The Dark Arena - Mario Puzo [58]
“You know what he is interested in,” Wolf was saying. “Money, only money. American scrip.”
The German shook his head. “I have asked, I have asked all around. No one has the amount you say. That I know. I can buy a few hundred dollars, but that is the most possible.”
Mosca broke in, enunciating slowly what he had been taught to say. “I am interested in selling a great quantity at one time. Five thousand cartons minimum.”
The little German looked at him with respect and awe and his voice was filled with envious greed. “Five thousand cartons, OH OH OH.” He thought of it dreamily and then said with a brisk, businesslike air, “However, I will keep an eye out, have no fear. A drink before you go? Freidl,” he called. A woman opened an inner door and peered out. “Schnapps,” the German shouted as if he were calling a dog's name, bringing it to heel. The woman disappeared and reappeared a few minutes later with a thin, white bottle and three small water glasses. Behind her came a small boy and girl, golden-haired but with dirty, red-splotched faces.
Wolf crouched on his haunches. “Ah, what beautiful children,” he exclaimed. From his briefcase he took four bars of chocolate and extended a pair to each.
The father stepped between them and reaching out took the chocolate into his own hands. “No,” he said, “it is too late for them to eat candy.” He went to one of the foot lockers resting against the wall and when he turned to face them his hands were empty. “Tomorrow, my children,” he said. The boy and girl turned away sullenly. As Wolf and Mosca lifted their drinks the woman said something sharply in a dialect they could not understand. The man gave her a warning and threatening look. “Tomorrow, I have said. Tomorrow.”
Mosca and Wolf left, and in the dark street, lit only by a single yellow windowpane they could hear the shrill voices of man and wife, voices raised in menacing anger, fear, and hate.
The white, homemade potato schnapps, almost as strong and raw as alcohol, warmed Mosca but added to the blackness of the winter night. He was unsteady and stumbled often. Finally Wolf stopped and held his arm and asked in a concerned voice, “You wanta call it off for tonight, Walter, and go home?” Mosca shook his head at Wolfs pasty-white face, luminous and cold as death in the darkness before him. They started to walk again. Wolf slightly ahead, Mosca following, straining against the cold wind and the physical nausea in his body. He thought of how Hella had said the same words to him that afternoon.
She had been wearing one of the dresses he had given her for the Christmas just past. Ann Middleton had let him use her clothing card at the Army store. Hella had watched him take the little Hungarian pistol from the wardrobe and slip it into the pocket of his short coat. Then she asked him quietly, “Don't you want to go home?”
He knew what she meant. The marriage ban against Germans had beat lifted a few days before Christmas and now more than a month later he had done nothing about putting in his papers for permission to marry. And she knew that this was because once they were married they would have to leave Germany and go back to the States. And he answered, “No, I can't right now, I have six months to go on my job contract.’
She had been hesitant, almost fearful, and when she came to kiss him good-by, as she always did when he left her, even for a few hours, she said, “Why don't you read the letters from your family? Why don't you answer them with more than a little note?”
Against his own body he could feel the slight swelling of her rounded stomach and filling breasts. “We have to leave here sometime,” she said. And he knew that this was true. But he couldn't tell her why he couldn't go home now. That he had no real feeling for his mother or Alf, and reading their letters would be like hearing their voices crying out That the sight of the ruined city pleased