Kiss Me Once

by Thomas Gifford

  He never even noticed it. The twin explosions came almost simultaneously and the recoil blew Cindy backward against the wall.

  Bennie left this imperfect world in a blur of black wool courtesy of Brooks Brothers, his bowler hat sailing away like youth and memory and hope getting out just in time. Both shells caught him waist-high. The top half of Bennie spun sideways and backward, following a trajectory not unlike that of Cookie Candioli’s final flight. The bottom half of Bennie stood there for a while like a doubtful guest, then tipped over.

  Cassidy got up and stood looking at him, part of him, amazed at what had just happened. He felt as if Bennie had been interrupted to death. Poor Bennie had made the same mistake twice. Twice when he had Cassidy down he’d have been better off just killing him. But he was a sentimental galoot, a softie at heart, and he hadn’t taken the situation seriously enough. Maybe he didn’t think a nice girl like Miss Squires would actually kill him. Cassidy could hear him saying it. Hell of a thing, Lew, hell of a thing. He wondered if Bennie would make it through the Gates of Heaven, if he’d meet him one day walking the Streets of Glory. Maybe they needed a guard up there.

  The next thing he knew he was lying facedown in somebody else’s blood and yet another pool of pain, brand-new shining pain. It felt like a sledgehammer had hit him in the back. He heard Cindy screaming. He heard the crack of the shot that hit him. He squirmed sideways like a crab and came up against Bennie’s legs, his face in the wet snow on Bennie’s galoshes.

  When he’d rolled over onto his back and hitched up against the wall, he looked up and saw Max Bauman coming down the stairs one at a time. He had a .45 in his hand and he was crying, tears streaming down his sallow, sunken cheeks. He was wiping his nose on his sleeve.

  “Bennie,” he sobbed. “Jesus, Ben …”

  He’d shot Cassidy in the back but high and to one side. He figured his shoulder was crushed. The pain was making him sweat in the cold. He had no feeling in his right arm. His fingers wouldn’t move. He felt like a burning blade had been plunged into his back. He was seeing lots of little bright stars and everything was fuzzy.

  Max came down the stairs slowly, a tired old man. He was still wearing his tux under his long formal evening coat, a homburg, black gloves, none the worse for wear following his hike through the drifts. All the snow had long since melted from his trousers and coat and he looked much as he always did. Except that now he was a ruin, old and sick and tired and shambling as he came down. Cassidy had seen him cry once before, a million years ago when he’d sat before the fire at the end of a long party and told the story of his son Irvie dying a hero. Going down with his ship.

  Now Max was coming down the stairs to a room that looked like a battlefield, the men who’d been doing his bidding strewn dead at his feet. It was Max’s kind of war and it had been going on a long time. Everybody was tired or dead. As if he were reading Cassidy’s mind, he said, “Are they all dead now, Lew?”

  “I sure as hell hope so.”

  He looked over at Cindy, smiled wearily. “Cindy. I’ve missed you, baby.”

  She tried to smile back, brushed her hair away from her face. “Well, we’re all in quite a mess, aren’t we, Max?”

  “Funny the way things turn out, Cin. Who’da thunk it?” He shook his head, chuckled. “I’ll be dead soon, you didn’t know that, did you? Why did you always lie to me, Cin? Was I so awful?”

  “Oh, Max, you were good to me. And I didn’t always lie to you. I hardly ever lied to you.”

  “Only about the big things, I guess,” he said. “Love, death … sure, death, baby. Harry Madrid and I had a little talk the other night, Cin. All about that shoot-out in Jersey that time. I couldn’t believe it, Cin, couldn’t believe you’d do that, set me up … ah, hell, it’s all over now, anyway, isn’t it? Put down the gun, Cin. It’s empty. You used both barrels on Ben. You shouldn’t have killed Ben—”

  “But why not?” she asked. “Isn’t that what this is all about? Who lives and who dies? You’ve already decided to kill me—”

  “I’m not so sure of that now I see you. That’s what I hoped for, that I’d see you and remember the good times and then I couldn’t kill you. Oh, hell, Cin … if you’d have humored me another couple months I’d have died and you’d have come out safe and sound and rich. Instead”—he pointed with the gun at the carnage in the gray light of dawn—“it’s the last act of Hamlet. And you killed Ben … But, then, how long can I miss him? Coupla months? Big deal.” He wiped sweat from his forehead, looked over at Cassidy. “And you, Lew. Whattaya got to say for yourself? I hear tell you’ve been fucking my little girl here while you were supposed to be looking for her boyfriend. Hey, the joke’s on Max! God damn you, how I hate that kind of double-dealing crap! It’s not worthy of you, Lew. Your father’d be disappointed in you … say, you shot up bad, Lew?”

