Two Weeks in Another Town Read Online Free PDF Page A

widely recounted in the newspapers, and someone had figured out that if he lived until the age of ninety, giving all his salary to the department, he would still be in debt for over two hundred thousand dollars at the end. “They owe me months of back leave,” Jack said. “And I was getting so nasty everybody in Paris cheered when I took off.” He had no intention of burdening Delaney with the story of the dangers he was running with Morrison by his insistence on coming to Rome.
    “Working hard protecting civilization as we know it, kid?” Delaney asked.
    “Only day and night,” Jack said.
    “Do you think the Russians’re working day and night, too?”
    “That’s what the man tells me,” Jack said.
    “God,” Delaney said, “maybe we ought to blow the whole thing up and get it over with. Do you think when it blows they’ll get the income-tax records?”
    “No,” Jack said, “it’s all on microfilm in underground vaults.”
    “Ah,” Delaney said, “not even that hope. There’s no escape. Say,” he said, “just what do you do with all those soldiers in Paris?”
    “A little bit of everything,” Jack said. “I brief visiting congressmen when my boss is busy, I draw up reports, I lie to newspapermen, I escort newsreel photographers and keep them away from secret installations, I write speeches for generals…”
    “Since when have you learned how to write?”
    “I haven’t,” Jack said. “But anybody who knows enough to spell deterrent with two r’s can write a speech for a general.”
    Delaney laughed hoarsely. “How the hell did you ever get mixed up in anything like that?”
    “By accident,” Jack said. Just the way I’ve gotten mixed up with everything else in my life, he thought. With Delaney, too. “I was playing tennis at St.-Germain one Sunday,” Jack said, “and my partner turned out to be an Air Force colonel. We won. He wanted to keep me as a partner, so he offered me a job.”
    “Come on now,” Delaney said. “Even the Air Force can’t be as sloppy as that. He must have known something about you.”
    “Of course,” Jack said. “He knew that I’d been mixed up with the movies at one time or another and there was a project on foot to make a documentary about the NATO forces, and one thing led to another…”
    “Guido!” Delaney shouted at the driver, who had just missed a taxi, “you’ll never forgive yourself if you get me killed. Remember that!”
    The driver turned his head and smiled widely, his teeth perfect and gleaming and happy, his eyes changelessly dark and full of sorrow.
    “Does he understand English?” Jack asked.
    “No. But he’s Italian. He’s sensitive to emotional intonations. Tell me,” Delaney asked, “how’s your family? How many kids you got now? Three?”
    “Out of how many marriages?” Jack said.
    Delaney grinned. “Out of the current one. I know how many you have by the previous ones.”
    “Two,” Jack said. “A boy and a girl.”
    “Happy?” Delaney eyed him inquisitively.
    “Uh-huh,” Jack said. Except at airports, he thought, and certain other places, at certain other times.
    “Maybe I should have married a Frenchwoman,” Delaney said. He had been married four times and his third wife had once shot at him in a parking lot with a hunting rifle.
    “Try it some day,” Jack said.
    “When I finish the picture maybe I’ll visit you in Paris,” Delaney said. “I could use a little Paris. And a short vision of domestic bliss. If I ever finish the picture.”
    “What’s it about?” Jack touched the pink cardboard cover on the seat beside him.
    “The usual.” Delaney made a face. “Ex-G.I. comes back to Rome, his life all fouled up, and meets the girl he loved on the way up from Salerno. Mediterranean passion and Anglo-Saxon guilt. God, stories are getting wearier and wearier these days.” He fell silent and stared moodily out the window at the bustling evening traffic.
    Jack looked out the window on his side. They