by Greenberg
“If – and I am recounting this possibility – the letter shows beyond any doubt that your husband is still alive, we’ll continue to play along and use every resource to try to get him back for you. Just remember one thing: No matter what the letter shows you are to act as though you have no doubt. Can you do that?”
“I can try.”
“We’ve asked a great deal of you, Francie. Just this little bit more.”
The Jacksons came over to the cabin on Wednesday, minutes after Francie’s arrival from the lab. They stamped the snow off their feet, and came in smiling.
“So you doubted me, eh?” Stew said cheerfully. “It came this morning.”
As he fumbled for his pocket, Francie realized that Osborne’s doubts had shaken her more than she knew. She was afraid of the letter – afraid to read it.
It seemed to take Stewart an impossibly long time to undo myriad buttons to get at the pocket which held the letter. Francie stood, looking beyond him, hand half outstretched, and through the windows she saw the shale of new ice that reached tentatively out from the shore line into the lake. She heard Betty prodding the fire.
“Here you go!” Stewart said, holding out another folded sheet of the familiar cheap fibered paper.
Francie took it, her finger tips alive to the texture of it. Betty knelt in front of the fire, bulky in her ski suit, head turned, smiling. Stew stood in his shaggy winter clothes, beaming at her.
“Well go on!” Betty said. “You going to stand and hold it?”
Francie licked her lips, “Could I – read it alone please? It means so much.”
“Read it now, honey,” Stewart said. “We want to share your pleasure with you. It means a lot to us, too, you know.”
She unfolded the letter. At first the pencil scrawl was blurred. She closed her eyes hard, turned her back to them, opened her eyes again.
Baby, now I know they weren’t kidding when they said you’d get that other letter. I guess you’re doing all you can for me. Anyway, I seem to be a guest of honor now. Sheets, even. Baby, don’t feel bad about helping them. Maybe it’s for the best. They’ve got something I’ve never understood before. For the first time I’m beginning to see the world as it really is. And now, darling, that fireplace seems closer than ever. And so do you. You still got those two freckles on the bridge of your nose? When I get my hands on you, baby, we’d better turn Willy’s face to the wall.
Francie stopped reading for a moment and took a deep breath. A breath of joy and thanksgiving. He had to be alive. Nobody else could sound like that.
Remember that I love you and keep thinking that we’ll be together again. That’s what really counts, isn’t it? Figure on me being back in the spring when all the world is turning as green as Willy’s hat.
She stared at the last words. How could Bob have made such a grotesque and incredible mistake? The figurine wore no hat! How could he possibly – ? And she read it again and saw the whole letter begin to go subtly false. This new letter and the one before it. False, contrived, artificial. It was all so clear to her now.
Bob, under the circumstances he described, would never have written in such a pseudo-gay way. His other letter had been like that because he had been trying to keep her from worrying about combat wounds or combat death. Now these letters, these fake letters, sounded absurdly light-hearted.
Still looking at the letter, her back turned toward them, Francie saw how they had taken the most precious part of her life and twisted it to their own ends. Bob was dead. He had died during the retreat. Had any doubt existed they would have labeled it Missing in Action. She had been the gullible fool. The stupid sentimental fool who clung to any hope, closing her eyes to its improbability.
Involuntarily she closed her hands on the letter, crumpling it, as though it were something evil.
Stewart Jackson had walked over to where he could see her face. “Why are you doing that?” he asked, his voice oddly thin.
She fought for control, masking her anger. “I – I don’t know. Excitement, I guess. To think that he’ll be back in the spring and we can – ” But that was a spring that would never come.
In its own way this letter was far more ruthless than the original telegram. She couldn’t pretend any longer, not with the two of them watching her so carefully.
She looked at them, hating them. Such a charming civilized couple. Stewart’s face, which had seemed so bland and jolly, was now merely porcine and vicious. Betty, with features sharpening in the moment of strain, looked menacingly cruel.
“Filth!” Francie whispered, careless now of her own safety. “Filth! Both of you.”
Stewart gave a grunt of surprise. “Now, now, after all we’ve done for – ”
“Grab her, you fool!” Betty shouted. “It went wrong somewhere. Just look at her face!” Betty jumped to her feet.
Stewart hesitated a moment before lunging toward Francie, his arms outspread. In that moment of hesitation Francie started to move toward the door. His fingers brushed her shoulder, slid down her arm clamped tightly on her wrist. The meaty touch of his hand on her bare wrist brought back all her fear.
His lunge had put him a bit off balance, and Francie’s body contracted in a spasm of fright that threw her back. Stewart was pulled against the raised hearth of the fireplace. As he tripped, his hand slipped from her wrist and before she turned she saw him stumble forward, heard the thud his head made striking the edge of the fieldstone fireplace, saw both his hands slide toward the log fire.
As Betty cried out and ran toward Stewart, Francie found the knob and pulled the door open and ran in panic toward the trail. She went up the first slope, reached the handrail, caught it, used it to pull herself along faster.
She glanced back, gasping for breath, and saw Betty, her face set, her strong legs driving her rapidly up the hill.
