by Howard Fast
“You don’t know me,” I said harshly. “Damn it, Pat—you don’t know me.”
“I said that to you before at the party, and do you know I felt that I had broken your heart?”
“My heart doesn’t break.”
“I don’t care what you feel—oh, I do care. But don’t you see that I know what I feel. I mean about you.”
“It doesn’t change the fact that we are strangers.”
“Not to each other,” she said firmly. “On earth, perhaps. We’re strangers here. I grant that. But not to each other.”
“Suppose I told you about myself, and what I told you sickened you.”
“It could not.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Are you sure about me, Breck?” she asked gravely, stopping in the street and turning to face me.
I thought about it for a moment, and then I nodded. “Yes.”
“There you are, Breck. How? Of what are you so damn sure about me?”
“That you are,” I said. “That you exist.”
“Is that enough, Breck?”
“I think so.”
“So enough—” She paused, hesitated, staring into my eyes. We were on a little street off Shaftesbury, next to the Globe Theatre, I think, or perhaps the Apollo, because I remember the theatergoers hurrying past us, brushing against us but paying no more attention than that to a man and a woman who stood facing each other on the street. “So enough,” she said, “that you would live or die for it, Breck.”
“I think—” I didn’t say whatever I would have said, but took her in my arms instead and kissed her deeply and hungrily. You can do that on a street in London if perhaps nowhere else. It was the first time we had really kissed, and that joined us together and we took hands naturally and easily, almost like two children, and walked along without press or purpose but just walking, up Shaftesbury to Cambridge Circus and then along Earlham, bearing right to Covent Garden, where a convoy of lorries were unloading a mountain of oranges from Israel. The smell of the oranges was in the air, mixed with the sweet smell of rotting vegetables and the smell of onions and tomatoes and fresh apples, and we stood for a while and watched and then walked on past the big storage sheds.
Finally Patience said to me, “I can’t take you back to the Embassy, you know—even if Helen Adams were quite different. We are dear friends, but you know, she values my misery. It makes her own bearable. She isn’t happy, yet I think she is honestly concerned about the trouble you might mean.”
“You mean the scandal—not the trouble.”
“Both, Breck.”
“And you’re not concerned?”
“We’ve started the scandal already.” She shrugged. “Whatever comes must come, Breck. We both know that. I don’t care any more. Do you?”
“Isn’t it different with me?” I could have spelled out how different it was.
“Have you nothing to lose if you love me, Breck?”
“If I love you—then I probably have nothing to lose.”
“You still can’t admit it, Breck. I began to tell you before that we must go somewhere. We are grown people, and time confronts us, doesn’t it? You’re at the Albert Hotel?”
I nodded.
“Then we’ll go there.”
“You could be recognized.”
“I don’t care.”
“Well, you care,” I said. “Of course you care.”
“I know best, Breck.”
“You’re sure of yourself.”
“Would you want a woman who wasn’t, who played games with you? I know how you feel about games.”
“All right. You must do what you wish. There can’t be any other way between the two of us.”
“I know that.”
“Should we go there together?” I asked.
“You know the answer to that, Breck. I won’t go surreptitiously, only with you.”
“And then if I told you that this was a game we play to the end, and if the end is death?”
“Oh, who’s the romantic now?” She laughed about it. “I have made myself a commitment, Breck. Don’t question it any more.”
Chapter 12
PATIENCE came into the dry, dead hotel sitting room and looked around and found nothing.
“It’s a place,” I said.
She nodded and walked to the window, which overlooked the court in back.
“Would you ever marry me, Breck?” she asked.
I had tried to think about it. I had placed us in a villa in Amalfi or on Majorca or hidden on one of the Greek islands. But she would not hide—that was not in her. I had thought of us in her Connecticut, which was a place as alien as any in the world, but I had been there once and had the memory of the white clapboard houses and the stone fences.
I told her that I had thought about it, and then she smiled at me and said, “But not really about where I want to live?”
“I thought of that.”
“Here?”
“In the Albert?” I asked unbelievingly.
“No, no—in London. Oh, somewhere in Chelsea in one of those ugly old Victorian buildings—just a flat …”
She let go of it and walked into the bedroom, and I followed her, standing at the door as she examined the room. Then she sat down on the bed and kicked off her shoes and sat looking at an outstretched leg.
“I’m skinny, Breck. Do you like skinny women?”
“I like you.”
“I think,” she said, “that if we talk we’ll mouth dreadful clichés and say things that are ridiculous. Anyway, I’m frightened, so it would be better if you took me in your arms again.”
I took her in my arms, and we sprawled out on the bed, and I knew what it was to love someone. My eyes filled with tears, and she wiped the tears away without any comment. I kissed her, her face, her eyes, her arms, and then I clung to her and I knew the meaning of fear that stabs into your heart like a knife of ice, and then the fear went away.
“Breck, did you ever weep before?” she whispered.
“No,”
“I heard a Negro preacher say once that when a man cried, he was washed in the blood of the Lamb. Oh, how I love you, Breck.”
