Authors: Stephen Hunter
Even as he walked through the anonymous maze of the city in the deepening dark, he knew he’d secretly changed course several blocks back, though he’d lied to himself, refused to acknowledge it at the moment of decision.
But when he reached the flats in which she was quartered, he was unable to maintain the fiction of coincidence. He was going to see Susan.
She was not there, of course; Mildred, one of the roommates, was vague but remotely optimistic about her return, and so Leets sat idiotically in the living room and waited, passing the time with Mildred’s date for the evening, a B-24 pilot, another captain, while Mildred made ready in the john.
The pilot was not so friendly.
“One of my buddies got killed in some crazy OSS thing,” he told Leets.
“Sorry,” Leets said mildly, hoping to end the conversation there.
“Low-level agent drop, nobody came back at all,” the pilot declared, fixing Leets in the black light of a glare.
And what about all the agents spread to hell and gone by panicked pilots who dumped them like freight twenty miles off the drop zone? His own operational jump had been handled by a British crew, who’d been in the business since 1941; they’d put him and his two companions right on the mark. But he’d heard horror stories of poor guys coming down in enemy territory miles from their contacts, to wander about stupidly until nabbed.
“People get killed in a war,” Leets said. “Even Air Force pilots.”
“Yeah, sure, in the
war,”
the pilot said. “What I want to know, is that crazy stuff you do, is it part of the
war?
Or is it some game for rich kids? Is it real?”
An interesting question. Leets had no answer. He looked steadily at the other man and saw that the fellow wasn’t really angry with him but at the war and its waste and stupidity and ignorance.
“It varies,” he finally said, and as he spoke he heard the door opening in the hallway.
Mildred, coming out of the john, ran into her first.
“Suse, guess who’s back?”
“Oh, Christ,” Leets heard Susan say.
He felt himself rising as she came into the room.
Her starches were wilted and her hair was a mess. She held her white shoes in her hand. Her face was tired and plain.
“Well, here I am again, ha, ha,” Leets said, grinning
sheepishly, uncomfortably aware of the hostile bomber pilot watching him.
“Suse, we’re going now,” Mildred called, as she and the grumpy pilot got ready to leave.
Susan still had not said anything. She looked him over, ruthlessly, as if he were another patient on the triage list. She was a first lieutenant in the Army Nurse Corps, in plastic surgery; she was a pale, bright, pretty girl from Baltimore; Leets had known her forever, meaning from that magical period only remotely remembered as Before the War. She’d gone to Northwestern too, where she’d dated and, incidentally, married a friend of his who was now on a ship in the Pacific. Leets had run into her six months earlier in the hospital, where his leg had put him.
“Guess I can’t stay away,” he confessed. “I had my mind all made up; it was set. No more Susan. Best for her. Best for me. Best for Phil. But here I am again.”
“This must be the twentieth time you’ve pulled this routine. When you get it just right, you can do it on ‘Jack Benny.’”
“It is pretty funny, I admit.”
“You don’t look so hot,” she said.
“I’m not. You don’t have a date, or anything?”
“Date? I’m married, remember.”
“You know I do.”
“But I do have something later. I said I’d—”
“Still going?”
“Still.”
“They give the Nobel peace prize during a war? You deserve one.”
“How’s the leg, Jim?”
“I should love it; it brought us together.” He’d first seen her with his leg hanging on a line off the ceiling like a prize fish.
“But it’s not so good,” he said to her now, “the goddamn thing still leaks and when it leaks, it really
aches.”
“There’s still metal in there, right?”
“Real small stuff.”
“Too small for the X-rays. And they keep infecting on you. They’ve got you on penicillin, right?”
“A ton a day.”
“Nobody’ll catch the clap from you, that’s for sure.”
“Hear from Phil?”
“His ship took one of those crazy Jap kamikazes in the bridge. Fifteen guys got killed. He’s all right. He made lieutenant commander.”
“Phil’ll do fine. I know he will. He’ll come out an admiral.”
“Hear from Reed?”
“No, but I got a note from Stan Carter. He’s still in Washington. He says Reed’s a major, shooting down Japs left and right.
Major!
Christ, and look at me.”
“You never were the ambitious one.”
