I laughed. “Impossible. Jimmy’s solid iron. But he has a big soft heart when it comes to some. You were right, of course. In terms of my rogues’ gallery of friends, to use your term, he’s the real standout. Probably the best man I’ve ever known. I mean, at least since Hem kind of went to pieces in the late thirties.”
Duff filled our wine glasses. I raised mine and said, “Let’s drink to putting them safely on whatever craft carries them to America.”
We tapped goblets. I looked out the window, sipping my wine and watching the hard rain streaming down the glass. There was lightning in the distance and the deep thrum of rolling thunder occasionally rattled the panes.
Duff licked her lips and nodded approvingly. “Who picked the vino, you or Jim?”
“The wine was Jimmy’s discovery and it’s lucky for us it is good as he’s not a wine kind of guy. I’ve got a pretty formidable palate and so usually have to see to my own needs.” I smiled ruefully. “What that palate boasts, my liver lacks.”
Duff nodded spread her napkin across her lap. “So, another close call. But you again carried the day. You seem to have what they call the Nelson touch.”
“Thanks. I just hope I come to a better end than the Admiral did.”
“How close, exactly, did this one come?”
“Thanks to the priest, it wasn’t much of a scene. I didn’t kill anyone, for instance. But that would have been rough duty anyway with a child in my arms. I stole a German’s motorcycle to get some distance from the church, then ditched it quickly and continued on foot.”
“May be a good thing Marie was there to stay your hand, to push you toward flight. You strike me as the committed kind that would have stuck it out at the Alamo.”
“No way,” I said. “I’m much too fond of myself for that flavor of sacrifice. I got those death-for-country urges out of my system early on, during the last war. Any romantic notions I had about dying for Uncle Sam were ground out of me pronto in that majestic cluster fuck.”
Duff sipped more wine, still savoring the taste. She said, “That crude admission aside, nearly as I can tell, if you ever had nine lives, you have to have exhausted eight of them before the 1930s wound down.”
“Possibly.” I started in on a bowl of soup, some too-thin, chicken broth affair. I sifted in some salt and pepper and said, “This evening’s close call at the church brought home for me what I said to you before about Höttl having the resources of the Third Reich to pitch at us. If there had been any fewer of his minions swarming the church grounds, we might not have slipped safely out in the ensuing confusion.”
Duff paused, a knife and fork poised over her meat. She put them down and reached across the table, placing her right hand over my left. She hesitated, frowning, then said, “While I bathed her, Marie told me her version of what happened after Jimmy and I left you at that church. The child’s account was pretty harrowing, Hector.”
I topped off my wine. “The state of fear is the sorry place that little girl has lived, and for a very long time. This wasn’t that bad, Duff. Really.” Well, thanks to Frederick Schmidt it had worked out okay.
Duff picked back up her utensils. I was very sorry she quit touching me. Her hand was warm, strong and silky. The memory of its touch lingered. She said, “Marie also said you told her a story. A story about your parents’ deaths. Exhaustive as your file seems in some ways, it doesn’t include the fact you’re an orphan.”
“It’s not exactly something I trumpet,” I said. “How’s your food?”
“Adequate. Soup’s quite disappointing. I deduce you think so, too, given the damage you’ve done to the saltshaker. What happened to your parents, Hector?”
Staring at my plate, I stirred my food around. I’d only ever told the story once in full. That had been done in France, to Brinke Devlin, my eventual first wife. I gave Duff a drastically truncated account. Still, she was the second on earth to hear it. Maybe that should have told me something.
“My father murdered my mother,” I said, staring at my food. “The state of Texas saw to my old man’s demise. I was raised by my mother’s father, a gallant old gent and infamous confidence artist.”
Duff nodded slowly. After I was silent a while, she just said, “Did you see this happen with your mother?”
“The immediate aftermath? Yeah.” I stared at my plate. “I’ve seen too many people I love bloody.”
