Hamilton, Donald - Novel 01 (3 page)

     
The headwaiter seated them at a table for
two by the wall and the girl slipped her arms out of the sleeves of her coat,
but Branch did not look at her but sat polishing the rain from his glasses and
looking about the room, a little fuzzy in detail to his uncorrected vision.
There were many other uniforms in the room. Some were foreign and he did not
recognize them.

     
"I'd like a cigarette," Janet
Haskell said.

     
He gave her one and took one for himself,
feeling that his pipe was not compatible with the genteel atmosphere of the
room.

     
"Look," he said, "look,
what do you really want it for?"

     
"If I told you, you wouldn't give it
to me," she said. In the low-necked dress the rolled-up hair made her neck
seem quite long, the head small and neat on the long graceful
neck.
She had an air of complete reserve. He felt that he
was only barely in communication with her.

     
"I'm not going to give it to you
anyway," he said, grinning. Then he said, "Just tell me the guy's
name. I'll shoot him free, for nothing."

     
She smiled a little, tolerantly. He was
glad for the arrival of the colored waiter with the rolls and water. When the
man had gone he began quickly to tell her about what had happened that morning.
Halfway through the recital some breathless quality in her silent attention
made him wish he had not started, following the foolish and ineffectual ending
that was coming. He got it over with quickly, and she looked up.

     
"But why didn't you
... ?"

     
"What was I supposed to do??" he
demanded. "Start a fight?"

     
"But you could have
... ?"

     
"All right," he said irritably.
"I suppose I could have told somebody, but I didn't fancy myself
explaining why I had let him get away." She was still watching him.
"Jesus Christ," he said, "by the time I'd caught my breath they
were six blocks away. You don't generally expect ... Why?" he said.
"Do you know anything about it?"

     
After a moment she laughed. "No.
No, of course not.
What made you ... I still don't
understand how
you ...

     
"The promotions, dopy," he said
slowly. There was no point in pressing her about it. She would not tell and the
thing was beginning to be vaguely clear, up to a point. He remembered the small
girl saying, Paul was sure you were married, and the man, how did you make out,
sir? And I thought it was the room they were after he thought bitterly,
sometimes I'm not very bright.

     
He buttered his roll slowly. "We're
all promoted from
Washington
," he said, "up to
full lieutenant and sometimes even lieutenant commander. Your commanding
officer hasn't got a thing to do except sign the papers. When you've put in
your time you go up, if there's a promotion at the time. Sometimes you have to
wait a couple of months for them to catch up with you. I've heard of guys
getting spot promotions, but I've never heard of a man being held back when the
ALNAV came out if he was healthy and not under sentence of court-martial and
not newly transferred." He laughed. "Mother was very upset about it.
She thought it was simply awful that her son had to wait as long as everybody
else when he was ever so much smarter. But I don't know. At least I didn't have
to worry whether Commander
Tollifer
liked me or not,
I knew I'd get my two stripes eventually, if the war lasted."

     
Their dinners were set before them and he
told her what he had paid for the new stripes six months ago, and how two of
the boys had gone on a toot to celebrate, and the physical was announced for
the next morning; their urine samples had been practically pure water and
alcohol and they had had to come back the following day.

     
"Well, anyway," he said,
grinning. "It was a nice comfortable way to fight a war.

     
He felt her eyes watching him a little too
keenly. "Do you wish you had got out there, Lieutenant?"

     
"Oh, hell," he said,
"Mother would have thrown a fit. I probably wouldn't have liked it anyway."
He grinned quickly. "These glasses made a good excuse," he said
dryly.

     
"Would they have let you go?"

     
He said, "Listen, at the beginning,
when I first
came ,
if you could find the doorknob to
let yourself out of the, room your eyes were O.K. I could have got it, all
right, if I'd asked for it." He grimaced. "I don't know why they
insist on making you volunteer for everything. I hate to make up my mind."
He laughed. "To tell you the honest-to-God truth I'm just as glad I didn't
get out. I just feel that
maybe ..
·
maybe
I missed learning something, if you know what I mean.
Now that it's over."

     
"When do you expect to get out?"
she asked.

     
He was grateful to her for turning the
conversation and said quickly, "Oh, a couple of months. I don't really give
a damn. I'll just pop back in the office and pick up my slide rule where I left
it. Mother wanted Dad to write a letter requesting release for me. I guess he
Is
pretty shorthanded, but I told him to lay off. He's got
along without me this far and I don't want to start pulling strings at this
stage in the game."

