move on my part, except for the bit when she'd stopped that Kraut from killing me.
I wanted to scare her, to make her think twice about parachuting into France or Greece or wherever the SOE needed a female agent. I wanted her with me and-I had to admit-I wanted her waiting for me when I got back from wherever Uncle Ike sent me next. I hated the thought of worrying about her once more, of not knowing if she was alive or dead. Or worse.
'If you do this, I won't be there to back you up, Diana. You'll be all alone.'
'I'm all alone right now,' she said. She buttoned her blouse and put her shoes on. 'I'm going for a walk. Please be gone by the time I get back.'
'Don't go, Diana, please,' I said. I took her by the arms and held her, breathed in her scent, felt the heat rising from her skin. 'I love you.'
'No, you don't,' she said. 'You want to possess me. I've been waiting for you to learn the difference.'
She twisted out of my embrace and left, slamming the door behind her. I stood there, unsure of what to do next, the tick tick tick of the ceiling fan in the empty room marking the beats of my heart.
CHAPTER TWO
I found Kay in the hotel bar. Then I saw a waiter and ordered two Irish whiskeys. Doubles. I asked Kay if she wanted anything.
'I'm fine, Billy. But what sorrows are you drowning?'
She raised her glass and drank, her gaze fixed on me over the rim. Kay Summersby was a knockout, with dark, wide eyes set above prominent cheekbones. Her smile was infectious, and I had a hard time staying miserable around her. But I was working at it as hard as I could.
'Diana and I had a fight.'
'Billy, you shouldn't waste time quarreling. Not the two of you, not in the middle of a war. Life's too short, believe me.' Her smile vanished, and she reached for a cigarette.
I lit it for her, but she avoided looking straight at me. Her fiance had been killed in combat several months ago but I didn't think she was still broken up. She had the look of having suffered a more recent wound.
'It's about her going back to the SOE,' I said. 'I don't want her to.'
'But she is anyway,' said Kay. It wasn't a question.
'Yes, and she didn't even tell me! She should at least have talked it over with me.'
'Oh dear,' Kay said. 'I didn't realize I'd spilled the beans. I thought you knew.'
'I was probably the last to find out,' I said, taking a gulp of one of the drinks that had been set in front of me.
'Tell me, Billy. Why is it that men always look at every decision a woman makes as if it revolves around them? You're moping about here instead of going out on the town with Diana and toasting her success, all because she did something without consulting you. As if she needed to. Your feelings are hurt, that's all.'
'But she could get killed. Look what happened to her in Algiers-'
'Look what happened to you in Sicily.'
'What about it? I'm OK now.'
'Exactly.'
Kay raised a slender hand and nodded to her empty glass as a waiter passed. He skidded to a halt and took it, assuring her he'd be right back with a fresh drink. Kay could always count on attracting attention, mostly the admiring type, from men, and occasionally the jealous sort from women, especially if they were attached to those admiring men. She'd been a model before joining up with the Mechanised Transport Corps, and it showed in her graceful movements, calm assurance, and killer good looks. But she was no debutante dressed up in khaki. She'd driven an ambulance in the East End of London during the Blitz, digging out the living and the dead from bombed and burning buildings, before she'd been assigned as Uncle Ike's driver. When Kay was sent to North Africa, her transport had been torpedoed, and she'd spent a night bobbing in a lifeboat on cold ocean waves as destroyers depth-charged the waters around the survivors. And she'd endured her own loss in this war, so I had to admit she might know what she was talking about.
'OK, I get your point. It's just that where I come from women don't go off and jump out of airplanes behind enemy lines.'
'Where I come from, Billy, women don't go off to drive generals about England and North Africa. Yet, here I am.' She bestowed a smile on the waiter as he placed her gin and tonic on the table and disappeared behind a potted palm tree. The bar was filling up as the cocktail hour approached. Civilians in white linen suits mingled with British officers in lightweight khaki. Except for the heat and the tropical clothing, we could have been in London.
'Where do you come from, Kay?'
'The same place as your family came from, Billy. Ireland. Country Cork, to be exact. My father was a colonel in the Royal Munster Fusiliers, and my mother was British. I'm a rare example of Anglo-Irish accord.'
'It's a bit odd, isn't it? Helping the British to hang on to their empire?'
'Only half odd to me, Billy. But yes, I know what you mean. The Black and Tans burned the center of Cork in 1920, so I'm familiar with the heavy hand of the British Empire.'
'I know,' I said. 'My uncle Dan told me that afterward the Black and Tans tied pieces of burnt cork to their revolvers, as a message to anyone who resisted them: If they burned Cork, they could burn out any town or village they wanted to.' I could recall the stories Uncle Dan had told of the Irish Civil War, when the British recruited veterans of the World War to bolster the ranks of the Royal Irish Constabulary. They were issued a mixture of surplus military uniforms and police uniforms. The army uniforms were khaki, the police uniforms darker. The colors gave them their name, a name that in my family stood for brutal repression and arbitrary killings.
'Well, we're a long way from Ireland, and the Nazis make the Black and Tans look like naughty schoolboys, so I think we're on the right side.'
I wasn't so sure about the comparison. The Black and Tans had been a law unto themselves, foreign soldiers putting down a rebellion in my homeland. But I didn't want to argue with Kay. I started on my second drink instead and made small talk.
'Are you enjoying the trip?' I asked. After the Cairo conference, Uncle Ike's boss, General George C. Marshall, had ordered him to take a brief vacation. Uncle Ike decided to play tourist, and took a bunch of us along to see the pyramids in Egypt, and then on a short flight to Jerusalem to see the Holy Land. Kay and a couple of other secretaries from headquarters had come along, as had Uncle Ike's aide, Colonel Tex Lee, and Sergeant Mickey McKeogh, his orderly. Diana and I rounded out the party.
'Yes, and Ike needed a break. I'm so glad General Marshall ordered him to take one. He hasn't had a day off for months. Neither have the rest of us.'
'I never thought I'd see the Garden of Gethsemane.'
'It was so very sad,' Kay said, her eyelids flickering as she looked away from me, her hand playing around her mouth. I thought she might cry.
Uncle Ike had taken us to the Mount of Olives, where the thick, gnarled olive trees reminded me of Sicily. The Garden of Gethsemane is on the western slope, next to a church built over a rock where the Franciscan monks told us Jesus prayed the night before his arrest, while his disciples drifted off to sleep. I thought about how easy it always has been to get men to do unimaginable things. Roman soldiers nailing men to crosses, Black and Tans burning homes and shooting Irishmen, Nazis committing mass murder. Indeed it was all so very sad, but I didn't think that's what gave Kay her faraway look.
'What's wrong, Kay?'
'Don't mind me, Billy,' she said, shaking her head as if coming out of a dream. 'Diana is who you should be thinking of. Don't let your pride kill what the two of you have together.'
'If she has her way, we won't be together.'
'Don't be a fool!' Kay slammed her glass down, drawing brief stares and raised eyebrows. She grabbed her uniform jacket from the back of her chair and pulled it on, thrusting her arms in angrily. As she did, a packet of postcards fell from an inside pocket. I recognized them as the ones Uncle Ike had bought outside the church and
