Dark Tunnel Read Online Free PDF Page B

battlefield towards smoking guns on pointed toes like ballet dancers and bleeding black oil when they fell down dead.
    The girl beside me touched my arm and said in a low voice, “Let’s get out of here.”
    I turned to her and she seemed smaller. Her mouth looked soft and defenseless, and was pale where she had bitten it. Her face was as white as a pearl and her black lashes shadowed her eyes. She looked very tired.
    The circus was over and the crowd began to break up. We moved away with it, she leaning lightly on my arm.
    “What’s your name?” I asked. “Mine is Robert Branch.”
    “Ruth Esch.”
    “Will you have tea with me? You look as if you could do with some tea.”
    “I’ve never learned to like tea,” she said, “even when I was in England.”
    “Have you been in England? I just came from there.”
    “Did you? I have been there often with my mother. She had friends in England.”
    “You speak English almost like an Englishwoman.”
    “Thank you,” she said and smiled, more to herself than to me.
    “If you won’t have tea, will you have coffee with me?”
    She hesitated. “Well, I really have an engagement with Thomas, you know. He’ll be expecting me. On the other hand, he’s not likely to go away.”
    “I’m sorry, I didn’t know you had an engagement. Don’t stand anybody up for me.” I wondered who Thomas was and felt jealous of him already.
    “Stand anybody up?” she said gravely like a child repeating a lesson, but there was laughter in her eyes.
    “Break a date, call off an engagement,” I said. “Americanese.”
    “Oh, Thomas wouldn’t really care so much. Even when you stand him up, his arms still reach to the floor.”
    “What?”
    She laughed at my surprise. “He lives in a cage at the Zoological Gardens. He’s a chimpanzee and I go to see him nearly every day.”
    “Are you interested in animals?”
    “I like Thomas,” she said. “He’s so very human. The Nazis haven’t thought it worthwhile to indoctrinate him.”
    “Are you an anti-Nazi?” I asked. “You look like one.”
    “Dankeschön. We won’t speak of it, if you please. By the way, are you a scholar?”
    “A sort of one. Why?”
    “Are you quite poor? Most scholars are.”
    “Not particularly,” I said. “I’ve got a pretty good scholarship. In fact, I seem to be quite rich in German money.”
    “Then you may give me coffee over here.” She pointed to the plate-glass front of a restaurant across the street.
    I said, “Thank you very much,” and meant it. She spoke and moved with the independence and dignity of a woman who could not be easily picked up. I felt that my one-guinea pipe had been broken in a good cause.
    We crossed the street and entered the restaurant. The air inside had a hothouse warmth and was laden with the scent of expensive perfumes and expensive cigars. The men and women at the tables looked well fed and well dressed. Most of the women wore Paris dresses and had the slightly unreal, glazed look of the too perfectly groomed, the look of orchids and rich men’s wives and daughters and top-flight politicians’ mistresses. The rich men were there in clothes cut in Savile Row and Bond Street, and the officers in black SS uniforms and brown shirts were the top-flight politicians. At the far end of the room, a string orchestra in Hungarian peasant costume whined and throbbed and lamented. A faint sweet odor of dead and rotting Babylons came up through the cracks in the wainscoting, but the expensive cigar-smoke covered it over.
    A waiter led us to a table and we had thick Turkish coffee in tiny cups.
    “Oriental splendor,” I said. “Are you by any chance a beautiful Armenian slave-girl?” Without her coat, Ruth Esch was more beautiful than before. She wore a high-necked, long-sleeved tunic of black wool above which her skin shone starkly. Her shoulders were wide for a woman but slender and delicately curved. Her bright hair burned steadily around her head like downward