Up in Honey's Room

“That’s all, they didn’t give you a medal?”

“Not for ending up in a VA hospital.”

“They gave me a Navy Cross,” Carl said, “for doing the two Nips. I think because nothing was going on at the time, the island, you keep telling me, being secured.”

Carl missed Kevin’s helpless look. He’d turned to Honey Deal.

“I can’t wait to hear you tell me about Walter.”

She liked his eyes and the way he was looking at her that had nothing to do with Walter. She said, “If you all are through telling war stories, why don’t we order? I have to get back to being a salesgirl, put on my smile.”

Carl said, “I was hoping we’d have time to talk.”

She said, “I could meet you after work for a drink,” and saw a gleam come into his soft brown eyes.

Carl said, “Tell me when the last time was you saw Walter.”

“The day I walked out, November ninth, 1939.”

“You think about him?”

“Hardly ever.”

“You want to go with me when I see him?” It stopped her. She saw Walter staring, he opens the door and she’s in his life again. He looks stunned. Well, confused.

“Really?” Honey said, wanting to smile but held off. “What would I do, introduce you?”

“I think you’ll make him nervous,” Carl said. “I’ll get him talking, ask him questions. You watch, jump in when you think he’s lying.”

Kevin said, “I’m there too, aren’t I?”

“The only trouble,” Carl said, “if you’re with us-Walter’s already told you he’s never laid eyes on Jurgen and Otto, and he’ll stick to it, realizing it’s why I’m talking to him. I want to edge around the two Krauts and take him by surprise, get him admitting things before he knows it, while Honey stares and has him fidgeting. But what you can do for me,” Carl said, “find out if Walter’s at the butcher shop or the farm.”

Honey watched Kevin, the poor guy not knowing whether to cry or act like a cool federal agent. What he did, he stuck to the job saying to Carl, “You don’t know where anything is around here.”

Honey said, “I know where the butcher shop is. Give me the address of the farm and I’ll see Carl gets there.”

“All right, fine,” Kevin said, looking at Carl, “if that’s how you want to do it.”

Taking it like a man, Honey thought and looked at Carl, wanting to say, We work pretty well together, don’t we? What she said was, “Are we having lunch or not?”

Carl ordered the chicken potpie.

Kevin asked the waitress if he could have the Canadian cheese soup and, let’s see, a club sandwich, toasted, no mayonnaise?

Honey was hungry but chose the Maurice salad for now. She saw herself with Carl until he went back to Oklahoma.  

Nine

The elevator stopped twice on the way up to let people crowd on, Otto and Jurgen pressed against the back of the car by the time they came to thirteen. Otto waited while people in front of them walked off the car with some purpose, knowing where they were going, but not the two old ladies in front of him. Otto saw the wide-open entrance to a restaurant, people at rows of tables that reached to windows showing sunlight, Otto thinking he would like a table back there to look out at the city, the streetcars, the crowds of people, uniforms among them but not that many. They called this city the Arsenal of Democracy. Oh, really? He saw nothing to tell him these people were at war. Jurgen had gotten off and Otto saw him now standing with the hostess. The two old ladies made it out of the elevator and came to a stop and Otto stopped. He saw Jurgen looking over the room of tables with the hostess pointing her pencil, a good-looking woman, her hair done . . . Jurgen turned and now he was looking this way at the elevator, then holding up his hand to tell Otto Halt, Jurgen shaking his head. Otto turned and stepped in the elevator again. Jurgen had seen someone he didn’t expect to see, didn’t want to see, and that was enough. He was coming now, his face, his expression, telling Otto nothing. Now he was stopped by the two old ladies in front of him, Otto watching from the elevator as the door closed and the Negro girl at the wheel turned the handle of the circular control and said as the car rose, “Fourteenth floor. Beauty salons, Hudson’s Americana Salon and the Executive Barbershop. Employment office, employees’ cafeteria, and the J.L. Hudson Company hospital.”

Otto said to her, “Where are the books?”

On the mezzanine, tables and tables of books, nearly all by American authors. This was acceptable to Otto, he believed Americans wrote the greatest variety of readable books found in any language, all kinds of novels by authors who kept you turning pages. One of his favorites, about the confident gentleman who addressed his friend as “old sport.” He also liked the author who used a blunt way of writing his stories set in Spain and Africa, not North Africa, East Africa, where the tall, handsome American on safari with his wife had “bolted like a rabbit” in the face of a full-grown wounded lion coming at him. He and Jurgen had both read the story while in the Oklahoma prison camp. Jurgen didn’t understand the wife turning on the poor man, insulting him to his face. “Because he proved himself a coward,” Otto said. Jurgen said, “But it wasn’t his job to kill lions.” Otto remembered saying, “What does the white hunter with the cold blue eyes tell him? ‘In Africa no woman ever misses her lion and no white man ever bolts.’” Otto liked the woman using her husband’s cowardice as an excuse to sleep with the white hunter, Robert Wilson, who brought a double-size cot on these trips, anticipating the strange behavior of American women. Otto liked the guns too, the white hunter’s big-bore .505 Gibbs, and the 6.5 Mannlicher the wife used on her husband once he had redeemed himself and she realized she had lost him, shooting Francis Macomber “two inches up and a little to one side of the base of his skull.” He called her Margot. Otto would see himself having a drink with Margot, smiling, toasting her with his glass.

He came to a table laden with green and gold copies of a book, Forever Amber, some of them upright, the woman on the cover of the novel looking at him, showing Otto bare shoulders but not much in the way of breasts. Now he was aware of a woman on the other side of the table watching him as he looked at the woman on the cover who must be Amber, though the blond ringlets made her look so innocent.

“Amber St. Claire,” the woman across the table from him said and then recited, “uses her wits, beauty and courage to . . . well, become the favorite mistress of the merry monarch, Charles II.”

Otto raised his eyes to this one in a black suit with trousers, a young woman, much more interesting than the one on the book cover, this one up to something.

Otto said, “Is it a good story?”

His accent didn’t make her hesitate.

“It was banned in Boston, and you haven’t read it?”

Otto said, “No,” and smiled at her. He felt good and couldn’t help smiling.

She wore round glasses in thin black frames, red lip rouge, no jewelry, no blouse beneath the slim, the very slim black suit he knew was expensive. She was tall, still a girl without being girlish, clean dark hair to her shoulders. He liked the easy refinement about this one he believed was up to something.

She said, “Are you a Vicki Baum fan? She’s just out with Once in Vienna. . . . ”

“I don’t think I’ve ever read a book,” Otto said, “written by someone named Vicki.”

He watched her stroke her hair from her face with the tips of her fingers lacquered bright red, then toss her hair and he liked the way she did it, though it was only a gesture. He watched her turn to pick up a book from the table behind her and come around to him saying, “Werner Richter’s Re-educating Germany. You know Richter?”

“He was Weimar, pre-Nazi,” Otto said, “from olden times.” He said, “Tell me your name.”