Fear gave Francie renewed strength and for a few moments the distance between them remained the same. But soon she was fighting for air, mouth wide, while a sharp pain began to knot her left side.
Betty’s feet were so close that she dared not look back. Her shoulder brushed a tree and then Betty’s arms locked her thighs and they went down together, rolling across the sticky trail into the base of a small spruce.
Betty slapped her hard, using each hand alternately slapping until Francie’s ears were full of a hard ringing and she could taste blood inside her mouth. But she could hear the ugly words with which Betty emphasized each blow.
“Stop!” Francie cried. “Oh stop!”
The hard slaps ceased and Francie knew that she had learned a great deal about Betty’s motivations during those brutal moments.
“On your feet,” Betty said.
Francie rolled painfully to her hands and knees. She reached up and grasped a limb of the small spruce to help herself to her feet. The limb she grasped was only a stub, two feet long. It broke off close to the trunk as she pulled herself up. She did not realize that, in effect, she held a club, until she saw Betty’s eyes narrow, saw the woman take a step backward.
“Drop it Francie,” Betty said shrilly.
Francie felt her lips stretch in a meaningless smile. She stepped forward and swung the club with all her strength. It would have missed the blond woman entirely, but Betty, attempting to duck, moved directly into the path of the club. It shattered against the pale-gold head.
Betty stood for a moment bent forward from the waist, arms hanging, and then she went down with a boneless limpness. She hit on the slope, and momentum rolled her over onto her back.
Francie, laughing and crying, dropped to her knees beside the woman. She took what remained of the club in both hands and raised it high over her head, willing herself to smash it down against the unprotected face, her temples pounding.
For a long moment she held the club high, and then, just as she let it slip out of her hands to fall behind her, Clint Reese came down the wet path. He was half running, slipping on the wet snow, his overcoat fanning out behind him. When
he saw Francie the tautness went out of his face. He took her arm and pulled her to her feet.
“Get off the path,” he said roughly.
“They – ”
He pulled her with him, forced her down, and crouched beside her. She heard the shots then. Two that were thin and bitter. Whipcracks across the snow. Then one heavy-throated shot, and after an interval, a second one.
She moved and Clint said, “Stay down! I came along to see if you were getting all the protection Osborne promised.”
“Oh, Clint, they – ”
“I know, darling. Hold it. Somebody’s coming.”
It was Luke Osborne, walking alone, coming up from the house. He walked slowly and the lines in his face were deeper. They came out to meet him. Osborne looked down at Betty Jackson. The woman moaned and stirred a little.
One of the young men, a stranger, came down the road.
Betty sat up. She looked vaguely at Osborne and the young man. Then she scrambled to her feet, her eyes wild. “Stewart,” she screamed. “Stewart!”
Osborne blocked her as she started forward. “Your partner is dead, lady,” he said. “Quite thoroughly dead.”
Betty pressed the knuckles of both hands against her bared teeth. Instinctively Francie turned to Clint, and pressed her face against the rough top-coat texture. She heard Osborne saying, “Get her up to the car, Clint.”
After giving Francie a shot the doctor sent her to bed in the Cudahy guestroom. As the drug took hold she let herself slip down and down, through endless layers of black velvet that folded over her, one after the other.
On the fourth day, Clint Reese took her from the Cudahy house back to her cabin. He helped her down the trail and pointed out where Osborne’s men had been trying to protect her as much as possible without alarming the Jacksons.
He lit a fire, and tucked a blanket around her in the chair. And then he made coffee for them. He lounged on the bunk with coffee and cigarette. “Take tomorrow off,” he said expansively.
“Yes, boss.”
“Remember when I was going to say something in bad taste and you stopped me?”
“I remember.”
“Oh, I’m not going to try to say it again, so don’t look so worried. I’m going to say something else. Lines I memorized last night, in front of my mirror, trying to wear an appealing expression. The trouble is, they still happen to be sort of – well, previous. So I won’t say them, either.
“But I’ll keep practicing. You see, I’ve got to wait until you give me the go-ahead, then I’ll say them some day. Old Reese, they always said, a very patient guy. Got a master’s degree in waiting, that one has.”
“It is too soon, Clint. Especially after all that’s just happened.”
“Well, I’ll stick around and wait. The way we work it, you show up some morning one of these years with a lobster trap in your left hand and a hollyhock in your teeth, humming ‘Hail to the Chief.’ That will be our little signal – just yours and mine. I’ll catch on. Then I’ll spout deathless lines you can scribble in your diary.”
He stood up for a moment. His eyes were very grave.
“Is it a date?”
“It’s a date, Clint.”
“Thanks, Francie.”
He left with an exaggerated casualness that touched her heart. She pushed the blanket aside and went to the window to watch Clinton Reese go up the trail.
Now the Adirondack winter was coming, and during the long months she would watch the frozen lake and let the snow fall gently on her heart. A time of whiteness and peace, a time of healing. By spring Bob’s death would be a year old, and spring is a time of growth and change and renewal.
Francie recalled the look of gravity and warmth and wanting in Clint’s eyes, the look that denied the casual smile.
Possibly with strength and luck and sanity, it might come sooner than either of them realized. For this might be the winter in which she could learn to say good-bye.