We made love. For the first time, I came to a woman with love and it was all good, and then out of the bright and endless darkness we found each other again, and she said to me, “Oh, Breck—I’m hungry.”
“Of course, we had no dinner,” I said.
“Because today had no beginning. It’s always been. Please don’t let it end, Breck.”
“All things end,” I said gently.
I ordered some food from room service, but our hunger for each other was more pressing. The waiter knocked and knocked, and finally I let him in, signed for the food, and tipped him.
He was a small, scrawny kid, no more than twenty-one or twenty-two, open-eyed, staring at me and looking past me. The tip was a pound note, and he said, “This here’s a pound, guv’nor?”
“It’s more than they gave you to say what you’ve seen.”
“And how do you know that, guv’nor?”
“Here’s another pound.”
“What for, guv’nor?”
“To say you didn’t see a bloody thing.”
He nodded and left, and then Patience came into the sitting room, wrapped in my robe.
“Sit down, Pat. Here’s cold chicken and wine and a pork pie. It’s not great, but it’s good English food.”
She sat at the table and sipped wine.
“Why don’t you eat?”
“I was hungry before,” she said. “Not now. I want you to hold me, but you can’t hold me if we’re eating.”
“I’ll hold you later.”
“Who are they, Breck?”
“Who?”
“They—the people who want to know about us.”
“I just played a hunch,” I said.
“What was your hunch about, Breck?”
“About us.”
“You’re very prov
oking. Is that because I love you too much to be annoyed?”
“I imagine so.”
She leaned back to her chair, touching the wineglass the fingers of both hands and smiling at me, and said, “Breck—Breck, shall I tell you some of the things I will not ask you?”
“If you wish.”
“I wish, Breck darling. First, I will not ask you again who they are, since obviously you have no intentions of telling me. Second, I will not ask you who you are—really—I mean who you really are. Third, I will not ask you what you do. And fourth, I will not ask you again whether you love me.”
“I love you,” I said.
She rose and walked into the bedroom, hidden in the folds of the robe, and then threw it off and stretched herself lazily and naked on the bed, “It’s a decent figure for forty-two, isn’t it?” she wanted to know. “God, it’s so frightening to be over forty, Breck. The chances disappear. The world squeezes and you can’t break loose, can you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hold me, Breck, and I’ll forget questions.”
Her life was like no other life that had ever been, her warmth, her smell and taste and whimper, her bones under the flesh, her breath. It was like she was giving suck to me, pouring into me something that had never been before, like breathing life into the mouth pf myself choking and asphyxiating.
She lay with her eyes closed. “I could fall asleep here, Breck,” she whispered. “Don’t let me.”
“What shall I do?”
“Pinch me, prod me. I must go back there, and before midnight, Breck. Oh, I resent it so! I even dreamed of cutting it all through at the root, just going to the airport and going and losing my name and my position and everything else—oh, just one simple, enormous damn it all to hell and down with Norton Glee Quigley and dump him in the lake. I used to go to a statusy camp in Maine, proper young ladies of proper lineage, and it became our little cry of defiance—dump her in the lake. Down with dreadfuls and up with water—do you like a woman who chatters away as I do, Breck?”
“I don’t mind it. But your thing stays a dream, doesn’t it?”
“Breck, I have two kids—mother, friends. Well, you don’t run, do you? There are sensible ways, like a properly planned divorce. But you would have to want me—to marry me. And you don’t, do you?”
“No.”
“But you’re not married.”
“No.”
“And you do love me?”
“You’re all that I love,” I said. “The beginning and the end.”
“Then what is it? What secret could be so dreadful? I don’t think there is anything in the world that could make me love you less.”
“How can you say that about any man?” I wanted to know.
“Not any man—just yourself. You can never see yourself as I see you. You “have no vanity, Breck. You can’t feel your own softness, the thing in you that is so gentle and good.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said coldly.
She was hurt, and she turned away from me. I went into the next room then and dressed and waited for her. She was dressed when she joined me, and herself again, and she apologized for her impatience with me.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters,” she said stubbornly. She broke the pork pie now and began to nibble at it with a sort of hungry-little-girl ferocity. “Aren’t you hungry?” she demanded.
“No.”
“Well, I am. And it matters. It matters that you’re nasty to me when I say something kind and loving to you.”
“What you said was not kind and loving, Pat. It was an invention for your own purpose.”
“My own purpose!” she snorted, and then stuffed her mouth with pie. “Oh, I like that! My purpose! And just what secret, evil purpose could I have that is accomplished by telling you that you are gentle and good—”
“Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to talk with a mouth full of food?”
“No! And I am ready to change my mind. I don’t think you are very gentle and good.”
“All right. That’s better.”
She came up to me and I embraced her, and we stood, clutching each other and full of our frustration and hopelessness.
“You couldn’t stand a civilized home and children, could you?” she mumbled into my shirt front.
“Pat darling, that has nothing to do with it.”
“Then why can’t you tell me why?”
“I will tell you, sometime. I don’t want to lie about it. What I have to tell you isn’t an easy thing.”