  “I’ll live,” he said.

  Max laughed, coughed into his fist. It was cold. His breath hung like smoke between them. “Well, now you mention it, I don’t really think you will.” He pulled a pigskin cigar case from his pocket, bit the end from a cigar, and lit it with the flame from his gold lighter. The gun never wavered. He coughed again, a man coming down with a cold that didn’t matter anymore. “Come over here, baby. Sit on the steps by me.” She went and they both sat down. “Are you sorry, Cin?”

  She shook her head. “Maybe. I don’t know, I wish it gone fifteen with Tony Janiro. He managed a broken, cracked smile. There was a black space where one of his front teeth had been. Harry Madrid was close now. He moved to steady Terry but Terry shook him off. Somehow they were allies for the last act …

  “Max, your army’s dying off. Looks like old Bob Erickson over there. Swordplay, Lew—I’m proudaya.” Terry tried to laugh and winced. Max stared up at him, slowly puffing. “Listen, Max, this is serious. I just tripped over something out there on the porch. Looked like about half of Bennie to me. Pieces of Cookie Candioli out there, too. I’d say the old Cooker man has boosted his last hubcap. Some party you guys been having.”

  “Harry,” Max said. “Whose side you on, anyway?”

  “Always on the side of the angels, Max. Had to get you one way or another. Matter of principle. This was the best way. You’re gonna have to die now, Max.”

  The sun was coming up behind Harry Madrid, a bright pink glow stretching across the snow. It hurt Cassidy’s eyes. Maybe nothing awful could happen on such a beautiful morning.

  “Put the heater down, Max. Give us all a break.” Terry winked at him, good-natured.

  “No, I can’t do that, son. I’m a very sad old man this morning but I don’t feel at all benevolent. I know you’re supposed to get all soft and easy at the center when you get ready to cross over … but I just don’t feel that way, Terry. Maybe I’m bitter about the deal I’m getting—you think? So I die now, I die in a coupla months, what’s it to me?”

  He pushed the gun’s thick, blunt muzzle up under Cindy’s chin. She looked into Cassidy’s eyes. He could have lost himself in the sapphire ocean of her eyes. He saw her and he saw a memory of Karin … Cindy, Cindy … The muzzle pressed into her white flesh. She was eternal, all women, he knew it as Max had known it. The Daughter of Time. Her eyes were speaking to him. She wasn’t afraid.

  “So, we got a Mexican standoff,” Terry said.

  “No.” Max shook his head. “I win.”

  Her eyes weren’t blinking. Her patrician face was expressionless. Her eyes were speaking to Cassidy. She saw him, she saw past him, she saw the limitless future called forever.

  Then he knew what she was saying.

  She was saying good-bye.

  Max pulled the trigger and blew her head off.

  A long sigh escaped from Terry.

  Then the noise began and Cassidy let it roll over him and there was no escape.

  Terry was shooting Max, breaking him up into chunks with the slugs, and it was taking forever. The cigar, the hat, the toupee, the face. The explosions came one after anot
her and Cassidy just didn’t give a shit. Terry had come back from the dead and Cindy was gone … all gone …

  Finally the trigger was going click, click, click, one empty chamber after another.

  Terry was kneeling beside Cassidy, his arm around his good shoulder.

  “Time to call it a day, amigo.” His gun clattered to the floor. Harry Madrid bent down and together they helped Cassidy to his feet.

  They went outside.

  The sun was glaring on the snow and then it was fading away and Cassidy was colder than he’d ever been.

  Everybody was dead.

  Everybody but Harry Madrid and Terry Leary and Lew Cassidy.

  Cassidy

  OKAY, OKAY, I’VE HEARD IT all.

