Silver Stars (Front Lines #2)(22)

“Oh . . .” Stick says, sensing where this line of questioning is going.

“A nice five-mile run, out to the wadi and back. I need to confer with my sergeants, so Corporal Sticklin? Lead the men out.”

Jenou raises a trembling hand, and Vanderpool says, “Yes, the women too.”

Rio has made many five-mile runs. But a five-mile run with a crashing headache and a mouth full of wool is a whole new level of agony.

“Is it okay, do you think, if I marry the lieutenant?” Jenou asks as they slog through the camp toward the distant cluster of trees they’ve taken to calling the wadi.

“Unh,” Rio answers.





7

RAINY SCHULTERMAN—NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK, USA

The smaller gangster slides in beside Rainy. Something about him reminds her of the SS colonel. There’s something not fully human about him, as if one parent had been a lizard or a snake.

“You have a number for me?” Rainy asks, keeping her voice level on a sea of rising and falling waves of emotion.

“Number? You trying to be funny?”

“I assumed you were here to give me a way to contact Mr. Camporeale.”

“Way to contact? You’re the contact, girly.”

“It’s sergeant, not girly,” she says, and the instant the words are out of her mouth she thinks it’s a mistake. The little man’s reptilian expression turns feral for a moment, the look of an animal ready to pounce. But he leans back, reins in his hostility, and says, “All right then, Sergeant. We’re all good Americans, aren’t we, Louie?”

“I bought a war bond for my kid,” Louie offers over his shoulder. “Twenty dollars!”

“Don Vito don’t want to talk to some FBI or some army officer either, don’t trust ’em. He’ll talk to you.”

“Then I would be pleased to talk to him,” Rainy says stiffly, feeling very uncomfortable, as if she’s disobeying an order. She isn’t exactly, her orders had contemplated the possibility of a face-to-face meeting, but she’s already thinking ahead to having to report all this to Colonel Corelli.

Professor of Oriental Languages Corelli.

Amateur.

They drive far longer than is strictly necessary, sometimes creeping at walking speed around a block only to go racing away up Broadway at full speed. Louie keeps a close eye on his rearview mirrors.

“We’re clean,” Louie says at last, and moments later they pull to a stop in the oily darkness beneath an elevated train track. They are in the Bowery, an elongated rectangle of streets around Delancey and Forsyth in Lower Manhattan, just north of Chinatown. It is a neighborhood of secondhand shops, employment agencies, cheap hotels, and narrow all-hours diners catering to the crowds of sailors and soldiers who wander unsteadily from tavern to tavern.

The nearest lit-up establishment is a second-story pool hall above a closed-for-the-night grocer.

Louie climbs out and opens Rainy’s door. Then he glances in the direction of a loud shout floating down from the pool hall and says, “This may not be the most suitable place for a young lady of quality.”

“She’s a kike, she ain’t quality,” the smaller one says.

“I’ve been in worse places,” Rainy says, images of the Tunisian desert appearing in her memory. She ignores the casual anti-Semitism.

They walk up a long, steep, narrow flight of stairs, at one point having to turn sideways to let a trio of Marines come down. Before she sees the pool hall she hears it, a rich concerto played by cues hitting balls, and balls snapping into others, and glasses tinkling with ice, and shouts of frustration and triumph, loud guffaws, and somewhat more distant the musical ding-ding-ding! of pinball machines. All of that, and someone is spinning records, because Rainy hears the risqué Andrews Sisters song “Strip Polka” playing.

There’s a burlesque theater where the gang loves to go



To see Queenie, the cutie of the burlesque show.



There’s no door at the top of the stairs, so they emerge directly onto the gaming floor, onto wood stained almost black by generations of benign neglect, and wallpaper that fairly drips with congealed smoke. There are a dozen tables in three rows of four, green felt bright beneath bare bulbs, and three pinball machines against the far wall, ding-ding-dinging away. There’s a bar at the back and a record player perched on one end of the bar along with a tall stack of 78s.

A lanky, sad-looking sailor in a stained white uniform sits at a stool thumbing through the records. All the pool tables are in use, sailors, soldiers, working men in dungarees or overalls, and interspersed here and there like flowers in a sea of weeds are women—women of the type one would expect to find in a pool hall late at night. They aren’t all beautiful, but they are all young, or pass for young, and they are all dressed down to the very lowest limits of propriety.

“Like I was sayin’,” Louie says with an abashed half-grin, “maybe not the place for a young lady such as yourself, miss. Sergeant, I mean.”

“I promise not to faint,” Rainy says, which tickles the gangster’s fancy and he gives up a huge guffaw.

“Take it off, take it off,” cries a voice from the rear.



“Take it off, take it off,” soon it’s all you can hear.