Among the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page A

couldn’t imagine Anna expecting him, never again to look at another woman, or even meet a woman and fall a little bit in love, and have her fall a little bit in love with him. What was to be expected was self-discipline, and an eventual cessation of uncontrollable desire. Why that? Because as the years passed, and there would be years, the attention to only one person, the devotion to the other, would focus the heart, and in the end become an obsession. This would be love, he told himself, the great project of his life, now that he was rich, what other work was more important? Charity? Yes. I will give to good causes, thought Frank. And not only the popular charities. I will give money to the library. I will give to the poor.
    It was two o’clock when he left the restaurant, and the traffic was slow. He hated himself for taking so long to say goodbye to Mary. And he could still taste her, still smell her. Well, if I get there just in time, Anna will be angry with me for almost screwing up, and she won’t want to kiss me, not on the mouth. She won’t taste Mary. She might smell her. He thought of asking the limousine driver to smoke, to cover Mary Sifka’s scent, but he would have had to leave the back seat and sit next to him, and how could he ask for that?
    Frank asked the driver for a cigarette. The driver gave him one, and Frank lit it. He had once smoked for a few years, in college, and he took a few puffs, and let the cigarette burn near him, for the smoke, or the ash, to settle on his jacket and in his hair. He didn’t want the cigarette on his breath, but Anna, in the frenzy of getting ready for the flight, would not likely feel romantic. He was sure she suspected something; the rush to take the trip had betrayed a necessity greater than the need for relaxation.
    He took another puff of the cigarette, and the little charge of the nicotine, a pleasant dizziness, bought him a moment’s happiness. This is a drug, he thought. No wonder people still use it. He took a few more drags and put the cigarette out. Will I smoke again? It was impossible to say.
    The traffic was slow, and the plane was leaving at three o’clock. At two-thirty he knew he would never get to the airport in time. At 2.45 he was still a mile away. He would never make it. This was going to be a mess, since Anna had his ticket and his passport.He would have to ask her to find someone at the airport to hold them for him, and who knew if that kind of request could be honoured? There was a phone in the back seat of the limousine, and he called Information for the phone number of the airline. There was no number for the terminal, but the reservations clerk gave him another number. He asked to have his wife paged, and explained why, although he wasn’t asked for a reason.
    Anna was on the phone quickly, in less than a minute.
    â€˜I have your ticket and passport, and you’re going to miss the plane,’ she said, without any introduction. It bothered him that she didn’t even ask how he had found her. How had she known it was him? Who else could it be? People knew they were going away, but nobody knew which airline they were flying.
    â€˜It’s the traffic’
    â€˜Where were you, why couldn’t you leave earlier?’ She was angry and suspicious.
    It was still time to lie. ‘I tried. I couldn’t get away. It was important.’
    â€˜Nothing you do is important, Frank.’
    â€˜Anna, please, what are you saying?’ Something awful was about to happen. She was saying something to him in a voice she had never used with him before, but it was the voice she used with people when she had lost all patience, when she stopped trying to see things their way.
    â€˜Oh, Frank, now what are we going to do?’ Was she backing off from this frightening rage? And what was he scared of? That she would drown Frank in a flood of insights into his failings, that she would finally tell him who he