  So we weren’t Romeo and Juliet. And we weren’t Héloïse and Abelard. And we weren’t Tracy and Hepburn. I know all that. I’m a college man, after all.

  But we weren’t Abbott and Costello either.

  You could argue pretty persuasively that I only spent a few days with her and what can you tell about somebody in a few days?

  Well, the answer is, I don’t know. I don’t know how you explain love and I don’t know what would have happened if Max hadn’t pulled the trigger and she had lived. I don’t have a clue, frankly.

  But I know what I felt for her and I know how deeply she touched me and I remember making love with her and I remember how she stood up to the bad guys at the end.

  I remember her solemn face and the veil of blond hair and the blue of her eyes. The eyes, the good-bye eyes.

  Some days I’d give anything if I could just stop thinking about those eyes, never remember them again. I see them saying good-bye and I think of the life she might have had and the years of beauty that will never be, all the years we might have had together. There is an old belief that on some distant shore, far from despair and grief, old friends will meet once more. Maybe I’ll find Cindy on that distant shore. I would like that.

  But I’m not planning on it.

  It can be argued that at bottom she was very bad news, that she was the kind of woman who brings everything raining down on herself and all the guys who care about her. There was a hell of a pile of stiffs to support that particular thesis.

  Still, it didn’t matter.

  What was she really? I don’t begin to know. Maybe such women always exist primarily in men’s imaginations, in the foggy valleys of longing and romance.

  She’d been dead a year and a half and I still woke up in the morning having dreamt of her, still wanting to see her and speak to her and touch her. And knowing, of course, that none of it could ever happen again. But I wasn’t altogether sure she was gone because something still whispered to me that I would find her again because she was indeed eternal, the Daughter of Time, the light and the dark. Yeah, Max had it right all along but she was a spirit, quicksilver, and he couldn’t hold her.

  Every couple of weeks I drove out to the lovely cemetery in Westchester and visited her grave.

  For a while, I admit, the journeys were a little grief-stricken, pretty morbid, but then the sorrow and the weeping began to subside in the face of time.

  Through the rest of 1944, through the D-day landings in June, through Tom Dewey getting the Republican nomination for the presidency and then losing to Roosevelt, who looked like he was dying and won anyway, through the German breakout which came to be known as the Battle of the Bulge, I didn’t trust myself to tell anyone I was visiting her, bringing flowers like a suitor. It was just between the two of us and I didn’t know what shape I’d be in if someone came after me.

  I had this tendency to sit there on a bench near the marker and let my memory wander wherever it wished. I would remember that day in the Oak Bar at the Plaza when she’d swept nervously in and sat beside me, then I’d go through the whole day and it would end with my stick sinking into Bennie’s head …

  Or I’d remember the way she’d moved against me that night we’d stood in the cold and watched the U-boats sink the ships off the Jersey shore …

  Or I’d think about Cézanne’s Greetings at Christmas … I’d think about I love you … and I’d think about the last good-bye look in her eyes …

  I was remembering a lot of those things still by the summer of 1945 but the sorrow wasn’t so intense anymore. Time had worked its surgical miracle on me. In return for my heart, my love, my feelings, Time granted me the numbness to survive the memories with my sanity intact.

  Karin and Cindy.

  The only women I’d ever loved and they were both dead.

  Well, everybody got buried, of course, all in a flurry there.

  Bennie didn’t seem to have any people so Terry and I saw to it he wound up at the cemetery in Westchester. Not far from Cindy. It was something to smile about but I’m not sure why.

  Bob Erickson got shipped back to Saint Louis, to the bosom of his family, and Cookie Candioli’s people did for him. They all got buried.

  And Max, too, of course. A very nice Jewish cemetery, next to doctors and lawyers and financiers and writers and teachers, very good company, indeed. But then he was a Harvard man.

  One day there was a reading of Max’s will. It turned out that he hadn’t been kidding about looking upon Terry like a son. Terry needn’t have worried about the cigars, for instance. Max left him the entire supply of Havanas, five thousand and eleven of them, all safe and secure in the humidor room at Dunhill.

  But that wasn’t all.

  He left Terry the Long Island mansion.

  And one thing more.

