He was pounding the back of Chunjin’s head into the floor and asking him a series of what he thought were deliberative questions when the youngest squad-car cop came into the room first and fast, hitting him behind the head with a sap, and the entire, wonderful opportunity passed.
At St. Luke’s Hospital, Chunjin was adamant about two things: (1) he was emphatic in his refusal to press charges against his former commanding officer whom he had served long and intimately as orderly and interpreter, and who had most obviously mistaken him for an intruder in Mr. Shaw’s apartment, knowing that Mr. Shaw had never employed a servant before, and (2) it would be most necessary for the hospital staff to get him out of the place not later than noon on Monday so he could shop for food, then cook the first meal on his job for Mr. Shaw, because if they did not get him out he could lose his job and it was the only job he wanted in the United States of America. He could not, of course, explain that he would be shot if he lost it.
At the Twenty-fourth Precinct House at 100th Street and Central Park West, after riding the uniformed, half-conscious Marco from Raymond’s apartment in the squad car, they went through his effects, found his AGO card, made his branch, and called the Military Service Bureau downtown at the Police Academy, which maintained liaison between the New York police and branches of the armed forces. The bureau reached the duty officer at Army Intelligence, Washington, early in the evening. Marco was identified. The police were told with a very special sort of a voice, effectually a pleader’s voice, that Marco was one of the best men they had and that he had been having a very hard time. The voice explained, with great attention to their credulity, that Marco had picked up a sort of infection in his imagination while in the forward area in Korea, that he had run two hospital courses which had proved that he was as sane as anybody else but, well, Marco had had a hard time and anything the New York police could do that would tend to pull him together and send him on his way would be greatly appreciated by the U.S. Army.
Under proper conditions, there is no more cooperative institution than the New York Police Department, but they had had so much experience with top-blowers they insisted that Marco leave the station house in some custody which could be certified as being equable. Marco’s head still wasn’t very clear. He had been slugged. He had been in a rough fight and the adrenalin had turned to curds and whey in his veins. He was exhausted and he hadn’t been eating very much, but he knew enough to ask them to call Eldorado nine, two six three two and ask for Miss Eugénie Rose Cheyney.
They left him in a cell while they made the call and before the cell door had closed he was asleep. Rosie got to the station house in thirty-seven minutes. Unfortunately, just as she and the two detectives came along the cell-block corridor, he had been sleeping just long enough to have reached the auditorium at Tunghwa where Raymond was strangling Mavole with a silk scarf. As they stared into his cell, motionless for an instant, even the two cops were stricken with fright at the piteousness of his sounds and the imploring motions he succeeded in shaping with his hands. One detective got the door open. Eugénie Rose had gone chalk-white and was gripping her whole lower lip in her teeth to keep from yelling. She slid into the cell ahead of the second cop and got on her knees beside Marco’s bunk and shook him by the shoulders, talking steadily; then, desperate to get him out of the trap he was in, she whacked him with the full strength of her splendid arm across the left cheek and he came out of it, shaking. She held him in her arms. “It’s O.K., sweetheart,” she said. “It’s Rosie. It’s all right now. The dream is over. It’s Jennie.” And stuff like that.
She signed out for him at the desk as though he was a ripped purse some cannon had torn off her arm. He swayed slightly as he waited for her. She shook hands like a fight manager with the desk lieutenant, the two detectives, and a patrolman who happened to be passing through, and she told them if she could ever line up any hard-to-get theater seats for them they were to call her at Job Justin’s office and she would handle it with joy. She took Marco out into the air of that freak night; a cold, cold night in mid-April that was just one of the vagaries that made New York such an interesting place to die in.
He was wearing a uniform overcoat and an overseas cap. He did not look so bad in the half light. Everything was pressed. There was just a little blood on his right sleeve from Chunjin’s face from when he had overshot with the second right-hand punch. Eugénie Rose called a taxi as if it were her own hound dog: it came to heel with a hand signal. She put Marco in first, then she got in and closed the door. “Just drive through the park,” she said to the driver, “and discard the conversation you’ve been hoarding up since the last fare.”
“I don’t talk to passengers, lady,” the driver said. “I hate people until they tip me and then it’s too late.”
“I think you should eat something,” she said to Marco.
“I love food,” he answered. “I always have but I can’t swallow very well any more.”
“We’ll try, anyway,” she told him and leaned forward to tell the driver to take them to the Absinthe House, a calorie and beverage bourse catering to some of the craftiest minds this side of the owl and the pussycat, on West Forty-eighth. She leaned back on the seat and looped her arm through his. She was wearing a dark blue polo coat, some firm, dark skin, some white, white teeth, egg-sized dark eyes, and white hair.
“It was very original of you to have the Police Department call so shyly and ask for our first date,” she said softly.
“They asked me who I would—who would be willing, and I just—I—”
“Thank you. Very much.” She decided they needed more air and started to open all windows, telling the driver, “Sorry about all this air, but it’s very important. Take my word.”
“Lissen, lady, while the meter is going it’s your cab arreddy. Go ahead take the doors off it gets stuffy.” Marco’s teeth began to chatter. He tried to hold them clamped shut because he wanted her to feel efficient about opening the windows, but he sounded like a stage full of castanets. She closed the windows.
“Let’s pick up a can of soup and go to your place.”
“Sure.” She gave the driver the changed destination.
“You think they’ll let me visit that fellow at St. Luke’s tonight?”
“Maybe first thing in the morning.”
“Would you come with me? It would keep me calm. I wouldn’t want to hit him lying down like that.”
“Sure.”
“I have to find out where Raymond is.”
“The newspaperman you told me about? Why not call his newspaper?”
“Yeah. You’re right. Well, sure. So let’s go to the Absinthe House if you’d rather do that. I feel better.”
“You know what I was doing when you had the police call me?”
“I could guess, if I wasn’t so tired, I give up.”
“Well, after you dropped me off and I got upstairs, and before I took my coat off, I telephoned Lou Amjac, my fiancé”—Marco came forward, alert and alarmed—“and he came over as soon as he could, which was instantly, and I told him I had just met you and I gave him his ring back.” She held up her naked, long fingers of the left hand, and wriggled them. “I tried to convey my regrets for whatever pain I might be causing him. Then, just then, you had the police call me with the invitation to go into the tank at the Twenty-fourth Precinct. I grabbed this coat. I kissed Lou on the cheek for the last time in our lives that I would ever kiss him and I ran. At the station house they told me you had beaten up a very skinny little man but that you were a solid type yourself, according to Washington, so I figured that if they were willing to go to the trouble to get a comment on you out of George Washington, you all must have had a really successful séance while you were in the poky, and I must say it was real sweet of General Washington with you only a major, and I hadn’t even known you two had met, but if those policemen were the tiniest bit puzzled about you, they could have asked me. Oh, indeed yes, my darling Ben—I would have told them.”