As Time Goes By (23 page)

"I have promised my wife that you will take part in
this mission. She has assured me of your loyalty. She
is my most trusted confidante. How and why she is so
certain of you is of no import to me. Nor is what hap
pens to any of us after we accomplish our mission. That
I will leave to God. Should you try in any way to inter
fere with our chances for success, though, I will kill
you myself. To do anything less would betray a sacred
trust, and that is one thing, indeed the only thing, I am
not prepared to do."

Major Miles interposed himself. "Very well, then,
gentlemen, you have your orders. Upon receipt of Miss
Lund's signal, you are all to report to the airfield at
Luton at once. You
will be issued your armaments at
that time. I advise you all to set your affairs in order
and to get plenty of rest. When the shooting starts you'll be glad you did."

He put down his pointer. "The mission upon which
we are all embarking is fraught with danger. I won't
deny that. His Majesty's government is as much a part
of it as any of you, and it is in the highest interests of
that government to make sure that Operation Hangman
succeeds. It must, and it shall. That is all."

If only that were true, thought Rick.

Rick and Renault shook hands with everyone in the
room as they departed. When it came time to shake
hands with Victor Laszlo, it was Rick this time who
had to hold out his hand and wait several seconds before it was grasped.

"Good luck," said Rick. "It must be nice to always be right."

"It is," said Laszlo.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY

He knew what he promised Ilsa, and he cared. But
not that much, and not right now.

Ilsa was in Prague. He was in London. A body of
water and half of a bottle of Jack Daniel's lay between
them, although not for long. She never had to know about it. Besides, he needed all the help he could get.

He drank straight from the bottle; this was no time
to stand on ceremony. Demon rum had always helped
him think before. After everything that had happened, after the worst that could happen had happened, it had still been his friend. It had protected him from the Ital
ian bullets in Ethiopia, had shielded him from the gun
fire of the Nationalists at the Ebro River, when victory
had seemed so close and then evaporated so quickly,
and had given nun the courage to fight on, all the way
to the end, when even the bottle could tell the differ
ence between victory and defeat, if he still couldn't.

Rick the liberal. Rick the idealist. Rick the freedom fighter: what a laugh. Couldn't they tell the difference
between a man on a mission and a man on a suicide
mission? In Ethiopia he had thought death would be
simple. There was a war on; all you had to do was
wander out on the killing ground and wait for the one
with your name on it to show up. Selassie's battle
against the Italians had seemed hopeless, which suited
Rick just fine; but the Africans had surprised every
body by holding off Mussolini for almost eight months.
From late November 1935, when he washed up in
Addis Ababa because it was the most remote place he
could think of on such short notice, until May 1936,
when the new Roman legions had occupied the coun
try, he had fought as best he could—not expecting to
win, hoping somehow not to lose, but not caring much
either way, and always ready to take a bullet. Just as
long as he could take out a few Italians, especially the ones who reminded him of Salucci. They all reminded him of Salucci.

He got to Spain three months later, just in time for the civil war. He hadn't intended it that way, but his bad luck seemed to be following him around. The Spanish Civil War taught him a few things. The first
thing it taught him was that he was glad he wasn't
around for the American Civil War. Practically overnight, brother fought brother, father fought son, and
everybody killed everybody in the most horribly imag
inable way.

He didn't like to think about what he'd seen in Spain.
Hemingway had written a whole novel about it, about
the place where futility married brutality and their off
spring was called the International Brigade. Heming
way had made the war sound heroic, but what did a
writer know? Rick had seen the Internationals used for
cannon fodder, chewed up and spat out by Hitler's
Condor Legion and the Italian Blackshirts, and there was nothing heroic about it It was Ethiopia all over
again, except with better food. He hated to see so many
good boys fed to Franco's machine guns so cavalierly.
Like him, they believed in the cause of fighting fascism; unlike him, they were willing to die for it. Not
that he wasn't willing to die; it was just that he was
trying to die for something else, and not succeeding.

Not like Lu
í
s, who wasn't trying to die at all. His
death wasn't much in the grand scheme of things, just
the exit of another kid who believed the slogans and the shouting, who trusted people he shouldn't have trusted and paid for it with the only coin he had:
h
is
life.

Lu
í
s Echeverria bought the farm at the Ebro River in
September of 1938, which was near the end, just before
Rick, like thousands of others on the losing side, had fled to France and the simulacrum of Maginot Line
safety. Everybody said the Ebro River was the turning point of the war. That made it sound glamorous in ret
rospect, which it wasn't. Back home, the equivalent would have been the shot to the back of head as you
were strolling idly along the Fifth Avenue underpass at
the new Rockefeller Center, or the pop between the
eyes when your last vista was some Hackensack
swamp, and here you thought you were just going out
to get the papers with a bagel and a schmear on Second
Avenue.

Lu
í
s was a handsome, black-baked boy of nineteen whose fondest wish was that he would get home alive to Marita, the girl he loved even more than he loved
freedom, which was to say one hell of a lot. Lu
í
s had
shown him the lone photograph of Marita he carried
with him at all times, had shown him the letters he had
received from her. Rick had not had the heart to tell
him about the perfidy of women—hell, about the per
fidy of people—because, after all, what difference
would it have made? That was the sort of thing a young
man had to find out for himself, the hard way, if he
lived long enough to become an old man. Poor Lu
í
s, who wore his heart on his sleeve and the picture of
Marita next to his heart and died in the fullness of his
twentieth year.

