Memorial Bridge (23 page)

Surely she would do that now.

Lothrop looked up at her gratefully. She had succeeded in making him feel that, despite her age and her obvious expertise, he was the first man who had found the way to touch her. "It is not me," he said pathetically. "It's you, darling."

She leaned to kiss him, with more tenderness than passion.

Dillon found Yergin's tenderness more appealing than her sexual heat, but no more believable. He knew that now her thrust would come because she had Lothrop completely at her mercy. Dillon was certain she had a mandatory question, and he knew what it had to be. After a period of two months in which Lothrop had compulsively sought her out almost daily, nearly two weeks had now passed in which he hadn't called her.

They kissed again, lightly, and Dillon strained to hear past the amplified rustle of bedclothes as they readjusted themselves.

"I missed you so." She stroked his forehead, brushing the strands of his thin hair with her fingers. Lothrop was now reclining half against the headboard and half in her arms, lacking only grapes. He seemed to be settling into sleep. An old man's nap would suit Dillon's purposes no more than Yergin's.

"You never told me where you went."

Lothrop looked at her sharply. "Who said I went anywhere?"

"I know you left Washington. Or else you would have talked to me."

"I had to stay with my wife. She wasn't well."

Yergin smiled. "You know I don't believe you. Your wife is in Ohio. She has been in Ohio since before Christmas."

"How do you know that?"

Yergin shrugged. "My friends in the Ohio Red Cross."

A look of pure horror crossed Lothrop's face, but then he realized she was joking, and he pushed her shoulder, a bit roughly.

She sat back from him, tugged a corner of the sheet free and draped herself with it. The shadow of an uncharacteristic pout crossed her face. "But now I see you have lied to me. And there can be only one reason."

"What reason?"

"There is someone else. Not your wife. Some other—■" She finished the sentence with a weary hand gesture.

Lothrop sat up abruptly. To Dillon, Yergin's complaint had been obvious posturing, and he was shocked to see how it seemed to wound Lothrop. "That's not true. There is no one but you."

"But what shall I think? You tell me you were in Washington when I know you were not."

"How do you know?"

She turned her back on him, shamelessly flaunting her naked spine, reminding him which of them was stronger, ordering him implicitly to grovel.

"I can't tell you where I was. I can't."

She neither faced him nor moved.

"It's too important. It's secret." He put his hand on her shoulder, but she was marble. "It's my work."

"Your work gives you a way to deceive me. I never believed I would be lovers with a man who did not trust me."

Lothrop laughed and rolled away. "Don't trust you! I trust you with everything. You could ruin me."

Dillon thought Lothrop had turned from her in a pout of his own, but he reached across to the nearby chair, fumbling in the pocket of the coat he'd flung there. He rolled back to Yergin and said in an unhappy voice, "Here." Still she did not move. "This is for you." He held a small brown package out.

She faced him, letting the sheet slip, exposing her pearly breasts as she accepted the package.

Dillon marveled at her lack of modesty.

As she unwrapped the paper, Lothrop's face lit up expectantly.

A piece of gold jewelry. Yergin carefully removed it from its wrapping and held it up, an oblong pendant on a chain. The thing seemed to
draw to itself what light there was in the room. "It's beautiful," she said.

"It's a cartouche. It's old."

"A cartouche?"

"Those are hieroglyphic figures engraved there, the name of some pharaoh. I mean it's very old. It's real."

Yergin raised her eyes to him, shining with pleasure. "You were in Egypt?"

Instead of answering, Lothrop took the chain and pendant from her. "Here." As she inclined her head toward him, he hung it on her like Caesar bestowing an honor. The flat gold swung between her breasts. Her breasts drew his attention, and he leaned down to them, kissing each one, a gesture of loving tenderness it seemed to Dillon impossible to feign.

Then Lothrop took Yergin into his arms and held her.

"Where did you find it?" Yergin asked quietly. "It is so beautiful."

Lothrop touched his finger to her lips, but then he said, "Cairo. I found it for you in Cairo."

"Cairo?"

"My company has business there, my company in Cincinnati, I mean. I wasn't always in the War Department, you know. I still do a little business."

