Harry pointed to the galvanized tub. “You fill that with snow and put it on the stove. Don’t worry about Johnny. He’ll turn his back.”
Cynthia’s gaze moved to the square features of the gunman, who looked back at her without expression. But in his eyes she detected the same faint look of hunger with which he always regarded her, and quickly she averted her own eyes for fear he would be able to read the responsive hunger in them.
“Sure, Mrs. Ross,” Johnny said quietly. “I’ll turn my back.”
The room by now had become comfortably warm. Shrugging out of his topcoat, Johnny hung it from a nail on the wall and turned to help Cynthia off with her coat. With her back to him, she felt his knuckles rub along the silk covering her arms as she slid from the coat, and the contact sent a terrifying sweep of fire through her whole body.
As Johnny carefully hung the coat on a hanger, Harry regarded his wife admiringly. She was a beautiful woman, with delicate features, an over-ripe mouth, a pale, milk-white complexion emphasized by jet black hair, and a perfectly proportioned body. Cynthia was proud of her body and proud of the hold it gave her over her middle-aged husband. She started to respond to his admiring glance by flattening her stomach and thrusting her firm breasts outward to make the thin silk of her dress outline her figure in detail. But when Johnny turned around, she abruptly let her shoulders slump and folded her hands demurely in front of her.
Together she and Johnny helped Harry remove his topcoat, suit coat and shoes, so that he lay on the bunk in only shirt and trousers.
“Now loosen your belt so I can pull off your pants,” Cynthia ordered. “I want to give that wound a decent dressing.”
Obediently Harry did as directed and she pulled his trousers down below his knees. In the center of his right thigh was a blood-soaked rag bandage.
Carefully she pulled it loose and looked down with pursed lips at the purple-ringed hole. Ordering the wounded man to roll on his side, she examined the puckered but clean exit hole on the back of his thigh.
“Heat some water,” she told Johnny without looking at him. Rising, she began poking through the first aid kit attached to the wall next to the front door.
Twenty minutes later Harry Ross, freshly bandaged, sat upright on his bunk wearing clean pajamas and sipping a cup of coffee. His wife and Johnny Venuti sat on opposite sides of the table with cups before them also. Johnny had removed his suit coat to disclose a leather shoulder harness containing a German P-38 with a transparent grip.
Cynthia’s eyes rested idly on the gun, traveled to the bodyguard’s powerful shoulders and then to his square, expressionless face. There was strength in that lean body, she was thinking. Ruthless, almost animal strength. Fleetingly she imagined his arms crushing her against him, and was horrified that the thought created a guilty feeling of pleasure.
“Something bothering you, baby?” Harry asked.
Swiftly she jerked her gaze from Johnny. “I just wondered why Johnny has to keep wearing that gun up here,” she improvised.
“Force of habit,” Johnny said. Slipping off the harness, he hung it from the back of his chair.
“I never saw a gun grip like that before,” Cynthia said. “Is that a picture on it?”
Instead of answering, Johnny glanced questioningly at his boss.
“She’s a big girl,” Harry said. “Show it to her.”
Slipping the automatic from its holster, Johnny removed the clip and ejected the shell in the chamber. He offered it to Cynthia, butt first.
“It’s a war souvenir,” he said. “The Kraut it come from must of cut the side grips out of plexiglass from the cowling of a crashed plane, and put those pictures under the plexiglass. Maybe she was the Kraut’s girl.”
The pictures under the transparent side grips were of a plump, full-bosomed blonde, the one under the right grip a front view and the one on the left a rear view. Both were full-length photographs and in both the girl was stark naked. Cynthia handed the gun back without comment.
“I got it off my captain at Cassino,” Johnny said. “Best officer we ever had, Captain Grace. I’d of followed that guy straight into hell.”
“I thought you said it came from a German,” Cynthia said.
“Yeah, the captain found it on a dead Kraut, and when the captain died, I got it off him. Funny thing, the way it happened.”
The bodyguard stared down at the gun in his hand, and when neither Cynthia nor Harry commented, he said, “We was on a patrol and the old man got out ahead of us. We saw him get hit, but just then a couple of Kraut machine guns started sweeping the area between us and Captain Grace. The sergeant was all for getting the hell out of there, but I could see the captain leaning back against a pile of rocks, and he didn’t look dead to me. So I went after him. Still don’t know how I made it there and back. It was three hundred yards through machine-gun fire with hardly any cover.”
Cynthia, who had been listening intently, stared at him with dawning understanding of her husband's regard for the lean gunman. Her normal sense of guilty uneasiness in his presence was replaced by a feeling of astonished respect.
“That must have taken remarkable courage,” she said.
Johnny considered this with evident surprise, as though it had never previously occurred to him. Finally he said in a tone which indicated he thought the explanation should have been obvious, “He was my captain.”
After a moment he added, “Never forget what he said when I showed up. He kind of smiled and said, ‘I might have known you’d be along, Johnny. But it’s no use. I’ll be dead in ten minutes.’ He wasn’t lying. He was totally paralyzed from a hole square in his center, and the minute I saw his wound, I knew it would kill him to move him a foot.”
Again he gazed down at the gun he was holding. In a reflective voice he said, “Funny part about it, two minutes later he was cussing my brains out.”
Both members of his audience looked at him without understanding.
“Because I took the gun,” Johnny explained. “When he felt me pulling it out of his holster, he got it in his head that’s all I’d come after. Christ, as though I’d crawl three hundred yards through machine-gun fire after a lousy gun. I never even thought of it until I saw the captain was a goner. But when I crawled away he called me every kind of name he knew. He was still swearing when I got out of earshot.”
Cynthia said blankly, “But, Johnny, if it upset him that much, why didn’t you leave it?”
“What good was a gun to a dead man?” Johnny asked with genuine astonishment. “I was just being practical. Christ, if I could of changed places with the captain, I’d of been glad to watch him crawl away, but there wasn’t anything I could do for him. I always liked this gun. Lot’s of times before the captain got killed I used to wish it was me who had found that dead Kraut instead of him.”
Harry said with a mixture of wonder and affection, “Johnny, you’ve got the damndest philosophy I ever heard of.”
The tale left Cynthia more confused about Johnny than ever, for it revealed a mixture of courage, loyalty and ruthlessness which hardly seemed compatible in the same person. Deliberately she wrenched her mind from him by leaving the table to examine the galvanized wash tub. Harry’s eyes followed her.
“Cynthia wants her bath,” he said to Johnny. “Come hell or high water, Cynthia wants her bath seven nights a week. As a student, they called her ‘Sanitary Cynthia’.”
“What’s wrong with liking to be clean?” Cynthia asked.
Without having to be requested, Johnny did the preliminary work necessary to taking a bath under primitive conditions. Going outdoors with the galvanized tub and a snow shovel, he returned with the tub half full of snow, dragged it across the floor and heaved it up onto the stove.