Assassins Have Starry Eyes Read Online Free PDF Page B

disapproving. One of Van Horn’s men was at the door; maybe the one I had seen that afternoon, maybe not. I never bother to learn their names or remember their faces.
    I said to both of them, “Get the hell out of here.”
    They went. Natalie said in a muffled voice, “That’s telling the old bitch.” Then she cried a little more. I patted her head in a gingerly fashion. After a while she said, “That damn house just got on my nerves, darling. Nobody in it but me. I made up a pitcher of martinis for company. Then I started… started worrying. I called the hospital long distance and they said you were doing fine, just fine, in that damn insincere voice they use for reassuring the family and friends… I had another drink and was sure you were dying and I couldn’t stand it any longer and I threw my coat on and got in the car and came on up. Fellow at a gas station said I couldn’t make it without chains, but they just think in terms of Detroit iron. They don’t know what baby can do… Well, here I am. Are you really all right?”
    “Yes,” I said. “I’m fine. Doing very well. Everybody’s proud of me.”
    “Excuse me for being a damn fool,” she said.
    “I don’t mind,” I said. “I’m used to it.”
    She made a face at me, and we looked at each other for a while.
    I said, “You’re a screwball, Princess. You might have killed yourself.”
    She said, “Look, let’s stop this horsing around, darling. Do you want me back?”
    I said, “Getting divorced wasn’t my idea.”
    “Is that all you’re going to say?”
    I said, “The hell with you, Princess. I did all my crawling last summer. If you want to come back, come back, but don’t expect me to get on my knees and ask you.”
    She said, “You don’t leave a girl much pride.”
    I said, “You’ve got enough.”
    She said, “Well, I’m coming back. Somebody’s got to look after you. And it’s going to work this time. I’m going to make it work. You’ll see. I’m just going to love this lovely old country with its lovely old dust storms and its fascinating old men in dirty old blankets and its enchanting old mud ruins… I think I’ll become an authority on old ruins. I might as well, everybody else is. What the hell are you laughing at?”
    “You’re drunk, Princess,” I said. “Go over to the hotel and sleep it off.”
    “There he goes,” she said. “After pleading with me for hours to come back to him, he’s trying to get rid of me already.”

FIVE
     
    THEY LET ME come home for Christmas. It was the first time in my life I had been glad to leave picturesque old Santa Fe for Albuquerque, which is a big, impersonal, modern city; and one it’s hard to get very fond of. There’s no visible reason for its existence except tourist courts; and you can’t see what the hell a tourist would want with the place. Aside from a small plaza, known as Old Town, there are few historical attractions; the scenery is nothing out of the ordinary for that part of the country; and the much-advertised Rio Grande—the historians’ Rio Del Norte—is a string of mudflats much of the year, since most of the water is drained off for irrigation from early spring to late fall.
    Despite these handicaps, you have one of the largest cities in the southwest sprawling over a God-forsaken stretch of desert along the banks of the little river that mostly isn’t there. The city is divided into two parts; there’s the Valley, and the Heights. The Valley is the river bottom; outside the downtown business district, green stuff will grow there if you water it with reasonable regularity. The Heights is the barren upland, or mesa, in the shadow of the abrupt Sandia Mountains east of town, and nothing grows there unless you soak it down good each night to keep it from blowing away in the morning. The bluff that divides the two sections is not precipitous, but it is quite noticeable, and the climatic difference is such that all Albuquerque weather reports give