Together We Kill

Together We Kill

I avoided the street for six months; I kept the hell away from it all that time. Yet, I knew as sure as the grass grows green that the first time I set foot on it she’d be there. It wouldn’t be something that she’d plan or I’d plan, no, nothing so simple as that. It would be that evil little fate that’s followed me ever since the day I was born who would do it. Laughing, always laughing at me. A mean snicker I could hear, and my insides would go all in a knot again because there was nothing I could do about it.

Any other time I wanted to go west from Broadway I’d take some other street, but never this one. It was one block long, but only a little way off the corner was the theatre and her picture outside. Several pictures. That, and a long line of people demanding tickets for “Fair Is the Wind” and the chance to see the beauty that was Claire.

Every day she was there in magazines, newspapers, on billboards, beautiful and blonde with the loveliness of youth and maturity combined, exotically appealing and so alive with that radiance that comes only from the soul. And everybody wanted her. Hollywood screamed for her and Broadway wouldn’t let her go. There was never a moment when she wasn’t surrounded by men who fought for her smiles and who would give anything they owned for just the chance to touch her.

Claire was beauty. Claire was love. She was everything all women want to be and all men want.

But to me Claire was a memory. You see, I had Claire.

But that was seven years ago in a different world, and this was Broadway and there she was in front of me. If I hurried I knew I could catch her before she turned and went into the street level bistro, the one with the big wooden rooster hanging over the door.

But I didn’t hurry, because even the sign of the rooster was part of the joke fate was playing. The Rooster was the place we promised to meet seven years ago. Now it was noon, and the Rooster was only a few doors from Claire’s theatre and she was going there for lunch with never a thought of that last moment in France or of me. So I didn’t hurry at all. I watched her go in and kept going past the theatre.

Now that I saw her, at last, I could forget her and all she’d done to me. I could go up to see Gus Kimball who had his office up the block and tell him to skip the whole deal. It was off, finished, kaput.

Four months ago he’d called me in and said, “Joe, we’re putting that tunnel through in Bolivia. The engineer who’s to tie the job together has to be tops. That guy is you. It’s big money, and a chance to make a name for yourself, even a better one than you have now. How about it?”

That was a silly question. Does a bee want honey? I got one of those grins on my face that wouldn’t wipe off because the world was in my lap. “You bought yourself an engineer, Gus.”

He grinned back and poured a pair of shot glasses full. “We’ll drink to it then. Frankly, Joe, I was worried for fear you wouldn’t take it. It’s a lonely place to be and you’ll be there for a few years. In some respects it isn’t the dream job.”

“Nuts,” I said. “For me it’s beautiful.”

“Fine, then there’s only one other detail to iron out. You know the company policy. It may sound extreme, but we found that it works. All our company officers are required to take their wives on the job.”

My grin was hard to hold. I threw the drink down fast.

“Not that I’m worried,” he added. “Guys like you aren’t without women... not from what I’ve heard about you. Aren’t you engaged?”

“I was. Several times.”

“Lucky you,” he chuckled. “I wish I was thirty and on the brawny side again. Well, you have four months to get things settled. Stop in then and we’ll go over the details and arrange for transportation of your personal effects. A woman needs a lot of pretty things down there to keep her morale up.”

I said something I don’t remember and we shook hands. That was four months ago. Helen and Jean and Gloria and Francis ago. All beautiful, all ready to share a life with me that couldn’t be shared because Claire had been there before them and would always be there before anybody else. That was what my personal fate did to me — let me climb for the top on a ladder that was one big fat rung short.

But there was always the memory of having had her. I could reach back through the seasons to that time when St. Marie was nothing but a huddled mass of hills and houses on the ground below me, and when the moonlight filtered past the canopy of my parachute to sketch a fuzzy round shadow on the meadows...