She took my hand again. She didn’t say anything, just searched my eyes, smiling sadly and shaking her head.
***
I suggested walking off dinner. Duff was initially skeptical. “You’re a hunted man, Lassiter.”
It was still raining steadily, but not the bucketing rain that was falling during dinner together. I said, “The streets are all but empty. Even the goddamn Nazis are staying warm and dry inside somewhere. It’s dark, too. With a fedora and an umbrella, I reckon I’ll be safe enough company.”
Duff took a look out the window and bit her lip. “Dinner was a bit heavy and could use walking off. So okay, it sounds nice. Like something one did before the world went to hell and gone. Just let me tell Jimmy we’re going out for a soggy stroll.”
***
We shared a big umbrella, Duff clutching to my left arm. The streets were very quiet, just us and the rain. “This is nice,” Duff said. “Simple pleasures like this have been denied so long that it feels sadly alien to have them back.”
“The good old days will come again,” I said, smiling. “All these simple pleasures will become familiar again,” I said. “The tide is already turning in some important ways. I can see it. We’re winning this war.”
“But there will still be battles lost. So many more lives taken…or squandered.”
I said, “Have you thought about what you might do when this war is finally over? Will you go back to singing, maybe?”
“I was never that good,” she said. “I’ve learned to let that dream go. And my imagination isn’t strong enough to imagine all of this ending anytime soon. It seems too much tumult for things ever to return to what we’d call normal. Something has ended.”
“Nah, it’ll shake out, and the speed of the course-correction will leave you dizzied, honey. I thought the same thing during the Great War: ‘We can never go back. It’ll never be the same again.’ People living in times like these always have such thoughts. But it does swing back. Things return to just the way they were, for the most part. We have a talent for forgetting. And then, somewhere down the road, goddamn us, we will do this bloody thing again.”
“What will you do, Hector? What will your life consist of after this war?”
“At base, I’m a one-trick pony,” I said. “I’ll do what I always do. I’ll write. Novels, screenplays. Maybe some journalism recording the aftermath of this war.”
The wind was picking up, tugging at the umbrella with insistent gusts that blew a cold spray under the umbrella and into our faces.
We ducked into a recessed storefront—some jeweler’s closed for the night. Looking around, I saw many vacant retail spaces.
War and occupation were not friends to local businesses.
I shook out a cigarette and fished out my Zippo. “Guess we best wait for a break in the weather before heading back. Sorry to have dragged you out in this, Duff. I thought the hard rain was behind us.” From some upstairs window a phonograph was playing Edith Piaf.
She smiled. “There are worse places to be. I kind of like this, actually.”
“Maybe you haven’t worked out your career options yet,” I said, “but when this war does end, will you stay here in Europe, or will you go home?”
“It’s back to America, I think,” she said. “I’d have left before now if I hadn’t somehow gotten caught up in this OSS stuff. I thought I had an obligation to avenge my husband and the others we knew who’ve been taken or abused. I still feel I need to do what I can to that end. But once it’s over, I won’t be coming back to France, not to live. Once we get to England, I may make up my
mind to stay there. Or, perhaps, to press on home. Either way, I left Lyon with you three knowing I’d never go back there. I guess, for me, that city is what you say Key West became for you.”
I heard laughter from up the street. Some drinkers were half-carrying one another, passing by our little sheltered space from the storm. They seemed oblivious to the weather, but were not yet that wet from the rain.
“Must be a café or bar very close by,” I said. “May I buy you a drink, Duff?”
She seemingly didn’t have to give it much thought. “Sounds wonderful if it truly isn’t far.”
“I’m wagering it’s just around the corner. Those boozers looked like they were just starting their night’s soggy, liquor-soaked odyssey home.”
***
Business was predictably light. We grabbed a table by a piano at the front of the café. Duff sampled her whiskey sour, then nodded at my glass. “So sorry you had to settle for your third choice.” She raised her ginger eyebrows. “What is a mojito, anyway?”
