.” Burke turned to Gearhart, stuffed into his chair, his fingers laced across the balloon of his lap. “What do you think, Gearhart? Is there cause for alarm?”
Gearhart shrugged, moved his turtle eyes curiously beneath their lids.
“Maybe he skipped,” said Reed.
“Without his compensation?” said Burke. “I don’t think so. And Bender is a peacock who likes to show his colors. If things had gone off right, he would have been right over here, bragging about the details, embellishing the story.”
Burke poured bourbon from a decanter into a glass. Recevo watched him take it in one swig.
“There’s something wrong,” said Burke.
“Maybe not,” said Recevo. “Maybe they turned Stefanos, and Bender just slept in. He had tickets to that show tonight, remember? Maybe he’s getting himself ready for that.”
Burke poured two more fingers of bourbon.
Reed dragged on his cigarette, snapped off some ash. “I don’t know why we’re dancin’ around about it. What we ought to do, we ought to go over to that grill right now and settle it right. Just us, like we shoulda—”
“They’d take you apart,” said Recevo.
Reed’s eyes flared. “Oh, so they’d take me apart, huh? Is that it?”
“That’s right.”
“Who? That sawed-off little Greek, the one with all the hair? Or maybe your buddy Karras. You tellin’ me that gimp pal of yours would take me apart?”
Recevo didn’t respond. Burke sipped his drink.
Burke said, “Reed’s got a point, Joe, in his own primitive way. We went outside of our own backyard to solve a problem that we should have handled ourselves. Perhaps we should pick up Karras, have a talk with him, see if he can’t act as an intermediary in all this mess.”
“We’re getting ahead of ourselves, Mr. Burke. We don’t even know if there is a problem, not yet.”
“I’m supposed to just sit around and wait?”
“Give it another day,” said Recevo. “I got this feeling, see? By tomorrow, it’s all gonna work itself out.”