He looked terrible.
He said, “Let’s get married, Rosie.” He stepped over the threshold and grabbed her as though she were the rock of the ages. He kissed her. She kicked the door shut. She started to kiss him in return and it turned his knees to water.
“When?” she inquired.
“How long does it take in this state? That’s how long.” She kissed him again and massaged his middle with her pelvis. “I want to marry you, Ben, more than I want to go on eating Italian food, which will give you a slight idea, but we can’t get married so quickly,” she breathed on him.
“Why?”
“Ben, you’re thirty-nine years old. We met three days ago and that’s not enough time to get a bird’s-eye view or a microscopic view of anyone. When we get married, Ben, and please notice how I said when we get married, not when I get married, we have to stay married because I might turn into a drunk or a religieuse or a crypto-Republican if we ever failed, so let’s wait a week.”
“A week.
“Please.”
“Well, all right. There is such a thing as being over-mature about decisions like this but we won’t get married for a week. But we’ll get the papers and take the blood tests and post the banns and plan the children’s names and buy the ring and rent the rice and call the folks—”
“Folks?”
He stared at her for a moment. “You neither?”
“No.”
“An orphan?”
“I used to be convinced that, as a baby, I had been the only survivor of a space ship which had overshot Mars.”
“Very sexy stuff.”
“You look a different kind of awful from yesterday. Mr. Shaw told me you slept all night. Quietly.”
“Ah. You talked to Raymond.
“This morning. He is very formal about you.”
“Poor Raymond. I’m the only one he has. Not that he needs anybody. Old Raymond has only enough soul to be able to tolerate two or three people in his life. I’m one of them. There’s a girl I think he weeps over after he locks the doors. There’s room for just about one more and he’ll be full up. I hope it’s you because having Raymond on your side is not unlike being backed up by the First Army.”
“Did you have a bad time today?”
“Yeah. Well, yes and no.”
He sat down as suddenly as though his legs had broken. She descended like a great dancer to rest on the floor beside his chair. He rubbed the back of her neck with his right hand, absent-mindedly, but with sensual facility.
“You are the holiest object I have in the world,” he said slowly and with a thick voice, “so I swear upon you that I am going to get even with Senator John Iselin for what happened today. I don’t know how yet. But how I will do it will always be somewhere in my mind from today on. From today on I’ll always be thinking about how I, Marco, am going to make him pay for what he did today. I probably won’t kill him. I found out today that I will probably never make a murderer.”
She stared up at him. His face glistened with sweat and his eyes were sad instead of being vengeful. Her own eyes, the Tuareg eyes, were black almonds with blue centers; a changing blue, like mist over far snow. They were the eyes of a lady left over from an army of crusaders who had taken the wrong turning, moving left toward Jarabub in Africa, instead of right, toward London, after Walter the Penniless had sent them to loot the Holy Land in 1096, to settle forever in the deep Sahara, to continue the customs of the lists, knight errantry, and the wooing of ladies fair for whose warm glances the warriors sang their songs. She stared at him steadily, then rested her head on the side of his leg and sat quietly.
“Iselin is Raymond’s stepfather,” Marco told her. “He sits right there in his office on the Hill. He’s the most accessible, available senator we have, you know, because most of our newspapers are published right in his office nowadays. Senator Iselin is really fond of Raymond because Johnny is a terrific salesman. Raymond has no use for him, and a lack of buyer feeling about the product has always been a tremendous challenge to a salesman. All I needed to do was to call Johnny, tell him Raymond sent me, be shown right into his office, lock the door, and shoot him through the head. Or maybe beat him to death with a steel chair.” Marco was talking quietly, through his teeth. He thought about his lost opportunity for a moment.
“Did you know Raymond was a Medal of Honor man, Rosie?” he asked almost rhetorically. She shook her gray-white head without answering. “I wish I could explain to you what that means. But I’d have to find a way to send you back to grow up on Army posts and put you through the Academy and find you a couple of wars and a taste for Georgie Patton and Caesar’s Commentaries and Blücher and Ney and Moltke, but thank God we can’t do any of that. Just believe it because I say it, that a Medal of Honor man is the best man any soldier can think of because he has achieved the most of what every soldier was meant to do. Anyway, after Raymond got the medal, I began to have nightmares. They were pretty bad. I had come to the worst of them when I found you, thank God. The nightmares were always the same for five years and they took a lot of trouble to suggest that Raymond had not won the medal rightfully after I had sworn he had won it and the men of my patrol had sworn to it. In the end, the dreams have convinced me that we were wrong. I am sure now that the Russians wanted Raymond to have the medal so he got it. I don’t know why. Maybe, if I’m lucky, I never will know why. But I’m an officer trained in intelligence work. I filled a notebook with details about furniture and clothing and complexions and speech defects and floor coverings. I talked everything over with Raymond. He got the idea that I should request a public investigation so that the enemy, at the very least, would think we knew more than we knew. That idea ended this afternoon with a lieutenant general putting a bullet into his head because it was the only possible thing he could have done to make Iselin hear the Army’s protest against what Iselin had done to us. I knew that general. He liked living and he had a big time at it but he saw that protest as being an important Army job and he had been trained to accept responsibility.” Marco’s voice got bleak. “So I swear on you, on my Eugénie Rose, that the day will come that I, Marco, will make Senator John Iselin pay for that, and if he has to be killed, and I can’t kill him, I’ll have someone kill him for me.” He closed his eyes for a few beats. “We got any beer in the house?” he asked her.
She got some. She drank plain warm gin.
Marco drank a can of the beer before he spoke again. “Anyway I was stopped,” he said at last. “Before he shot himself the general ordered me to forget the court-martial, so that is that. I’m frozen with my terrible dreams inside of a big cake of ice and I’ll never get out.”
“You’ll get out.”
“No.”