He nodded toward them.
“I did more with her than follow her around like a lovesick calf,” Jimmy said.
Marjie turned to see what his nod was pointing out.
When she turned to look at him, her face showed that she had taken his meaning.
“And there’s more you don’t know about me,” he proclaimed. “Worse than that.”
“What could be worse than that?”
“You really want me to tell you?”
Her reply to that was nonverbal.
She struck his face. Not with an open hand, a slap, against his cheek—but with her fist balled. She hit him square in the nose, with sufficient force to both daze him and cause his eyes to water.
When he could see again, he saw that his right hand—which in a reflex action he had brought to his face—was bloody.
And when he looked away from his hand, he saw that Marjie was gone.
He looked out the door but couldn’t see her.
He fished out his handkerchief—with some difficulty, as his bloody hand was at his face and he had to use his unbloodied left to get to his right hip pocket—and held it against his nose, and leaned against the wall just inside the door.
He had been there about five minutes, long enough to decide that, all things considered, a bloody nose was a fair price to pay for being able to end the business with Marjie—and then to wonder who the hell had taught her to punch as she had.
He was about to push himself off the wall, find a men’s room, wash off the blood, and return to help Niedermeyer and the others with the documents he’d brought from Kloster Grünau when Cletus Frade came through the door.
Oh, God! Marjie was probably crying, and he saw her, and now he’s come to settle with me for whatever I did to make his baby sister cry!
“Jes
us Christ!” Frade exclaimed when he saw the bloody handkerchief, then asked, sarcastically, “What did you do, walk into a door?”
Jimmy decided that that seemed an obviously better thing to confess to than the truth.
“That’s exactly what I did,” Jimmy said, pointing at the door.
“You have to be careful, Jimmy. You can really hurt yourself that way. You sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine. A little bloody, but . . . What’s up?”
“I’m going to take von und zu A to the airport and shoot some touch-and-gos in the Lodestar. I thought you might want to come along.”
Who the hell is von und zu A?
Oh . . . the guy who used to fly transports here from Germany.
Oberstleutnant Dieter von und zu Aschenburg.
“Why?”
“Why are we going to shoot touch-and-gos, or why am I asking you along?”
“Both.”
“We may need von und zu A to fly down south. He’s got a lot of experience in flying in Arctic—Antarctic—conditions like that, and I have zero such experience.”