by Joel N. Ross
One flight up, he said, “After what?”
“After what, what?” She laughed again. “You’re making me sound like Inch.”
“You said Inch was the last person to see Earl after he did what?”
“He—he misbehaved.” A tint of red started above the swell of her breasts and rose to the nape of her neck. “It’s personal. It’s embarrassing.”
“So spill.”
“Shove in your clutch, Tommy,” she said.
On the second floor, a long corridor unrolled in front of them. A dozen dark wooden doors lined the cream-colored walls. The ceiling was high and the carpet thick.
“Here,” she said. “Hardly a shelter in a raid, but private as private can be.”
The doors on the left side had pictures of flowers. The doors on the right had dogs: a poodle, a Yorkie, a bloodhound. At the end of the hall was a picture of a boxer. The Pugilist Room.
“Earl’s room?” Tom said.
She nodded, and it hit him again. The Hun knew. Knew Earl was a member of the Waterfall, knew he called it the Rapids. Maybe even knew he had a room. The connection between them was real.
“You look ill,” the girl said.
“I am.”
“You need—” She unlocked the door. “I’ll fetch a glass of water.” She put a hand on his arm. “You should rest a moment.”
He shook her off. “Wait outside.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
She tried to enter, but he blocked her. “You heard me. My brother. My business.” He took the key and dropped it in his pocket. “My key.”
“You wouldn’t know about the room if it wasn’t for me. You wouldn’t have the key. . . .”
He raised his hand to cuff her and she didn’t flinch. She stared with her midnight eyes and set her jaw. He dropped his hand. “Stay out of my way.”
She slipped past him into the room, switched on the light.
“Fuck,” he said, following her.
She flopped onto the bed. “That is rather the notion, yes.”
And it was. The room was a peach trap—big blue bed with big blue pillows and carpet thick enough to make a girl want to kick off her heels. There was a bureau, a night table, and a pair of cushioned chairs, which wouldn’t look right unless draped with stockings. A walk-in closet with a chest of drawers. Blackout shades covered by ruffled curtains, a desk under a shelf of books with spines that matched the walls. A door half-opened to a bathroom. Another door, dull red, like a fire door, leading . . .
“Exterior stairs,” the girl said. She had her shoes off and her legs folded under herself, reclining against the headboard. Her dress was rucked to her knees and her stockinged feet rubbed smoothly, slowly together.
He opened the red door, and it was cold and dark outside. There was a wide ledge with a half wall of brick extending along the building. It would have been used for hanging laundry if this were a tenement. He closed the door.
“That’s what I meant by privacy,” she said. “The outside stairs. What are you looking for?”
“Please,” he said.
“I can help.”
“You can leave.”
He checked the bureau. It was empty. There was nothing under the bed. The bathroom was a bathroom. He tossed the chair cushions to the floor. He ran his fingers over the wallpaper. He walked into the closet—Earl’s suits, shoes, hats, ties. There was an empty suitcase, which was only an empty suitcase. He grabbed one of Earl’s ties from the rack, clumsily loosened the knot on his own loud tie, pulled it over his head, and tossed it on the floor.
“I’m starting to think it is delirium tremens,” the girl said.
Tom pulled the new tie around his neck, but his bandaged hand gave him trouble. He struggled with the fucking thing. It was all falling apart.
The girl unwound herself from the bed and stood eight inches from him. She was small. He looked down at her glossy black hair, the tip of her nose. She fixed the knot, taking her lower lip between her teeth while she worked. He turned his head, told himself he couldn’t smell the perfume of her hair, couldn’t feel how warm she’d be to hold. Her fingers were clever and quick. She finished the knot and smoothed the tie. She put her palm on his chest and looked up at him. “Much better.”
His eyes locked with hers. He moved to the desk and she returned to the bed. He heard the mattress sigh.
He checked behind the books and opened the drawer of the night table—lipstick, scattered change, a box of matches, a pen with a mismatched cap. He dumped everything on the tabletop, turned the drawer over to check the underside.
