Chapter 11

Vermeer sat in his hotel room. He flipped through the pages of a Hustler magazine that he'd bought in the afternoon.

He sat in the room, amongst the cheap hotel furniture, with almost no sign of anyone even booking this room. Vermeer had turned in most of his belongings to Joe, who would take care of them until they got to Hawaii.

He sat back in the bed, wondering just how many ways they could show naked females. Either way it was the same thing being shown over and over, albeit different girls.

Vermeer sighed. He was bored. Not only was he too old to be aroused by cheap pictures of girls more than half his age, but he was too dignified to allow himself to be aroused. Anyone who called him a gay old man was an ignorant little son of a bitch. He would much rather know the woman whose privacy he was invading. These girls were just giving it away for a price. That was the problem of these days: call him old-fashioned, but America was losing its compassion. It had nothing to do with that religious crap that had always been targeting these things, but maybe he was on their side.

Flipping through, he almost dropped the magazine in surprise.

A lithe-looking Chinese girl stared out at him, giving that phony smile. She was pretty flat-chested, but even Vermeer could see the lean muscles in her arms and legs. She had long hair that reached down to her nipples. If she had let her hair fall down her front, she could have hidden her breasts completely. Her eyes were narrow, emphasized by the makeup.

Vermeer stared in horror: he had forgotten that he might come to a picture like this. It reminded him too much of the painful experiences with his wife.

He had loved her, and lusted her. She had been so goddamn beautiful. For a man that had spent more than four years killing Japs, he had loved that Far Eastern look. And she had been especially pretty. Vermeer could remember crooning her name even as she undressed.

Toby. He could have said that name ten times, and it would sound lovelier with every new pronounciation.

Vermeer closed the magazine, even as he remembered his wife. He wasn't going to disgrace her memory with this filth. Tears came to his eyes as he thought of how she had awkwardly undressed in front of him. Her culture was such that she knew that a husband had the right, yet it had almost been as painful for Vermeer as it had been for her. She had found herself alone in a country that she had thought would help her, and he had been the best man she could see. And they had both known that that hadn't meant much. She had been sixteen, the same age he had been when he had lied his way into the war. He had been four years older than her, and like her, he was coming back from a war that had changed his life.

Joe had found it funny that Vermeer found this thin little girl to marry, but he had always been polite to her for Vermeer's sake. She herself never learned English very well, and even if she had, then she tried not to speak to Joe. Vermeer could sense that she had feared him. Certainly he was a man to intimidate the people around him. So he had seen Joe less and less for her sake.

He had tried to be a good man for her. He didn't lay a hand on her for the first week of their marriage. She had looked so resigned, so helpless, that it killed him to think that her body was legally his. Nobody would help her if she tried to run away, or if she was cruelly beaten.

So he had slept beside her, not daring to give reason for her to hate him. He had tried to be courteous to her, despite the language barrier. But everything seemed to be the wrong thing on Vermeer's part. He couldn't understand what she wanted.

She herself was obedient in her duties as a wife, despite his own diffidence. She always changed in front of him, though whether it was an attempt at seduction or what she considered necessary, Vermeer never found out. She always cooked the meals, her passive, silent determination seemingly barring him from taking over. It seemed an insult to not allow her to control the kitchen. Vermeer tried to show his gratitude, but always that passive face. It hurt him deeply to never know whether she was happy or not.

During this time, Vermeer did little jobs for Joe, helping him in his rise in the crime underworld. Joe was always generous to loyalty, and Vermeer lived decently. He didn't complain: he knew that it would get better. While he helped out Joe, he also did some small contracts with others on the side. All his life, he made sure that they never got near Toby. He guarded her with his life, though he didn't know if she would do the same thing.

She prospered, though. Vermeer gave her gifts in an attempt to get some emotion out of her. Aside from the cheap wedding ring that he had given her during the service, he gave her earrings, necklaces, little things to show his kindness. She never showed anything from it.

One thing seemed to break through, though. A little silver arm band, easily slipping over her own slender arm. No matter how old she had gotten, she was always skinny. She wore it all the time that he saw her. Even in bed, when they had lain together, that armband was there. He didn't know why she didn't take it off, but she never answered.

Of course, this lifestyle was affected by Vermeer's jobs, no matter how careful he was. In 1970, Klaus Vermeer, war hero from the fights in the Southeast, was arrested for being involved in a drug deal. He had almost shot killed a police officer trying to escape, and that went into his sentence.

Ten years. He was lucky not to get more: the officer he'd shot should have been killed with a bullet into his eye, but instead he'd gotten an ugly scar across his skull. The negro bastard had given Vermeer the biggest ass smile when his sentence had been given, and Vermeer had wanted to knock every single tooth out of that smile.

But he was terrified of what would happen to Toby. Without him, one of his enemies could get to him through her. She had been brought in to testify, and she had mostly been calm throughout the whole case. She seemed to give no hard evidence against him, Vermeer could tell by the angry looks from the prosecutors, who had a translator handy for her questioning.

Then the translator told her of the business he was in and how he was still working part-time for Joe, and possibly responsible for at least thirty murders (he had in fact been responsible for four of them). She had begun to cry and finger the silver armband around her wrist, and the translator, an arrogant Chinese cop, had demanded she give an answer. She said that she had had no idea. Vermeer could have wept. He bowed his head, fearing her gaze more than anything on Earth or under it. He feared her disapproval so much at that moment that he had not looked at her after that.

One of Joe's guys came in to see him, to tell him that Joe was working on getting him out, and Vermeer had begged Joe to look after Toby. He asked the guy to give Toby a message.

It wasn't necessary. Toby came in to see him a month afterwards. She looked terrified in that visiting room. Vermeer stared at her in shock. She looked at him with that same face that he knew so well. But there, in her eyes, was an emotion. It was an emotion of worry, of hoping that he was okay. Vermeer was astonished at this. Was she genuinely showing her affections? Or was she merely carrying out some kind of loyalty to him? He couldn't guess. He did notice that her armband was gone, though, and he wondered what had happened to it.

He would never get the chance to ask her, though. Her prison visit was the last time he ever saw her. When he was released and he went home, she wasn't there.

And in a sense, that had been the worst part of it all. Not the humiliation of being in jail, not the niggers that would have killed him had they the chance, not the conditions of living like an animal. It was her departure that made him weep, feel worse than he'd ever felt before.

Vermeer thought of all that in that hotel room. The tears flowed in the comfort of privacy. Toby. Where had she gone? Where was she now? He had never asked Joe where she was. He had offered his deepest sympathies and had begged him forgiveness.

Vermeer noticed he still held the Hustler magazine. In a sudden surge of absolute fury, he tore it to little pieces and threw them out of his hotel window.

A few hours later, when he had composed himself, he went out of his room. He wanted to go get a drink, as he usually did after remembering Toby. But he never got drunk: even now after all these years, he never got drunk. It was a habit he'd gotten into after the Second World War. He had known that Toby always waited for him to come home, and he didn't want her to see him drunk.

Note from Author.: One thing you should try is to listen to the Centurions' "Bullwinkle Part 2" during the flashback, and Johnny Cash's "Hurt" when it jumps back to Vermeer in the present day. It allowed me to sink into the mood of this scene so much better as I wrote it down.