Dark Tunnel by Ross MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page A

bomber circled, learning to understand cities from the air.
    For a month Ruth and I were together almost every day. We walked in the Englischer Garten and went to the opera. We took a bus to Garmisch-Partenkirchen and skied in the mountains. We went riding along the Isar on rented horses, and I learned how female centaurs carry themselves. I was in love and young enough to forget, or almost forget, about Hitler and the certainty of war, but I don’t think she ever forgot. There was always a secret strain in her face as if she was carrying a weight hidden under her clothes.
    By the second week I was urging her to marry me and come to America. She wouldn’t leave Germany. By the fourth week I was desperate. She hated the Nazis, yet she wouldn’t leave Germany and to me there was no sense in it.
    On the last day of the last week we were sitting together in her apartment, and I said for the twentieth time, “Marry me and come to America.”
    “Marry me and stay in Germany,” she mocked me.
    “It isn’t the same. I have a living to make. My life is in America.”
    “My life is in Germany. The people are angry and wild, they’ve let the nightmares out of the inside of their minds. I must stay here because I am not insane. Is that egotistical of me, Bob?”
    “It’s the truth,” I said, “but sane people aren’t going to be happy in Germany. You’re not happy now.”
    “What regard Americans have for happiness. I have no wish to be happy. Nobody is happy. I wish to stay where I’m needed.”
    “What can you do for Germany?” The question sounded cruder than I intended.
    Her throat and mouth were still as marble. I thought if the Winged Victory of Samothrace had a head it would be her head, serenely proud and brave. “I can remain myself,” she said.
    With the abstract part of my mind I couldn’t argue against her, but the rest of me was twenty-three and wanted to carry her out of the country on a white charger. I stood up and put out my hands for hers and pulled her up to me. When I kissed her, she kissed me back but the firm body against me did not yield. There was an integrity of will in her that could not give in, and even in passion she seemed remote, though her lips were soft and opened under my kiss and her hand was cool on the nape of my neck.
    I could think of no more arguments and said, “I suppose it’s time we were going to Frau Wanger’s.”
    A friend of Ruth’s who lived in a flat near hers had invited her to tea and asked her to bring her American, me. I was flattered by Frau Wanger’s invitation because she lived by herself with a dachshund and her small daughter and had very little to do with men. She was a political widow. Like some other decent German women she had left her husband when he turned Nazi, and had lived since by tutoring foreigners in German.
    By the time Ruth and I reached her flat the little drawing-room was crowded. When I was introduced, there was a good deal of heel-clicking and bowing from the waist, but there was no satanic flicker in the eyes, and neither insane anger nor South German sentimentality in the cool tones of the conversation. Franz was there and gave me a dazzling smile. Several of the other men were like him, younger-looking than their eyes and quick-moving when they moved. The women looked intellectual and tough as if they had laid aside their sex. Several of the names were Jewish. Frau Wanger’s friends were not Nazis.
    On the contrary. While we were drinking our tea, there was a series of scrabbling taps on the door of the apartment. The dachshund squealed and jumped into Frau Wanger’s lap, and Ruth got up and opened the door. A heavy, grey-haired man staggered in, one side of his face glistening with blood from a gash over the eye.
    “Dr. Wiener, you are hurt!” Ruth exclaimed.
    There was complete silence in the room and we could hear the old man’s quick breathing. He opened his mouth to speak but his jaw shook and he could not. Some drops of