It was a bad night for the jump. It left you a dangling target for anybody who happened to look up, but it had to be that way. The bridge had to go. The push was due in the morning; a whole army was coming through the slot that had been opened up the day before. But the push wasn’t a secret any longer and the Krauts were moving up an army that could plug the hole. It depended on me, one guy with a sackful of high explosives strapped to his back, and a bridge over a river that ran through St. Marie.

When the bridge went, the Krauts went.

There was only the faintest whisper of sound when I hit the grass. I rolled with the fall and snagged the bottom shrouds to spill the air out of my chute, snatching up the lines and the nylon so the white blob wouldn’t be there to give me away. I was tearing the sod away to bury it when the voice said, “No... m’sieu, not there!”

I went flat on my face, the .45 in my hand ready to spit when I saw her, a white face speaking to me from the folds of a cape. “You damn near died, girl,” I told her. My hand and my voice shook together.

“I die every night, m’sieu. Come with me, please. If I saw you, then perhaps others saw you, too. Quickly.”

She took my arm and led me away from the field to a footpath, then to a low stone house built into the side of the hill. I went in behind her and stood with my back to the door while she covered the windows and touched a match to the candle on the table. When she turned around she saw the gun in my hand still pointing at her stomach.

“I am not of... them!” She spit the word out.

“Maybe not, kid. It’s just that I’ve seen all kinds of traps and I’m not taking any chances.” I grinned at her because I was jumpy and didn’t want her to know that I was scared, too.

She tossed off the cape. Maybe that’s when I fell in love with her. It happened too fast, and all of a sudden I felt slippery inside and wanted to come apart at the seams. I thought a lot of things all at once, but most of all I thought what suckers war made of us, how it could make a man’s mind forget what his body never stops remembering.

She was beautiful even then. Twenty maybe, soft and beautiful, with eyes that burned holes in your soul. Hell, you don’t describe that kind of beauty. You have to think it or imagine it. Her body was the fulfillment of a dream, every movement more than a subtle invitation... a complete giving if you were the man. For anyone else it would be torture. I slid the gun back in the shoulder holster and stood there. She smiled and the room went bright.

“It is the bridge you want, is it not?”

I didn’t answer her. She sat down quickly, her fingers drumming the table.

“We have known this would come. So have they.” She spit it out again. “You will not be able to do it according to your plans, m’sieu. Only this afternoon they have brought in many men to guard the place. They are all over because the bridge is their only weak link. You see, they know.”

“We found that out,” I said.

“And your plans?”

I laughed. “To do it anyway.” I started climbing out of my jump suit, stripping down until I was in ragged breeches and the torn shirt of a farmer. I tucked the gun in my belt and the explosives in a sack over my shoulder.

“You will be shot if you are caught, of course.”

“Of course.”

Her laugh was deep and throaty, a laugh of devilish amusement. “You Americans have too much of the... bravery. Sometimes you forget that one need not be so... direct. There are other ways of doing things and not getting shot.”

I looked at her carefully, alive to the woman, yet alert to every sound that came through the night. From the village I could hear the rumble of trucks going over the pavement. “Who are you, girl?”

“In the underground I have a code number. Always, since I was a little girl, I have played under the bridge and along the banks of the river. When the people of the village moved I was directed to stay. You see... for long we knew that this time would come, and since I was the only one who was familiar with every spot that would be of importance about the bridge, the job was assigned to me. I am to... guide you, shall I say?”

“No, let’s not say it. The thing’s too pat.”

“There is not time to argue. Certainly your intelligence knows how heavily the bridge has been guarded.”

“They know it.”

“Then how can I convince you that you must trust me?”

“You can’t,” I said. “It’s still too pat. We never communicated with the French underground on this movement.”

Her fingers stopped tapping the table. “I said we expected this. The railway is the only one on which troops can be moved. All the roads are out of service.”

I said, “Sorry, kid,” but I made it easy by backing it up with a smile.

“I see.” Her eyes bored into mine, searching for the answer. “And what will you do with me?”

“Tie you up so you can get loose after a while. Like I said, there are too many traps for me to step in one blind.”

