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By Root 354 0

was thinking about the man beside him. Eddie Cassin wasn't a romantic guy. As far as Mosca knew he was the opposite. He remembered when they had been GIs, Eddie had found in the city a very young, very developed Belgian girl, pretty as a Dresden doll. He had established her in a small, windowless room in the billet and thrown a party. The girl had serviced the thirty-odd GIs in the billet, not leaving the room for three days. The men played cards in the anteroom, a kitchen, waiting their turn. The girl was so pretty and good-natured that the men had pampered her as husbands pamper pregnant wives. They scrounged eggs, bacon, and ham and took turns preparing her breakfast tray. They brought packages of food from the mess hall for her lunch and supper. She laughed and joked as she sat up naked in bed to eat from the tray. There was always someone in her room at any hour of the day and she seemed to have a real affection for everyone. She was difficult about only one thing. Eddie Cassin had to visit her once a day for at least an hour. She always called him Daddy.

“She was just too pretty to keep to myself.’ Eddie had said. But Mosca always remembered a note of mean satisfaction in his voice.

They turned from the Kurftirsten Allee into the Metzer Strasse and drove in late-afternoon shade cast by the long rows of wide and leafy trees. Eddie parked in front of a four-story, new-looking brick building that had a small lawn. “This is it,” he said, “the best bachelor billet for Americans in Bremen.”

The summer sun dyed the brick a dark red, and the street fell into deep shadows. Mosca took both suitcases and the gym bag, and Eddie Cassin went before him up the walk They were met at the door by the German housekeeper.

“This is Frau Meyer,” Eddid Cassin said and put his arm around her waist. Frau Meyer was a woman of nearly forty, an almost platinum blonde. She had a superb figure molded by years of service as swimming teacher in the Bunddeutscher Maedel. Her face had a friendly but dissipated look accentuated by large, very white buck teeth.

Mosca nodded and she said, “I'm very pleased to see you, Mr. Mosca. Eddie has told me so much about you,”

They went up the stairs to the third floor, and Frau Meyer unlocked the door to one of the rooms and gave the key to Mosca. It was a very large room. In the corner was a narrow bed and in another corner a huge, white, painted wardrobe. Two large windows let in the dying sun and the first beginnings of the long summer twilight. The rest of the room was bare.

Mosca put the two suitcases on the floor and Eddie sat on the bed. Eddie said to Frau Meyer, “Call Yergen.”

Frau Meyer said, ‘Til get the sheets and blankets, too.” They could hear her going up the stairs.

“It doesn't look so good,” Mosca said.

Eddie Cassin smiled. “We have a magician in the house. This guy Yergen. Hell fix everything.” And while they waited, Eddie told Mosca about the billet Frau Meyer was a good housekeeper, saw to it there was always hot water, that the eight maids were thorough in their cleaning, and (by special arrangement with Frau Meyer) the laundry perfectly done. She lived herself in two comfortably furnished rooms in the attic. “I spend most of my time up there,” Eddie went on, “but I think she screws Yergen on the side. My room is on the floor below this one so we can't keep a real close check on one another, thank God.”

Mosca, becoming more and more impatient as the twilight deepened, listened to Eddie go on about the billet as if he owned it. Yergen was indispensable, Eddie said, to the Americans billeted in the Metzer Strasse. He could fix the house water pump so that even people on the top floor could take baths. He made up boxes for the chinaware Americans sent home, and packed so skillfully that the grateful relatives in America never complained of breakage. They made a good team, Yergen and Frau Meyer. Only Eddie knew that during the day they would carefully loot the rooms. From one it would be a pair of shorts, another a pair of socks, here a few towels or some handkerchiefs. The Americans