Джон Макдональд - The Last One Left

“How much questioning?”

“I would say forty minutes this morning. And almost an hour later in the day.”

“Officials?”

“Yes. I could not say who. The head nurse brought them and asked me to leave.”

“Did any newspaper people interview him?”

“Oh no! And they are eager ones, I tell you. All manner of sly tricks. Oh, I say I could have made very much money today, to help some of them sneak into the room. Or to ask the Captain some question and then tell someone what he answered. One of them offered me five pounds to take a little camera in and take a picture of him. Stay five feet from him, the man said. Look through here. Push this little button. Bring the camera back to me. The flash bulb is all ready.” She frowned. “When I said I could not do such things, all the time I knew what I had hidden near the bed behind the towels.”

“It isn’t the same, Nurse.”

“Best you keep telling me that, Mr. Boylston.”

“If there was any trouble about it, I guess Sir Willis could intercede for you.”

She made a face, took deep swallows of her drink. “My brother asked this. I think we may leave Sir Willis out of it. The great man would not bother his head. You know? It would offend him, I think, to be asked to help such an unimportant little female person. He would say, Oh my God, what will they ask of me next? And he would worry about what all his important friends might think if he came to the rescue of...” She stopped quite suddenly and gave him a look of challenge he could not interpret. “It does not matter. One learns to look after oneself, yes?”

“What’s the matter?”

“Is something the matter?”

“All of a sudden you ducked behind a wall.”

She pondered that, then smiled. “I rather like that. Yes. I went behind my wall. Perhaps I forgot my place for just one little moment. Sir Willis is Bay Street. And so are you. A Bay Street in Texas. You have the look.” She pressed her fingertips to her cheek. “I heard what it is called there, I think. A touch of the tar brush? Perhaps it is uglier there than here. But ugly here, too. At least here we are not something one lays with to change one’s luck.”

“I reckon we’ve got our share of people who like to suffer on account of the color God happened to be handing out at the time.”

“Ah. Cowboy talk! It is beautiful! I have made you angry. Why should you be angry? I am doing you a favor. I am giving you a very nice drink. Who are you to get angry if I say the world happens to be round?”

“What gives you the right to classify me?”

“Ho! So back there in your Bay Street of Texas, you are some bold crusader, yes? And so you go rushing out from your big office to defend some poor nigger girl because she has this so touching confidence in you, yes? Ah, you are a very valuable fellow!”

He stood up quickly with his drink and went and stood at the windows, staring out, eyes unfocused, at the distant vista of Nassau harbor. She came and deftly took his empty glass from his hand. She rattled ice in the small kitchen, brought him a new drink.

“Is the world round, Mr. Boylston?”

“Sam. It is very damned round.”

“I am Theyma, Sam. And it is too bad it is so damned round I think.”

“My wife left me over five months ago, Theyma. Not for another man, or because I was mixed up with another woman. Nothing like that. I seem to be a little less than her ideal. One of the things she threw at me surprised me. About a year ago the brother of a woman who worked for us got into a cutting scrape down in Brownsville. The woman’s name is Rosalie. Short, dark, plump, cheerful, not too much English. She’s Mexican-American. She asked me to defend her brother. I did the sensible thing. A lawyer in Brownsville owed me a favor. He does a lot of that kind of work. I asked him to take the case. The brother got off with ninety days, which was pretty good, considering. Rosalie acted huffy about it. When my wife left me she said that was one of the times I let her down, when I let Rosalie down. I said I wasn’t that kind of a lawyer. She said there were apparently only two kinds of lawyers. I thought it was a lot of romantic idiocy. Until you shook me up, Miss Theyma.”

“Have you lost her for good?”

“I don’t know. I hope not. I miss her, and I miss the kid. He’s five now. I can’t let myself think she’s gone for good. This is a stronger drink.”

“It seemed like a good time for the drinks to be stronger.”

“I was wrong about Rosalie’s brother?”

“If she trusted you, yes. It is a matter of honor, of her being part of your family. If you appeared in court and he went away for a year, she could still be proud.”

He turned toward her, smiling, and said, “Miss Theyma, why does so much of the round, round world make so damned little sense?”

And as he tried to keep the tone light, to his dismay he felt his eyes filling with tears. He tried to hide it by finishing his drink. But when he lowered the glass, she took it from him and set it aside and took his hands in hers and stood, head tilted, looking at him in a troubled way.

“I did not mean to hurt you, Sam.”

“I don’t know what the hell is wrong with me!”

“Sam, I was being naughty. That is all. To give you — what is it? — needles. I did not mean to hurt. To hell with the roundness of the world, Texas Sam.”

“Okay.”

She studied him. “You know what I think about you? You are a very severe man. Very strong, very rigid, very honest in your own fashion. Too much is happening for you now. The loneliness of no wife and boy. The pain of the sister. Hatred for that Captain. Be careful, Mister Sam. A man can break, and he can do mad things and spoil everything forever.”

The directness of her sympathy made his eyes begin to smart again, and in a clumsy and unexpected way of hiding his face from her, he took her into his arms. She stood rigidly, but without protest, and he had the feeling she had stopped breathing. Then her arms slipped around him. She inhaled tremulously, pressed the warm wiry slender strength of her body against his, her fingers prodding into the muscles of his back, rolling and twisting her hips against him, nipples suddenly hard as little pebbles against his chest, through fabric. As he felt the planes of her slender back, the small ripeness of her hips, he inhaled in her crisp hair and soft throat an incongruous scent from childhood, suddenly recognizing it as the smell of vanilla Necco wafers. As he searched for her mouth, she suddenly gasped, thrust at him, wrenched herself away, ran to the couch and sat on the very edge of it, head bowed, back deeply curved, fists on her tawny knees, breathing audibly.

He went to her, touched her shoulder. She reached up and put her hand over his. “Sorry,” she breathed. “Sorry.”

“My fault.”

She stood up, gave him a wan smile and went off to her bathroom. It was a full five minutes before she came back, in full possession of herself.

“Sam, there are too many ways a thing can go wrong, I think.”

“How do you mean?”

“You must know how naughty I really was. You were very attractive to me. The look of you and how you move, and the color of your eyes. I thought it would be a very pleasant matter, you know? This pretty shift, and nice drinks, and then I would challenge you in some small ways so you would notice me as I am, and then we would take the challenges to bed and turn them into good sport. See? I have no shame. To arrange a thing so coldly, I can do it only if the attraction is strong and if — it can be — unimportant. So we spoiled it.”

“Did we?”

“Of course! I have concern for you, Sam. Too, too quickly we have some meaning for each other. The chance to be casual is gone. I cannot risk anything that would be more than that. Or would you.” She grinned. “In your marvelous language, who needs it? Now please put a new tape in your little machine and go away, my dear Sam, before we become damn fools and forget how round the world is.”