The Game of Love and Death(15)

“Oh, I couldn’t,” Henry said, falling into step beside her.

“Are you saying that to be polite?”

Henry was so relieved he laughed. “Yes. I love gingerbread and I’m hungry enough to eat a goat, beard and all.”

They shared the cake and talked about airplanes until they arrived at Flora’s small green house, which was about a mile from the park. He told her how it felt to shake Mr. Lindbergh’s hand, which, in all honesty, was pretty much like any other grown-up’s hand. But she seemed interested, so he told her everything about it, including the fact there was a small cut on one knuckle.

It wasn’t until he delivered her to the porch steps that he remembered to ask her name.

She bounded to the top of the steps and put her hand on the doorknob. “Flora.”

Flora. The only Flora he’d met before had been an elderly aunt who smelled like powder and Sloan’s Liniment. But he liked the name for this girl. And she smelled nice.

“Look what followed us.” He pointed to the black cat.

“She’s around a lot. I’m not supposed to feed her.” Flora stood in the open doorway and, for the first time, smiled. “But I do. Don’t tell.” She put her index finger to her lip.

“Your secret’s safe with me.” That smile, that gesture. He liked them. But he couldn’t think of a reason to stay. She didn’t ask his name, which he took to mean she didn’t care to know. It was surprisingly disappointing.

“Good-bye, I guess,” he said, wishing he could think of something else to say.

She waved and shut the door behind her. Then he got back on his bicycle and headed home, whistling a melody of his own invention, one to which he would someday return.





WEEKS passed. Late-night jazz music, looks given through candle-and stage light, schemes whispered into the ears of tax inspectors. Why had Death consented to this Game again?

Ravenous, she stood in a small Spanish market town wearing a simple black dress. She could have been any young woman sent by her family to pick up food for the evening meal: a loaf of bread, a bit of meat, something leafy and green, a bottle of red wine. She was as far as she could be from the modern city by the Sound, and deliberately so. When the hunger was this great, the players were in danger. Her control over the Game was in danger.

As she walked through the market, stopping to inhale the perfume of flowers, Death felt a fingertip on her forearm. A light touch, as swift as the closing of an eye.

“For you, beautiful one.” A young man stood before her, offering her a red tulip.

“I did not ask for this,” she said.

“But you are so lovely, I cannot help myself.” The man, who was no more than eighteen, looked down, his face turning red.

Death understood what he meant. She accepted the flower and noted the dirt pressed into the ridges of his fingertips. These were the hands of a person who spent his days working the earth, coaxing life from the soil. He’d seen a million flowers. Even so, each new bloom could make him smile, and unlike all the other humans who’d passed her, he noticed her. He saw her.

He is the one who is lovely.

The tulip was fragrant and beautiful. But, she noted, it was also dead. She would not be able to help herself. She moved on, and after a moment’s thought, turned and looked at him over her shoulder.

“When you hear the engines in the sky,” she said, “run.”



She brought the tulip with her when she took to the air in a Stuka bomber. This time, she wore the guise of a young Nazi Luftwaffe pilot who’d left his plane momentarily because he was literally sick with nerves. He would return, pale-faced and sweaty, to discover that the dozen Stukas and half-dozen Heinkel 51 fighters had already risen like a cloud of insects, casting their awful shadows in the late-afternoon sun. Much as he did not want to be part of a German experiment to determine how much firepower was required to bomb a city into oblivion, he also did not want to be executed for dereliction of duty. And yet, why was his plane not still on the ground? The man wondered this the rest of his days.

Now his plane was above Spain, lighting the sky with reflections of the firestorm below. Death marveled at the noise, at the sudden lightness of the aircraft as it dropped a bomb from its belly. Every so often the roaring of the swooping Stuka was overtaken by the tatter of machine guns strafing the fleeing townspeople below. The noise, the heat, the color, the smell, the buzz of her hands on the yoke. It was almost like music, and she bombed herself senseless, unaware of anything save the plummeting thunder and fire.

Eventually, all of the town, except a church, a tree, and a small unused munitions factory, had been pounded to bits. The smoke of charred bodies rose, setting the stage for a bloodred sunset. By the time she landed the plane, the sky was smoke clogged and dark, lit only by the reflection of fires that would burn for three days. For each of those days, she returned to the village in the guise of the Spanish girl, walking quietly through the smoking ruins. The soil had been stunned to silence. All around lay the harvest, so many lives. Too many to reap at once.

She twisted time like a kaleidoscope, suspending the crucial shards until she could visit them one by one, lifting souls from their scorched and shattered cases. The sensation of so many lives rushing into her was deliriously good, so much so that she was insensible to anything beyond it. The enormity of what she’d done hadn’t yet hit her, although she knew it would, ribboning her essence as though it had been run through the blades of an airplane propeller. White-eyed and insatiable, she consumed these souls as one might pick up scattered cards in another sort of game, scraping them into order, fanning them out in front of her, feeling their perfectly balanced weight in her hands before flinging them into the beyond.