Silver Stars

by Michael Grant

  “Dammit,” Cole says, which is about as extreme as his language gets unless there’s shooting going on.

  Rio rolls off of Cat, tumbles, and slams hard into the dirt. She lies there, facedown, for quite a while, arms and hands flattened on the ground. She might just as well have fallen out of a passing plane.

  How did I get here?

  The ground does not feel quite solid to Rio, in fact it is spinning, spinning, and sort of falling away, like one of those boards they use to ride the waves at Stinson Beach. Oh, she wishes she were there right now, wishes she were far away, lying on some beach. And also really wishing hard that she had not started drinking that ouzo they got . . . somewhere.

  Her tongue is a dead rat coated in tar; her muscles are both limp and sore; her stomach . . . oh, she doesn’t even want to think about that because she’s got nothing left to puke up unless she’s going to start puking up her liver.

  Also, her face hurts. She almost remembers the punch that connected with her right cheek. And she can vaguely trace the soreness in her throat muscles to an armlock, possibly from an MP, that part is not at all clear. The one thing she does remember with a certain satisfaction is that the sprain in her right ankle is from the impact of her boot tip on a sensitive area of a male Texan’s person.

  “All right, you useless bunch of clowns, crawl off and shower. Who knows what bugs you picked up, and I won’t have them in my tents. And, Suarez, for God’s sake pull up your pants!”

  Cat says, “Hey, I lost a tooth.”

  By reveille they have showered and caught ninety minutes of sleep. Rio returns only very reluctantly to consciousness because consciousness is pain. Her head. Oh God, her head. And her eyes! Oh no, that’s even worse.

  Like a zombie she dresses and runs a comb across a head that has become a big bass drum pounding, pounding.

  “You okay?” Rio says to Jenou through gritted teeth.

  “Unh,” Jenou answers.

  “You have a black eye,” Rio points out.

  “Unh,” Jenou agrees.

  The squad shuffles miserably toward the assembly area. They feel that their misery must be obvious to all, but as Rio blinks in the painful sunlight she notices that the same misery afflicts at least two-thirds of the forty-seven—now forty-eight—men and women who make up Fifth Platoon.

  Sergeant Cole lines up with them, no one too concerned with spit and polish given that this is now a veteran platoon with a number of experiences in combat.

  Phil O’Malley, the new platoon sergeant who has replaced Garaman, is an ancient forty-five-year-old veteran of the last war. He’s a man who gives an impression of being almost as wide as he is tall, but the width is in the shape of solid muscle and gristle. He has a salt-and-pepper buzz cut, a tan face, and slitted brown eyes that could be amused or cruel, depending. O’Malley stands a little ahead of the formation.

  Rio assumes this is the usual morning ritual, with the usual pro forma assurances that all are present and accounted for. But it’s already gone on too long and the thought that maybe she should force herself to pay attention begins to form in the woolly depths of her hungover brain.

  Or I could just sit down right here in the dirt. That would be nice.

  There are two lieutenants up there now in the eye-searing light. One Rio recognizes as the headquarters company lieutenant who has been filling in until a new lieutenant can arrive to replace the deceased-but-not-mourned Lieutenant Liefer.

  This would explain the second lieutenant who is shaking hands now with the acting lieutenant, who salutes pleasantly and ambles off.

  “Better put them at ease, Sergeant O’Malley, some of them look about ready to keel over,” the new lieutenant says.

  He’s young—they always are—twenty-three or twenty-four years old. His uniform is perfection, creases all crisp and ruler straight, lapels starched and ironed to a knife’s edge, cap set to the correct angle with just a bit extra for a hint of swagger. He has a patrician face with high cheekbones, smooth peaches-and-cream complexion, and eyes the color of a calm sea on a sunny day.

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” Jenou says voicelessly.

  The lieutenant is gorgeous.

  “I’m Lieutenant Mike Vanderpool, I’m your new platoon commander.”

  Despite the dandy’s uniform, he stands easy, a slight tilt to his head, and neither his voice nor his expression marks him as any kind of martinet.

  “I’m a West Pointer, I’ll just confess that right from the start.”

  There is a rustle of low laughs, quickly quashed.

