Carol O’Connell - Shell Game

His smile was entirely too sweet, and she braced herself for the coming shot.

„If it matters to you, Kathy, I still agree with Helen.“ The elevator opened, and he stepped inside the humming box. „I find you quite perfect – twisted as you are.“ The metal doors closed on his great pleasure in her annoyance.

The rabbi’s timing was flawless, as always. Once again, he had gotten the last word. She had yet to beat him at this game. But he was getting older, slowing down – his day would come.

Malakhai awakened, fully clothed, on the bed in his New York hotel room. He was not running through his dreams anymore, but neither had he shaken off the confusion of things unreal.

And the ringing had not stopped.

He switched on the bedside lamp and looked at his watch. It was two o’clock in the morning. He picked up the telephone receiver, intending to slam it down again, when he heard a woman’s voice.

„Malakhai?“

„Yes?“

„When you were a prisoner of war in Korea, was your cell completely dark? Or did it have a light?“

„Mallory.“ Odd child – and rude. Malakhai glanced toward his wife’s side of the bed. He stared at the glint of gold foil and his hand tightened around the telephone receiver. So it had happened again. He had fallen asleep before removing the hotel mint from Louisa’s pillow. No – he had forgotten. „I’m so sorry.“

„That prison cell,“ said Mallory’s voice at his ear, no doubt believing that he had spoken this apology to her. „Was there a light? A window?“

The sense of shame was overwhelming him – all for a bit of chocolate wrapped in gold foil. He kept the tears out of his voice when he spoke to Mallory. „There was light during the day, but not much.“

This old history was an event with large gaps in it, but the physical surroundings were clear. „My cell had a small window facing a stone wall. I could see the light, but not the sky, not the sun. Shadows moved from one side of the wall to the other. That’s how I kept track of the time.“

„What did you do with all that time?“

„I spent it with Louisa.“

„And that was the beginning of – “

„My madness? That’s what the army psychiatrists said.“ But he had always thought of it as a discipline, a religion with a requisite of absolute faith and a complement of sins and atonements – even a litany of guilt. He took the mint off Louisa’s pillow and crushed it in his hand. I’m so sorry.

What would he forget tomorrow?

„It wasn’t war you loved – the killing,“ said Mallory. „That’s not why you signed up for Korea.“

„It was Louisa I loved.“ He sat up and unbuttoned his shirt, averting his eyes from the other side of the bed. „But there’s an interesting parallel. I once saw a poster in Warsaw, a bit of political art. It was the portrait of a young woman. The top of her head was obscured in a wash of blood red, as if it had been blown away. Beneath the poster were the words – how shall I translate them? ‘War, what a woman you are.’ I think that sums it up.“

The line went dead. Apparently, Mallory had been satisfied with the short answer. Would she have understood the music? No, it was pointless to attempt that explanation. It would only try her patience.

He had given Louisa form and substance in a Korean cell, but she had come back for him years before that, in the chaos of World War II, when Roland had aptly named him Hollow Boy.

Malakhai lay back on the pillow. The ceiling became low clouds over the plains of a European winter. His arms wrapped tight around his shoulders, for it was bitter cold. Not night anymore, but morning – first light.

He could have spared the child if he had called out from the safe cover of the rock wall, but he didn’t. He watched a five-year-old boy walk into the field. It was perfect, really. Instead of waiting another hour for one of the Germans to trigger an explosion, the curious child was heading toward a land mine.

Young Private Malakhai had been rubbing his frozen hands through the succession of annoying miracles that had kept the German boys alive. They had nearly finished dismantling the heavy tree, clearing it from the road, section by section. He didn’t know or care what all the soldiers in the troop truck were laughing at. One of them was pointing at the child who would be dead in minutes. The soldier beckoned to the little boy, and the small figure moved closer, stepping quickly now.

Good.

Malakhai’s fingertips were going the blue-gray color of frostbite, and he wished the child would hurry even faster to his dismemberment and death.

A smiling, yellow-haired soldier was holding out a sausage. The little boy moved forward, shy eyes round as brown cookies, his tiny hand extending to the promised treat.

The first mine blew under the child’s foot, and the rest followed. There was hardly a second in the chain of explosions for the soldiers to register the shock of what was happening to them as the parts of their bodies bid torsos farewell and flew elsewhere. And it rained blood for a time; a fine mist crystallized death into frozen red drops.

The truck was on fire. The air was filled with the acrid stew of odors, sulfur and smoke, burnt tires and burnt boys. Malakhai had not yet felt the pain of the head injury made by a fragment of metal. He moved out from behind the cover of rocks and began the death count of the thirty-four soldiers for his report. He didn’t count the child, who was not a military statistic.

When he was done, he stood over the smallest corpse. The little body at his feet was mutilated, but not divided. The boy had been at the center of the first explosion, yet the tiny, perfect face was unspoiled, and his limbs still clung to him by red tendons and bones.

Malakhai felt the hardening of an erection. And this was also curious. He could not explain it away, but as Louisa’s face filled his mind, he found it natural to be thinking of her, coupling her with all things sexual. He could feel the heat in his crotch, more intense now – live fire in winter. And inexplicably, it had all begun with this little corpse at his feet. The child must belong to that farmhouse in the distance.

Malakhai’s body stiffened and froze in the attitude of attention – lightening. Across the snowy plain, he heard the music of a violin.

Impossible. The head wound?

Auditory hallucination? Of course, and it was not his first. He was learning all the medical jargon, wound by wound. But this was not the familiar ringing, the pain of hellish bells and bombshells. This was music, and violins were not in his repertoire of injuries to body and brain.

He looked down on the face of the child. Snowflakes settled upon the rounded glass of brown staring eyes, and they melted there. Malakhai felt nothing but the sex warming his crotch in a spill of cum.

He turned his head in the direction of the farmhouse, the better to hear the music. A wind was rising, and the faint notes were drifting away from him. And now there was another sensation of wetness. His hand moved up to his face.

Tears?

For Louisa.

Thoughts of her had conjured up no companion emotions of pain or loss. He was only tasting the salt of tears – Louisa’s gift. The hollow boy was weeping by conditioned reflex to an imagined violin. He credited Louisa with this trick, creating false tears for a dead child, trappings of sorrow, an illusion of regret.

But why?

Two indistinct figures were emerging from the distant farmhouse. The parents? Perhaps they had just discovered that their child was not sleeping in his bed. He knew their frightened eyes would be turning toward the fire of the burning troop truck. And yet, Malakhai was feeling no empathy or sympathy, nothing but the throbbing of his head wound.