Elsa could not feel anything anymore. At first, last night, she had been furious with Al's tardiness. Then after she had called and found out he had left hours ago, she had gone through a period of worry. Maybe he'd got into an accident or worse… Then as the night dragged sleeplessly on rage had returned. Rage and doubt. Was he with another woman? What other explanation could there be? He didn't want to sleep with her, but he would sleep with another woman? It was disgusting! Infuriating!
She had stormed around the house, ranting to herself, sobbing, snarling. Then she had settled in the living room just before dawn, with her hand-carved box on her lap and the book that somehow she had never got around to returning to Cindy in her hand. She read it again, for the dozenth time, staring at the horrific pictures, and trying to imagine her impeccably groomed, beautifully dressed, fastidious husband existing under such conditions. She tried to see him in the half-naked men drawing water from a polluted well; or the pain-twisted wretch held down by a guard giving him a dry shave with a dull razor; or the defeated shadow bound cruelly with coarse ropes, being pushed and bent into impossible positions. She couldn't. She just couldn't imagine it. Al, who was so particular about food, eating cold, weevil-infested rice and flavorless cabbage soup? Al, who kept a cleaner house than she did, emptying a brimming slop bucket into an open lagoon. Al, covered in lice and plagued by mosquitoes and tormented by rats. It didn't seem possible.
Of course, when she tried to imagine Andrew charred and blackened, she couldn't do that either. She couldn't see him without skin, his muscles exposed and blistered, his beautiful dark hair gone. She couldn't picture him with an I.V. running morphine into his ravaged bloodstream, another with every antibiotic under the sun, a nurse massaging silver sulfadiazine cream into his burns as he tried so bravely to keep smiling… That didn't seem possible, either.
She set aside the book and opened the box. She hadn't really taken it out for months, much less touched the silver snake inside. It was cool and smooth in her hand, and made its familiar sound as she lifted it. The tears that had been burning in her eyes began to fall. Finally she gave into her exhaustion and fell asleep on the sofa.
MWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMW
Rodney returned from the one-hour photo lab in triumph. He stood by while Myrtle Wetherspoon examined yesterday's handiwork. There were some really excellent shots, especially the one of the two of them embracing next to the station wagon. The woman had put on fresh clothes for the new day—clothes that actually almost fit, and showed off her trim figure very well.
She'd tailed him with the intention of cranking out a story about how a national hero treats his wife on their first anniversary. She had expected the usual candy-and-flowers routine, with maybe a little gossip about where he took her for supper, what they ordered, and whether they were into feeding each other or linking arms as they sipped their champagne. Sunday supplement stuff.
Instead, she had this. It was a genuine scandal. Of course, she wasn't stupid. She'd seen the bruises on the woman's face and the three pallid little kids in the back of the station wagon, but the truth wasn't important. What was important was how it looked and what the public would want to believe. The only thing that sold papers faster than torture was sex, and with these shots it wouldn't be hard to leap to a conclusion like that.
Luck and the gods of journalism had been smiling on her. Whoever had beat up the woman was a southpaw, and all the profile shots showed the left side of her face; the side without bruises. She was tall and blonde and at least twenty, probably closer to twenty-five years younger than Calavicci. In those grubby clothes you could make a case for her being his longtime mistress from the slums, so comfortable in her position that she didn't need to look presentable, or the very worst kind of discount hooker.
The Sun-Times, naturally, would never print it. No respectable paper would, but she could make a mint flogging these photos to the supermarket tabloids.
The money, however, wasn't the best part. She had been in the business long enough to know that the money didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was the glory. She could have had that in abundance, if Calavicci had just cooperated and given her the story she'd asked for, whatever it was. There was a real scoop there, starting right after the V.C. had taken him out of that camp named after a rabbit. You didn't have to be a basset hound to smell Pulitzer material, but he'd had to go and play hard-to-get.
It wouldn't have been a problem, but in order to get the tickets to Washington she had had to promise her editor a major scoop. She had bragged how she could get the whole story, no problem. She was still paying for that failure: he hadn't trusted her with a hard-hitting scoop since then.
Even if Calavicci never knew who got him, though, she was finally going to get some revenge.
MWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMThe sound of a key in the front door woke Elsa with a start. She hastened to return her treasure, her last reminder of Andrew, into the box, which she slid under the sofa. Then she got to her feet and hastened to the front hallway.
Al's face melted into contrition when he saw her. "Elsa, God—" he began.
"Where have you been?" she asked coldly. "Out all night, where have you been?"
"I…" He closed the door and bolted it. "I had an accident."
"What kind of an accident?" she asked, her need to be stern suddenly melting into a fear that he had been hurt.
"Nothing major: car merging without watching grazed the side of the Ferrari," Al said. "It's just a scratch…"
Just a scratch? But then why had he been out last night?
"The driver… it was a kid from the orphanage. In trouble…" he mumbled, scrubbing at his shadowed eyes as if he was struggling to stay awake. "Had to help, Elsa. We spent the night at a little motel… put Fefner on the plane to Pierre… God, I'm sorry, honey…"
She backed away as he stumbled wearily towards her, hands outstretched in supplication. Then she realized something. Either she could cling to her stupid suspicions that he had betrayed her on the one year marking of their wedding night, or she could believe what he said about helping an old friend. Of course, if he had met such a friend he had to help him. He had no other brothers to look after. She understood that he had to show loyalty to those he had grown up with.
And she was tired. Too tired to fight. Her heart was so sore, worn down by the horrific imaginings of Al's life in Vietnam and the still more debilitating thoughts of what had happened to Andrew, while she was on the other side of the country and could not help him hold on… and it had been so long since they had last made love...
"Then show me, Al," she murmured, wrapping her arms around his neck and feeling for his lips with her own. "Show me how you are sorry."
"Elsa, Elsa…" he mumbled. Then he was tugging at the zipper of the dress she had now been wearing for thirty-seven hours. "Elsa, Elsa, Elsa, Elsa…"
She was busy fumbling with the buttons on his uniform shirt, and so could not quite make out what he said after that, so softly that she didn't believe that he meant her to hear it at all.
Still, she though it sounded oddly like; "Not Beth."
MWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMAl was in a great mood. All week, he and Elsa had been absolutely inseparable. She had unquestioningly accepted his rather disjointed explanation of why he had been out all night and missed their anniversary entirely. Not a harsh word had passed between them. Best of all, they were sleeping together again. it was almost like the honeymoon they had had to forgo because of training.
He had had a call from Ana Fefner, who had safely arrived in South Dakota, and was settled in with her friend. Everything was fine. At least, everything seemed fine, though probably she would never admit if it wasn't. Al knew how that went. He was the same way. Probably every kid who had had to grow up without parents or family or even affection was like that.
He had wanted to call Dirk Simon to check up on how things were going on the alimony front, but something was holding him back. He got a creepy, crawly, scary feeling every time he even thought about it. There had been something about that midnight phone call that had placed a seed of discontent in his soul, and he decided that he would never contact the man again, not if he could help it. It wasn't right. Somehow, it just wasn't right.
What was right, however, was Elsa! God, what a woman! What a woman!
He brushed his hand over the side of the newly repaired Ferrari. You couldn't even tell the thing had been through the wringer.
Leaving the garage, he strode through the handsome yard towards the house. It was a beautiful day! He had a happy marriage! And in less than three months, he would be on the moon! It seemed too good to be true.
It was too good to be true.
She was waiting in the kitchen with a face that wouldn't have looked out of place on a murderer moving in for the kill.
"You elfajzott!" she spat. "Elfajzott! Tépõfarkas! Házasságtörõ férfi!"
Al frowned in confusion. "What?" he said.
Her eyes flashing with rage, she snatched up a newspaper from the counter and hurled it at him. It exploded in mid-air, scattering pages in every direction. The front page floated to earth, face-up, and what he saw turned his blood cold.
It was a grainy photograph of him and Ana Fefner, a close-up of their faces as he kissed her. It was the moment when he had pecked her lightly to the side of her mouth, but the angle of the picture made it look like they were locked in a very passionate osculation. The inch-high red letters smeared across their shoulders read Astronaut's Mystery Girl—What Will Comrade Calavicci Say?
"What is this?" Elsa demanded. "You lie to me, tell me stories about old friends, and now I see in a paper what you've been doing? You… you…"
She launched into a string of Hungarian oaths. Al stared at the photo again, too stunned to do anything at the moment.
