Johnny Temple - USA Noir - Best of the Akashic Noir Series

But none of this is worth mentioning. Anyway, I am an old man now and there are times I don’t know what day it is, what year. Or maybe I just don’t care. I look up at the televi­sion, and that man in the nice suit, he could be Mussolini. He could be Stalin. He could be Missouri Harry, with his show-me smile and his atomic bomb. This hospital, there are a million old men like me, a million stories. They wave their hands. They tell how they hit it big, played their cards, made all the right decisions. If they made a mistake, it wasn’t their fault; it was that asshole down the block. Myself, I say nothing. I smell their shit. Some people get punished. Some of us, we get away with murder.

“You on leave?”

Anne had black hair and gray eyes and one of those big smiles that drew you in. There was something a bit off about her face, a skewed symmetry—a nose flat at the bridge, thin lips, a smile that was wide and crooked. The way she looked at you, she was brash and demure at the same time. A sales­man’s daughter, maybe. She regarded me with her head tilted, looking up. Amused, wry. Something irrepressible in her eyes. Or almost irrepressible.

“No, no,” I said. “I’ve been out of the service for a while now.”

She glanced at my hand, checking for the ring. I wasn’t wearing one—but she was. It was on the engagement finger, which she tucked away when she saw me looking. What this meant, exactly, I didn’t know. Some of the girls wore engage­ment rings the whole time their fiancés were overseas, then dumped the guy the instant he strolled off the boat. Anne didn’t look like that type, but you never knew.

As for me, like I said, I wasn’t wearing any kind of ring—in spite of Julia Fusco, back in Reno. We weren’t married, but…

“I grew up here.”

“In The Beach?”

“Yes.”

She smiled at that—like she had known the answer, just looking.

“And you?”

“I’ve been out East for a while,” she said. “But I grew up here, too.”

“But not in The Beach?” I asked, though I knew the answer, the same way she had known about me.

“No, no. Dolores Heights.”

The area out there in the Mission was mostly Irish those days, though there were still some German families up in the Heights. Entrepreneurs. Jews. Here before the Italians, before the Irish. Back when the ships still came around the horn.

“Where did you serve?”

I averted my eyes, and she didn’t pursue it. Maybe because I had that melancholy look that says don’t ask any more . I glanced at a guy dancing in front of the juke with his girlfriend, and I thought of my gun and had another one of my ugly moments. I took a drink because that helped some­times. It helped me push the thoughts away. The place was loud and raucous. Maglie and his blonde were sitting across from me, chatting it up, but I couldn’t hear a word. One of the other girls said something, and Anne laughed. I laughed too, just for the hell of it.

I took another drink.

Fontana’s had changed. It had used to be only Italians came here, and you didn’t see a woman without her family. But that wasn’t true anymore. Or at least it wasn’t true this night. The place had a fevered air, like there was something people were trying to catch on to. Or maybe it was just the jailbreak.

Maglie came over to my side and put his arm around my shoulders once again. He had always been like this. One drink and he was all sentimental.

“People don’t know it,” he said. “Even round the neigh­borhood, they don’t know it. But Jojo here, he did more than his share. Out there in the Pacific.”

“People don’t want to hear about this,” I said. There was an edge in my voice, maybe a little more than there should have been.

“No,” said Maglie. “But they should know.”

I knew what Maglie was doing. Trying to make it up to me in some way. Letting me know that whatever happened to my father, in that hearing, it wasn’t his idea. And to prove it, I could play the hero in front of this girl from The Heights with her cardigan and her pearls and that ring on her finger.

I turned to Anne.

“You?” I asked. “Where were you during the war?”

She gave me a little bit of her story then. About how she had been studying back East when the war broke out. Halfway through the war, she’d graduated and gotten a job with the VA, in a hospital, on the administrative side. But now that job was done—they’d given it to a returning soldier— and she was back home.

The jukebox was still playing.

“You want to dance?”

She was a little bit taller than me, but I didn’t mind this. Sinatra was crooning on the juke. I wanted to hold her closer, but I feared she’d feel the gun in my pocket. Then I decided I didn’t care.

I glanced at the ring on her finger, and she saw me looking.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“Berlin.”

I didn’t say anything. Frank went on crooning. Some of my father’s friends, I remembered them talking about the Berlin of the old days. About the cabarets and the big­mouthed blondes with husky voices who made the bulge in their pants grow like Pinocchio’s nose.

“He, my fiancé—he’s a lieutenant,” she said. “And there’s the reconstruction. He thought it was important, not just to win the war. Not just to defeat them. But to build it back.”

“He’s an idealist.”

“Yes.”

I wondered how come she had fallen for him. I wondered if she had known him long. Or if it had been one of those things where you meet somebody and you can’t escape. You fall in a whirlwind.

At that moment, inside Alcatraz, Bernie Coy and five other convicts were pinned down in the cellblock. None of us in the bar knew that yet, or even knew their names. If you wanted to know what was going on inside Alcatraz, the best you could do was climb up a rooftop and listen to the radio—but it was too far to see, and the radio was filtered by the mil­itary. Anyway, prison officials weren’t talking. They were too busy to talk. Later, though, it came out how Bernie Coy was the brains. He knew the guards’ routines. He’d managed to crow apart the bars and lead a handful of prisoners into the gun room. He and his buddies had clubbed the guards, taken their keys, and headed down the hall to the main yard; but the last door in the long line of doors would not open. The keys were not on the ring. They had all the ammunition in the world, but they could not get past that door. Now they were pinned down, cornered by the fire on one side and the guards on the other. So they fought, the way men in a foxhole fight. Our boys in Normandy. The Japanese in those bloody caves. The floodlights swept the shore and the tracer bullets lit the sky, and they fought the way desperate men fight, creeping forward on their bellies.

Sinatra was winding it up now, and I pulled Anne a little closer. Then I noticed a man watching us. He was sitting at the same table as Maglie and the rest. He was still watching when Anne and I walked back.

He put his arm around Anne, and they seemed to know each other better than I would like.

“This is Davey,” Anne said.

“Mike’s best friend,” he said.

I didn’t get it at first, and then I did. Mike was Anne’s fiancé, and Davey was keeping his eye out.

Davey had blue eyes and yellow hair. When he spoke, first thing, I thought he was a Brit, but I was wrong.

“London?” I asked.

“No, California,” he smiled. “Palo Alto. Educated abroad.”

He had served with Anne’s fiancé over in Germany. But unlike Mike, he had not re-enlisted. Apparently he was not quite so idealistic.

“Part of my duties, far as my best friend,” he said, “are to make sure nothing happens to Anne.”