“Warm my feet,” she said, and he grunted again, and she stifled a laugh.
I mustn’t laugh. It’s really Friday, no matter what he says, it won’t be Saturday until I wake up in the morning, why are men so ridiculous about time? She lay in bed with a smile on her face, holding his hand between her own, clutching his hand to her bosom. In a little while she fell asleep, the smile still on her mouth.
She heard the shower going, and she opened her eyes. She could not have been asleep for more than a few hours; there was bright sunlight streaming around the edges of the leaded casements. He began singing in the bathroom, quite suddenly and quite awfully, and she grinned and stretched and pushed her blond head deeper into the pillow, feeling very luxuriant and very loved and also very tired.
Well, he sings in the shower, she thought. She was pleased, even though he sang terribly. She pulled the covers to her throat, feeling that she looked very impish and pure and clean without make-up, and probably very horrible. When he sees me, he’ll run out of the room screaming. Maybe I ought to get up and put on some lipstick. The singing stopped, and then the sound of the water. The bathroom door opened. He had wrapped the towel around his waist and he headed for the dresser now, apparently going for a comb. He had not dried himself very thoroughly. There were droplets of water clinging to his shoulders; his face and hair no were still wet, the hair clinging to his forehead. He moved totally unaware of her, stepping into a narrow wedge of sunlight, his eyes suddenly flashing very blue. She watched him, the broad shoulders and the narrow waist, the pathetic droplets of water clinging to him, the damp hair flattened against his forehead, his face glistening wet, the blue eyes captured by sunlight. She watched him silently, seeing the man as he moved toward the dresser, thinking, This is the man unawares, this is the man I love.
She made a small sound.
He turned, mildly surprised, his eyebrows quirking upward, his mouth beginning a smile. “Oh, are you awake?”
She could not answer for a moment. She loved him so much in that instant that she could not speak. She nodded and kept watching him.
“You look nice,” she said at last, inadequately.
He went to the bed, knelt by it, took her face in his hands and kissed her. “You look lovely,” he said.
“Oh, ja, ja, ja. I’ll bet.”
“Oh, ja, ja, ja. You’d win.”
“I look horrible. I’m a horror.”
“You’re the most beautiful horror I’ve ever seen.”
She ducked her head into the pillow. “Don’t look at me, please. I have no lipstick on.”
“The better to kiss you, my love,” he said, and he turned her face to him, capturing it in his hands again. His mouth was reaching for hers when they heard the airplanes. He lifted his head. The noise of the planes filled the sky, and then the small room. His eyes turned toward the window. A squadron of planes, Karin thought, heading for Berlin, and then she noticed that he was trembling and she was filled with instant alarm.
“What is it?” she said.
“Nothing.”
She sat up and gripped his arms. “What is it, Hank? You’re shaking. You’re—”
“Nothing. Nothing. I... I...”
He got off the bed and walked to the dresser. He lighted a cigarette quickly and then went to the window, following the progression of the squadron across the sky.
“Transports,” he murmured.
“Yes,” she said softly. “The war is over, Hank.”
“In Germany it is,” he said. He took a hasty drag at his cigarette. She watched him for a moment and then threw back the covers, swung her legs over the side of the bed and went to stand alongside him at the window. The planes were out of sight now. Only their distant hum could be heard in the sky.
“What is it?” she said firmly. “Tell me, Hank.”
He nodded bleakly. “I’m flying on Monday. That’s why I got the weekend. I’m taking some brass to...”
“Where?”
He hesitated.
“Where?”
“One of the islands in the Pacific.” He squashed out his cigarette.
“Will there be... shooting?”
“Possibly.”
They were silent.
“But you aren’t sure?” she said.
“Half the island is still held by the Japanese,” he said. “There’ll be shooting. And planes probably.”
“Why did they pick you?” she said angrily. “It isn’t fair!”
He did not answer her. She faced him, looking up at him, and she said, very softly, “You’ll be all right, Hank.”
“Sure.”
“You will, darling. Whether they shoot or not, you’ll be all right. You’ll come back to Berlin. You have to, you see. I love you very much, and I couldn’t bear losing you.”
And suddenly he pulled her to him, and she could feel tension surging through his body like a sentient force.
“I need you,” he whispered. “I need you, Karin. Karin, I need you so much. I need you so much.”
And now even the sound of the planes was gone.
Eight
This was McNalley’s jungle.
It didn’t look like a jungle at all.
Hank had come down the long street, starting in Italian Harlem and walking west, retracing the steps of the three young killers on that night in July. Now, on Park Avenue, he walked into the market beneath the New York Central tracks, listening to the babble of voices around him. He felt as if he had truly entered a foreign land, but he felt no fear. He felt again, and very strongly, that the idea of three Harlems existing as separate territories was truly a myth. For, despite the change of language, despite the change of color — the Puerto Rican people ranged from white to tan to brown — despite the strange vegetables on the stalls and the religious and mystic pamphlets printed in Spanish, he felt that these people were no different from their neighbors to the east, or the west. In fact, they shared a common bond: poverty.
And yet he could, in part, understand McNalley’s fear. For here was, on the surface at least, the alien. What ominous words were being spoken in this foreign tongue? What malicious thoughts lurked behind these brown eyes? Here among the botanical herbs on the stalls, the hedionda, and maguey, and higuito, and corazón, here where the housewives haggled over the price of fruit and vegetables — “How much the guenepas? The chayote? The ají dulce, the mango, the pepino?” — here was another world, not a jungle certainly, but a world as far removed from Inwood as was Puerto Rico itself. Here, in a sense, was the unknown. And McNalley, the caveman squatting close to his protective fire, looked out into the darkness and wondered what terrible shapes lurked behind each bush, and he fed his own fear until he was trembling.
He walked to the exit at the end of the long tunnel and came out into sunlight again. On the corner of the street a butcher shop nestled beneath the tenement, its Carnicería sign advertising the meats resting on trays in the window. Alongside it was a bodega, cans of groceries stacked in the window, strings of peppers hanging overhead. He walked past the grocery and into the street where Rafael Morrez had been killed.
The people knew instantly that he was the law.
They sensed it with the instinct of people who have somehow discovered the law to be not their protector but their enemy. They allowed him a wide berth on the sidewalk. They watched him silently from the front stoops of the tenements. In the open lots strewn with rubbish, children looked up as he walked by. An old lady said something in Spanish, and the crone with her began laughing hysterically.