A smile played with the corners of her mouth. It stayed a while then danced into her eyes. “I should curse you in the name of France for being so stupid. But too, I should curse myself and the others for being so cautious as not to leave any proof of my identity behind.”

I had a coil of rope wound around my waist and I started to shake it loose. “In the name of France and the others you’ll do better if you let me alone: I told you that I wasn’t taking chances. The Krauts come across with nice prizes for dragging in a saboteur or two.”

“And why couldn’t I have turned you in before?”

I held the rope in my hand and fiddled with it. “Because I’m a man and you’re a woman, chicken. A beautiful woman, but still a woman.”

Her hand had a gun in it and it was aimed right at my head. My fingers jerked the rope tight and my mouth felt dry. “If I had wanted to I could have killed you before. Or I could have drawn a prize as you seem to think.” She laid the gun on the table with the butt toward me. “Do you still think I shouldn’t be trusted?”

The stiffness left my fingers and I wound the rope back around my waist. “Someday I’ll smarten up,” I said. When she saw that I wasn’t going to touch the gun she put it back in the folds of her skirt. I glanced at her sharply. “You know what will happen if they catch you with that thing?”

“Yes. First I will kill several of them, then myself.”

She meant it, every word of it. I finished tucking the ends of the rope in, then straightened up. “Okay, what gives. Tell me two things: if you knew how important the bridge was, why didn’t the underground do something about it? When you tell me that tell me how we’re going to go about it.”

“The thing you carry in your pack is the thing we lacked. We have no explosive. Nor is it a job for one person.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see. As for the plans, they were arranged long ago. I told you that was why I was left behind.”

“Go on.”

“The war came close to us, m’sieu...”

“My name is Joe.”

“And mine is Claire. As I said, the war came close. Rather than risk destruction the populace moved to the hills beyond.”

“Not even token resistance?”

Her voice had a sharp edge. “It was hardly necessary. It happens that here we had the radio transmitters and the printing plants that was the lifeblood of the underground. We could not afford to have it captured.”

“Sorry,” I said. “You’re brave.”

Her eyes got grey and cloudy. “No braver than you, Joe. You expected to die when you came here, did you not?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I figured it would happen sometime.”

“It may not be necessary. You have made arrangements to be picked up?” I nodded a yes. “Then we shall hope for the best. However, it is agreed that I will lead you there?”

I was doing everything I shouldn’t do. I was taking a chance on an unknown quantity in violation of all my training. How many lives depended on my judgment — thousands? All because a woman was beautiful, with a deep, rich voice and eyes that burned holes into my soul. I was fully briefed to do my job, yet here I was letting a woman change plans that had been made by experts.

And I knew I was right, I knew it damn well! I looked at my watch, and said, “Let’s go.”

The bridge is part of history now, but not that night. That’s pure screaming torture that has etched itself into my memory with an acid so strong it will never leave. I could forget it, if within an hour I hadn’t found myself loving her and having it returned.

But it happened and I can’t forget it, see? She was mine. She was beautiful and soft, and she was mine before the moon was at its peak...

That night the air and the ground were alive with death. We heard the sharp metallic noises it made and felt the force of it waiting to thunder into reality. It was there in light and shadows, and we walked through it safely. Claire took my hand and I responded to the slightest pressure of her touch, letting her show me the path until we had the sounds behind us and the sound of the river coming our way.

We still had two hours to wail, timing ourselves so the job could be completed with precious minutes left over for me to reach the field where the plane would come down.

We didn’t speak of our plans. Somehow we both knew what was to be done, and whatever she had to do I didn’t want to know about.

That was where we found life, there right in the middle of death. We forgot about it and talked of the things that were and would still be when it was over, lying on our backs facing the stars. I was counting them when a shadow of golden hair moved across my vision and I tasted the warmth of her mouth and the sweetness of her breath. She said, “We love each other, Joe.”

My answer was in my arms and in the present. I had to come across a continent to find her. I was hers until the hands on my watch marked the time to end the life we had found.