The girl watched him as he tossed the place as thoroughly as he knew how, without slitting cushions and snapping chair legs. It took forty minutes by the bronze windup clock used as a bookend on the shelf. He found nothing. Hyde Street Misfits, then? It was all he knew.
He threw a pillow back onto one of the chairs and sat. He needed to search the bed, but the girl was there. She had unwound her scarf, and her hair fell in perfect bedroom disarray.
“What was it Earl did?” Tom asked. “The embarrassing thing?”
“I’d rather not say.”
He fumbled in his pocket for the silver lighter, snapped it open and closed. It reminded him of the smell of rum and ashes. By what dark magic had Sondegger stolen it?
The bronze clock clicked off two minutes. The girl said, “He spread word I’d been . . . He said we’d been sleeping together.”
“Had you?”
“I can’t imagine that’s any of your affair.”
“Whose affair was it?”
She laughed suddenly. “You’re almost charming, Tommy.”
“I’m almost a lot of things. Were you lovers?” Wrong word, if it had been commerce. “I mean, had he . . . Did you—”
“I know perfectly well what you mean.”
“But you won’t answer?”
“Why do you have trouble sleeping?” The girl smoothed her skirt. “The answer is no, we weren’t lovers. He was taking the mickey out of me by saying we were. He’s not malicious, just unable to draw distinctions.”
“You’d be surprised,” Tom said.
“A girl in a place like this can’t afford gossip.” She grinned. “Unless she’s the one who starts it.”
“Undercut your prices? He said he’d had you for free?”
“Don’t be cruel, Tommy. It doesn’t suit you.”
He lowered his head. He was tired. His mind was dark as the streets outside. “Why are you here? What do you want?”
“Must I want something?”
“Everyone wants something.” He heard bitterness in his voice. That didn’t suit him, either. “What do you want, Miss Pritchett?”
The mattress whispered as she stood. Her feet made no sound on the thick carpet. She knelt next to his chair. She reached for his right hand, and he moved it away.
“My name is Audrey.” She spoke softly, as if she were gentling a horse. “My father was killed early in the raids, and our house burned with him. He was a docker, a proud, poor man. I’d been an ambulance driver since County Office first asked for volunteers—because that’s the sort of girl I am. Or was. I had no home, Tommy, no family, no savings, like ten thousand other Londoners, but more fortunate, because when they dug me out, Inch was there. He arranged the job here. I serve and I pose—and that’s all I do.”
Tom didn’t know what to say. He still didn’t know why she was here, with him, in this empty dead-end room. “I need to find Earl.”
“How long since you slept?”
“Forty days and forty nights.”
“How much longer can you go?” She touched his forearm with her fingertips. “Come to bed.”
He raised his head.
She laughed, and he almost smiled. “Alone. I’ll tuck you in.”
&n
bsp; “Bring me a cup of tea?”
“Then to bed?”
“Sure,” he said.
She stood and opened the door. “You’re planning to lock me out.”
“Why bother?”
“Give me your word.”
“You wouldn’t rather have half a crown?”
She moved toward him over the carpet. He looked up at her. She had a funny sort of face.
“You have my word I won’t lock the door,” he said.
She said something soft and rich, and left.
He stood. Turned the bed inside out, the pillows, the bed frame, the headboard. Felt for lumps. Checked the wall behind. Nothing.
He sat on the edge of the mattress. Glanced at the clock. His head was heavy on the pillow, surrounded by the scent of night flower. He closed his eyes. He heard a rush of water, the sound of a distant train.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
May 1941
THE SOUND OF a distant train.
There were no rail tracks on Crete. There was one airfield, a pitted concrete patch with no electricity, no equipment, no hangars. There was a single paved road, which ran almost 150 of the island’s 170-mile length, from Kastelli through Canea and Retimo, then to Iraklion and a handful of villages whose names Tom had never learned. Then it faded to dirt.
It was a common trick of Cretan roads—well-packed dirt roads narrowed into foothill paths, finally dwindled to mountain trails fit only for goats. Half the bridges could carry military traffic. Half would crumble. Nobody knew which half was which.