     
He let her keep him talking about himself,
and after dinner they walked out into the lobby. A neon sign at the head of a
stairway said "Tap Room" in archaic script, with an arrow pointing
down, and they walked slowly past the groups of talking people and the pillars
and the shiny impersonal settees, to the stairs, still talking about him, and
down. The Tap Room had heavy oak beams and massive furniture, hardly any light,
a minimum of waiters, and it was crowded to the doors. After fifteen minutes
they squeezed themselves into a vacated seat along the wall. Half an hour later
they were served.

     
It was close to
midnight
when they came into the
lobby of her hotel. She touched her hair and shook her fur coat to dislodge the
rain on it, and turned to him where he stood waiting.

     
"Do you want to come up?" she
asked.

     
He looked at her for a moment and was
careful to make his voice match hers when he spoke. "Yes. I'd like
to."

     
They went past the desk where the clerk
was half asleep and did not look up, and in the alcove beyond took the
automatic elevator to the third floor. He followed her down the narrow corridor
and waited while she opened the door and turned on the light. Standing behind
her he thought he heard her breath catch a little as the light went on. She
turned to him.

     
"I forgot I hadn't tidied up,"
she said. "I'm rather a terrible housekeeper."

     
Beyond her he saw the small traveling case
on the bed that occupied two-thirds of the room. The contents of it were
scattered over the rumpled bedspread. Coming into the room he could see that
the drawers of the bureau were half open. The clothes she had been wearing
earlier lay over and around the single straight chair in the comer.

     
"Take off your coat," she said,
closing the door behind him. "Sit down somewhere while I pick up a
little."

     
He picked his way to the bureau and laid
his raincoat on top of it on the small paper bag that contained the stockings
she had bought that afternoon. He dropped his cap on top of the coat. This
room, he thought, has been searched. This room has been searched, it's been
searched.

     
"Can I help you?" he asked,
turning after running a comb through his hair.

     
She was sweeping the things on the bed
back into the traveling case. "No, that's all right." She carried the
case into the corner and picked up and brushed off her striped yellow suit,
carrying it into the closet with her coat. "Well," she said emerging,
"well, that looks a little better," and she returned to the bed and
plucked at the coverlet. When she turned, her face had the look of smiling
reserve that he was coming to know. "Well?" she said.

     
"Cigarette?"

     
"Thanks."

     
She came forward, watching him as he
reached into his pocket, smiling a little, and he brought his hand out empty
and took her wrist, drawing her to him and kissing her, a little afraid until
he felt the pressure of her narrow young body against him. Then he picked her
up and carried
her the
three steps to the bed, putting
her down and bending over her, then lying against her.

     
"Let me take off my dress,
darling," she whispered, suddenly still, and he was still holding himself
tightly. "I want to take my dress off, Phillip," she said with a
trace of insistence in her voice. He raised himself and began to unfasten the
small gold buttons, aware that she was smiling up at him. His fingers did not
function properly and, afraid of tearing something, he left her to do it and
walked stiffly across the room to the light switch.

WHEN
HE CAME OUT?
the
tall buildings had the beautiful
clarity that always came to things afterwards. The street lights and the lights
of the cars reflected themselves in the wet pavements. It was no longer
raining, but he buttoned his uniform raincoat to his chin, not quite sure that
he had put on his collar and tie properly in the dark. He pulled on his gloves
as he walked away briskly and the palms of his hands remembered the warmth of
her body and the faint harshness of the lace of her nightgown. A small part of
his mind warned him that now was the time to leave, pack up,
check
out. It would not ever be as good again. Nothing more could make it any better
than it already was. He looked back at the dark dingy brick front of the hotel
as he turned the comer. You never really knew what a girl thought about it.

     
In the morning the telephone awakened him,
and as he rolled over to reach it he wondered if the hotel would cash a check
for two hundred. He had the momentary thought that it was certainly an expensive
way of getting something you could get for five bucks if you knew where to go
and wanted to go there. He told himself sharply, don't make it dirty now, don't
be cynical about it, you know it was the nicest thing that has happened to you
in a long time; and he reached for the telephone that was still ringing, and
the desk told him that Mr. Dickerson wanted to see him.

     
After a moment he set himself up less
precariously in the bed and asked, "Who?"

     
"Dickerson," said the desk.
"Mr. A. J. Dickerson, Lieutenant."

