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Was that what Muldoon had had in mind? He could have mentioned it in front of Szymanski; the captain didn’t mind taking a drink now and then, or even more often than that.
Then Mutt spotted the line of guys in grimy olive drab snaking their way down a narrow alley. He’d seen-hell, he’d stood in-lines like that in France. “They got themselves a whorehouse goin’,” he said.
“You betcha they do,” Muldoon agreed with a broad grin. “It ain’t like I need to get my ashes hauled like I did when I was over in France, but hell, it ain’t like I’m dead, neither. I figure after we got our boys settled in at the hotel, maybe you an’ me-” He hesitated. “Might be they got a special house for officers. The Frenchies, they done that Over There.”
“Yeah, I know. I remember,” Mutt said. “But I doubt it, though. Hell, I didn’t figure they’d set up a house a-tall. Chaplains woulda given ’em holy hell if they’d tried it back in 1918.”
“Times have changed, Lieutenant,” Muldoon said.
“Yeah, a whole bunch of different ways,” Daniels agreed. “I was thinkin’ about that my own self, not so long ago.”
Captain Szymanski’s was not the only company billeted at the Gifford Hotel. Along with the beds, there were mattresses and piles of blankets on the floor, to squeeze in as many men as possible. That was fine, unless the Lizards scored a direct hit on the place. If they did, the Gifford would turn into a king-sized tomb.
When things were going smoothly there, Mutt and Muldoon slid outside and went back to Fountain Square. Muldoon gave Daniels a sidelong look. “Don’t it bother you none to have all these horny kids watch you gettin’ in line with ’em, Lieutenant?” he asked slyly. “You’re an officer now, after all.”
“Hell, no,” Mutt answered. “No way now they can figure I ain’t got any balls.” Muldoon stared at him, then broke up. He started to give Mutt a shot in the ribs with an elbow, but thought better of it before he made contact. As he’d said, even in a brothel line an officer was an officer.
The line advanced steadily. Mutt figured the hookers, however many there were, would be moving the dogfaces through as fast as they could, both to make more money and to give themselves more breathers, however brief, between customers.
He wondered if there’d be MPs inside the place. There weren’t, which probably meant it wasn’t quite official, just winked at. He didn’t care. As his foot hit the bottom of the stairway that led up to the girls, he noticed nobody was coming downstairs. They had a back exit, then. He nodded. Whether this crib was official or not, it was certainly efficient.
At the top of the stairs sat a tough-looking woman with a cash box-and a.45, presumably to keep the wages of sin from being redistributed. “Fifty bucks,” she told Mutt. He’d heard her say that a dozen times already, all with the exact same intonation; she might have been a broken record. He dug in his hip pocket and peeled greenbacks off a roll. Like a lot of guys, he had a pretty good wad of cash. When you were up in the front lines, you couldn’t do much spending.
A big blond GI who didn’t look a day over seventeen came out of one of the doors down the hall and headed, sure enough, toward a back stairway. “Go on,” the madam told Mutt. “That’s Number 4, ain’t it? Suzie’s in there now.”
Anyway, I know whose sloppy seconds I’m gettin’,Mutt thought as he walked toward the door. The kid hadn’t looked like somebody with VD, but what did that prove? Not much, and who could guess who’d been in there before him, or before that guy, or before the fellow ahead ofhim?
The door did have a tarnished brass 4 on it. Daniels knocked. Inside, a woman started laughing. “Come on in,” she said. “It sure as hell ain’t locked.”
“Suzie?” Mutt said as he went into the room. The girl, dressed in a worn satin wrap, sat on the edge of the bed. She was about thirty, with short brown hair and a lot of eye makeup but no lipstick. She looked tired and bored, but not particularly mean. That relieved Mutt; some of the whores he’d met had hated men so much, he never could figure out why they’d lie down with them in the first place.
