Silver Stars (Front Lines #2)(17)

Surely.

Jack is tall enough without being striking, has reddish hair, faint freckles like her own, and he’s funny. And charming. Strand is also charming, but he lacks Jack’s quick and easy wit.

I’ve kissed them both, and . . .

Jillion and her damned pictures.

Strand, unlike Jack, is not here. Strand is on an air base three hundred miles away on the coast of Algeria. She’s had letters from him, all censored of course, but it is clear that he is not flying the fighters he’d hoped to pilot but rather is flying bombers. Where he’s bombing and who he’s bombing, she does not know.

What she does know is that there are women with the Air Corps, as well as nurses and local women, all of whom would presumably find Strand as attractive as she does herself.

Strand isn’t that kind of fellow.

But really, is there a male who isn’t that sort of fellow? Really?

Suddenly Rio wants a drink or several. Or else to hide away somewhere, all alone, and think. Or better still, not think.

Jillion and her damned pictures.

Tilo says, “Heard we’re shipping out. For real, this time.” He speaks with the exaggerated care of an inebriate.

Rio nods. Everyone knows they aren’t staying in North Africa. Everyone knows they’re going somewhere, and probably soon since summer is coming on and up north the Soviets are crying endlessly for the Allies to open a second front by invading Europe proper.

“France,” Tilo says in what he mistakenly believes is a confidential whisper.

“Not France,” Stick says. “It’s either Sardinia or Sicily.”

“What’s the difference?” Cat asks and drinks half her beer in a single long pull that leaves her with a foam mustache.

“Damned if I know,” Jack says, but he’s not really paying attention, he’s watching Rio, head cocked, grin hovering.

Stick sighs and says, “Okay, here it is.” He dips his finger in his beer and begins tracing squiggly lines on the countertop. “That’s the Mediterranean Sea. That big boot sticking down? That’s Italy. And here’s Sicily and Sardinia, which the Eye-Ties control. If we set out for southern France, see, we’d pass right under Kraut and Eye-Tie planes and get shot to hell.”

Rio looks on, partly out of actual interest and partly because it allows her to form a blank expression. Is Jillion recording this too? Like most frontline soldiers, Rio has no real idea where she is, let alone why. The geography is a mystery to her. “That one,” she says, stabbing a finger at the larger of the two islands.

“Why?” Stick asks, curious.

“Because it’s bigger?”

Stick laughs. “That’d probably be enough of a reason for the generals,” he admits.

“We’ll know when we know,” Jillion offers in a soft, almost-inaudible voice.

“But when?” Tilo cries in exaggerated despair, arms thrown wide and nearly sweeping an overflowing tin can ashtray onto the floor.

“You in a hurry?” Cat asks him.

“I don’t like not knowing. It gets on my nerves. Back and forth, scuttlebutt and more scuttlebutt. Let’s just get this war over with!”

“I’m happy to let someone else win it,” Rio says. “I’m happy just to sit here in the desert. I can have my folks send me some magazines. Maybe I’ll take up knitting.”

“Right,” Jack says. “Knitting.”

He can’t even imagine me as I am back home. He’s never even met that Rio. He doesn’t know me. Not me.

And that’s when a half dozen exceedingly drunk Goums come bursting in, loud and aggressive.

The Goums are Berbers, French colonial troops now supporting the Allies. They are Muslim, so they are not allowed to drink, but like the many Baptists equally forbidden to drink, they have suspended some rules temporarily. They are dark-skinned, fantastically bearded, dressed in loosely belted, open-front robes of sorts, like bathrobes, with wide vertical stripes of tan and sun-bleached burgundy. They wear last-war French helmets or white cloth head wrappings and carry what appear to be daggers very much like the one Rio purchased.

“I thought towel-heads didn’t drink,” Tilo says. It is unlikely that any of the Goums speak enough English to understand his words, but they see the challenge in his eyes and then see that he is in company with women.

One of the Goums shoves Tilo, knocking him back against Rio. Stick moves quickly in front of Tilo, holding up his hands, palms out, and speaking in a soothing voice.

The Goum laughs, takes a step back, grins, and launches himself forward.

And the bar fight begins.

The first bar fight of the night.





5

RAINY SCHULTERMAN—NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK, USA

Rainy Schulterman is wearing a dress in the bathroom. It is a perfectly nice dress, a young woman’s dress, a navy-blue dress with a white collar. She puts it on, twists the collar into place, and performs the necessary gymnastics to raise the zipper from her lower back to her neck. Then she resets the collar, runs smoothing hands down the front of the garment, and stares at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. She moves this way and that, trying to see it from as many angles as possible, a little dance that causes her to brush against her mother’s brassieres, hanging from the shower curtain pole.

She last wore this dress to attend her cousin’s bar mitzvah. It is her good dress, the only thing she can wear to a place like the Stork Club.