His mouth was dry with a consuming thirst and he got up in the darkness for water, only to remember there was none. Swearing, he climbed back into bed.
Irma laughed at him with unconcealed satisfaction.
“Now,” she said boastfully, “am I nineteen?”
3
HE AWOKE with the sun shining on his face, spilling through the open window he had raised the night before. The room was quiet and unmoving, a large and clean room in sharp contrast to that other squalid cell in which he had awakened the previous day. After a few moments the quiet and unmoving street below the window came to his attention, and he remembered where he was and what had happened to him. Nothing had happened to him — that was the surprising thing. He lived. He didn't move, didn't get up and rush to the window to see if the city had changed itself overnight, to see if the dead had returned to life and were moving about the streets in normal fashion. There would be no magical change, no overnight erasing of the nightmare that had killed a city. Yesterday and last night were too real, too much like those towns in Italy and France. This city was gone. His immediate concern was to find out how many others had died with it, how many others had fallen under enemy bombs.
That, and get back to the army.
Meanwhile, what would he do with the girl? Take her along and turn her over to the Red Cross — or walk out on her, leave her here in the city where she lived? He turned his inquiring eyes toward the other bed and found it empty.
Gary sat up, startled. Had she left him?
He stepped out of bed and padded across the rug in his bare feet, to pause before the bureau. The flashlight was still there but the stolen jewelry was gone. Turning, he quickly crossed the room to the outer door, tugged at the knob and found it locked. The key was not there. The girl had left him and locked the door from the outside, taking her loot with her. He stood at the door, thinking of her.
Nineteen… and she could prove it. Had proved it. He looked back at her rumpled bed and said aloud, “Hell of a note!” And then he went into the bathroom.