"Your company? Business in Cairo?" Yergin laughed suddenly. "I thought your company made furnaces. Furnaces in the Sahara?"

Lothrop stared at her, then said, "We did. That was before the war. How did you know what my company made?"

"You told me."

"No, I didn't."

"What does your company make now?"

"You tell me."

"I don't know." She laughed again. "But you are testing me." She tickled his ribs. "Aren't you? You are testing me."

Despite himself, Lothrop began to laugh. "It's ridiculous, isn't it? As if I can't trust you."

"Yes, darling, ridiculous." She held the cartouche up. "I love this. Thank you." And she kissed him, pushing her tongue into his mouth.

When they stopped kissing, she simply rested against him, apparently content.

Lothrop said in the silence, "We make diesel engines, for the LCI."

"LCI?"

"Landing Craft–Infantry, the flat-hulled assault vessels we use to bring soldiers ashore on beaches."

Yergin pulled away from him, to look in his eyes. "And you were in Cairo?"

"Yes. Does that tell you something?" He grinned, a boyish I-know-a-secret grin.

"It tells me perhaps something is happening in the Mediterranean."

"Very good, darling.
Very
good. The truth is, everything depends on landing craft. For want of landing craft, the invasion hasn't happened yet. But not for long. Not to blow my own horn, but my company has turned out eleven thousand LCI engines in the last seven months."

Yergin's eyes had brightened. "I had no idea you were so—" She shrugged happily. "So wonderful."

He laughed again, but then said soberly, "I haven't been able to tell anyone, not even my wife. It's fantastic, what we've done!"

"Tell me."

"My trip was to the staging areas, Cairo, but also Tunis and Nicosia. Soon we'll have thousands of LCIs and LSTs in place all across the Med."

"But everyone says the invasion will go across the Channel."

"Yes, they do, don't they?" Lothrop smiled.

"But it will be the south of France, instead of the north?"

He shook his head. "The Balkans," he announced triumphantly. "The back door to Germany. The door Churchill had slammed in his face in the First War. This will be the vindication of his losses at the Dardanelles. Are you old enough to remember the Dardanelles?"

Yergin grimaced, tugged the sheet free and once more covered herself with it. She left the bed and disappeared from Dillon's line of sight.

Lothrop was too revved up now to stop. "And if we go in through the Balkans, we keep the Red Army out of Eastern Europe."

He grinned at her expectantly: Isn't it brilliant? "The key is Bulgaria. Germany collapsed in the First War only when Bulgaria defected. We've spent all this blood on Italy, but Italy means nothing. Bulgaria! That's the linchpin!"

From her place out of Dillon's view, Sylvia's response, if any, was silent.

"I'll have one of those," Lothrop said, then caught the cigarette pack she threw at him, then the lighter.

The silence curdled the air in the room while the two lit up and smoked.

When Yergin spoke at last, her disembodied voice seemed ghostly. "Will it come soon?"

"The Joint Chiefs just ordered materiel and supplies brought up to the forward staging areas."

"Which are Tunis, Alexandria, Nicosia...?"

"Heraklion in Crete, Tripoli and Valletta."

"Valletta?"

"The port of Malta."

"And where is the headquarters?"

Lothrop's head snapped as if he had just taken a blow, and for a long moment he could only stare at her. Color rose in his face. Finally he cleared his throat nervously. "That's an overly interested question, Sylvia. If you don't mind my saying so. You make me nervous all of a sudden." Lothrop inhaled his cigarette compulsively.

Yergin came back to the bed, and Dillon could see her again. She laughed. "Oh, darling, I do not care. Tell me nothing more. I am only interested because it involves you." She stroked his arm, tracing the line of it with a crooked finger. "I had no idea your work was so ... near the center..."

"Yes, well..."

She had lost her advantage and saw it. She knew enough not to push. Instead, she took his cigarette and put it with hers in the ashtray on the bed table. Then, letting her sheet fall, she reclined alongside Lothrop and began to plant kisses on his torso. At first he refused to respond, like a pouting adolescent. But then she began to fondle him blatantly, and he became aroused. Abruptly, angrily almost, he pushed her over onto her back and mounted her.

