Golden Trap by Hugh Pentecost Read Free Book Online

rocks. He didn’t belt it down in one gulp, but he didn’t sip it either.
    “I know you’re not doing this for me,” he said “Pierre’s people have always gone all out for him.”
    “You’re a story,” I said. “I’m glad to have you here so I can keep on top of it.”
    His hands weren’t quite steady as he lit a cigarette. “Thanks for not pretending to feel sorry for me,” he said. He took another swallow of his drink. “Were you in the war?”
    “Korea,” I said.
    “There’s a difference between that and the situation I’m in,” he said. “In a war you know who the enemy is. You know there may be a bullet somewhere with your name on it. The idea scares the hell out of you, but you understand it, and the odds are in your favor. Let’s say only one in ten men gets killed. The odds in my favor today are about zero, in spite of Pierre’s promises of help. And I don’t know who the enemy is. It could even be you.”
    “It isn’t,” I said, trying to make my smile ingratiating.
    “That’s what the enemy would say too,” he said, and held out his empty glass to me.
    I poured him another drink, not quite so stiff. I had an idea he was a gent who could hold his liquor, but Lieutenant Hardy would give him a hard time if he thought he was loaded. He held the glass up to the light, but he didn’t drink.
    “Marilyn spoke kindly of me?” he asked.
    “She spoke like a woman in love,” I said.
    “God help her,” he said.
    “Were you just using her, that time in Paris, as a hiding place?” I asked.
    “Only the first few days,” he said—”But that doesn’t matter, Mark.” He used my first name as though we were old friends. “She mustn’t be allowed to imagine that it can start all over. She can only be hurt again.”
    “Almost anything would be easier to take than the hurt of rejection,” I said.
    “Worse than that is to hope for something that can’t happen,” he said.
    “You don’t care anything for her now?”
    He turned his head from side to side like a man in pain. “I can’t feel anything now for anyone but myself. Isn’t that a hell of a thing? For twenty-five years, when every day could so easily be the last one in my life, I cared for other people. I could be concerned about them, feel for them. I could love. And now, when I’m no longer fighting for a cause, for my country, I can’t feel anything except a kind of outrage that I couldn’t end the game when I chose to. Outrage—and fear because I’m too tired to fight and too tired to run. I don’t know why living is so precious to me, without reason to live, without love, without friends. But God damn it, it is! I’m sorry about Marilyn. Five years ago I loved her. Now I can’t make myself feel anything but concern for myself.” He shook his head again, as if he couldn’t really understand it himself. “In the old days there were little spaces of time in which you tried to extract all there was out of living. An hour, in which you could eat the best dinner in the best restaurant and savor every bite of it; a night in which you could make love without obligation or commitment because there was no dependable future, only the moment. There was time, once, to fall deeply and eternally in love.”
    “With Marilyn?”
    “No!” his voice was harsh. “Long before that.”
    You visit someone who’s sick and they talk and talk, about their pain, about their business worries, or their family, and you let them go on, interested or not, because you sense it’s important to the process of getting well. I had the feeling all kinds of things were bottled up in this man who had lived so dangerously for so long and was being tortured now by a new kind of fear. I suspected there had been no one he could talk to for a long time; no one he dared talk to. I was a stranger, but I was what he had called one of “Pierre’s people,” and the closest thing to someone he could accept as the opposite to “enemy.”
    “It was a