Max's smile and fatigue vanished just as suddenly. 'Jesus, I didn't mean anything. It's just a saying.'
'Then why pick on Harlem? You wanna say it stinks like a brothel, great.
They all stink the same. No difference because one's black and another's white.' The King was hard and mean and the flesh on his face was tight and masklike.
'Take it easy. I'm sorry. I didn't mean nothin'.'
Max had forgotten that the King was touchy about talking crossways about Negroes. Jesus, when you live in New York, you got Harlem with you, whichever way you look at it. And there are brothels there, an' a piece of colored tail's goddam good once in a while. All the same, he thought bitterly, I'm goddamned if I know why he's so goddam touchy about nigs.
'I didn't mean nothin',' Max said again, trying hard to keep his eyes off the food. He had smelled it all the way up to the hut. 'I tracked him down and told him what you said.'
'So?'
'He, er, gave me something for you,' Max said and looked at Peter Marlowe.
'Well, hand it over for Chrissake!'
Max waited patiently while the King looked at the watch closely, wound it up and held it close to his ear.
'What do you want, Max?'
'Nothin'. Er, you like me to wash up for you?'
'Yeah. Do that, then get to hell out of here.'
'Sure.'
Max collected the dirty dishes and meekly took them outside, telling himself by Jesus one day he'd get the King. Peter Marlowe said nothing.
Strange, he thought. Strange and wild. The King's got a temper. A temper is valuable but most times dangerous. If you go on a mission it's important to know the value of your wing-man. On a hairy mission, like the village, perhaps, it's wise to be sure who guards your back.
The King carefully unscrewed the back of the watch. It was a waterproof, stainless steel.
'Uh-huh!' the King said. 'I thought so.'
'What?'
'It's a phony. Look.'
Peter Marlowe examined the watch carefully. 'It looks all right to me.'
'Sure it is. But it's not what it's supposed to be. An Omega. The case is good but the insides are old. Some bastard has substituted the guts.'
The King screwed the case back on, then tossed it up in his hand speculatively. 'Y'see Peter. Just what I was telling you. You got to be careful. Now, say I sell this as an Omega and don't know it's a fake, then I could be in real trouble. But so long as I know in advance, then I can cover myself. You can't be too careful.'
He smiled. 'Let's have another cup of Joe, business is looking up.'
His smile faded as Max returned with the cleaned mess cans and put them away. Max didn't say anything, just nodded obsequiously and then went out again.
'Son of a bitch,' the King said.
Grey had not yet recovered from the day Yoshima had found the radio.
As he walked up the broken path towards the supply hut he brooded about the new duties imposed on him by the Camp Commandant in front of Yoshima and later elaborated by Colonel Smedly-Taylor. Grey knew that although officially he was to carry out the new orders, actually he was to keep his eyes shut and do nothing. Mother of God, he thought, whatever I do, I'm wrong.
Grey felt a spasm building in his stomach. He stopped as it came and passed. It wasn't dysentery, only diarrhea; and the slight fever on him wasn't malaria, only a touch of dengue, a slighter but more insidious fever which came and went by whim. He was very hungry. He had no stocks of food, no last can and no money to buy any with. He had to subsist on rations with no extras, and the rations were not enough, not enough.
When I get out, he thought, I swear by God that I'll never be hungry again.
I'll have a thousand eggs and a ton of meat and sugar and coffee and tea and fish. We'll cook all day, Trina and I, and when we're not cooking or eating we'll be making love. Love? No, just making pain. Trina, that bitch, with her 'I'm too tired' or 'I've got a headache' or 'For the love of God, what, again?' or 'All right, I suppose I'll have to' or 'We can make love now, if you want to' or 'Can't you leave me in peace for once,' when it wasn't so often and most times he had restrained himself and suffered, or the angry 'Oh, all right,' and then the light would be snapped on and she would get out of bed and storm off to the bathroom to 'get ready' and he would only see the glory of her body through the sheer fabric until the door had closed and then he would wait and wait and wait until the bathroom light was snapped off and she came back into their room. It always took an eternity for her to cross from the door to the bed and he saw only the pure beauty of her under the silk and felt only the cold in her eyes as she watched him and he could not meet her eyes and loathed himself. Then she would be beside him and soon it would be silently over and she would get up and go to the bathroom and clean herself as though his love was dirt, and the water would run and when she came back she would be freshly perfumed and he loathed himself afresh, unsatisfied, for taking her when she didn't want to be taken. It had always been thus. In their six months of married life — twenty-one days of leave, being together — they had made pain nine times. And never once had he touched her.
He had asked her to marry him a week after he had met her. There had been difficulties and recriminations. Her mother hated him for wanting her only daughter just when her career was launched and she was so young.
Only eighteen. His parents said wait, the war may be over soon and you've no money and, well, she's not exactly from a good family, and he had looked around his home, a tired building joined to a thousand other tired buildings amid the twisted tramlines of Streatham, and he saw that the rooms were small and the minds of his parents were small and lower class and their love was twisted like the tramlines.
They were married a month later. Grey looked smart in his uniform and sword (hired by the hour). Trina's