She sized him up the same way he did her. After a couple of seconds, she nodded and tried a smile on for size. “Hello, Pops,” she said, not unkindly. “You know, maybe only one guy in four or five bothers with my name. You ready?” She pointed to a basin and a bar of soap. “Why don’t you wash yourself off first?”
It was a polite order, but an order just the same. Mutt didn’t mind. Suzie didn’t know him from Adam, either. While he was tending to it, she shrugged the wrap off her shoulders. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath it. She wasn’t a Vargas girl or anything, but she wasn’t bad. She lay back on the narrow mattress while Mutt dried himself off and got out of the rest of his clothes.
He couldn’t tell if the moans she made while he was riding her were genuine or professional, which meant odds were good they were professional. She had hellacious hip action, but then she’d naturally try to bring him off in a hurry. He would have come pretty damn quick even if she’d just lain there like a dead fish; he’d been without for a long time.
As soon as he was done, he rolled off her, got up, and went over to the basin to soap himself off again. He pissed in the chamber pot by the bed, too.Flush the pipes, he thought. “You don’t take chances, do you, Pops?” Suzie said. That could have come out nasty, but it didn’t; it sounded more as if she approved of him for knowing what he was doing.
“Not a whole bunch, anyways,” he answered, reaching for his skivvies. If he hadn’t taken any chances, he wouldn’t have gone in there with her in the first place. But since he had, he didn’t want to pay any price except the one from his bankroll.
Suzie sat up. Her breasts, tipped with large, pale nipples, bobbed as she reached for the wrap. “That Rita out there, she keeps most of what you give her, the cheap bitch,” she said, her voice calculatedly casual. “Twenty for me sure would come in handy.”
“I’ve heard that song before,” Mutt said, and the hooker laughed, altogether unembarrassed. He gave her ten bucks even if he had heard the tune; she’d been pretty good, and friendlier than she had to be in an assembly-line operation like this. She grinned and stuck the bill under the mattress.
Mutt had just set his hand on the doorknob when a horrible racket started outside: men shouting and cursing and bellowing, “No!” “What the hell’s goin’ on?” Mutt said. The question wasn’t rhetorical; it didn’t sound like any brawl he’d ever heard.
Through the shouts came the sound of a woman weeping as if her heart would break. “My God,” Suzie said quietly. Mutt looked back toward her.
She was crossing herself. As if to explain, she went on, “That’s Rita. I didn’t think Rita would cry if you murdered whatever family she’s got right in front of her face.”
Fists pounded, not on the door but against the wall. Mutt went out into the hallway. GIs were sobbing unashamed, tears cutting winding clean tracks through the dirt on their faces. At the cash box, Rita had her head buried in her arms. “What the hell is going on?” Mutt repeated.
The madam looked up at him. Her face was ravaged, ancient. “He’s dead,” she said. “Somebody just brought news he’s dead.”
By the way she said it, she might have been talking about her own father. But if she had been, none of the dogfaces would have given a damn. All they were here for was a fast fuck, same as Mutt. “Who’s dead?” he asked.
“The President,” Rita answered, at the same time as a corporal choked out, “FDR.” Mutt felt as if he’d been kicked in the belly. He gaped for a moment, his mouth falling open like a bluegill’s out of water. Then, to his helpless horror, he started bawling like everybody else.
“Iosef Vissarionovich, there is no reason to think the change in political leadership in the United States will necessarily bring on a change in American policy or in the continuation of the war against the Lizards,” Vyacheslav Molotov said.
“Necessarily.” Iosef Stalin spoke the word in a nasty, mocking singsong voice. “This is a fancy way to say you haven’t the faintest idea what will happen next as far as the United States is concerned.”
Molotov scribbled something on the pad he held in his lap. To Stalin, it would look as if he was taking notes. Actually, he was giving himself a chance to think. The trouble was, the General Secretary was right. The man who would have succeeded Franklin D. Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, was dead, killed in the Lizards’ nuclear bombing of Seattle. The Foreign Commissariat was, however, quite familiar with Cordell Hull, the new President of the United States.