“Cuban drink, made mostly of rum,” I said. It had been such a long while…
“And a daiquiri?” That was longer still in the past.
“More of a south Florida, Keys or Cuba kind of thing,” I said. “It was silly and sentimental to think a French bartender had ever heard of either, let alone could mix ’em.”
I smiled and sipped my single malt. “I still own a little house in Key West. I rent it out now for walking-around money. If you do return to the States, I could shoo the tourists out for a couple of weeks. You could come down and take the guest room, and I could introduce you to any number of exotic, tropical libations.”
This knowing smile. Duff said, “Those among other things you’d like to introduce me to, I’ll bet.”
Yes, she had me there.
Couples were taking turns at a piano in the corner, playing tunes; some singing along.
The latest duo of impromptu entertainers moved back to the bar. I looked at the suddenly silent piano. I said, “Come over here, won’t you? Bring your drink with you.” I moved to the piano bench. Duff smiled. “You’re joking—you play?”
“Mostly by ear, but yeah, I can bang out a tune or two.” I played a few bars of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Skylark.” When the bartender didn’t order me away from the piano, I shifted tunes.
Duff smiled, delighted. “You really can play!”
“And you can sing,” I said. “Let’s entertain the local elbow-benders. Don’t you dare say no.”
I began to play “I’ll Be Seeing You.” Duff smiled uncertainly, but then began to sing, smoky-voiced, silky and sublime.
When it was done, the spare and scattered patrons applauded.
Duff took my hand. “Let’s get out of here, Hector.”
“It’s still raining.”
“I don’t care. Let’s go, I mean right now.” She wasn’t to be denied, whatever her reason for getting out of there in a jiffy. Nobody was spying on us; we weren’t drawing funny looks. Hell, quite the contrary…
I followed her out into the rain, huddled close together under our umbrella.
“Where are we going, Duff?”
“I have no idea. I’ll just know when I see it.”
She led me to a park. There was a gazebo there. “Perfect,” she said.
Duff pulled me under the canopy of the darkened gazebo. She led me to a bench out of the rain. Duff sat down on the bench, shrugged off her coat, and then lay back on the bench. She urgently pulled me down into her arms. I started to say, “Here? Like this? This is a crazy place for it.”
“Hush, Hector.”
She kissed me hard.
14
We sat in the gazebo, waiting for some let-up in the intensity of the rain. The thunder and lightning, at least, had abated.
Duff was still trying to correct her wardrobe, to adjust her under-things, reattach her garters and to do something with her hair. She said, “Next time we behave improperly we must find a proper bed to do it in.”
I kissed her another time and said, “Absolutely.” It was bucketing rain again.
“My God, how you wrecked my hair,” she said. “Do you think Jimmy will know?”
I swept an arm at the weather. “Time we get back in this monsoon, we’ll both look like drowned rats. So, no, I doubt that he’ll notice anything. All evidence of impropriety washed clean.”
“It was a crazy time for this, but entirely my fault, of course,” Duff said. “Selfish of me.”
“I was there,” I said, smiling, “ and so much more than willing. So it’s selfish of me, too.”
“We have bigger things to do,” Duff insisted. “Passing wonderful as this was, we should already be back with Jimmy, figuring out our next moves.”
She was right of course. I said, “Very sorry to see this moment pass so soon. But, you’re right of course. Duty still calls. You said you can get us in contact with the OSS when we get closer to the coast. How exactly will you do that?”
“I can even do it now,” she said, adjusting her bra strap under her dress. “But I think it’s best to wait until we’re closer to our destination. In order to narrow the window for interception or any countermeasures by moles, or spies, I mean. As to how, I have a radio hidden in one of my bags. You hook jumper cables up to a car battery to boost the transmitter’s signal. It’s a very nifty gizmo. Of course, if it was found in a search by the Germans, it would be grounds for summary execution.”