“Say, let’s go get something to eat. I need something to cheer me up. Tough one at the office. They’ve all decided I’m a crank. The jerks. So anyway, okay?”
“Jim, I don’t have time. Really. Not tonight.”
“Oh. Yeah, sure, I see. Well, listen, I just stopped by to see how you were, you know, see if you’d heard from anybody.”
“Don’t go. Did I say go?”
“No, not in so many
words
. But—”
“Damn you. I wish you’d make up your goddamned mind.”
“Susan,” he said.
“Oh, Leets,” she said. “What are we going to do? What in hell are we going to do?”
“I don’t know. I really have no idea.”
She stood up and began to unbutton her uniform.
Later, in the dark, he lit a cigarette.
“Listen, darling, put that cigarette out. It’s time to go,” she said.
“The Center.”
“Yes. Walk me over, all right? It’s not far.”
“Okay. You sure know how to keep yourself depressed.”
“Somebody’s got to go. From our side, I mean. I promised my father—” She turned on the light.
“I know. I know all that. But it’s such a waste of time. They don’t
own
the war, you know. We get part of it too, you know.”
“I’m sure there’s enough to go around,” Susan said. Naked, she walked to the dresser. She was beautiful to him. Her hips were slim and he could see her ribs. She had small, fine breasts, with just enough a sense of density to them, roundness without bulk. He felt another erection begin to swell. The center of his body warmed. He reached and turned out the light.
“No,” she said, disinterestedly. “Not now. Please. Come on.”
He turned it on again, and climbed out of bed into his GI underwear. The Jews. The fucking Jews came first.
“They’re a pain in the ass,” he said. “The Jews.”
“Their part of the war is special.”
“Special! Listen, let me tell you something. Everybody who somebody’s trying to kill is special. When I was in France getting shot at, was I ever special!”
“No, it’s different. Please, let’s not go over this again, all right? We always come back to it. Always.”
She was right. They always did. Sooner or later.
He grunted, putting on his uniform. Susan, meanwhile, stepped into a civilian dress, a shapeless, flowered thing, dowdy. It made her look forty and domestic.
“Look,” he suddenly said, tightening his tie, “I’ll tell you who’s special. Who’s
really
special.”
“Who? Reed?”
“No. You. Divorce Phil. Marry me. All right?”
“No,” she said, trying to get a necklace fastened. “First, you don’t mean it. You’re just a lonely boy from the Midwest in a big European city. You think you love me. You love my—well, we both know what you love. Second, I don’t love you. I love Phil Isaacson, which is why I married him, even if he is six thousand miles away on a ship and I feel guilty as hell. Third, you’re what we call a Goy. No offense. It doesn’t mean inferior, but it means different. It would make all kinds of problems. All kinds. And fourth—well, I don’t remember number four.” She smiled. “But I’m sure it’s a great one.”
“They’re all great,” he said, smiling himself. “I ask you every time. When we started you had ten reasons. Then eight. Now it’s down to four, three really, because you don’t remember the last one. I feel like I’m making some kind of progress.” He leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek.
* * *
“Turn here?” Leets thought he remembered, even in the fog.
“Right. Good memory,” she said.
He’d been there once before and was not overwhelmed at the prospect of returning. He knew he didn’t belong.
“Funny the stuff that sticks in your mind. I remember the kid.”
“The kid?”
“The little boy. You know, the one in the picture they’ve got there.”
“Oh, yes. That’s Michael Hirsczowicz. At fifteen months. In pleasanter times. Warsaw, August, 1939. Just before it all began.”
“You’ll laugh at this. Tony called
me
a Jew today.”
“That’s not very funny.”
“No, I suppose it’s not. Here, right?”
“Yes.”
They turned in a dark doorway and began to climb some dim stairs.
“You don’t think of the Jews having a government in exile,” Leets said.
“It’s not a government in exile. It’s a refugee agency.”
“Everybody knows it’s political.”
“It’s powerless. How can that be political? It’s to try and keep people alive. How can that be political? It’s funded by little old ladies in Philadelphia. How can that be political?”
The sign on the door said something in that squiggly funny writing and beneath it
ZIONIST RELEIF AGENCY.
“Jesus, they can’t even spell.”