After she was mine she took me to the banks of the river, leading the way through the weeds. She was calm, but I didn’t dare speak. Along the causeway and on the bridge itself I could see the file of the sentries back and forth. They shouted instructions and commands, following any object that moved with the white beam of the searchlights. Then there would be the short snarl of the machine guns and the questions asked afterward. Nothing moved and lived.

“Notice, Joe...” I turned my head to her. “The river flows under the bridge, but here starts a little offshoot of the river that winds through the rushes. The bottom is clay, and if you walk softly without splashing and keep in the shadow of the tall grass, you can get under the bridge. From above this looks like part of the bank and they will not be watching. Their lights are trained on the river itself and the road along the bank. Only in this one section of the river is the footing solid enough to follow. None of them are under the bridge because no man can stand long in the ooze of the silt without sinking under.”

I nodded, picking out the way with my eyes, glad that the moon was directly above, so that I’d leave no trailing shadow. “I may not be able to be quiet.”

Her voice was very soft. “They will not hear you, Joe.”

“Why?” My chest felt tight.

“Because I am beautiful. Because I am the only woman in the village and they are men, Joe. Kiss me once more.”

I kissed her. I tried to crush the life out of her so nothing would take her away from me, but she was too strong and pulled back with a sad smile. “Always I will love you, Joe,” she said.

There were only seconds left now. “No matter where I am I’ll be loving you, Claire. Remember this, the present doesn’t last long. When it’s over I’ll be looking for you, if we can live through it. It might take a while to find you because even in peace there are problems. I can’t give you much, but it will be more than you ever had before. If I can’t get to you, try to come to me. Right off Broadway there’s a tiny bistro. A red rooster hangs outside the door and we’ll meet there. No matter where I am, I’ll come back on this day, the ninth of each month, looking for you.”

“I’ll remember, Joe.” Then she was gone. A white shadow that simply disappeared. I shifted the sack of explosives and stepped into the stream.

A cat couldn’t have been more silent. I left nothing to reveal my passage through the brush. Not even a splash or the snapping of a twig. Sure, I made it. No trouble at all because she was right all along the line. It was a snap getting under the bridge and it left me feeling good because there was nothing to it. The boys back in HQ better get their medals ready, I kept thinking.

It made nice thinking, until I got a good look at the underside of the structure, then I felt like a jerk. There was a keystone there that would pull the whole works down, but getting up to it meant a scramble and a lot of noise. Swell. Just one lousy sound and I’d be dead. You know what I felt like. Not too far south a thousand guys could figure on dying because the job was too big for me. Maybe one of those guys was somebody you knew. Then you know how I felt.

Twenty feet above me the muted noises of soldiers on guard sounded like the drone of bees, never loud enough to muffle foreign sounds. I couldn’t wait any longer. I shook my rope out and stood ready to throw it over the projecting beam above. One lousy sound and I’d die. Nice.

It didn’t come. Like everything else I froze because the only other sound in the night was a deep, rich voice lifted in song. Somebody barked an order and the lights came around. Two of them. They pointed down river and merged on the banks where she stood so lovely and white and naked.

Somebody choked out a whistle.

She dived into the water, flashed to the surface and shook her hair back from her face, then swam to the shore again, framed in the lights that never left her, laughing and waving toward the bridge.

Sound? Who could have heard me? There was so much sound that I whistled while I tied the explosive into place and set off the long fuse. They screamed from the rail, whistled and shouted to that vision so tantalizingly close to them, yet so tar out of reach. Hell, I even laughed too.

Yeah, I laughed. I finished the job and got away.

I made the field where the plane picked me up, but the laugh was a frozen grimace of hate and fury because I’ll never forget the light picking up the officers throwing their clothes on the banks and diving in after her. She swam away, her arms flashing in the light, laughing over her shoulder, letting them draw closer and closer so every eye on the bridge was focused on the wanton sight, their eager shouts and cheers drowning out the noise of my escape and the sputtering of the fuse and even the sound of the light plane taking off again from the field.