"Rick," asked Lu
í
s as they awaited the attack, "are you scared?" He always asked Rick that question before a battle. It had become a kind of good-luck ritual
between them. Lu
í
s was grinning his funny gap-toothed
grin, the wind was in his hair, and he looked like a
minor Greek god, disporting himself on the
Champs de
Mars.

"No," he answered truthfully.

"Why not?"

"Because I don't care," replied Rick. He knew Lu
í
s
did care, that he cared too much for his own good, that
he cared not only for himself and for Marita, but for
Spain, which was far too much for one brave boy to
care for.
     
:

The kid was right beside him as Franco's forces
charged. The attack was only a feint, but nobody both
ered to tell them that. The main offensive would take place somewhere else. Unfortunately the feint was in
their direction, which made it the main offensive as far
as Rick and Lu
í
s were concerned.

The Nationalists were coming at them, wave upon
wave, and Rick was killing them as fast as he could.
Something was wrong, though: it was too easy. Franco
usually didn't fight like this, didn't give up this much so easily. The men were coming straight across the
river, into the teeth of the entrenched Republican posi
tion. Well, that was their problem; with every shot he
felt one step nearer to whatever vindication he could
muster.

Rick kept firing as fast as he could. He loved being
in these kinds of scrapes, so different from the wars
in New York. Those had been conducted with brutal,
practically corporate efficiency. In New York victory
or defeat all depended on who got the drop on whom, and the fight was over in a matter of not minutes but seconds. Triumph was all in the planning. In Spain, in
battle, you either bought it or you didn't, and there
wasn't a damn thing you could do about either eventu
ality.

"Rick!" shouted Lu
í
s. "Watch out!"

He whipped his head away from his smoking ma
chine gun, but it was too late. A handful of Franco's men had crossed the river on horseback, sweeping
around behind their platoon's position. Damn! he
should have anticipated this: the old sucker punch.
Frantically he struggled to turn the machine gun
around. He was still struggling when the bullet entered
Lu
í
s's head just above his left eyebrow. Rick saw the
damage before its victim felt it. He knew Lu
í
s was dead
before he did.

Lu
í
s died in his arms, his eyes still staring forward,
in anticipation of the glorious victory that would never
come.

Whispering softly, Rick laid him down to rest. He
wished he knew some kind of Catholic requiem, but
the Kaddish would have to do. It had done before.

He knew the end was near, of course. Right in the
middle of the Ebro campaign had come word of the
Munich Pact of September 29, 1938, signed by Hitler, Chamberlain, Daladier, and Mussolini. It cut the heart
right out of the Loyalist cause. No help would be forth
coming from France, or Russia, or England—or, for
that matter, from the United States. The good guys
were alone; no cavalry would be charging over the hill
to rescue them. Franco's German-trained air force
pounded the Loyalists in the hills, Franco's troops
slaughtered them in the streets of their cities. Somehow Rick managed to survive, staggering from defeat to de
feat. Barcelona fell on January 26, Madrid on March
28. The civil war ended four days later, but Rick Blaine
was already in Marseille, drunk and wondering what it
took to kill yourself besides courage.

"Mr. Richard?" Sam's voice came out of the night
and into his fog.

"What is it?" he asked. He tried to tidy up the sitting room, to make himself more presentable, but it was no
use. Sam had seen him like this too many times to be
fooled. He sank back into his chair, clutching his bottle
like a baby.

Sam pretended not to notice. Instead he busied him
self in Rick's bedroom, organizing his clothes, folding
them neatly, and packing them into a duffel bag. The
bag was all Rick was going to be allowed to take with
him, but that didn't mean the clothes couldn't be neat.

"
You
all
ready to go, boss?" Sam asked idly, know
ing that Rick was looking for the answer in the bottle and, unlike most men, stood a pretty good chance of
finding it there.

"As ready as I'm ever going to be," replied Rick,
trying to get up but unable to because the swallow or
two left was still weighing him down.

Sam sat across from Rick. In his hand he held Rick's
favorite Colt .45 automatic, the one he had brought
with him from New York, the one he had used on Mus
solini's men and on Franco's, the one he had shot
Major Strasser with. He took the weapon apart lovingly, cleaned it, and oiled it. "This one's always been
your favorite," he observed.

"Yup," agreed Rick. "I just wish I'd killed the right guy with it in the first place and saved us both a lot of
trouble."

Sam shook his head. "Boss, you got to forget about that. It was all a long time ago. Besides, it wasn't your fault, everything that happened."

Rick laughed bitterly. "Whose was it, then? I didn't see anybody else standing in my shoes, wearing my clothes, driving my car." He took another drink.

"I was driving your car. Or did you forget?"

"That was so long ago I don't remember."

"Well, if I hadn't been driving your car, you
wouldn't be here."

"Next time, try not to do me any favors."