I said, “I’d like a cigarette.”
“By all means! Perhaps your wife would like a last one also.”
From the doorway Ann Fullerton said, “Sergi! You’re not—”
Without turning his head he said, “Shut up! Speak when you’re spoken to.”
I lit a cigarette for Lodi and one for myself. My hands weren’t shaking, but not because they didn’t want to. I said, “So you’re going to pull the string on us. I wonder why. Not for the secret machine, I’m sure. You must have read all about that in the papers by this time.”
He swung his crossed leg idly. “No, my friend. Not the machine. We slipped badly on that, Ann and I. No; you took the lives of six of the men associated with me. In effect, you made a fool out of me as well. This last is unforgivable, Mr. Terris.”
“Then you won’t accept my apology?”
He eyed me almost admiringly. “You are a brave man, sir. I like brave men... Tell me. Mr. Terris, do you love your wife?”
“...We weren’t planning on getting a divorce.”
He nodded, satisfied. “I don’t intend to kill you, my friend. Not, that is, unless you literally force me to — which you may well do. It will be an interesting experiment, this — to learn if grief can drive a man to ignoring the law of self-preservation. I know it has done that to some men.”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” I said, “what the hell you’re talking about.”
He bent forward across his knee. “Killing you, sir, would accomplish nothing. As they say, your troubles would be over. Dead men feel nothing: no pain, no anguish of soul, no regrets. But when a man loses the one thing he holds most dear, something he has suffered for, endured hardship for, fought for — that loss is, to him, more horrible even than death. In your particular case, Terris, it would be your wife.”
Something with cold feet walked up my spine. I bit down on my teeth, and it was almost a minute before my throat could form words. “You can’t afford another mistake, Porkov. You’ll take a full helping of hell if you so much as start a run in one of my wife’s stockings. People who know me will tell you that.”
He said, “You fascinate me, Mr. Terris,” and lifted the gun and shot Lodi three times through the left breast.
Through a twisting nightmare of incredulity I watched my wife droop like a tired flower. Then her body sagged forward and she toppled out of the chair to form a pathetic heap on the rug. Death had been instantaneous.
I stood up the way an old, old man stands up. I started toward Porkov. I was in no hurry. I wouldn’t live to reach his throat anyway. But that was where I was going.
From the doorway, Ann Fullerton took a gun out of her bag and shot Porkov through the head. Before he hit the floor she was standing over him, pulling the trigger again and again. He caught the full load and even after the gun was empty she went on pulling the trigger in a frenzy of hatred and revulsion until I took it gently out of her fingers.
She turned on me, her eyes burning, her breasts shaking, her body trembling. “I killed him, Karl. I love you! I want you! Right here! Now! Now!”
You don’t explain those things. Not at the time, nor later. Nor ever. The blood sang through me and her body was hotter than any fire and mine was just as hot.
I was sitting on the bed when she came out of the shower. She was as naked as the palm of a baby’s hand and she smelled of bath powder. She came over and sat down on the bed beside me and put both arms around me.
“We’ll put all those other things out of our minds, Karl, darling.” Her voice was like the purr of a cat. “I loved you from the first moment I saw you. We’ll go away, Karl, and we’ll have each other, and that will be all we’ll ever want. Just us two...”
I didn’t say anything. She got up and went over to the vanity and began to run the comb through her hair. She was what the boys who invented Valhalla were talking about. She had a body that would melt a glacier from across the street. She was everything a man wanted in a woman if all he wanted was a body.
Very slowly I reached under the pillow and took out the .45. I held it loosely in one hand and raised my head and said, “Turn around, Ann.”
She turned around and saw the gun and all the color ran out of her face. “No, darling. No! I killed him, Karl. I killed the man who shot your wife. He would have killed you too. I saved your life!”
I said. “Sure, baby, you did fine,” and fired twice. She caught both slugs full in the belly. I could hear them go in from clear across the room.
I put the gun down and smiled a little looking at her. I said, “The worms will love you, darling,” and got up and walked over to the telephone.
I wondered what the cops would say about finding her naked that way.
The Affair with the Dragon Lady
Now that that wise guy photographer from Life found us out there’s hardly any sense making up excuses for what happened. We might sound like a pack of idiots to some, but, damn it all, for two whole years we had a lot of fun with our secret society and crazy clubhouse and in a way it’s a shame to see it all end.
Only watch out who you call crazy, because you’d be surprised at the big names who put on the Dragon Lady costume for one of the meetings and tucked same costume away in a locked trunk in the attic and hoped for another invite back.
Like all good things, though, it had to come to an end. And, like most good things, it took a dame and a calamity to bring it about, so now our secret society is out in the open where all can see it and to save wear and tear on the tarmac I’ll tell you about it.
The story really starts back in October of ’45 and you know how that was. All of us coming out of the service all at once with a pocket full of dough, if you were lucky, and plenty of places to spend it. If you were lucky enough to be married, you settled down right away. If you weren’t, you made all the places, saw all the faces, joined the 52–20 club until you got a job, and from then on wondered what had happened to three or four years and didn’t know whether to be sad or glad about being in civvies.
Well, there we were, the ten husbands of the Dragon Lady. Our mutual wife was a B-17E with bullet-hole acne, a patched-up tail, and joints that creaked and groaned even when she was trying to rest. Still, she was a thing of beauty who took us all there and back 82 times, twice almost giving her own life in a grand gesture that we might live, but survived because our love for her was just as strong.
You can imagine having to leave her. We each took a little piece of her away in our B-4 bags, kissed her mutilated body, and left her there with tears of 100 octane dripping from No. 1 and No. 4 engines. Don’t ever tell us an airplane can’t cry.
We did, too, because, behind us, strangers took her to a far away prison in the desert with others of her kind, put her in solitary confinement behind plastic shrouds and left her there to die in whatever strange way airplanes are supposed to die.
Us? We all came home to the same state, settled down within three counties of each other and began the slow disintegrating process of living. We all wrote, sent greeting cards, got drunk, and went phone happy sometimes, but we stayed in touch. From Ed Parcey, the tail gunner, up to me as first pilot, we all had babies a few times, named them after each other until you could hardly tel) who from whom on the roster.
That is, all of us except Vern Tice, our old co-pilot who out and out refused to enter the marital state because he didn’t want to get like us. Which is to say, weathered out of our own desires by women who made better mothers than wives and wanted the same thing from both children and husbands alike.