his staff car, stripping off her undoubtedly worn and tragic underwear, and allowing her to entertain him with slow and worldly acts of love, and then returning quickly to the bar, possibly with an easily cleared up disease upon him, but one delicious notch[Pg 72] closer to his magic number of sleepings. Stern sidled close to the woman, an offer of a drink on his lips, when a romantic voice behind him rang out: "Come, woman, and drink my wine. I have need of company and you seem much woman to these eyes." The hooker wheeled on her seat, said, "Scuse me," to Stern, and joined the one who had called out—a husky middle-aged man with much blond hair curled romantically down over his forehead and with deep lines burned in his face. He was wearing civilian clothes and talked in a bleary-eyed, outrageously romantic way, rising gallantly for the hooker and telling her, "Woman, you're a rare one and you've wisdom in your smile." When the hooker took her seat, the romantic man shouted to Stern, "Let the Jew join us, too. I'll not close our circle to the Jew." Stern's face froze at the bar, but he came over and said, "What do you mean, Jew?" And the man slapped his shoulder and said, "Let the Jew sit and take wine with us." Stern, oddly at ease, sat down with the pair, uncomfortable only because the man was talking so loud. "Your company is good, woman," the romantic man said, leaning back and drinking deeply. "Big Jew, you warm me with your presence." He called Stern "Jew" and "Big Jew" each time he spoke to him, and he called the hooker "woman," endowing her with a universal quality, and Stern felt a nice feeling of camaraderie sitting and drinking with the pair, the romantic gentleman who might have been an aging soldier of fortune and the wise and silent hooker who had been to many places and stayed with a legion of men. He felt as though he was in a small bar in Macao, among scarred people with grave crimes in their past, at the world's end now, saying only bitter, philosophical things and waiting to die. Ava Gardner a must for the film version. The romantic man, indeed, was a kind of soldier of fortune, a civilian flying instructor assigned to the Air Force. He had trained a[Pg 73] small group of Israeli pilots during the Arab-Israeli war, and he had glowing things to say of Israeli skills. "You Jews fly well, Big Jew," he said to Stern, who exulted in his words. "You fly a good plane, and my hat is off to the flying Jew. I'll drink to you, Big Jew. You do well in the sky." [Pg 72] [Pg 73] "I don't actually fly myself," Stern said, but the romantic man waved him off and said, "Big Jew, you fly a deadly plane. Drink
Prev.
Back
Top