  The club. He left Terry the club. Heliotrope.

  Sitting in the cemetery. August sunshine warm on my face. Flowers banked at the stone, beautiful as she deserved. Kids laughing, dancing around a gravestone not far away. I was sitting remembering Cindy as if we’d had lots of good times together instead of just our few days. Sometimes I got to thinking about her very hard and it seemed that those good times stretched out further and further until they became something like a lifetime, a lifetime of our own. At least in the dimensions of my mind, which was really all I had left of Cindy. And I always thought of the little girl sitting on the tombstone in the little English cemetery wondering what it all meant.

  A couple of men were coming toward me from way down by the road where I’d parked the same little Ford convertible. I watched them through the shimmering heat haze. They looked like unreal messengers from another galaxy, shapes shifting in the heat.

  It was August. The dog days.

  The war was over and the good guys had won.

  The Germans surrendered on the sixth of May in a little red schoolhouse which was General Eisenhower’s HQ.

  General Jodl, Chief of the German General Staff, came to the schoolhouse and signed the unconditional surrender. Eisenhower wasn’t there at the time. When Jodl and the representatives of the Supreme Allied Command, the Russians, and the Frenchmen had all signed, Jodl went to meet Ike. He asked for mercy. Probably figured it couldn’t hurt to ask.

  The European war ended at 2:41 Monday morning, French time. It was still Sunday evening, 8:41 Wartime, in New York. Of course, we were still slugging it out with the Japanese on Okinawa where lots of men were dying. And the flags were still at half staff because Franklin Roosevelt, who had seen us through so much, was dead.

  New York got swept away in a premature celebration stemming from the first radio reports Monday morning. Mayor La Guardia in his high-pitched voice told the celebrants to knock it off in an emotional midafternoon speech. He told them that the end wasn’t official yet, that for all they knew men were still fighting and dying over there, and a hell of a lot of people in Times Square began feeling pretty sheepish. The bobby-soxers and the guys and gals looking for a day off and an excuse for getting loaded calmed down and the crowd broke up and the mounted police cleared the area. By five o’clock there wasn’t much of anybody left to read the Times bulletin board announcing that V-E Day would come the next morning at nine o’clock. But later the celebratio
n began all over again and old-timers said the city had never seen anything like it. The din was incessant. Every boat on the East River and the Hudson kept their sirens and whistles going and the cabbies laid on their horns and total strangers went to bed together.

  Six weeks later Eisenhower came back to the city’s greatest welcome, four million people along the parade route to see the general. It had been quite a war, after all. And the marines were still fighting on Okinawa. Two days later Okinawa was ours but the cost was high. Lots of Japanese leaped into the sea rather than surrender.

  A month later the British swept Churchill out of office in a Labor landslide that made Clement Atlee the new prime minister.

  A couple days after that, on a foggy Saturday morning, a twin-engine B-25 bomber crashed into the north side of the Empire State Building, almost a thousand feet above 34th Street. Seventy-ninth floor. Thirteen people got killed. The wings were sheared off and fell into the street. The gas tanks exploded. One of the engines ripped all the way through the building, tore a hole in the south face, plummeted almost seventy stories, and demolished the penthouse of a famous architect who lived at 10 West 33rd. The other engine fell over a thousand feet down an elevator shaft to a subbasement. A propeller embedded itself in a concrete wall and burning gasoline was everywhere. The steel girders at the seventy-ninth floor were bent eighteen inches out of shape. The pilot was a recently decorated bomber commander who was trying to find Newark in the dense fog. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another.

  On August 7 we dropped the first atomic bomb and 60 percent of Hiroshima was gone. On August 9 we dropped the second on Nagasaki and that night President Harry Truman reported to the people. And then, on the 15th, everybody went crazy again because the Empire of the Sun surrendered unconditionally. This time it was really over over there. The New York Post said so in a typical two-word front page: JAPS QUIT! Well, as Terry said, you could hardly blame them.

  A car radio was playing loudly on a nearby path. Someone was waiting for mourners to pay their respects to the dead, and the day was made for music. The tune caught on the soft, hot breeze. It was the song everybody was singing and whistling those days. It was the official anthem of the end of the war, that summer of ’45.