The apartment was cold, as the landlord was only required to provide heat between five p.m. and five in the morning. Mike had often speculated upon who paid what to whom to bring about this ordinance. “But if there were no do-gooders in the world,” Parlow said, “they wouldn’t be constrained to provide heat at all.” Which Mike knew was just a conversational gambit, as Parlow hated the blue-stockinged reformers with a passionate delight. “Their pussies, man and woman, have been stitched up from birth, and I defy the most persuasive Mick ever born to cadge a drink from them.”
“But, and I will speak under correction,” Mike said, “these same moral adventurers, whose implied hypocrisy you so rightly deplore, are they not also those who favor Prohibition?”
“Yes,” said Parlow.
“. . . Thus being immune to indictment for refusing a man a drink,” Mike said.
“I do not see it,” Parlow said.
“As they, in their rightly decried hypocrisy, would likely not only refuse to serve, but probably lack the access to spirits.”
“They have access to coin,” Parlow said, “and I have set my fantasia in a speak or restaurant, and my poor desiccated hero approaching the philanthropic table.”
“How does he recognize them, these philanthropists?”
“By their pinched and disapproving mien,” Parlow said. “By the awful though expensive cut of their clothes, proclaiming at once their superiority to earthly things, and their financial ability to so hold; by the fare before them, consisting if not of actual raw vegetables, then of some substance equally sad; by the set of the women’s noses and the effeminacy of the men.”
Mike gestured for another round.
“And, to make an end, by that thin, burnt-out bearing, proclaiming to the sentient world their English derivation and pagan lack of reverence for the Holy Mother Church.
“Let them drink in hell gazing in wonder at celestial images always denied them, of their masters, holy and temporal, and pleading for the chance to mitigate, if not their punishment, their shame, by acceptation of the Holy Sacrament, its blessed balm ever receding as they tread the road of burning pitch.
“Yes, there is balm in Gilead, its name is Revenge.”
Mike had, in fact, attended a Mass just prior to, and as a subterfuge enabling, the afternoon’s tryst with Annie Walsh.
He sat three rows behind her and to her left, in love with her piety, in love with the very head scarf which she would remove on the apartment stairs, shaking out her hair in transformation from dutiful religious virgin to lover.
Having told her father she was going to Mass, she would not consider the sin of nonattendance. The subterfuge and the unlicensed love she held, when she examined it, as merely a betrayal of her father, who, as a man, was, of course, not entitled to her utter frankness. But though she might affront, she would not lie to God.
Mike understood that the religion’s duty did not and was not intended to excuse the subsequent transgression, but that she had chosen to perform it nonetheless, as an obligation. He loved her for her ability to choose. She had chosen to be his lover and to pay the cost, and he loved her strength. He loved everything about her.
They warmed each other in the frozen apartment. After making love she hurried, shivering, from the bed. She took his heavy overcoat from the hook on the back of the door, and put it on.
“Where are you going?” he said.
“Make tea,” she said.
She hugged the overcoat around her and ran on tiptoe into the alcove that was his kitchen. She took the matchbox, shook it, and found it empty.
Mike opened the bedside table drawer and took out a book of matches, and a pack of cigarettes. She came back toward the bed for the match.
She glanced down into the open drawer and looked quizzically at Mike. He closed the drawer, sparing her the sight of the Luger. She waited for Mike to answer her unasked question. He lit the cigarette and looked away.
She took the book of matches, walked back to the stove, struck a match, and lit the rear burner. Shook the teakettle, and, satisfied, set it over the flame.
She crouched down by the stove door, opened the overcoat, and flapped the sides to bring the heat close.
The stove was lit and its door open, as in any of the apartments occupied during the day; for though the city allowed the landlords to shut down the furnace, they were prohibited from restricting the flow of gas, and the apartments, in the winter months, stank of the gas and of the stove.
She rubbed her hands, and turned back toward the bed to grin. “No one,” he thought, “has ever seen anything so lovely.”
He raised himself against the headboard, and gathered the bedclothes tight around him. He sat on the edge of the bed, looking at her.
He saw her, smiling, start to speak, and then she cocked her head, slightly, toward the door. Mike was looking at her when the man kicked the door in.
He was a large man in a heavy coat, holding a large revolver. Mike remembered later that he brought the winter in with him, in that back-of-the-nose smell of weeks below zero, and the Lake, and the outdoors, and that the man smelled of smoke.
“Laborers have that smell,” Mike thought. “Hunters, and vagrants. It’s the soldier smell, but it’s not. No, perhaps it is. The Germans had it.”
He had turned to the door. His mind tried to frame the sentence which would explain to her father and her brother and/or their emissary that all would be well, that he was sorry he had taken her virginity, but that they were going to be married, that he had asked to go to her people, but she had said to wait.
The first shot hit the girl as she stood and turned to him.
He thought, “No. She’ll be burned, she’ll fall on the stove.”
He rose to attack the killer, to explain that it wasn’t her fault. To stop him.
The man buttstroked him with the heavy revolver, and Mike went down unconscious.