The Dark Arena - Mario Puzo [60]
Mosca, dead tired, disgusted at leaving the comfortable room, asked Wolf curtly, “Do you think well ever find these bastards?”.
“rm just looking for a lead tonight,” Wolf said, “and letting these people look you over. That's the big thing.”
Now in the darkened streets they passed other hurrying forms, saw jeeps parked in front of deserted-looking houses. “Everybody is on the hunt tonigjht,” Wolf said. He waited for a moment and then asked, “How did you like Furstenberg?”
The wind had died away and they could talk easily. “He seems like a nice guy,” Mosca said.
“He's damn nice for a Jew especially,” Wolf said. “No offense against your buddy.” He waited for Mosca to say something and then went on. “Furstenberg did his time in a concentration camp. His wife and kids are in the States. He thought he was going to join them, but he has T.B. so bad they won't let him in. And he got it in the camp. Funny, huh?” Mosca didn't answer. They crossed a weU-lighted avenue, coming back to the heart of the city.
“He's gone a little crazy,” Wolf almost shouted. The wind had started up again and they were walking into it, tripping over rubble. They turned a corner and the wind was gone again. “You see those two girls? He gets them fresh from the country, new ones every month or so. His agent told me the story; we do business together. Fursten-berg goes along for weeks living with the girls, they have their own room. And then, bang, after treating them like daughters all this time, one night he goes into their room and humps their ass off. Next day he ships them away with some real valuable presents and a week later he gets a fresh set. These are new ones, I haven't seen them before. That must be a nice little scene when he slips them the business. Real wild. Like a guy chasing chickens to cut off their heads.”
Another guy, Mosca thought. Everybody going off their nuts. And he wasn't much better. So they wouldn't let the poor bastard in because he had T.B. That was a law for the books. Sensible, all laws were sensible. But they always screwed somebody. But screw that son of a bitch Fursten-berg, that heel-clicking prick. He had his own troubles. And that's what he had wanted to tell Hella this afternoon. That every day he lived he broke a law. Having her with him in the billet, buying clothes for her with Middleton's Army card, sleeping with her, and he could be sent to jail for loving her. And he wasn't complaining, that was the world, he wasn't indignant. But when they pulled all the other shit with this and tried to make you feel ashamed and tried to say it was right, justice, then it was shit. When they wanted him to act as if everything the world told him was so, then he just said fuck you in Ids mind. He couldn't stand listening to his mother, and Alf and Gloria. He couldn't stand reading the newspapers, they made him puke. They said this is good today and tomorrow they said you're evil, a murderer, a wild animal, and they made you believe it so much you helped hunt yourself down. He could get away with murdering Fritz but go to jail for taking care of a woman he wanted. And a week ago he had watched them shoot the Polacks against the wall, the handball court behind the air base, the three brave Polacks who had massacred a small German village, men, women, and children, but those poor bastard Polacks had made a mistake; they murdered a few days after the occupation had begun instead of a few days before, and instead of receiving their medals from the general as brave guerrillas, the top half of their bodies had been shrouded in brown cord sacks, and they were tied to wooden stakes driven into cracks in the cement, and ||e firing squad stood almost on top of them, shootinj down into the slumped bodies a few feet away. And you could say it any way you wanted, you could prove a million times how necessary it was, the murdering, backward and forward, and he didn't give a shit about the whole business anyway. Didn't he eat a good breakfast after watching the Polacks?
But he couldn't tell Hella why he