“Iselin is Raymond’s stepfather,” Marco told her. “He sits right there in his office on the Hill. He’s the most accessible, available senator we have, you know, because most of our newspapers are published right in his office nowadays. Senator Iselin is really fond of Raymond because Johnny is a terrific salesman. Raymond has no use for him, and a lack of buyer feeling about the product has always been a tremendous challenge to a salesman. All I needed to do was to call Johnny, tell him Raymond sent me, be shown right into his office, lock the door, and shoot him through the head. Or maybe beat him to death with a steel chair.” Marco was talking quietly, through his teeth. He thought about his lost opportunity for a moment.

“Did you know Raymond was a Medal of Honor man, Rosie?” he asked almost rhetorically. She shook her gray-white head without answering. “I wish I could explain to you what that means. But I’d have to find a way to send you back to grow up on Army posts and put you through the Academy and find you a couple of wars and a taste for Georgie Patton and Caesar’s Commentaries and Blücher and Ney and Moltke, but thank God we can’t do any of that. Just believe it because I say it, that a Medal of Honor man is the best man any soldier can think of because he has achieved the most of what every soldier was meant to do. Anyway, after Raymond got the medal, I began to have nightmares. They were pretty bad. I had come to the worst of them when I found you, thank God. The nightmares were always the same for five years and they took a lot of trouble to suggest that Raymond had not won the medal rightfully after I had sworn he had won it and the men of my patrol had sworn to it. In the end, the dreams have convinced me that we were wrong. I am sure now that the Russians wanted Raymond to have the medal so he got it. I don’t know why. Maybe, if I’m lucky, I never will know why. But I’m an officer trained in intelligence work. I filled a notebook with details about furniture and clothing and complexions and speech defects and floor coverings. I talked everything over with Raymond. He got the idea that I should request a public investigation so that the enemy, at the very least, would think we knew more than we knew. That idea ended this afternoon with a lieutenant general putting a bullet into his head because it was the only possible thing he could have done to make Iselin hear the Army’s protest against what Iselin had done to us. I knew that general. He liked living and he had a big time at it but he saw that protest as being an important Army job and he had been trained to accept responsibility.” Marco’s voice got bleak. “So I swear on you, on my Eugénie Rose, that the day will come that I, Marco, will make Senator John Iselin pay for that, and if he has to be killed, and I can’t kill him, I’ll have someone kill him for me.” He closed his eyes for a few beats. “We got any beer in the house?” he asked her.

She got some. She drank plain warm gin.

Marco drank a can of the beer before he spoke again. “Anyway I was stopped,” he said at last. “Before he shot himself the general ordered me to forget the court-martial, so that is that. I’m frozen with my terrible dreams inside of a big cake of ice and I’ll never get out.”

“You’ll get out.”

“No.”

“Yes you will.”

“How?”

“Do you remember that thing I told you which no girl in her right mind would ever tell a man she had gone limp over, about how I called up the man I was engaged to and resigned from the whole idea because you happened to smell so crazy?”

“I thought you just said that to get me to kiss you.”

“His name was Lou Amjac and you happen to be right.

“You know, you weren’t attracted to me irrevocably only because I smell this way. Don’t forget I cried like a little, lost tyke the instant I looked at you. Stuff like that is a steam roller for a potential mother.”

“Have you ever done that with another woman? The smell you can’t help, but I don’t think I could stand sharing your sniveling with another woman.”

“Never mind. That’s the kind of stuff that’ll come out after we’re married. What about Lou Amjac?”

“He’s an FBI agent. They are good at their work. I have a whole intuitive thing about how they can help you with that notebook—The Gallant Major’s Gypsy Dream Book.”

“I’m Army Intelligence, baby. We don’t take our laundry to the FBI. Macy’s definitely does not tell Gimbel’s.”

“The way you told it to me, you were Army Intelligence. If the FBI can prove you have something worth going on with, then your side will take you back and you can run the whole thing down yourself.”

“Jesus.”

“Isn’t it worth trying?”

“Well, yeah, but still, I don’t see Lou Amjac going out of his way to help me. After all, you were his girl.”

“He might not be pleasant about it, that’s true, but he’s an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and if you’ve got something in his line, you’re not going to be able to shake him.”

Amjac wasn’t entirely pleasant about Marco. In fact, he was particularly surly. Amjac was a skinny man with watery eyes and when Marco saw them for the first time he had a hot flash of jealousy go through him, feeling that maybe Eugénie Rose was nearsighted and that perhaps when she had first seen this guy she had thought he was crying. Amjac was tall. He had florid skin and sandy hair, freckles all over the backs of his hands, and looked as though he had a tendency to boils on the back of his neck. His hair was fine lanugo and he couldn’t have grown a mustache if he had stayed in bed for a year. He had a jaw like a crocodile and as he sat in Rosie’s small, warm, golden-draped room, which had horrible, large cabbage roses woven into the carpets and ancient northern European brewery posters on all walls, separated by mountain goat heads mounted on stained ash, he looked as though he would be happy to be invited to bite Marco’s right arm off.

When he entered the apartment and had stood staring down, repelled, at Marco, Eugénie Rose had said serenely, “This is Bonny Benny Marco, the chap I was telling you about, Lou. Benny boy, this here is a typical, old-time shamus right out of Black Mask Magazine name of Lou Amjac.”

“Did you bring me all the way over here in the rain just to meet this?” Amjac inquired.

“Is it raining? Yes, I did.”

“What am I supposed to do? Arrest him for impersonating an officer?”

Marco figured it would be better just to let the two old friends chat together.

“Would you like a nice plebeian rye highball, Lou?”

“Plebeian? Your friend is drinking beer right out of the can.”

“Wow, you FBI guys don’t miss a trick, do you?” Eugénie Rose said. “Do you want a rye highball or don’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, what?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“That’s better. Give me your coat. How is your elbow with the weather changing like this? Now sit down. No. Walk with me to the kitchen whilst I decant. Did your mother get back from Montreal?”

Amjac took off his coat.

“You know, I think if I was right-handed I would have had to quit the Bureau, Rose. I could hardly bend my elbow this afternoon, believe it or not. This Dr. Weiler—you met Abe Weiler, the specialist, didn’t you, Rose?—he may be a good man at certain things—you know what I mean—but I don’t think he even knows where to grope when it comes to arthritis.” He followed her into the tiny kitchen and Marco watched them go, goggle-eyed. “My mother decided to stay over another week,” he could hear Amjac say. “They sell very strong ale up there and since my sister’s husband won’t be home from the road until Monday, why not?”

“Of course, why not?” Rosie’s voice said. “Just make sure she’s out before he’s home, is all. He’d love to punch her right on her sweet little old-lady nose, he told me.”

“Aaaah, that’s a lot of talk,” Amjac said petulantly. “Thanks.” He accepted the stiff highball.