“That’s all?” she said bitterly. “Don Willie would have broken the back of this man. But it’s not important to you, of course. It’s just luck the little American pig liked my legs and will give us a ride.” She was beginning to cry, and the tears filled the cups of her eyelids and gleamed like silver crescents in the soft lamplight. “I’m something you can use for a free ride, that’s all. Like a bus ticket. You don’t care what I feel. Last night I was sick with fear, and it meant nothing to you. You fell asleep like a dog in front of a fire. I’m alone and helpless and frightened, but you don’t care anything about that.”
“Don Willie cared, didn’t he?” Beecher said.
“Yes, yes. He always thought of me. I don’t care what you say, or what anybody says, he was good and kind to me.”
“It always takes two people to make the slave-master relationship work,” Beecher said coldly. “Why don’t you face that fact? You told me you couldn’t get away from him. But the truth is you clung to him like a barnacle on a ship. You’ve made a career out of weakness. And it wasn’t such a bad deal at that, was it?” Beecher was suddenly angry, his blood surging with the hard stroke of his heart. “The nice warm hotel in Frankfurt with the waiters in evening clothes and all the food you could stuff into yourself. Not bad, was it? And the nice clean air of Paris. Where the waiters were rude to Don Willie, for no reason at all except that he might have arranged to have some of their family and friends shot as hostages during the war. But everything was so nice. Your clothes were nice, and your villa was nice, and Don Willie was nice, and the whole damn thing just stank for being so nice, didn’t it?”
“No, please,” she whispered and closed her eyes. There was no expression in her white face. She stood rigid and fearful, as if she were awaiting the lash of a whip across her bare shoulders.
“So now he’s gone,” Beecher said brutally. “The Golden Goose is dead. And you want him back. Or anybody who’ll move your arms and legs and lips like a ventriloquist’s dummy. You don’t want to get out of your cage. All you want is someone to scratch your head and put food through the bars.”
She tried once to speak, but couldn’t; the words were choked in her throat by sobs. She sat on the bed and pressed her fists against her temples. “Why?” she said, in a weak, frantic voice. “Why did you do this?”
Beecher could find no answer to her question. He sat down and lit a cigarette, feeling as drained and spent as if he’d been running for miles. The smoke curled in slow, deliberate patterns toward the ceiling, twisting languorously in the warm air. He stretched out his legs and put his head back, as a bone-deep weariness seeped through his body.
Ilse had turned away from him and was lying face down on the bed, a fist pressed against her mouth. The light touched the tears on her cheeks and fell smoothly on the backs of her bare legs. She was crying silently.
Why had he done it? She had needed to know the truth, but he hadn’t helped to drive it home with a sledge hammer. Beecher put out his cigarette and sat beside her on the bed. “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter. Why do you care?”
Beecher took her shoulders and turned her over gently. He looked into her eyes. “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he said again. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s what is horrible. That you didn’t mean to.” She shook her head quickly, as if she were in pain, and the tears trembled on her eyelids. “You didn’t mean to. I’m not important enough for you to hurt. It was just an accident, like you would step on the tail of a dog walking across a room.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Why? Does it matter that I can be hurt? That you can make me cry?”
“Yes, it matters,” he said. He touched her wet cheeks with his fingers. “I don’t want to make you unhappy.”
She caught his fingers in her hand. “Don’t leave me. Please.”
“All right.”
She turned her head slowly and looked up at him. Her eyes were wide and dark in her pale face, but the tears made them shine like diamonds. She held his fingers tightly against her mouth. They didn’t speak for a long moment. “Please,” she whispered, and her breath was soft and warm on his hand. “Please, Mike.”
Beecher turned out the lights, and she put her arms about his neck and pulled him down beside her on the bed. Beecher kissed her cheeks and eyes, tenderly but sadly. She thought this would solve everything. When he put his hand on the small of her back a convulsive shudder went down her body.
“Wait, please,” she said, in a voice that was thick and low and sweet. “I want to undress. Help me, Mike. Help me. I don’t know anything.”
Beecher put a finger across her lips.
She kicked her pumps off and one of them fell from the bed. Beecher heard it drop lightly on the soft thick carpet. The other one fell off sometime later. But he didn’t hear that one land...
There was a moon in the dark sky, and its light came into the room and lay as softly and delicately as rose petals on the gold-and-ivory furniture. The creamy panels of the closet door were white as chalk. From somewhere they could hear radio music. They knew it came from a radio for when it stopped they heard the voice of an announcer speaking in smooth, liquid French.
She lay still and warm and smooth in his arms.
“Say it again,” she said in a soft happy voice. “That it doesn’t matter. That you weren’t surprised.”
“I wasn’t surprised,” Beecher said. “And it doesn’t matter one way or the other.” She hadn’t been sleeping with Don Willie. She hadn’t slept with anyone before tonight. And he had been surprised as hell by this. But it hadn’t mattered. That much wasn’t a lie.
She sighed and rubbed her cheek against his shoulder. “He always said it wouldn’t be right for me. Because of the war, and the fears I had. I was like his daughter, and I would never need any other men. He had women in Málaga, and he talked about them without any embarrassment. It was like a meal or going fishing — something to do at regular times.”
Beecher patted her bare shoulder. “You go to sleep now.”
“You go to sleep,” she said, raising herself on her elbow. She shook her head so that her long black hair fell across his face. “I will stay awake and protect you.”
“We’ve got an early start tomorrow.”
“With my nasty little American, I know. I’m sorry I talked that way. All Americans aren’t nasty. Even though they like my legs. I like that, too. It’s nice.”
Everything was solved now, Beecher thought. He closed his eyes and turned his cheek against her warm shoulder. Everything was solved for a while.
20
The american’s name was Arthur Pusey. Ilse’s description of him had been apt; he was of the ferret family surely, a small and tidy man in his middle fifties, with a pale, pointed face, and quick, probing eyes. He spoke in oblique and nervous bursts, attacking the silence as if it were an enemy, his twisting, scornful lips partially obscured by a graying mustache. Pusey had told them that he was in the automobile business in Blue Island, Illinois. He was now on the last leg of a month’s vacation in Europe.
“Figured I’d take a look at it before they drop the bomb,” he said. “Not much point coming afterward, eh? My wife’s on a civilian defense team back home — she’s supposed to drive out with blankets for the survivors from Chicago.” Pusey laughed. “Lot of good that will do, I told her.” His wife had stayed home, he had explained, because she didn’t like to be away from her doctor. “But I always wanted to take a look at this place. After the taxes I’ve paid to keep ’em going, I figured I kind of deserved it. But what appreciation do they show, eh? Give ’em to the Russians, that’s what I’d do.” Pusey had arrived at Gibraltar two days ahead of the ship he was taking back to the States, and he had decided to rent a car and drive through Morocco. “Damn fool notion. Nothing but dumb Arabs in the country, and a gang of con men in the cities.” Pusey’s nose twitched constantly as he spoke, as if he were scenting the winds of danger. “Glad to give you and your wife a lift to Tangier. Some people don’t like to take a chance picking up strangers. But I like to help out, when I can. That’s my philosophy, I guess.”