He lay on the floor now with his head propped against Willis' jacket. His forehead was drenched with sweat which rolled down the uneven planes of his face. His nose was massive, and his eyebrows were bushy, and there was a thickness about his neck which created the impression of head sitting directly on shoulders. He was not a handsome man, Mis-cob less handsome now in his pain and his delirium. Blood was seeping through the sulfanilamide bandage, and his life was leaking out of his body drop by precious drop, and he cried out again "Mary!" sharply because he once had been in love.
He had been in love a long while ago, and then only for a few short weeks before his ship left Boston. He had never again gone back to that city, never again sought out the girl who'd presented him with a memory that would last a lifetime. His destroyer had been berthed in the Charlestown yards. He was a bosun at the time, the toughest goddamn bosun in the U.S. fleet. The second World War was still a long way off, and Miscolo had only three things on his mind: how to be the toughest goddamn bosun in the U.S. fleet, how to enjoy himself to the fullest, and how to find an Italian meal whenever he left the ship.
He had possibly eaten in every Italian restaurant in Boston before he found the little dive off Scollay Square. Mary worked as a waitress in that dive. Miscolo was twenty-one years old at the time and, to his eyes, Mary was the loveliest creature that walked the face of the earth He began taking her out. He lived with her for two weeks. In those two weeks, they shared a lifetime together, and then the two weeks were over and the ship pulled out. And Miscolo swam at Waikiki Beach in Honolulu. And he attended a luau on the beach at Kauai, and he ate heikaukau rock crab, and poi and kukui nuts while the hula girls danced. And later, in a Japanese town called Fukuoko-the Japanese were still our friends and no one even dreamt of Pearl Harbor then-Miscolo drank saki with a sloe-eyed girl whose name was Misasan, and he watched her pick up strips of dried fish with chopsticks and later he went to bed with her and learned that Oriental girls do not like to kiss. And on the way back, he hit San Francisco and had a ball there looking down from the hills at the magnificent city spr amp;ad out in a dazzling array of lights, flushed with his overseas pay, the toughest goddamn bosun in the U.S. fleet.
He never went back to Boston. He met Katherine instead when he was discharged, and he began going steady with her, and he got engaged, and then married, so he never went back to Boston to see the girl named Mary who worked in a sleazy Italiant restaurant in Scollay Square.
And now, with his life running red against a Sulfapak, with his body on fire and his head a throbbing black void, he screamed "Mary!"
Bert KIng put the wet cloth on Miscolo's forehead.
He was used to death and dying. He was a young man, but he had been through the Korean "police action," when death and dying had been a matter of course, an everyday occurrence like waking up to brush your teeth. And he had held the heads of closer friends on his lap, men he knew far better than Miscolo. And yet, hearing the word Mary erupt from Miscolo's lips in a hoarse scream, he felt a chill start at the base of his spine, rocketing into his brain where it exploded in cold fury. In that moment, he wanted to rush across the room and strangle Virginia Dodge.
In that moment, he wondered whether the liquld in that bottle was really nitroglycerin.
Angelica (.iomez sat up and snooK her now.
Her skirt was pulled back and over her knees, and she propped her elbows on both knees and shook her head again, and then looked around the room with a puzzled expression on her face, like a person waking in a hoteL And then, of course, she remembered.
She touched the back of her head. A huge knob had risen where Virginia had hit her with the gun. She felt the knob and the area around it, all sensitive to her probing fingers. And as the tentacles of pain spread out from the bruise, she felt with each stab a new rush of outraged anger. She rose from the floor and dusted oft her black skirt, and the look she threw at Virginia Dodge could have slain the entire Russian Army.
And in that moment, she wondered whether the liquid in that bottle was really nitroglycerin.
Cotton Hawes touched his cheek where the gun sight had ripped open a flap of flesh. The cheek was raw to the touch. He dabbed at it with a cold wet handkerchief, a cloth no colder than his fury.
And he wondered for the tenth time whether the liquid in that bottle was really nitroglycerin.
Steve Carella, she thought.
I will kill Steve Carella. I will shoot the rotten bastard and watch him die, and they won't touch me because they're afraid of what's in this bottle.
I am doing the right thing.
This is the only thing to do.
There is a simple equation here, she thought: a life for a life.