  “Yes, I am one of them. And this is my first time in the actual war. So I am relieved to find that I have under me some of the finest NCOs in the army. Sergeant O’Malley, Sergeant Shields, Sergeant Cole, and Sergeant Alvarez, I will rely on your experience as we work together.”

  Rio almost smiles to see Cole standing a bit taller before self-consciously relapsing to an unimpressed slouch.

  “You men—and women—I will come to know each of you in time. Give me a chance, and I’ll return the favor. Sergeant O’Malley? Anything you or your NCOs would like to say?”

  Jack suddenly collapses, but he picks himself up and is diplomatically ignored by the new lieutenant.

  Cole speaks up. “Sir, I don’t know if this is the right time, but I’m down a corporal and I’d like to replace him out of my squad.”

  “You have someone in mind?”

  “I’ve got a man who’s been filling the role temporarily. Stick. I mean, um, what the hell is your actual name, Stick?”

  “Dain Sticklin, sir.” He winces noticeably, perhaps because his jaw is bruised a yellowish blue and may not be quite centered. But he looks better than Jack, who may well have died, been buried, and only recently been disinterred.

  Lieutenant Vanderpool steps over, hands behind his back, interested. “You seem to have been injured, Private Sticklin.”

  “Sir, we had a pass and . . . well, those back streets get pretty dark, with stairs and all, so I tripped.”

  “Ah.”

  “Landed on my face, sir.”

  “Well. Maybe we could issue more flashlights. This tripping problem seems to be something of an epidemic in the platoon.”

  “Yes, sir,” Stick says, his expression that of a man straining not to throw up.

  “I will also require more attention to your uniforms in the future. The general is a stickler for proper uniform, including ties and shined boots. I would rather not be chewed out by General Patton. I saw it happen to a bird colonel once, and it was not a show I care to see twice.”

  O’Malley, standing beside Lieutenant Vanderpool, says, “Yes, sir. Understood, sir.”

  Vanderpool flashes a grin that gradually becomes a thoughtful frown. “It seems this platoon is afflicted with an unusual degree of clumsiness. At least half of you seem to have . . . tripped and fallen on your faces. But we’ll fix that right up. Sticklin, do you know what’s good for the aftereffects of tripping?”

  “Oh . . .” Stick says, sensing where this line of questioning is going.

  “A nice five-mile run, out to the wadi and back. I need to confer with my sergeants, so Corporal Sticklin? Lead the men out.”

  Jenou raises a trembling hand, and Vanderpool says, “Yes, the women too.”

  Rio has made many five-mile runs. But a five-mile run with a crashing headache and a mouth full of wool is a whole new level of agony.

  “Is it okay, do you think, if I marry the lieutenant?” Jenou asks as they slog through the camp toward the distant cluster of trees they’ve taken to calling the wadi.

  “Unh,” Rio answers.

  7

  RAINY SCHULTERMAN—NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK, USA

  The smaller gangster slides in beside Rainy. Something about him reminds her of the SS colonel. There’s something not fully human about him, as if one parent had been a lizard or a snake.

  “You have a number for me?” Rainy asks, keeping her voice level on a sea of rising
and falling waves of emotion.

  “Number? You trying to be funny?”

  “I assumed you were here to give me a way to contact Mr. Camporeale.”

  “Way to contact? You’re the contact, girly.”

  “It’s sergeant, not girly,” she says, and the instant the words are out of her mouth she thinks it’s a mistake. The little man’s reptilian expression turns feral for a moment, the look of an animal ready to pounce. But he leans back, reins in his hostility, and says, “All right then, Sergeant. We’re all good Americans, aren’t we, Louie?”

  “I bought a war bond for my kid,” Louie offers over his shoulder. “Twenty dollars!”

  “Don Vito don’t want to talk to some FBI or some army officer either, don’t trust ’em. He’ll talk to you.”

  “Then I would be pleased to talk to him,” Rainy says stiffly, feeling very uncomfortable, as if she’s disobeying an order. She isn’t exactly, her orders had contemplated the possibility of a face-to-face meeting, but she’s already thinking ahead to having to report all this to Colonel Corelli.

  Professor of Oriental Languages Corelli.

  Amateur.