BRUCE CASSIDAY
Deep-Sleep
1
Peter Baron blinked and turned away from the incessant glare of the flash bulbs popped by the news photographers eagerly lining the walls of the gaudy Naples nightclub. His eyes smarted. He tightened his arm around the waist of the Countess, who had slid off his lap and was now sharing his chair.
Countess Elena Rondi turned to him to smile, sagging against him, rumpling his impeccable dinner jacket and absently stroking his ear. Her full attention was centered on the dancer.
On the table top in the middle of the room, a heavily made-up girl with coal-black hair, blood-red lips, and clad only in a two-piece bikini and high-heeled Spanish dancing shoes, pirouetted and stamped to the beat of a perspiring combo. In her navel she wore an enormous opal. At each gyration, the girl’s breasts seemed about to escape from the strip of silk which bound them.
She was an Italian starlet, and she had just returned from Hollywood, where she had filmed a daring feature-length trifle about incest. Because of it, she was the sensation of Rome, Paris, the Riviera – and Naples. The paparazzi, the tabloid photographers, were avid for her. She was the toast of the Neapolitan social set.
Peter Baron sipped at the third-rate, expensive champagne and gazed about the lavish furnishings of the plush Naples night spot. The room smelled of money, of aristocracy, of status. Men in exquisite formal attire, women in lavish gowns, inverts in eccentric fripperies, all sat about watching the antics of the actress with jaded awareness, some clapping sardonically to the tempo of the dance, some sipping the flat champagne morosely. Decadence and boredom looked out of well-fed, well-fleshed, well-painted faces.
Wishing suddenly that he had opted for the sunshine and abandon of the Riviera and his villa there, rather than Capri and Naples this month, Peter Baron whispered to the woman at his side:
“Andiamo, Contessa. Let’s go.”
She was a lush, golden-bodied creature, with long, syrupy hair and eyes the color of Chinese ginger. Her carmine lips covered cat’s teeth. She was splendidly built, with the North Italian woman’s fine figure, and the South Italian woman’s passionate temperament.
She smiled lasciviously, her eyes darting about the room at the hollow-cheeked aristocracy, at the paparazzi, these denizens of the night whose job it is to capture in black-and-white permanence the tawdriness, the shame, the evil of modern Italy.
“Momentino,” she whispered. She snuggled against him, and he felt the warmth of her flesh through her sleek gown. It stirred him sensually. He fingered the champagne glass.
On the table top, the obscene dance reached a crescendo. The mascaraed girl twisted suddenly, tore the scant silken ribbon from her bosom, and threw the scrap into the air. She thrust herself about with greater abandon. The paparazzi went mad; the air quaked with chained lightning. Someone shrieked. A bottle smashed and a chair went over backwards.
With a resounding crash the music stopped. The lights went out. The girl on the table jumped to the floor and escaped to the rear of the club.
The dance was done.
Peter Baron pulled Countess Elena to her feet. “Now.”
“Si,” the Countess murmured.
She clung to him, pressing her soft body against him as he steered her through the close-packed tables, past the manicured hands of bright-eyed fairies and the fat, sweaty palms of bankers and merchants.
A paparazzo wearing enormous sunglasses which stretched in a wide band from one ear to the other stepped in front of Peter to take a picture.
“Aspettate!” Baron said curtly. “No pictures!”
The photographer shrugged, his lips a line of contempt under the black eyeless strip-mask. His flash bulb popped.
Baron lashed out at the camera, throwing it savagely to the floor. He bent down, opened it, unrolled the film quickly, and tore it out.
“What’s going on here?” the paparazzo cried in a woman’s way.
“No pictures,” Baron told him calmly. “I asked you nicely.”
The photogra
pher swaggered forward, grabbing Baron’s shirt front in his fist. Baron struck the finicky hand away and flung the other man down. The news photographer sank to his knees. His sunglasses hung lopsidedly from one ear. His eyes were naked, furtive and small.
The night club went dead quiet.
Baron threw a wad of bills on the floor contemptuously. “For your trouble, signore!” Then he gazed around at the pale, tense faces turned toward him. Without another word he gathered in the Countess, regal and silent, and hustled her into the street.
“Peter,” she whispered, kissing him on the cheek. “What did you do that to him for?”
“I don’t like my picture taken,” Peter Baron said softly.
More than anything else, Peter Baron loved to drive his off-white Lancia over the dusty roads of Italy. He liked to feel the wind blowing down on him, cooling him and washing away the stench of stuffy nightclubs, the rich and the sick. He slid his hand on to the Countess’s bare knee. He could see her gleaming thigh where her $2,000 Paris gown had hiked up.
“Elena,” he said softly.
She was leaning her head back, letting the wind catch her long, fine hair. “Where are we going?” she asked sleepily.
“To bed,” Peter said. “I’m tired.”
“Where, specifically?” asked the Countess, a smile curving her lips.
“In a pink palazzo near Avellino. You know it?”
“My second cousin Julia was born there. Before the Social Democrats turned it into an inn.
“It has a view of a lovely lake. Sailboats in the moonlight and all that.”
“I thought you lived on Capri, Peter.”
