“Sure. But I won’t have to send it.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t think you will now. But there’s some pictures and stuff they’ll like to have. He’s got a nice wife. Want to see her picture?”
He took it out of his pocket. It was inside his identity book.
It showed a pretty, dark girl standing by a rowboat on the shore of a lake.
“Up in the Catskills,” said Al. “Yeah. He’s got a nice wife. She’s a Jewish girl. Yes,” he said. “Don’t let me get wet again. So long, kid. Take it easy. I tell you truly I feel O.K. now. And I didn’t feel good when I came out this afternoon.”
“Let me walk down.”
“No. You might have trouble coming back through the Plaza de Espana. Some of those guys are nervous at night. Good night. See you tomorrow night.”
“That’s the way to talk.”
Upstairs in the room above mine, Manolita and the Englishman were making quite a lot of noise. So she evidently hadn’t been arrested.
“That’s right. That’s the way to talk,” Al said. “Takes you sometimes three or four hours to get so you can do it though.”
He’d put the leather helmet on now with the raised padded ridge and his face looked dark and I noticed the dark hollows under his eyes.
“See you tomorrow night at Chicote’s,” I said.
“That’s right,” he said, and wouldn’t look me in the eye. “See you tomorrow night at Chicote’s.”
“What time?”
“Listen, that’s enough,” he said. “Tomorrow night at Chicote’s. We don’t have to go into the time.” And he went out.
If you hadn’t known him pretty well and if you hadn’t seen the terrain where he was going to attack tomorrow, you would have thought he was very angry about something. I guess somewhere inside of himself he was angry, very angry. You get angry about a lot of things and you, yourself, dying uselessly is one of them. But then I guess angry is about the best way that you can be when you attack.
The End
