Across the River and Into the Trees Read Online Free PDF Page B

with his expensive looking and extremely desirable mistress. They were drinking negronis , a combination of two sweet vermouths and seltzer water, and the Colonel wondered how much taxes the man had escaped to buy that sleek girl in her long mink coat and the convertible he had seen the chauffeur take up the long, winding ramp, to lock away. The pair stared at him with the bad manners of their kind and he saluted, lightly, and said to them in Italian, “I am sorry that I am in uniform. But it is a uniform. Not a costume.”
    Then he turned his back on them, without waiting to see the effect of his remark, and walked to the bar. From the bar you could watch your luggage, just as well as the two pescecani were watching theirs.
    He is probably a Commendatore, he thought. She is a beautiful, hard piece of work. She is damned beautiful, actually. I wonder what it would have been like if I had ever had the money to buy me that kind and put them into the mink? I’ll settle for what I have, he thought, and they can go and hang themselves.
    The bar-tender shook hands with him. This bar-tender was an Anarchist but he did not mind the Colonel being a Colonel at all. He was delighted by it and proud and loving about it as though the Anarchists had a Colonel, too, and in some ways, in the several months that they had known each other, he seemed to feel that he had invented, or at least, erected the Colonel as you might be happy about participating in the erection of a campanile , or even the old church at Torcello.
    The bar-tender had heard the conversation, or, rather, the flat statement at the table and he was very happy.
    He had already sent down, via the dumb-waiter, for a Gordon’s gin and Campari and he said, “It is coming up in that hand-pulled device. How does everything go at Trieste?”
    “About as you would imagine.”
    “I couldn’t even imagine.”
    “Then don’t strain,” the Colonel said, “and you will never get piles.”
    “I wouldn’t mind it if I was a Colonel.”
    “I never mind it.”
    “You’d be over-run like a dose of salts,” the waiter said.
    “Don’t tell the Honorable Pacciardi,” the Colonel said.
    He and the bar-tender had a joke about this because the Honorable Pacciardi was Minister of Defense in the Italian Republic. He was the same age as the Colonel and had fought very well in the first world war, and had also fought in Spain as a battalion Commander where the Colonel had known him when he, himself, was an observer. The seriousness with which the Honorable Pacciardi took the post of Minister of Defense of an indefensible country was a bond between the Colonel and the bar-tender. The two of them were quite practical men and the vision of the Honorable Pacciardi defending the Italian Republic stimulated their minds.
    “It’s sort of funny up there,” the Colonel said, “and I don’t mind it.”
    “We must mechanize the Honorable Pacciardi,” the bar-tender said. “And supply him with the atomic bomb.”
    “I’ve got three of them in the back of the car,” the Colonel said. “The new model, complete with handles. But we can’t leave him unarmed. We must supply him with botulism and anthrax.”
    “We cannot fail the Honorable Pacciardi,” the bartender said. “Better to live one day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep.”
    “Better to die on our feet than to live on our knees,” the Colonel said. “Though you better get on your belly damn fast if you want to stay alive in plenty places.”
    “Colonel, do not say anything subversive.”
    “We will strangle them with our bare hands,” the Colonel said. “A million men will spring to arms overnight.”
    “Whose arms?” the bar-tender asked.
    “All that will be attended to,” the Colonel said. “It’s only a phase in the Big Picture.”
    Just then the driver came in the door. The Colonel saw that while they had been joking, he had not watched the door and he was annoyed, always, with any lapse of vigilance