  They drive far longer than is strictly necessary, sometimes creeping at walking speed around a block only to go racing away up Broadway at full speed. Louie keeps a close eye on his rearview mirrors.

  “We’re clean,” Louie says at last, and moments later they pull to a stop in the oily darkness beneath an elevated train track. They are in the Bowery, an elongated rectangle of streets around Delancey and Forsyth in Lower Manhattan, just north of Chinatown. It is a neighborhood of secondhand shops, employment agencies, cheap hotels, and narrow all-hours diners catering to the crowds of sailors and soldiers who wander unsteadily from tavern to tavern.

  The nearest lit-up establishment is a second-story pool hall above a closed-for-the-night grocer.

  Louie climbs out and opens Rainy’s door. Then he glances in the direction of a loud shout floating down from the pool hall and says, “This may not be the most suitable place for a young lady of quality.”

  “She’s a kike, she ain’t quality,” the smaller one says.

  “I’ve been in worse places,” Rainy says, images of the Tunisian desert appearing in her memory. She ignores the casual anti-Semitism.

  They walk up a long, steep, narrow flight of stairs, at one point having to turn sideways to let a trio of Marines come down. Before she sees the pool hall she hears it, a rich concerto played by cues hitting balls, and balls snapping into others, and glasses tinkling with ice, and shouts of frustration and triumph, loud guffaws, and somewhat more distant the musical ding-ding-ding! of pinball machines. All of that, and someone is spinning records, because Rainy hears the risqué Andrews Sisters song “Strip Polka” playing.

  There’s a burlesque theater where the gang loves to go

  To see Queenie, the cutie of the burlesque show.

  There’s no door at the top of the stairs, so they emerge directly onto the gaming floor, onto wood stained almost black by generations of benign neglect, and wallpaper that fairly drips with congealed smoke. There are a dozen tables in three rows of four, green felt bright beneath bare bulbs, and three pinball machines against the far wall, ding-ding-dinging away. There’s a bar at the back and a record player perched on one end of the bar along with a tall stack of 78s.

  A lanky, sad-looking sailor in a stained white uniform sits at a stool thumbing through the records. All the pool tables are in use, sailors, soldiers, working men in dungarees or overalls, and interspersed here and there like flowers in a sea of weeds are women—women of the type one would expect to find in a pool hall late at night. They aren’t all beautiful, but they are all young, or pass for young, and they are all dressed down to the very lowest limits of propriety.

  “Like I was sayin’,” Louie says with an abashed half-grin, “maybe not the place for a young lady such as yourself, miss. Sergeant, I mean.”

  “I promise not to faint,” Rainy says, which tickles the gangster’s fancy and he gives up a huge guffaw.

  “Take it off, take it off,” cries a voice from the rear.

  “Take it off, take it off,” soon it’s all you can hear.

  But she’s always a lady even in pantomime,

  So she stops and always just in time.

  They cross the length of the room toward the bar, and there is something in Louie’s size, and in the eyes and manner of the other thug, that causes even inebriated longshoremen and ladies of the night to step gingerly out of the way.

  There’s a door beside the bar. The driver knocks once, hears a single gruff syllable, and opens the door wide for Rainy to step in.

  It’s an office, a square room with a curtained window that probably leads to a fire escape. There’s an impressive oak desk with a vacant swing office chair behind it. One wall is covered in thumbtacked travel posters with curled edges: Naples, Sicily, Rome, but also Miami and New Orleans.

  The wall to Rainy’s right is fitted with shelves, mostly empty, but some bearing stacks of newspapers and magazines. There are three books, one of which, Rainy is sure, must be the Christian Bible. An impressive engraved silver crucifix hangs from the leading edge of the top shelf.

  There are two men already in the room, one small and old and gray, with a face that looks like a piece of driftwood, improbably craggy with a sagging mouth, and wearing no expression.

  The other is a large, portly man in a decent brown suit. He has a round, cheerful face and the red nose of a dedicated drinker. He steps forward smiling, hand out.

  “So you’re Schulterman’s kid. Well, glad to meet you, honey, your old man must be proud as hell—excuse my French—proud as a peacock.”

  “Thank you, and it’s good to meet you, Mr. . . .”