"Why do you lie?" she cried. "You think I care if you have other women, you slime, you nozzle? You think I care if an elfajzott like you sleeps in the gutter with filth like himself? You lie to me to hide it, and then you sleep with me?"
"Elsa, I didn't lie…" Al stammered. "That's Ana Fefner. She was at the orphanage the same time I was, and—"
"Liar!" she roared. "You lie! You lie! Do you think I do not have eyes? She is too young to be anyone who was at school with you—you filth! Házasságtörõ férfi! Házasságtörõ férfi!"
Damn it, she wasn't going to listen… he had to try anyway.
"You don't get it!" he said. "She fell in with a drug addict who was beating on her and the kids. She hit my car 'cause she wasn't watching the road, and I took her to a motel—"
"Hah! And you slept with her, pretty blonde American slut! You filthy slime! I hate you! I will kill you! I will kill you!"
He was losing his temper. "Damn it, Elsa, will you just listen?"
With a ululation of rage, she snatched up the glass carafe from the coffee pot and hurled it at him. He ducked, and it shattered against the back door. He took a step towards her.
"I didn't put a finger on her," he said. "I bought some pizza for her kids, and—"
"It's not your finger that I worry about!" Elsa snapped. "Elfajzott! Male chauvinist pig! Adulterer!"
"Now, that's not fair!" Al snarled. "I never cheated on you—not that you didn't deserve it! For months you wouldn't even touch me!"
"Not touch you, hah! I should never have touched you! You dirty, rotten, worthless filth! You scum! You bastard!" The Hungarian took over again, and the words grew harsher and uglier, polysyllabic and violent enough to leave little to the imagination despite his very rudimentary grasp of the tongue. The rest of the coffee maker followed its pot, and Al skirted around the table, trying to get some kind of barrier between himself and the eruption of unfettered fury that was embodied in this red-haired Harpy.
"Damn you, I didn't sleep with her! I gave her some money and made sure that—"
"Money! Sure! I bet you gave her money! Don't you always give your whores money, you lying creep! You dirty nozzle! May the devil use you as his mouthpiece, you worthless, spineless dog!" Elsa snarled. "How many women have you taken to bed since we married? All those nights you say you were out with Taggert and Jacobs and the rest—finding cheap girls and betraying the wedding vows—I should cut off your heres and cook them in lemon and onions, you—you—"
She snatched up the electric frying pan and hurled it with such force that it dented the wall. Al's heart pounded with genuine fear. She could have taken his head off with that thing!
"For crying out loud, Elsa, why don't you believe me?" he demanded. "Have I ever lied to you?"
"Yes!" she shrieked. "You wake up screaming, you say you are fine! I ask, how was it for you across the sea, you say not so bad! I ask if they hurt you, you tell me no! All you do is lie! You do not tell me the truth about that, why would you tell me who you sleep with? Why would you be honest when you know what I will do? Hah! But now the world knows! They know you have slept with this szutykos nõ, and still you tell stories! I hate you, you házasságtörõ férfi! Like a man—like all men! All stupid American men!"
The next tirade went on for so long that at last Al realized she wasn't going to switch back to English at all. It was time for Calavicci to stop protesting his innocence to a crowd not interest in hearing it, and to make his exit. Then suddenly instinct threw him to his hands and knees as the toaster flew across the room.
That was too much. No longer willing to stay here and argue with this closed-minded Fury, risking his life for a marriage that was obviously over, Al scrambled to his feet and fled. There was a lock on the door of his den, and he shut himself in with his liquor cabinet and his black thoughts.
MWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMThe moment Al was gone Elsa sank to her knees with a panicked sob. She wanted to believe him, she did, but it couldn't be true. The girl was too young, far, far too young to be anyone who had grown up in the orphanage with her husband. No, he had betrayed her. Cindy was right. He was sleeping with other women. He was nothing but a házasságtörõ férfi, a philanderer, an adulterer. It was over. She would not stay with him anymore. She would not. She would divorce him. She would destroy him. He had deceived her and betrayed her, and the worst of it was that this loss of the trust she had placed in Al was worse than any loss she had ever known…
Any loss. That was worst of all.