“Following torture,” I said. “Yeah. Good. I’m glad you have something dependable.” I pressed my hand to her heart. “I saw the necklace there when we…”
It was a silver pellet container on a chain. The container itself looked a little like a small bullet. I’d seen them before. They contained what the Brits called an “L” pill…“L” for “lethal.”
I said, “What is it in there, cyanide?”
“I really don’t know,” Duff said softly. “But they say it only takes five seconds. They were evasive when I asked about whether it’s painful. Yours?”
“I threw my suicide pill away within five minutes of being handed the goddamn thing,” I said. “Slow-motion self destruction I might warm to, but dying like that? Not my style at all.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Smiling, she pressed her hand to my cheek. “We’ve really created some complications for ourselves with this sweet night, haven’t we?”
“Not from where I sit.” I laughed. “Hell, I had the sense you despised me before we even met. Now I’m giddy.”
“Despised? No. More like I was intrigued by what I was learning about you in your file.” Her fingers traced my mouth. “I’d definitely formed some harsh opinions, though. I even sampled a couple of your novels in preparation for encountering you. I quite enjoyed them. When I met you, I found you compelling. Vexing, but compelling. I expect you provoke that reaction in many women.”
“You fascinate me,” I said. “But I don’t know nearly enough about you yet.”
“We still have some time together.” Duff checked her watch. “But for now, time has really gotten away from us. We better go.” She looked behind me and frowned.
I said, “What’s back there, darlin’?”
“Two Nazis. They’re watching us, trying to decide if they’re going to approach us, I think. Maybe they intend to tell us to move along. We’re probably violating some damned curfew.”
I picked up our umbrella. “Let’s keep looking like tipsy lovers, but shake a leg doing it. Save ’em the trouble of that warning.”
***
The rain had finally subsided when we reached the hotel. We seemed to have lost our two Nazi soldiers on the brisk walk back. But there was a new crop waiting outside our hotel, hard-case German troops massing around our hotel and the one across the street.
“Oh, God, this isn’t good at all,” Duff said. “How are they finding us?” She cursed softly. “And what fools we are! Passing time with one another like that while Jimmy and Marie sat in there
with these Nazis creeping in around them.”
I felt the same way about the two of us, but said, “We’ll persecute ourselves later, honey. Now let’s get in there and get them out.”
***
Jimmy looked simultaneously cross and relieved to see us. “We need to go,” he said emphatically, “and I mean goddamn now.”
“We saw ’em getting in position outside,” I said. “How’re they finding us?”
“They haven’t found us yet,” he said. “I’ve got everything packed and moved it downstairs into the car with the dog.” He handed the keys to Duff. “You drive. They may search for people, but I don’t think they’ll be going through bags and the like. Pick us up by the townhall at the end of this street.”
Duff nodded at Jimmy. “You seem to have it all planned. How will you all get out of here to meet me?”
“I have an idea about that, too,” Jimmy said. “Now get moving, Duff, darling. Time is in calamitously short supply.”
Duff left and I scooped up Marie and her doll. I said, “How are you up on all this, Jimmy?”
“Having some more time to myself than I expected,”—Jimmy put just a little edge in his voice, I thought—“I was toying with this radio gadget the spymasters gave me. I was trying to coax a BBC signal from the thing when I tapped into the Nazi radio band. I’ve been eavesdropping and sweating ever since. Now let’s move our asses, Hector. The Krauts are searching every hotel in town and they seem to be starting with this street.”
***
Jimmy led the way across the treacherous, rain-slicked mansard roof of our hotel.
I’ve never been good about heights, and a vivid imagination was more the liability. Lugging a frightened, fidgeting child across that slippery, sloped roof, I was assailed by visions of loosing my footing and plunging us both to our deaths.
We finally reached the end of the hotel’s roof. Jimmy slid over the side to the roof of the adjacent building. That one was blessedly flat and covered in tar. I lowered Marie over the edge to Jimmy, then vaulted the low wall to join them on the adjacent roof.
Roll the Credits: A Hector Lassiter novel Page 10