  “Camporeale,” he says. “It’s hard for folks to pronounce unless they grew up speaking Italian. We go with Campo, mostly, but you can call me Don Vito. That’s easier, right?”

  Instinctively, Rainy lies. “Don Vito it is, then, because I don’t speak any Italian. I have no head for languages.”

  She’s hoping her father has not bragged too often about his multilingual daughter. But almost certainly he would not have brought her name into his work, and in any case he works only indirectly for Camporeale.

  “And what do they call you, aside from sergeant, I mean?”

  “Rainy will do fine,” she says, forcing a smile. Time to be friendly: she is surrounded by gunsels.

  “Rainy. I like that. Must be a story there, huh?”

  “No doubt, but my parents have not shared the details.”

  He laughs knowingly. “Come, sit, what are you drinking?”

  “I’ll have a club soda,” she says.

  “Ah, a killjoy,” Don Vito says in mock irritation. “Get her a soda. Put a straw in it. Plenty of ice. Throw in a cherry, it’ll be like a, what do they call ’em? A Shirley Temple. She’s just a kid, after all. What are you, eighteen, nineteen?”

  Rainy sits in a hastily supplied wooden chair, and Don Vito settles in behind his desk. He leans forward, forearms on his desk blotter. “So. What can a humble immigrant do for the United States Army?”

  “Well, sir . . . Don Vito . . . I’m only a lowly sergeant, and this is a conversation you should have with someone who has some rank.”

  He winks, a move which, owing to his chubby cheeks, closes both eyes for a second. When his eyes open again the cheerfulness is gone, replaced by shrewd appraisal. A second earlier and Rainy might have mistaken him for a door-to-door salesman. But a much different animal is looking at her now from dark, porcine eyes.

  “I’m allergic to people with rank. Regular beat cop? That’s no problem, I buy ’em free drinks and let ’em play some pinball. Cops with rank? You never know if they’ll be reasonable or not. Same thing in the army, I’m guessing.”

  He lets the silence stretch and at last Rainy speaks. “I have no opinion on my superior officers.”

  Don Vito and Louie, now
leaning against the door, both erupt in loud laughter. The gray man does not laugh.

  “That was funny, Tony, you should laugh,” Don Vito says to the gray man, who still does not laugh. Then he says something in Italian—although in a dialect that to Rainy’s ear is subtly different from the standard Roman Italian she’s learned.

  Still, she can translate it. Don Vito has said, “The Jew bitch thinks she’s smart.”

  This, finally, earns a dusty wheeze that might be a laugh from gray Tony.

  “Listen, Rainy, right? Rainy. Yeah. Okay, Rainy, for obvious reasons I’d rather talk to people I know. People I trust. And I trust you because I know you love your father and would never want to do anything that could hurt him.”

  The threat is clear, and Rainy nods in acknowledgment. It occurs to her that playing word games with NCOs and officers, who are, after all, generally reasonable and constrained by the uniform code of military justice, is very different from sparring with a man who earned his nickname by castrating the men he kills. The threat is not empty, and this is not a friendly chat.

  “Here’s the thing,” Don Vito says. “I got a son, little older than you, a good boy but headstrong. You know? Impulsive. He’s smart but he’s young.” He shrugs.

  Rainy sips at her drink and takes a moment to realize that what Don Vito means by “headstrong” and “impulsive” is probably violent, predatory—the gangster son of a gangster father.

  Don Vito, speaking that same odd Italian to Tony, says, “Ten bucks says Cisco’s in her pants inside of twenty-four hours.” Then to Rainy he says, “I’m translating for Tony, his English isn’t so good. He’s my counselor. Like my lawyer, but Napolitano.”

  Napolitano? As in Naples? That’s mainland Italy, not Sicily. Rainy nods, blank, giving nothing away.

  “So my boy, Cisco, Francisco, but hey, he’s born American, right, so Cisco. Anyway, Cisco has a little problem with some people up in Harlem. They want an eye for an eye, but we ain’t giving ’em Cisco, so that could be war—our own kinda war—and that’s bad for everyone. So it would be convenient if Cisco could spend some time in the Old Country, with my uncle. My uncle is a very wise man; he’ll get Cisco straightened out.”