Dillon pulled back from the wall, aware suddenly of his parched throat. He wished Coles or one of the other watchers was with him so he could turn with a "Christ, you won't believe these two."

He had no choice but to stay there and listen on the chance that Yergin would resume her sly interrogation. She did not. Their exchanges now were limited to Lothrop's stifled yelps of surprise and delight as he found himself sustaining his rare second erection, and to Yergin's whorish cry of ecstasy, that abject lie with which, apparently, she'd leashed him like a puppy.

***

Cass didn't know whom else to call, and that seemed to sum up her problem. She had called Patty and Norma, her two friends in the apartment house, but neither was home. She'd called Mrs. Connor, the head of the sodality at St. Thomas More's, but the parish line was busy, and busy again.

If she were in Chicago, she'd have had a hundred others to call, beginning with her Ma. The thought of her mother lowering a chipped cup of steaming tea to answer her phone made Cass want to weep.
Oh, Ma! Who shall 1 call?

For three years they had been living in Barcroft, a garden apartment complex off Glebe Road in Arlington. The buildings at Barcroft were only three stories high, and had a crisp, colonial feel unlike anything in Chicago. There were lawns and flower beds, forsythia bushes and dogwoods, but the Dillons' neighbors were all government workers from elsewhere and they kept to themselves. A few FBI agents lived in Barcroft, though, and others had places nearby. Every few months, they got together for a picnic at Four Mile Run, if the weather was good, or in winter, for canasta parties. But even at those gatherings, the men stayed to themselves, playing horseshoes or, on card nights, poker in the other room—always talking shop. The women, young mothers all, it seemed, went on and on about their babies. No one seemed to notice or care that Cass did not have a child. If they had a clue about how desperately she wanted one, would they have tortured her so with their endless talk of diaper-rash ointments and formula? The FBI claimed to be a family, but where were Cass Dillon's sisters and brothers now? All she knew was that she was in trouble, and she was alone.

She had called Dr. Lyons, who wasn't in his office. The woman who answered wasn't even a nurse. She had listened from behind the counter of her silence, then had said, "You just lie down, Mrs. Dillon. The pain will pass. Doctor will call you when he comes in."

Now she was on the couch, the phone just out of reach, on the table behind her head.

She was trying to focus on her rosary. The amber beads trickled through her fingers, and her lips moved automatically around the words her heart knew best.

The rote prayer cut her mind loose and it rose to the Blessed Mother herself, how frightened
she
must have been, going into labor in a stable. But Mary had had her husband with her.

Cass joined her hands on her swollen belly, the rosary still entwined in her fingers. She pressed gently against herself. "Dear baby, please," she said aloud, and those words released the nervous incantation of her prayer, "Hail Mary, full of grace," as if she were kneeling with the sodality ladies in St. Gabe's. "Holy Mary, Mother of God..."

It was not that Mary was her closest friend, or that ordinarily prayer was such a consolation. She was running these words and images through her mind as a way of staying calm, of staying in control of herself.

"Mary!" she cried, as pain shot through her body, a twisting of innards she had never felt before.

Even with her eyes closed the light in her head blazed. She had never had such a headache. The scalding wire wrapping her stomach turned tighter and tighter until the sensation of pain exploded into something else—a feeling of pure terror. Now her unspoken prayer became, Punish me, but please don't punish my baby!

She tried to get up, but the torment curled through her, cutting off escape, forcing her back down onto the couch.

She reached up for the telephone as she realized that something serious was wrong with her. Something was wrong with her baby.

No sooner did the phone touch her cheek than the operator came on, saying, "Number please," the most familiar, soothing voice Cass had ever heard.

Oh, Helen! Oh, Maisie! She saw the girls lined up along the switchboards, leather-and-wire headsets framing their faces, her dearest friends waiting there to help.

But it wasn't the girls she wanted.

It was Sean! Her only Sean! He would take care of her. He would take care of their baby. He would make this pain go away. Never mind that she had never called him at work before. Never mind that she had never asked him to think of her first. She would ask him now. He would drop whatever he was doing. He would come for her. He would take her to the hospital. He would save their baby, and he would save her.