     
"Oh, all right," said Branch
irritably. "Send him up. He was quite sure that he had never in his life
met anyone named Dickerson, but it was easier to see the man.

     
He swung his legs out of bed and sat
looking at the sunlight on the roofs that did not quite come to a level with
the window of his room, but the morning was a little spoiled. Who the hell is
Dickerson?
he
thought angrily, yawning; and standing
up, he pulled about him the thin blue silk dressing gown that his mother had
given him for traveling. Christ, he thought, and I haven't written to her yet,
either.

     
The knock on the door came while he was
washing his face and he dried himself, ran a comb through his hair, and went
back through the room, closing the bathroom door behind him, putting on his
glasses, and drawing the belt of the dressing gown snug about him before he
opened the door to the hall. The man who stood there was a little below medium
height, but heavily built, and he had black hair streaked with gray that grew
in a short peak over his forehead, the long strands from this peak carefully
brushed over the thin spot immediately behind it. He had a square fleshy face
with the pores of the skin greatly emphasized; and he wore a very well-pressed
suit of gray with a fine colored stripe, an immaculate white shirt, and a
conservative silk tie.

     
"No," he said. "That's
right,
you don't know me, Lieutenant."

     
Branch grinned and stopped grinning.
"Well, what can I do for you?" he asked.

     
"You can let me come in."

     
"Well," said Branch, not moving,
"I'm sorry, but I just got up ···"

     
"Yes," said Mr. Dickerson,
"I guess you would be kind of sleepy this morning."

     
Branch stood for a moment quite still;
then he stepped back and the stocky man came in and walked across the rug to
the untidy bed, smoothed the blankets into place and sat down, putting his hat
carefully beside him. Branch closed the door and made
himself
go to get the pipe and tobacco from the uniform he had worn the night before.

     
"Pictures," said the man behind
him.

     
Branch pulled open the slide fastener of
the tobacco pouch. "How much?" he asked without turning. Oh, you
fool, he said silently to the absent girl, you little
fool,
you didn't have to do it this way, why couldn't you wait?

     
"Don't you want to see them?"
Mr. Dickerson asked.

     
"I had a match around here
somewhere," Branch said vaguely, looking about him. The stocky man offered
him a folder of matches and he walked to the bed and, lighting his pipe, stood
looking down at the other. "Thanks," he said, returning the folder.

     
Mr. Dickerson gave him a narrow strip of
photographic paper.

     
"You'll need this," Mr.
Dickerson said.

     
He looked up from the pictures and took
the magnifying glass the stocky man held out. The pictures had the horrible
fascination of an illustrated medical textbook. He heard himself asking how
they had been taken.

     
"Infra-red film and flashbulbs with
filters," the stocky man's voice said. "The first set in the light
were Super Double-X film, mercury
hypersensitized
, at
F-one-five."

     
"You were in the bathroom?"

     
"Uh-huh. It connects through with the
other room. I paid the guy fifty bucks to give it up." After a moment Mr.
Dickerson said, "I had two
Leicas
, one for each
room.

     
Branch looked at him and said bitterly,
"Listen, I don't care if you had a
trunkful
. I'm
not buying cameras." He held out the strip of prints.

     
"Oh, that's all right," said the
man on the bed. "Keep them. I've got the negatives."

     
Branch put the pictures on the bedside
table. "All right, what's the price?"

     
"Just beat it," said Mr. Dickerson.
"Just beat it. Go back to
Chicago
and in a month or so you'll
get the negatives in the mail.
All right?"

     
Branch sucked at his pipe and, after a
moment, went back to the chair that held his clothes, put the clothes aside on
the dresser, and sat down. It seemed to him that this was not making very good
sense. It seemed to him also rather silly that his first instinct should be to
feel almost happy at the possibility that the girl might not, after all, be
guilty of what he had automatically accused her of. As if that were any help.

     
"It's a little confusing," he
said.

     
The stocky man was lighting a cigarette.
"Nothing confusing about it," he said genially. "You've got a
return ticket, haven't you? Use it."

     
"Who are you, anyway?" Branch
demanded.

     
"Well," said the other, and as
he threw back his head from the smoke, the light from the window picked out the
coarse pores of his skin in detail, "well, I'm one of these guys they
write stories about.
In the magazines.
I'm a private
detective. I get a hundred and fifty flat, plus ten dollars a day, plus
expenses, and," he grinned, you should see my expenses.

     
"No use asking you who's paying
you?"

     
"Not a damned use in the world,
bud."