“It
is
pitiful, isn’t it,” Susan said bitterly.
She’d been coming for months now, three, four nights a week. First it was a joke: her father had instructed her in a letter not to forget who she was, what she came from, and though she blithely said she was an American, from Baltimore, she dropped in that first time only because she recognized Yiddish on the door. But gradually, it began to get under her skin.
“What the hell do you get out of it?” Leets had wondered.
“Nothing,” she said.
Still, she kept it up, until it became almost obsessive.
But it wasn’t as if she could do any good, any real good. That was the bitter joke beneath it all, though for Leets it wasn’t a joke anymore, merely a bitterness. They were so pathetic: from the old man Fischelson on down, the girls in the office, all hysterics, scared, most of them. They needed so much help and Susan did what she could, with paper work, and telephones, small things like dealing with the landlord, making sure the place stayed heated, proof-reading the news releases, even in their fractured, East Side Yiddish-English. She knew all along that nobody was listening.
“It’s Communist, isn’t it?” he said.
“It’s Jewish. Not quite the same thing. Anyway, the man whose money started it was a rich, conservative land- and factory-owning aristocrat. A banker. What could be further from communism?”
Still, Leets had his doubts. “I don’t know,” he said.
“It’s his kid. In the hall. Josef Hirsczowicz: he’s the
father. One of the richest men in Europe. That’s his child. Or was.”
“They’re dead?”
“They didn’t get out. That little boy, Jim. Think of that. The Germans killed him, because he’s Jewish.”
“They’re trying to kill a lot of little boys. They tried to kill
this
little boy. Religion has nothing—” but he stopped. He didn’t want to get back into it.
They reached the door at the end of the stairway.
“You’re wasting your time,” he cautioned.
“Of course I am,” she said. The Zionists hoped to communicate to the indifferent Western world what they maintained was happening in Occupied Europe. Susan had monstrous tales, of mass executions and death camps. Leets told her it was propaganda. She said she had proof. Pictures.
“Pictures don’t mean a thing,” he’d instructed her brutally weeks ago. “Pictures can be faked. You need a goddamned witness, someone who’s been there. That’s the only way you’ll get anybody to listen to your stuff. Listen, you’re going to get in trouble. You’re an officer in the United States Army. Now you’re hanging around with a group of—”
She’d put a finger to his lip, ending his sentence. But later she talked of it. Nobody would believe, she said. The Zionist leaders sat in the offices of great men in London, she explained with great bitterness, who’d listen earnestly, then shoo them out after a polite moment or two.
Now, standing in the outer office, about to lose her, Leets felt the beginning of a headache. The headaches always ended in rage.
Christ, what a hole! All that peeling paint and those blinky, low-watt bulbs that almost looked like candles. It smelled like a basement up here, and was always chilly, and all the other people seemed pallid and underfed and would not look at him in his uniform.
“Thanks for walking me over, Jim,” she said. “I appreciate it. I really do.” She smiled, and stepped away.
“Susan.” He grabbed her arm. “Susan, not tonight. Come on, we’ll do the town.”
“Thanks, Jim, but we had our fun.”
He didn’t mind losing her to Phil—he knew he would in the end anyway—but he hated losing her to this.
“Please,” he said.
“I can’t. I’ve got to go.”
“It’s just—”
“Just Jews, Leets,” she said. “Me too.” She smiled. “Believe it or not.”
“I believe, I believe,” he protested. But he did not believe. She was just an American girl, who’d invented her membership in this fossil race.
“No, you don’t,” she said. “But sometimes, I love you anyway.”
And she disappeared behind the door.
The next morning, in the office, Leets’s headache still banged away. He stood looking across the gray skyline.
And where was Roger? Late as usual, he came crashing in, uniform a mess.
“Had trouble finding a
cab,”
he said. He’d once pointed out that he was probably the only enlisted man in any army who took a cab to World War II each morning.
“Sorry,” he continued.
Leets said nothing. He stared grumpily out the window.
“Guess who I met last night? Go on. Guess, Captain.”
Leets complained instead. “Rog, you didn’t sweep up last night. This place isn’t the Savoy, but it doesn’t have to look like Hell’s Kitchen either.”