And from the air I could see the bright fingers of the light trained on the banks of the river now, and I said, “Oh, God! Oh, God!” and I thought I could hear their laughter even up there. Then when the flash came there was nothing. No noise. Just that one intense glare and I went on into the night. Later, I wondered if she gave all that for me or for her country. I tried to joke about it. It wasn’t funny. Not even to myself.

I saw her again. Sure, so did you. Beauty didn’t die that easily. The present went and the future came after it. The world settled back and enjoyed the beauty that had been hidden by the war, and you saw a star come out of France that was a bright light of fame and fortune that glittered from the stage.

Those soldiers on the bridge weren’t the only ones she drove mad. Whenever you saw her picture you saw someone staring at it with that funny look on his face. Everybody wanted her and she had everything she wanted. What was it I was going to take her away from — the poverty that was Europe? That was another laugh.

The price of a necklace she wore at a premiere was more than I could save in five years. It was a real big laugh, a regular howl, because I could go through a succession of Helens and Jeans and Frans and it was Claire who kept them out. Claire, the memory.

So she wound up in New York, the hit of the year’s biggest play. And she ate at the bistro with the sign of the rooster over the door, but that was only because it was noon and time for lunch and it was only a few doors away from the theater...

I started past the door for my appointment with Gus Kimball and then I got curious. Hell, I thought, why be a dope? Any guy likes to shake hands with fame, and maybe she’d remember me if she thought hard enough. I wouldn’t prod her with unpleasant memories. That’s what the psychiatrists would say. Go in and face your problem, and then you’ll have nerve enough to walk up the street again without going all shaky inside.

I opened the door and stepped in. Henri hadn’t seen me for years, but his memory was good. He said, “Why, good afternoon, Joe! It is good to have you back. A table, yes?”

“No, Henri, not right now.” I was looking across the room. “I just came in to speak to somebody a moment.”

My feet pulled me through the tables. She was by herself off in a corner and didn’t see me until I was in front of her. “Hello, kid,” I said.

“Joe.” Just like that, “Joe.” That’s all she said.

I pulled a cigarette out and stuck a light to it. Funny, but my hand didn’t shake. I blew the smoke toward the ceiling and grinned at her. “Imagine us crossing again. Didn’t think you’d remember me. I saw you turn in here and had to come in to be sure. You look good.”

“Do I?” I damned Henri for not having more lights in the place. I couldn’t see her face very well.

“Yeah. You did all right for yourself, too. I see your name in the papers every day. How do you like our country?”

“I like it, Joe.”

She hadn’t moved. Now that I was in the dark a while, after the brightness of the street, I began to see the vague outline of her face. The fires started inside of me and I couldn’t let them do it to me again. Not any more.

“Well, I got an appointment, kid. Maybe one day I’ll look you up if you’re not too busy. I have to go now.”

People were looking over at us, and I thought I saw her teeth bite her lips. Maybe she was thinking back to those searchlights.

She stood up quickly, scooping her handbag under her arm. What the hell, I didn’t blame her a bit. Nobody famous wants to be hamstrung by something from a forgotten past.

“It is I who has to go, Joe,” she said. Then she was gone.

Henri stood at my elbow. “You were to have lunch with the lady?”

“No, Henri. I was just saying hello.”

“A strange woman, Joe. Always she comes in once a month and sits here. Always the same day, the ninth of each month. It is that she has a pact, perhaps?”

The fires wouldn’t go out. The cigarette fell from my fingers and scattered sparks on the floor. The tight knot inside me jerked even tighter and something was going on in my head, fighting and screaming to free itself. Something that didn’t sound like my voice said. “And today, Henri...?”

“Is the ninth, Joe.”

I ran. I pushed everything aside and I ran, and if I went fast enough I could catch her before she disappeared again, and I could tell Gus that the job was fine and I’d be there with bells on. Wedding bells.

I caught her.