Silver Stars (Front Lines 2)

“Take it off, take it off,” soon it’s all you can hear.

But she’s always a lady even in pantomime,

So she stops and always just in time.

They cross the length of the room toward the bar, and there is something in Louie’s size, and in the eyes and manner of the other thug, that causes even inebriated longshoremen and ladies of the night to step gingerly out of the way.

There’s a door beside the bar. The driver knocks once, hears a single gruff syllable, and opens the door wide for Rainy to step in.

It’s an office, a square room with a curtained window that probably leads to a fire escape. There’s an impressive oak desk with a vacant swing office chair behind it. One wall is covered in thumbtacked travel posters with curled edges: Naples, Sicily, Rome, but also Miami and New Orleans.

The wall to Rainy’s right is fitted with shelves, mostly empty, but some bearing stacks of newspapers and magazines. There are three books, one of which, Rainy is sure, must be the Christian Bible. An impressive engraved silver crucifix hangs from the leading edge of the top shelf.

There are two men already in the room, one small and old and gray, with a face that looks like a piece of driftwood, improbably craggy with a sagging mouth, and wearing no expression.

The other is a large, portly man in a decent brown suit. He has a round, cheerful face and the red nose of a dedicated drinker. He steps forward smiling, hand out.

“So you’re Schulterman’s kid. Well, glad to meet you, honey, your old man must be proud as hell—excuse my French—proud as a peacock.”

“Thank you, and it’s good to meet you, Mr. . . .”

“Camporeale,” he says. “It’s hard for folks to pronounce unless they grew up speaking Italian. We go with Campo, mostly, but you can call me Don Vito. That’s easier, right?”

Instinctively, Rainy lies. “Don Vito it is, then, because I don’t speak any Italian. I have no head for languages.”

She’s hoping her father has not bragged too often about his multilingual daughter. But almost certainly he would not have brought her name into his work, and in any case he works only indirectly for Camporeale.

“And what do they call you, aside from sergeant, I mean?”

“Rainy will do fine,” she says, forcing a smile. Time to be friendly: she is surrounded by gunsels.

“Rainy. I like that. Must be a story there, huh?”

“No doubt, but my parents have not shared the details.”

He laughs knowingly. “Come, sit, what are you drinking?”

“I’ll have a club soda,” she says.

“Ah, a killjoy,” Don Vito says in mock irritation. “Get her a soda. Put a straw in it. Plenty of ice. Throw in a cherry, it’ll be like a, what do they call ’em? A Shirley Temple. She’s just a kid, after all. What are you, eighteen, nineteen?”

Rainy sits in a hastily supplied wooden chair, and Don Vito settles in behind his desk. He leans forward, forearms on his desk blotter. “So. What can a humble immigrant do for the United States Army?”

“Well, sir . . . Don Vito . . . I’m only a lowly sergeant, and this is a conversation you should have with someone who has some rank.”

He winks, a move which, owing to his chubby cheeks, closes both eyes for a second. When his eyes open again the cheerfulness is gone, replaced by shrewd appraisal. A second earlier and Rainy might have mistaken him for a door-to-door salesman. But a much different animal is looking at her now from dark, porcine eyes.

“I’m allergic to people with rank. Regular beat cop? That’s no problem, I buy ’em free drinks and let ’em play some pinball. Cops with rank? You never know if they’ll be reasonable or not. Same thing in the army, I’m guessing.”

He lets the silence stretch and at last Rainy speaks. “I have no opinion on my superior officers.”

Don Vito and Louie, now

leaning against the door, both erupt in loud laughter. The gray man does not laugh.

“That was funny, Tony, you should laugh,” Don Vito says to the gray man, who still does not laugh. Then he says something in Italian—although in a dialect that to Rainy’s ear is subtly different from the standard Roman Italian she’s learned.

Still, she can translate it. Don Vito has said, “The Jew bitch thinks she’s smart.”