In the south, the mountains rose ten thousand feet above the turquoise sea. In the north was civilization: a handful of homes with electricity and kerosene, and a few telephones. There was a scattering of taverns where GIs could buy what passed for beer, what passed for cigarettes, and ouzo and retsina and raki. Or wine like Tom had never tasted, and olives and strange dishes with strange names.
The terrain was rough—rocky outcroppings with patches of abrasive shrub, dry pebbled riverbeds subject to flash floods. Fields of grain and olive trees plunged into knife-blade ravines, and spiny trees rose above ancient crumbling walls. There was a village of stone houses, a church with a cemetery, and a three-span steel bridge over a dry river, crowded with oxcarts and peasants and supply trucks. The village was Máleme.
Beyond Máleme was the new airstrip, at the foot of Kavzakia Hill. Hill 107.
Tom’s platoon had been attached to the New Zealand Oakes Force during the evacuation from Greece. The Twenty-second and Twenty-third pulled the defense of the air base, the Twenty-first was allocated as a mobile force to counterattack any pressing threat, and the Maori Twenty-eighth was in reserve at brigade HQ. They had rifles, a few light automatics, and a whole lot of nothing else.
Two battalions of Greeks and Cretans were deployed with them, on the western flank. Some of the Greeks and Cretans had rifles; the rest had curved swords, wooden axes, and flintlocks. It was cause for concern. Tom assured his boys he’d investigate the matter, so he got blind drunk with a handful of Cretans—fishermen and goatherds, as organized as a pile of leaves in a windstorm. Only two of them spoke broken English, but it didn’t matter. The next morning, he had a deadly hangover, but he wasn’t too worried about the western flank. The fishermen and goatherds would fight.
It was the first day of May. The platoon had seen enough action in Greece to be grizzled veterans at nineteen and twenty. They were better equipped than some, with blankets and utensils, beanpoles and mess tins. No banjos, though, so they dug slit trenches with their steel helmets and waited.
Lord Haw-Haw on German radio boasted nightly of the invasion of Crete. May second and third came and went, and there was no invasion, despite the steady drone of bombers. Except for the plumes of smoke over the harbor, the days were brilliantly clear.
They could smell the Germans coming.
On the way to Retimo, they were outmaneuvered by a flock of sheep. They stood on an unnamed hill in the shade of a gnarled tree, which would outlive them all, and looked over Suda Bay. Thick black haze hung between the sky and water, oozing upward from the sunken hulls that littered the bay. Only one out of three supply ships made it through—it was a graveyard of rations, of weapons and vehicles and men. Everything afloat was set upon by the Luftwaffe swarm, from wooden fishing boats to the HMS York, which had been shattered by dive-bombers and strafing fighters.
The next day, the bombing started in earnest. Burial efforts couldn’t keep pace, and bodies rotted where they lay. By mid-May, only three Hurricanes and three Gladiator biplanes survived to repel the German air attacks. The Nazis attacked the antiaircraft batteries, but their attacks were not answered. The orders were clear: Do not return fire until the invasion by airborne troops begins, lest you reveal your position.
May sixteen, seventeen, eighteen . . . The Fliegerkorps, Goering’s elite paratroopers, would spearhead the invasion. It was a Luftwaffe assault, not Wehrmacht or Kriegsmarine. Bowing to the overwhelming Nazi air superiority, the three Hurricanes and three Gladiators were withdrawn to another theater.
Permission to mine or crater the airfield was requested. Engineers arrived, explosives ready. Permission was denied: Máleme was the only airstrip from which recon flights could depart. Which was swell, except they had no recon aircraft.
There were rumors that the invasion would begin the next day.
“It fuckin’ won’t,” Hanner the croot had said. “They got us on a dress parade tomorrow.”
“That’s proof,” Rosenblatt said. “Twenty thousand Krauts coming for breakfast, they order a parade rehearsal.”
Hanner glanced at Tom. “He shitting me, Sarge?”
Tom smiled and sat, started unlacing his boots.
