The Dark Arena - Mario Puzo [10]
One of the GIs threw him a blanket. “Thanks,” Mosca said.
The GI shrugged. “I have to stay up and guard this joker anyway.”
Mosca glanced at the sleeping Muhrooney. The face was blank. The eyes opened slowly, stared at him like a dumb animal, and in that moment, before the eyes closed, Mosca felt a sense of recognition and thought, You poor stupid bastard.
He walked back down the car, threw the blanket over Mr. Gerald, and stretched out again on his bench. This time he fell asleep easily and quickly. He slept dream-lessly until the train reached Frankfort and somebody shook him awake.
two
The morning son of early June lit every corner of the roofless terminal, turning it into a vast outdoor stadium, and as Mosca stepped off the train he drew a great breath of spring air, smelling already a faint, acrid dust that rose from the debris and ruins of the city beyond. Along the length of the train he could see groups of OD-clad soldiers forming into platoons. With the other civilians, he followed a guide to the bus waiting outside.
They moved through the crowd like conquerors, as in an earlier time the rich passed through the poor, looking to neither right nor left, knowing that a path wbuld appear before them. The conquered, their clothes worn, their bodies and faces thin, looked like masses of men and women accustomed to living in flophouses, eating in the soup kitchens of charity, and they made way sullenly, obediently, staring with envious eyes at the well-clad, well-fed Americans.
They came out of the station into a large square. Opposite them was the Red Cross Club, GIs in olive drab already lounging on the steps, Walling the square stood rebuilt hotels that housed the occupation troops and administrators. Streetcars crisscrossed each other, and military busses and taxis filled the wide streets. Even this early, GIs were sitting on the benches around the station, and each had beside him a Frfiulein with her inevitable little suitcase. It was all the same; Mosca thought, It hasn't changed. The GIs met the incoming trains as suburban wives meet their commuting husbands, picked out a pretty girl, and made their propositions with varying degrees of crudity. To spend a night in a cbld, dirty station sleeping on a bench, waiting for a morning train; or a good dinner, liquor, cigarettes, a warm bed. He might give her a good deal of pleasure, at worst, if one were careful, a few moments of annoyance during the night Usually the sensible choice was made.
On all the streets bounding the square stood the sharpers, the black-market operators, the children laying their trap for wary GIs, who emerged from thp PX with cartons full of candy, cigarettes, soap, and with eyes watchful as old prospectors carrying sacks of gold dust
Mosca, waiting to enter the bus, felt a hand on his shoulder. Turning, he saw a dark, bony face topped by the cap of the Wehrmacht that was the standard headgear for German men.
The young man said in a low, urgent voice, “You have American dollars?” Mosca shook his head, turned away, and again felt the hand on his shoulder.
“Any cigarettes?”
Mosca started to enter the bus. Hie hand grasped his shoulder more urgently” “Anything, you have anything you wish to sell?”
Mosca said curtly in German, “Get your hands away quick.”
The man stepped back, startled, and then into his eyes came a look of proud contempt, hatted. Mosca went into the bus and sat down. He saw the man looking at him through the window, at his gray gabardine suit, the white richness of his shirt, the streak of color that was his tie.
And feeling the man's look of contempt, he wished for a moment that he was again in the olive drab of Ms uniform.
The bus moved slowly away from the railroad station and took one of the many exits out of the square. It moved them through another world. Outside that central square which stood like a fortress in a wilderness, the ruins stretched away as far as the eye could see, with only a flora of building remnants, a still-standing wall, a door leading into the open air behind it,