The Return: A Novel by Michael Gruber Read Free Book Online

laughed out of the dark hole of her mouth, the montagnards and the other men in the bar all thought it was hilarious. Marder wanted to know what the joke was but was too embarrassed to inquire. One of the men with him caught the vibe, pulled at his arm. Maybe we shouldn’t …
    But Marder walked in boldly, went to the bar, held up three fingers, said “Bir khap,” and the woman, covering her mouth against the giggles, brought forth three bottles of Singha. As Marder drank his beer, his gaze kept turning back to the American. Without being loud or boisterous, the man was the center of the room’s attention. The bar girls vied for a word; the three montagnards clearly regarded him as the sun around which they orbited. Marder had never seen anyone like that close up before, but he’d read about such men, born leaders, natural warriors, not at all like his own officers, who were more like petty bureaucrats. He’d been fascinated by Lawrence of Arabia in the movie: here was another in real life.
    After a period of sneaking looks, Marder found the American looking back. Blue eyes, but with the flat, uninformative gaze of the tribesmen who were his companions; uninterested, hostile, but only mildly, as if to say Marder was not significant enough for serious hostility. Marder felt his face flush, and he turned back to the quiet nervous chatter of his companions and his beer. Finishing it quickly, he had little trouble convincing the other airmen to seek out a more welcoming venue.
    *   *   *
    In the biker bar, the only food seemed to be packaged bacon rinds, bar nuts, and the contents of large glass vats filled with murky liquid, in which floated pickled eggs and pigs’ feet. Skelly, meanwhile, was taking in all his calories via Jax beers and shots of Jim Beam. Marder sucked at the lip of a longneck and waited for the inevitable. Half a dozen of the bikers were in the back, playing pool, and ten or so were at the bar or at tables. They were ignoring the newcomers but also watching them, looking for an opportunity. On the neighboring stool, a big man in a studded denim vest kept jostling Marder every couple of minutes. He imagined a similar thing was going on on the other side of Skelly, delivered by a bushy-haired big-belly who had an SS skull tattoed on the back of his neck. It was not going to be hard to initiate proceedings.
    “Madam, what is that flag there? What does it signify?”
    This was Skelly, pointing at the Confederate banner, speaking loud and in the cultured tones of an eastern preppy, which, remarkably, he had actually once been.
    “It’s a rebel flag,” said the woman after a scrutinizing pause. The place quieted down, waiting. The click of pool balls stopped; people started to drift in from the back, so there was a substantial audience for Skelly’s peroration.
    Marder took a hundred-dollar bill from his pocket and stuck it, folded, under his beer bottle and eased himself away from the bar.
    Skelly evinced curiosity as to why a respectable saloon would display the symbol of an atrocious treason, a symbol, moreover, of the right of rich guys to fuck helpless slave women, many of whom were whiter than the people in this bar, and to sell the daughters thus produced to whorehouses, but perhaps only after first encouraging their sons to fuck their half sisters. Yes, long may it wave, the glorious symbol of the right of sister-fucking by rich men and the fact that poor assholes could be deluded into fighting for that right, and in his opinion Bobbie Lee and every fucking treasonous rebel officer over the rank of major should’ve been hanged from the highest—
    Mr. SS Skull swung the first punch. Marder had seen Skelly in operation many times and was always amazed at how fast the man still was, still a perfect machine of harm. Skelly time ran just a little faster than the time of everyone else and, up to a certain point, alcohol didn’t seem to slow him at all.
    The punch landed on air, because Skelly