Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [151]
“I’m not leaving them,” Val said. “If you want me out, we’ll take a place nearby, so they can finish their school term.”
Gideon picked the pistol up from his lap, stared at it, then tossed it on the coffee table. He dialed the studio.
“Good afternoon, Pacific Studios.”
“Gideon Zadok’s office. Hello, Belle, Gideon. What the hell’s the name of the hospital near the studio?”
“You mean St. Joseph’s? Say, you sound terrible.”
“Get me a private room and have the studio doctor come see me later. Get a typewriter and whatever we’ll need to write over there. Then, come pick me up.”
“What the devil is going on?”
“Will you do what the fuck I say!”
“Let me speak to Val.”
“Just do what I say, Belle.” He hung up and he wept.
“Oh God, baby,” Val cried, “forgive me. Gideon, you’ve got to forgive me.”
“In a pig’s ass I’ll forgive you.”
MITLA PASS
October 31, 1956
0800 HOURS, D DAY PLUS TWO
THE FIRST KISS of daylight began to melt away the darkness and the stars blinked themselves off. There was the soldiers’ anger at morning, stretches, groans, bitching all along the Lion’s foxhole. The paras took their morning piss, brushed their teeth, and dug into their rations. The night had gone fairly well. An Egyptian patrol had come out of the Pass after midnight to probe, but was easily beaten back. Word from Para 202 was that the attack on Nakhl had already taken place, or was about to begin. It wasn’t clear. The next few hours would tell the story.
A distant sound of bombing was heard coming from the other side of the Pass and the Canal. Someone might have been hitting the Egyptian airfields.
“So, you never forgave her?” Shlomo asked Gideon.
“No, how could I? I was playing around all over the place and now I had an excuse. If I had forgiven her, she would have had to forgive me. I wanted to keep on doing what I was doing ... balling starlets .going out on pot at my agent’s house in Malibu ... gang bangs ... fun and games. I never forgave her, but I know from how much she hurt me, how much I have hurt her. I never knew about that kind of pain until then. I’d give anything ... anything if I could tell her now.”
“And Natasha?”
“I suppose we deserve each other. I was smug. There wasn’t a woman in the world I couldn’t walk away from. I had my fortress home. I had a guilty wife, well fixed inside the moat, and the castle walls. I was safe ... until I got messed up with Natasha.” Gideon squinted out to the endless sea of rocks and sand. “Come on, Para 202, where are you, you bastards? Come on, Zechariah, stop farting around.”
“That’s the worst thing two people can do to each other,” Shlomo said. “If you live together, have children, share the same bed, if there is a morsel of love left, you have no right to withhold forgiveness. You have no right to hold it over her head.”
“Tell me about it,” Gideon snapped sarcastically.
“There’s an evil streak in all of us,” Shlomo went on, “which we must control. When it takes over, we become the devil’s advocates on earth.”
“Yeah ... I know and Val knows.”
“Do you trust Val?”
“Yes, but not all the way. Not like it once was.”
“Do you trust any woman?”
A sudden smile lit Gideon’s eyes. They were no longer sad. “There are two women in my life ... yeah ... I trusted them all the way.”
“Your mother and ...”
“No, not my mother. One, Miss Abigail Winters, a teacher. She thought I would become a writer one day. The other woman? Molly, my sister. I wouldn’t have made it without her. I love Molly. When I knock this book, I’m going to bring her to Israel and show her around ...”
They were suddenly interrupted by a half-dozen jets screaming over the Pass. Shlomo spotted the unmistakable twin tails of enemy Vampires.
“Egyptians! Hit the deck!”
MOLLY
1922
MY MOTHER, Leah, worked at the Ginzburg Brothers clothing factory in Baltimore, and so did my Aunt Fanny. All of us lived in Bubba Hannah’s house on Monroe Street. Zayde Moses lived there too, but nobody counted him.
I was four years old in the spring of 1922 when Momma and Aunt Fanny went out on strike, and don’t remember