Manny from Montreal wiped his face with his palm. “Then what the hell do we do now?”
“Don’t need a big band to jitterbug,” Tom said.
They’d stripped naked and leapt into the ocean, swimming and splashing, their constant escort of a dozen grimy Cretan children watching in astonishment. It was beautiful country, Crete. It was close to heaven.
The next morning, the locusts came.
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
NIGHT, DECEMBER 1, 1941
A SHARP NOISE startled Tom awake, his heart firing bursts like a grease gun in his chest. He reached for his Colt, but his Colt wasn’t there. It didn’t matter. The room was empty. The noise had come from his own throat. He checked the clock, saw he’d slept three minutes. Swell.
What else was in the room? Earl’s clothing, two sizes too large. A suitcase. A bar of soap. A shelf of books with matching spines and a pillowcase with the scent of night jasmine. The girl’s palm had been hot on his chest. She had clever fingers and bright dark eyes. He could crawl into bed with her and forget the past, forget the future.
No. Time to shove in his clutch.
He didn’t lock the front door—his word was still worth that much. He cut the light, stepped through the back door to the exterior stairs. Without his hat and coat, two stories up, the cold wind slashed at him. He walked twenty feet, found the stairs. Three flights to the bottom, and he emerged in what could have been a parking lot or a cemetery.
He stepped between the dark shapes. There was a faint smell of engine oil—a parking lot, then. The street was quieter than it had been, and colder. He needed to get to Hyde Street, needed to find this tailor, the misfit shop. He’d head for Hyde Park, then find someone to ask. He tried to orient himself, and a gust of wind blew freezing air through his shirt. First, he’d circle around, claim his coat and hat. Keep the girl ditched, because he didn’t trust her, because the desire for her warmth and scent and smoothness was a hard knot in his gut. He had room for only one desire: Stop Earl.
He kept the buildings to his right, circled the block, and the night lightened. It was the square. Tom crep
t forward, his lighter hooded by his hand, looking for Tudor’s. He had to find the alley, the entrance to the Waterfall.
He heard a clatter of iron-banded wheels—the creak of wood against wood, a soft tune. Tom almost fell into the man’s rubbish-heaped cart. The peddler swung around. He had an oil lantern banked to nothing. His face was obscured by a wild beard; his eyes were slits. Wearing a rough jerkin and a peaked cap, he’d walked off the streets of the eighteenth century.
“Lookin’ ta buy summat, guv?” he said.
“Looking for Tudor’s.”
“Right where he’s allus been . . .” The man raised a tattered arm and pointed.
Tom thanked him, headed across the square, back into 1941. Harriet had said he couldn’t trust his own mind. Maybe so, but he’d trust his eyes—he recognized the awning, TUDOR’S DRY CLEANING AND PRESSING. He patted his pocket for the check ticket for his hat and coat. Get warm, get to Hyde Street, and get Earl.
“Oi,” a high-pitched voice said, three feet from his ear.
“Pardon me, sir,” another man’s voice said. “Spare a light?”
The man leaned forward, into the glow of Tom’s lighter. He was an inch or two shorter than Tom, and a year or two younger. He had wavy hair parted down the center, friendly eyes, and big teeth jutting out of his wide grin.
He didn’t have a cigarette. He drove the dome of his forehead into Tom’s face.
Tom stumbled backward, his lighter clattering in the darkness. A flashlight blinded him, and the man with the teeth slugged him in the stomach with two quick jabs, then two more. Neat work, fast and loose, with a lot of muscle.
Tom staggered to the side and hit a wall.
The wall was wearing wool trousers and a thick coat. The wall said, “Fookin’ cank,” and put a hand on his shoulder, like a raptor sinking talons into a soft-bellied fish. King Kong. He drove a fist into Tom’s kidney and the blackout flashed white.
Tom couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see. Orange blotches spun behind his eyes. He went limp. He’d fall to the ground, curl up, and let them take his goddamn wallet—but Kong didn’t let him fall. He grabbed Tom’s good wrist and dragged him through the dark.