     
"Can't you get in trouble?"
Branch asked. "I thought you were licensed or something.

     
Mr. Dickerson's face changed a little.
"Sure," he said, "
if
you want to make
trouble for me you can, all right."

     
After a pause, Branch said, "What's
the point? I mean, what's the point in my going back?"

     
"If you don't go your commanding
officer gets copies of those, nice big ones on glossy paper." Mr.
Dickerson jerked his thumb at the tiny prints.

     
"And then?" asked Branch.
"After all, somebody has to prefer charges, don't they? Is she going to
say I raped her?"

     
Mr. Dickerson said, "Hell, don't you
know there's a law against it?"

     
"You mean, just doing it?"

     
"Federal statute, fornication, six
months in jail or a hundred bucks...."

     
"I thought you had to cross a state
line or something. My God," said Branch. "Listen ... I"

     
The detective laughed. "That's what
they all think. Don't look at me, I didn't write the damned law."

     
"Why does your client want me back in
Chicago
?"

 
    
"I
don't know," said Mr. Dickerson, rising. He blew a careful smoke ring and
watched it float towards the door on the still air of the room.

     
"Well, what do I tell him?" he
asked softly, without looking at Branch.

     
"Tell him to go to hell," Branch
said.

     
The detective's glance touched him
briefly.
"O.K."

     
Branch started up as the door closed. Then
he relaxed and listened to the footsteps receding dully along the carpet of the
hall. The stocky man's departure left a void in the room, and everything seemed
very much more final than he had intended it to be. He got up slowly and went
to the telephone book on the shelf of the table beside the bed, and the name
was there, Dickerson, A. J.,
pvt
.
detective
serv
. As he stood there he saw the strip of prints on
the varnished table. If only it didn't look so damned undignified, he thought.
He burned the prints carefully in the ashtray and emptied the finely powdered
ash into the wastebasket and opened the window to let out the biting smoke. The
air from outside was quite cold.

     
He went into the bathroom to shave and
found his refection in the mirror gradually replaced by Commander
Tollifer's
pale, impatient, freckled face: the face of a
young man on an old man's body. Mister Branch, the Commander would say, Jesus
Christ, do you have to do it in front of a camera, Mr. Branch. This is not the
kind of manliness the Navy is proud of developing, Mr. Branch. God, haven't I
told you boys to keep your goddamned noses clean, haven't I told you? Yes, sir,
Lieutenant Branch,
S(
E), USNR, would say, standing
stiffly in front of the desk in a reasonable facsimile of the posture of attention,
yes sir, yes sir, no sir, his eyes avoiding the pictures on the desk.

     
When he came into the small room she was
sitting on the bed wearing the plain skirt of her yellow wool suit, and a
yellow silk shirt with a small S-shaped gold pin at the throat. The jacket of
the suit was thrown over her shoulders and her dark brown hair was neatly
tucked about her head. She looked up as he closed the door behind him.

     
"I was just about to call you,"
she said, smiling a little. Then, ceasing to smile, she said breathlessly,
"What's the matter?)"

     
He went past her to the bathroom door and
looked in, finding the small cubicle empty; turning, he found himself in the
exact position from which the pictures had been taken. Janet Haskell came
around the bed to him.

     
"What's the matter, Phillip?"

     
He told her, watching her face. As he told
her it seemed to him she moved away from him a little without moving, and an
unspoken mutual embarrassment came between them.

     
She touched her tongue to her lips.
"I'm sorry," she whispered.
"How nasty.
You'd better go, hadn't you?"

     
"I've already told him ..."

     
"But you can call him." She
touched his arm, looking up at him. "Don't ..." She paused.
"Don't stay ... on my account." Her voice was a little uncertain, her
eyes very wide and helpless, watching him.

     
He slapped the side of her face smartly.
He stood quite still, hardly breathing, watching her after a moment step back
and reach slowly back to retrieve the jacket the impact of the blow had jarred
loose from her shoulder. He heard his voice mimic the tragic breathlessness of
hers. "Don't stay ... on my account." He laughed.

     
"Phillip," she whispered.

     
"Cut it out," he said. "Cut
it out. Quit it."

     
"Please," she whispered.
"Phillip. It was so nice and now it's spoiled, but don't make it
worse."

     
He waited, a little frightened at having
started this.

     
"Oh, all right," she said,
turning away. "Oh, all right," and he let himself breathe again. She
sat down on the side of the bed facing the window.
"Cigarette?"