“Don’t you think I understand that? But it isn’t the end of the world either—is it?”
“Perhaps.”
“Well, it is not. That’s my own decision.”
“You make good decisions,” I said, smiling. “You’re a very strong person.”
“Well, you wouldn’t want some soft, wishy-washy thing, would you?”
“No, just as you are.”
After that I took her back to the Embassy. We walked there, hand in hand—and it was all too short a distance, too short a time. A block from the Embassy I kissed her softly on her cheek. At the door she left me without looking back, and then it was as if she had never been.
Chapter 13
I TOOK a cab to Bloomsbury, and although it was hard onto midnight, a light still burned in the stamp shop on Great Russell Street and I could make out Gorivich behind the counter, peering through a glass at one of his precious bits of paper. He glanced up as I knocked at the door, nodded recognition, and smilingly came around the counter to open up.
“Breckner,” he acknowledged with pleasure. “I said you would come. Believe me, it’s a fine prop to a man’s ego to make a right estimation of character. But that’s what they pay me for, isn’t it? Well, I was waiting for you.”
“How did you know I would come?”
He closed the door of the shop behind me and locked it. “Does one divulge professional secrets?” He shrugged. “And believe me, the secrets of psychology sound foolish when verbalized. Let it be that I knew—so definitely that I asked Smith-Chandler to be with us tonight.”
“Smith-Chandler? You mean he’s here tonight?”
“Just in back of the store, in my humble quarters, Breckner. Would you please follow me?”
I followed him behind the counter, through a door, into a rather pleasant and comfortably furnished bedroom-sitting room. There was a studio couch, several upholstered chairs, a rather lovely, round Queen Anne table, and four striking Chippendale chairs drawn up to it. A wall was lined with stamp albums in shelves, and on the other walls were five splendid French Impressionist paintings, two Renoirs, a big Sisley landscape, a Seurat, and a Vuillard of a peasant woman. Smith-Chandler sat at the Queen Anne table, puffing at a long cigar and observing its ash thoughtfully. He glanced up as I entered and said, offhandedly, “Hello, Breckner. My pleasure.”
We had not met before but he spoke as if we had. He was a rather short, good-looking man, with a great head of white hair and very dark eyes.
“Would you like a cigar?” he asked me. “These are excellent Havanas that Gorivich pressed on me, and indeed a luxury. Almost a pound apiece, I would say. Can you imagine that going up in smoke each time a man indulges himself? One could have a woman for half of that twenty years ago. Well, times change, don’t they, Breckner, and inflation is as implacable as death and taxes.”
I shook my head.
“Ah, Breckner the puritan—he neither smokes nor drinks, which is altogether admirable. The hand would tremble, the trigger finger would be a trifle unsteady …”
I watched him carefully but to no end. As with Grupperman and Gorivich, his armor was complete and invulnerable.
“Do sit down, Breckner,” he said pleasantly.
Gorivich put brandy and soda and glasses on the table, and then he joined us, the three of us sitting around the table, the two of them silent and waiting.
At last I said, �
�It’s no good. You know that.”
“What is no good?” Gorivich asked gently. “You must be more specific, Breckner. Smith-Chandler has only just arrived here from our own country, and he takes the rather simplistic yet direct position that members of The Department are motivated by loyalty and that they do their duty. If you expect him to move along with your rather cryptic utterances, you must be more explicit.”
“I can’t do the job.”
“You mean, specifically, that you will not carry out your duties,” said Gorivich.
“Yes. That’s what I mean.”
“The quality I like best in you, Breckner,” Smith-Chandler put in now, “is your directness and your truthfulness. Grupperman was impressed with you as a forthright man. But a forthright man is a very dangerous man. Now listen to me, Breckner—you are a paid assassin, a killer who kills for hire. Gorivich tells me that you were upset when he put that to you. Why? Why were you upset? Do you deny yourself?”
“I do my work.”
“You do it well and you take your pay. And your work is to kill. You are aware of that, are you not?”
“Yes.”
“Do you lie to yourself? Do you dissemble to yourself? Do you convince yourself that you are the just extension of a noble cause?”
“No.”
“Then we will agree on an appellation. You are an assassin. What do you come to us with? A distaste for this particular assignment—or for the profession?”
“I don’t want to put it that way,” I said slowly. “I speak only for myself. I can’t carry out this assignment.”
“Ah—now we have the particular. What of the general? Suppose we should say to you, ‘Understandable, Breckner. This assignment is not for you. We have another assignment that must be carried out immediately.’ What then?”
“To kill?”
“Yes—to do what you do best, Breekner.”
I sat there and thought about it for a while. They didn’t press me. Gorivich poured a round of brandy, and they sipped their drinks and Smith-Chandler puffed on his cigar. The long ash held with dignity and pride—as you might expect from a cigar worth a pound. I took myself forward into time, step by step, trying desperately to look into myself and examine myself, but when I stripped away the veneer that was the tall, long-limbed Richard Breckner, white hunter, I found nothing, only a gaping emptiness that mocked me like a yawning, toothless mouth of death.
