your place—you know....”
The childish excitement in his voice was ridiculous. “You goon, I want to take pictures of Slob.”
“Oh. Well I'll bring the camera down Monday. Sure you can't make it to-night?”
“Positive. I'm unwell to-night, dearie,” I said, hanging up, knowing that corn would panic Joe. I walked back to the house with the ice cream, and I was full of a righteous goodness, which felt almost as fine as the self-cleverness I had felt once about keeping Lee with her own money. Now, I told myself (with a straight face, too, I was actually trying to help the poor girl.
I came in on quite a scene. Lee had Slob sitting on her stomach, holding him gently with one big hand. His tail was moving uneasily, and they seemed to be staring each other down. When I came in, the cat glanced at me over her nipples. I dished out the ice cream and Lee clapped her hands like a kid and I felt so damn good I wanted to cry. I left some ice cream in the box for Slob, and we all ate happily.
The pare feeling lasted nearly two weeks and paid off—I picked a winning horse every day, placing my two bucks on such hunches as Angel-On-Hoofs, Winsome, Pure Gal, and the like.
Chapter 5
I DID TRY TO help Lee, find out if she had any family, only all my efforts ran into a series of stone walls. On Monday I asked Jake Webster, the company dick, who was also a big military and National Guard character, if he knew anybody “high up” in the army. Years before, when I had been a minor “planter,” I knew people who had an “army in”—sometimes the soldiers or the navy could be used for a publicity stunt; but by now I had lost most of my connections. After a lot of gassing Jake gave me the name of a captain—“a boon buddy of mine”—who worked down at Church Street, and who was in charge of personnel for the local military district, or so Jake said.
I dropped down to see him. As I suspected, he didn't remember Jake at all, but he was quite cordial And he was just what I was looking for. I told him about Hank dying and that I wanted to get, or see, a copy of whatever papers Hank had used to bring Lee over. The captain was a middle-aged man with an affected, clipped manner of speaking. He said, “It will be a lot of red tape but I imagine I may be able to secure the records, especially if the widow, Mrs. Conroy, needed them. Are you acting for her?”
“Well, not exactly,” I said. I couldn't tell him the truth: he would call Lee to the office, and once he saw and talked with her... “You see, as I explained, she's alone in the country, and I'm trying to help her find whatever relatives she may still have in Germany. Therefore I need to know her home town and...”
He stared at me suspiciously and I knew I had talked too much. “Surely the girl knows her own home town?”
“Of course,” I said quickly, “but she thought that... well, there might be something more in the records, for instance, information the army might have picked up from official Nazi records. Might possibly state that her father and mother were known to be dead, etc.”
“Major Conroy would have told her those facts,” the captain said.
“From what she says, he didn't,” I said, clipping my words as sharply as he did. “Another thing, her knowledge of English is rather slight, and she's a bit hazy on official papers. After all, she spent a number of years in a concentration camp.”
The captain drummed on the table with his polished nails for a moment. “All this is most irregular, and I don't know what help I can be. But if Mrs. Conroy will come here, speak to the general and secure his permission, I'll see what can be worked.”
“You're very kind, and thank you for your trouble,” I said, standing up. “At the moment Mrs. Conroy is visiting friends in California, but will probably return within a few months. I'll ask her to come down then.”
“Fine,” the captain said, shaking hands with me.
I went out and had a quick drink. I was far from being a clever liar, and my better sense told me to stop this before I became involved. If anybody ever talked to Lee, how could I explain why I was living with this backward kid?
I made one more attempt. With Lee's picture I went to one of the refugee agencies, told a tired-looking, efficient young woman, “I'd like to locate the relations, if any, of this girl, Lee Unbekant, said to be born in Hamburg. I have reason to believe she isn't Jewish, and that's all I know, except she spent some time in a concentration camp, as a slave laborer, was branded with a number. I don't know the number or the name of the camp.”
