Night and Day Read Online Free PDF Page A

and retorts, “Murdered is murdered, whatever the cause. And afterward there is only vengeance left.”
    She’s sweet, and delicate, and fairylike, and the words in her angelic voice freeze you to your bones.
    “He’s here, and he’s ours,” Rick says, “and nobody’s going to murder him for whatever reason. Unless you have enemies we don’t know about?”
    This question is directed to you, and you shake your head. “No one,” you say, “only….” Bertie “… one, and he’s not an enemy, just… no longer a friend. No enemies, no friends, no family. I got plenty of nothing.”
    “Not anymore,” Rick says. “You have a contract, and we’ve got you. Come on.”
    He shows you the rest of the place: where they hide the good booze if they get raided (the place used to be a speakeasy, until the spring; then they turned it into a legal supper club to take advantage of the easing of the Volstead Act. Rick tells you Prohibition will be repealed by the end of the year. He’s so certain you almost believe him); the room in the back where the games are (all straight, even the roulette wheel; Rick tells you Corinna has an obsession with justice, and while she’s not above breaking the law, she won’t cheat an honest man); the fiery kitchen with the dark-browed Mario in command (he has a clubfoot, but that doesn’t slow him down; his knife flashes in the dim, steamy heat, the fires under his pots giving the place the reddish glow of a furnace. Or maybe Hell. But it’s a well-organized Hell; his assistants are quick and sure and seem to almost read his mind. It could just be fear of his knife. You don’t think you’ve ever seen one as long that wasn’t stuck on the end of a rifle).
    Rick takes you through the kitchen out to the alley, where he lights up a cigarette and stares at the sky. It’s coming on dusk now; you can hear the sound of automobiles out front as they disgorge the early arrivals. He stares at the west, where the sun is already out of sight, the clouds gone purple and rose and gold against a sky going indigo. “And so it ends, and begins,” he says softly, and turns his back on the sunset. “There’s the moon. She’s almost full tonight.”
    You don’t look. How many nights did you and Bertie gaze up at her beautiful, serene face from the filth of the trenches, lying close in mud, watching the moon rise behind the forward emplacements? There were moments then when you didn’t mind the mud, didn’t mind the sound of the guns, didn’t mind the stench or the cold or the wet. Moments when Bertie’s hand would touch yours, trailing a finger across your wrist; or when he’d shift so his hip brushed yours, or his shoulder. And you knew that later, you and he would be crawling into an abandoned side trench, trying to find a dry spot where you could fuck each other in hurried silence under that same moon, sometimes not even unbuttoning your damp wool uniforms, just rubbing up against each other, the only skin that touched being your hands and your mouths.
    “Oh, well,” Rick says quietly, “I like the daylight better myself.” And he opens the door, and you go back inside.
     
     
    WHEN YOU wake it’s still dark, and you lie in silence and confusion, not sure where you are. Then you remember, and stretch luxuriously in the clean sheets, in the clean if threadbare nightshirt you’d pulled from your suitcase. You couldn’t have gotten more than a couple of hours of sleep, but you’re as rested as if you’d slept for days; it’s not a challenge to rise and go to look out the open window. It faces east, and while it’s not quite dawn, there’s a lightening of the sky that matches the lightening of your mood.
    You’re staring at the dark sky when you hear the footsteps in the hall, going past your door: quick, but not running. Curious, you go to the door and open it and look out into the corridor, but all you see is a flash of dark cloth in the dim light of the wall sconce by the