A Flag for Sunrise Read Online Free PDF Page B

there.”
    Nolan exhaled slowly and let his narrow shoulders sag.
    “Give me a brandy,” he told the waiter. “Two brandies.” He turned from Holliwell to look around the room, at the wainscoted ceilings and the dwindling crowd of heavy-faced, hard-eyed diners.
    “Jesus, I picked this place because I thought the atmosphere might discourage moral posturing.”
    “It must be you and me, Marty. We’re spoiling the atmosphere.”
    Nolan took his brandy without ceremony.
    “This conversation depresses me,” he said, “because it reminds me that we live in the land of total vindication. T.V. T.V. or nothing. I mean twenty years ago we had the total vindication of William Jennings Bryan, and Father Flanagan and apple pie. Secularism”—he made a little equals sign in the air with his fingers—“was Communism. Modernism was godlessness. Bolshevism … All the eggheads were Commie stooges and you had to go to Fordham or Darlington, South Carolina, to find a loyal American. Then we get fucked up in Nam and Saigon falls and the whole card’s reversed. Hiss didn’t do it, the Rosenbergs didn’t do it, nobody fucking did it and Truman started the cold war. Total vindication.”
    “Well,” Holliwell said, “there’s nothing like total vindication.”
    “Exactly. See, it’s all a movie in this country and if you wait long enough you get your happy ending. Until somebody else’s movie starts. In many ways it’s a very stupid country.”
    “Is this the patriotic approach?”
    “Hell, no,” Nolan said, “the patriotic approach is out of date.”
    They sat drinking in silence for a while. When the check came, Holliwell moved it to his own side of the table and kept it there.
    “We’re at a very primitive stage of mankind,” Nolan declared, “that’s what people don’t understand. Just pick up the Times on any given day and you’ve got a catalogue of ape behavior. Strip away the slogans and excuses and verbiage, the so-called ideology, and you’re reading about what one pack of chimpanzees did to another.”
    Holliwell paid the check with his BankAmericard and Nolan did not move to prevent him.
    “Sorry,” Holliwell said. “Not this time.”
    They walked to the front door together and stood beside the parking-lot fence. The brisk wind raised whirls of dust from the sidewalk and Nolan shielded his eyes with his right hand.
    “When you’re down there you may feel differently. So if I may, I’ll ask you again through a third party.”
    Holliwell only smiled and they shook hands. It was not until he was halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge that the suggestion of a threat in Nolan’s final words struck him, making him think of the man entombed beside the Perfume River, the involved observer of the modern world. A chill touched his inward loneliness. He was, he knew at that moment, really without beliefs, without hope—either for himself or for the world. Almost without friends, certainly without allies. Alone.

He drove toward Manhattan facing the squat brutality of the new buildings that had gone up around the bridge; he was depressed and too drunk for safety. The drive uptown left him tired and anxious. Gratefully, he turned the Volvo keys over to the hotel doorman and once upstairs ordered a bottle of scotch from room service. When the drink arrived, he sat with his feet on the windowsill looking out over the midtown rooftops. On a day in May, he and Marty Nolan had once walked from the library on East Seventy-ninth Street all the way down Second Avenue to the bridge and then across it, ending up in a bar on Clark Street. It would have been about 1955. Hour after hour, block after block of talk.
    After a while, he moved over to the double bed, propped a pillow up behind him and dialed his home number. When he heard his wife’s voice on the line, he lit a cigarette.
    “So you’re O.K.,” he said. “You got back all right.”
    “I told you not to worry. He had his medicine at the hospital. He was