The woman lit a cigarette, added a butt to an ash tray filled with cigarettes she had chain-smoked, looked at the picture. “An interesting face, odd nose. Why do you want to find this girl, her parents?”
“For sentimental reasons. A... eh... brother of mine, a soldier, knew them in Venice. That is, he knew the girl. Later he was killed. He seemed to like them very much, that is the girl. I'd like to find them, help them, perhaps visit them.” I had thought this lie out carefully.
“My dear sir, we have a long list of people who are waiting for our help to locate their sons, husbands, daughters, parents, wives, and hardly for sentimental reasons. I'll place your case on the bottom of the list, but we go by the need involved in each case, so I can give you little hope. We're overworked and understaffed, you understand.”
“Then can you tell me how I'd go about finding out this information?”
“It's worse than hunting for the proverbial needle in the haystack. We play a great jigsaw puzzle game here every day, with human lives, and happiness as the missing piece,” the young lady said, enjoying her own dramatics. “You have very little information to go on, besides the picture. Hamburg was badly bombed, there are very few records to be found there now. You say her last name is Unbekant. Are you sure it isn't
“It might be the soldier—my brother— misspelled the name in his letters.”
She smiled. “My dear man, in that case the girl may have been... how shall I say... stringing the soldier along. Look at the picture, this girl is well fed, she was a long time removed from any DP camp, if she ever was in one, when this photo was taken. Also, Unbekannt means
I had a sinking feeling she was right, I was getting no place: Unbekannt might have been the first German word that came to Hank's mind, and if it meant unknown...? I said, “How would you suggest I go about finding out the information, then?”
“Bravo, you don't give up easily,” she said.
“What?”
“Have you any money?” Her eyes swept over my clothes.
“A little. How much would you want?”
She grinned, showing nice teeth. “My dear sir, I do not want any money. If you can spend about a thousand dollars, I'd suggest you have copies of the picture made, place an ad in various German papers—abroad and here—offer a reward of about one hundred dollars. I'll warn you in advance, it will be difficult to do that from this end, I mean it will be better if you have somebody you can trust place the ads in Germany, the money exchange and the general unsettled conditions, you understand. And once the ads are placed you will receive many false answers, some from outright charlatans. It will require much correspondence and patience on your part, possibly even a trip to Germany. And after all that trouble, you may never find the people, or you could be very lucky and find the girl after the first ad. Also, you can never tell in what part of the world you'll find her.”
“Ill think it over. Where can I find a list of the various papers?” I asked.
“Advertising agencies in Yorkville will be glad to handle it for you, only pick one you can trust. I'd, use one that has started since the war. And demand to see copies of all the ads.”
I said thank you and as I was leaving she called after me, with a wise smile, “You soldiers are all alike. If you liked the girl that much, why didn't you bring her back with you instead of waiting all these years?”
“That's right,” I said, although it took me several minutes to figure out what she meant. Outside, I looked at myself in a store-window mirror, pleased she thought me young enough to have been a soldier.
You see I tried—maybe not as hard as I should have, but I tried to help Lee. My relations with her had changed—on my part. I no longer felt at all clever in having her around, although I told myself I hadn't done anything to hurt her. And of course in bed I could hardly touch her: I could picture all the soldiers, Nazi and American, who had made her so mechanically capable—and sexless.
Lee didn't change. She ate when I told her to, danced now and then, and sat around with that blank look on her face. It was the beginning of October and a little cool, so at least she didn't sit around in the nude much. I still dressed her smartly, took her out to dinner, to the night clubs and movies, and of course I still gave her the hundred every week, which she hid.
Now and then I went back to questioning her about her family, which usually ended up in my not getting any new information and Lee becoming hysterical. Mostly we walked and ate in silence. I had plenty of time to myself, did a lot of reading, and started dunking about doing some writing. I fooled around with the alcohol-has-turned-to-water idea, without getting anywhere. But I did a short story about a dancer who loses his legs in the war and his effort to get back to normal by learning to dance on his artificial legs. To my
