Silver Stars (Front Lines #2)(115)
The silence that follows seems to vibrate from the walls. Her hands are twisted together on her lap. Her lips are drawn back, a dog with teeth bared.
Now too quiet, almost inaudible, so Herkemeier has to lean forward, she says, “Don’t let them do it, Jon. Don’t let them send me home. I’m not done. If they send me home, I’ll use a fake name and sign up for infantry.”
Herkemeier’s expression is shocked, but beneath that he is sad. He shakes his head slowly and looks at her with infinite pity. “Rainy, you’re not fighting this war alone.”
“Not alone,” she says. “Not alone, but I am still fighting this fugging war and no one is stopping me.”
Herkemeier sighs and stands up, moving heavily as if he were an older man. “Sergeant Schulterman,” he says, “you will go and receive this medal.”
She waits, ready to rage.
Then, with a heavy sigh, he says, “Afterward . . . well, I’m being reassigned to England myself, that’s where the action is moving. Afterward, if you still feel this way—and I hope for your sake you don’t, Rainy—but if you do, come see me.”
Rainy feels a fierce surge of some emotion that is like joy but much darker. A rational part of her knows she may be sealing her fate. A part of her even groans inwardly at what her parents or even her brother would say, if she told them. But they were not there with her in the cell, or in the interrogation room. They were not there. Herkemeier was not there. The voices screaming in the night were there, and now they were in her, in her memory, and she knows with terrible certainty that those voices will always be with her.
I will not forget you. I will kill Nazis for you. For each of your voices shrieking in the night, for each of you whose blood I watched spilling down that wall.
As if reading her mind, Herkemeier says, “Revenge is a dangerous quest, Rainy.”
He leaves, downcast and worried. But his mood doesn’t concern Rainy, because she knows she has convinced him.
He’ll help me. He’ll help me kill Nazis.
“Hah!” she cries, exultant now. A Silver Star? That will help her get the tough assignments. It will help her get close to them, within range of them. It will make it possible, with Herkemeier’s help, to hurt them.
Rainy cocks an eye at Pip. “You think I’ve gone round the bend, don’t you, Pip? Well . . . Well, maybe I have. But you know what, old Pip my friend? I feel a hell of a lot better.”
37
FRANGIE MARR, RAINY SCHULTERMAN, RIO RICHLIN—RINGWOULD, KENT, UK
The ceremony is to take place in Dover proper, but given that Dover has been bombed repeatedly—though not recently—plus the fact that there is scarcely a spare bedroom to be found in a town overrun with GIs, Frangie, Rainy, and Rio are housed in a pub’s rented rooms, in the tiny village of Ringwould, just northeast of Dover and south of Deal.
It is the land of the famous white cliffs. The army driver who picks them up at the airfield drives along the shore for a while so they can admire the cliffs—which are indeed snowy white except where creeping foliage has added splashes of green.
Their room—just one room—has two single beds and a chair. Staring at the room, it is Frangie who is most uncomfortable. Her first thought is that she should volunteer to sleep in the chair. She is, after all, a Negro, and neither of the white girls with her is likely to want to share a bed.
But she can practically hear Harder in her ear telling her that she’s acting like a second-class citizen. British hotels are not segregated—which is not to say that the English aren’t racists, but their treatment of blacks tends to be condescending and insulting without quite reaching the levels of open hatred Frangie would have expected in the South, and, if Harder’s right, much of the north, back home.
Rio solves the problem. “I got the floor.”
“The floor?” Frangie protests. “What do you mean?”
Rio shrugs. “I’ve been sleeping in mud. Cold mud. A nice, clean floor is pure luxury.”
“Still cold, though,” Frangie says. “I can see my breath in here.”
“Yeah,” Rio says. “But there’s a fireplace.” Wood and kindling have been piled in the fireplace, and Rio drops to her knees and sets about lighting it with her Zippo. “There you go.”
“Did you open the flue?” Frangie asks, as smoke begins to fill the small room.
“The what?”
Frangie reaches past her to an iron knob set in the wall that opens the flue. Smoke swirls then is sucked up the chimney.
“We’re here for tonight and tomorrow night,” Frangie says. “I’ll take the floor tomorrow night.”
Frangie and Rio are easy together, having a long acquaintance. Rainy is also slightly known to both of them from Tunisia, but this Rainy is somehow different than the determined, confident young intelligence sergeant they’d known back then. This Rainy is polite but quiet. And more than quiet—distant, as if nothing is quite real to her, as if she’s sleepwalking.
They toss their bags onto the floor, and Rio excuses herself to the bathroom down the hall.
Rainy sits on the edge of one bed and belatedly says, “I could take the floor.”
“We could draw lots,” Frangie suggests, wishing the whole matter settled. It is beyond strange to be spending a night in a white pub with two white women. It feels transgressive and maybe a little bold. It also feels very insecure—either of these two could tell her to get out, to find somewhere else to stay, to go sleep in the park, if they chose to.