The Dark Arena - Mario Puzo [100]
Yergen said gently, “Giselle, come now, I must take you home, I must go to work.” The child let the can of mirabelles slip from her hand, the heavy syrup spilled out, clotted over bits of stone and brick. She began to cry.
Yergen lifted her up from the great stone she sat on and held her, pressed her head against his neck. “TU be home early tonight, don't fret. And I'll have a present, something to wear.” But he knew she would continue to cry until he carried her up the church steps to their apartment in the steeple.
Framed against the pale sky, Yergen saw a man coming over a hill of ruins and then disappear and then come over another little hill, always coming toward him, coming out of the sun's light. Yergen put the girl down and she clung to his legs. The figure came over the last little rolling hill. Yergen was surprised to see that the man was Mosca.
He was wearing his officer greens with the white civilian patch. In the morning sunlight his dark skin had a grayish tinge and lines of tiredness in his face that cut the features away from each other, making each distinct in its own right.
“I been looking all over for you,” Mosca said. Yergen stroked his daughter's head. Neither looked directly at Mosca. Yergen felt a little strange that they could be found so easily. Mosca seemed to sense this. “Your housekeeper, she told me you usually come over this way mornings.”
Daylight was now at full strength. Yergen could hear the clanging of the Strassenbahn. He asked slowly, mistrustfully, “Why do you want to see me?”
On one of the slopes surrounding them there was a shifting and falling of rubble, a tiny landslide that sent a small cloud of dust toward the sky. Mosca shifted his feet, he could feel them sinking in the treacherous ground. He said, “I need some morphine or codeine and some penicillin for Hella. You know about that tooth. She's become really ill.” He paused awkwardly. “I need it today, the morphine, she's in very bad pain. I'll pay anything you say.”
Yergen picked up his daughter and began to walk over the ruins. Mosca walked beside him. “That will be very hard to do,” Yergen said, but everything had already clicked together in his mind. At one stroke he would come three months closer to Switzerland. “The price will be terribly high.”
Mosca stopped, and though the morning sun had no fire Yergen saw that the sweat was pouring off his face, and Yergen saw in that face an enormous relief.
“Christ,” Mosca said, “I was scared you couldn't swing it. I don't care what I pay, you can steal me blind. Just get the stuff tonight.”
They were standing now on the last hill and before them was that part of the city not completely destroyed, with the church Yergen lived in. “Come to me at midnight,” Yergen said. “Don't come in the evening, my daughter will be alone and she is very ill, she must not be frightened,” He waited for Mosca to make an expression of sympathy and felt an angry bitterness when none came. This American so concerned about his mistress, why didn't he take her to America and safety? And the fact that Mosca could do for someone he loved what he could not do for his daughter increased the bitterness in Yergen. He said almost spitefully, “If you come before midnight, I won't help you.”
Mosca stood on top of the hill and watched Yergen sliding down it, the child cradled in his arms. He called after him, “Don't forget, pay anything to get the stuff.” Yergen turned and nodded, the child's face in his arms staring directly upward to the autumn sky.
twenty
Eddie Cassia and Mosca left the Civilian Personnel Building, walked through the gray autumn twilight toward the hangars and the take-off strip.
“Another guy leaving the old gang,” Eddie Cassin said, “First Middleton, Leo, now Wolf. I guess you'll be next, Walter.’
Mosca didn't answer. They were walking against the stream of workers leaving the base, German laborers and mechanics moving toward the guarded exits. Suddenly the ground began to shake and they could hear the roar of powerful engines. Rounding a corner of the Administration