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“Because it’s bigger?”

Stick laughs. “That’d probably be enough of a reason for the generals,” he admits.

“We’ll know when we know,” Jillion offers in a soft, almost-inaudible voice.

“But when?” Tilo cries in exaggerated despair, arms thrown wide and nearly sweeping an overflowing tin can ashtray onto the floor.

“You in a hurry?” Cat asks him.

“I don’t like not knowing. It gets on my nerves. Back and forth, scuttlebutt and more scuttlebutt. Let’s just get this war over with!”

“I’m happy to let someone else win it,” Rio says. “I’m happy just to sit here in the desert. I can have my folks send me some magazines. Maybe I’ll take up knitting.”

“Right,” Jack says. “Knitting.”

He can’t even imagine me as I am back home. He’s never even met that Rio. He doesn’t know me. Not me.

And that’s when a half dozen exceedingly drunk Goums come bursting in, loud and aggressive.

The Goums are Berbers, French colonial troops now supporting the Allies. They are Muslim, so they are not allowed to drink, but like the many Baptists equally forbidden to drink, they have suspended some rules temporarily. They are dark-skinned, fantastically bearded, dressed in loosely belted, open-front robes of sorts, like bathrobes, with wide vertical stripes of tan and sun-bleached burgundy. They wear last-war French helmets or white cloth head wrappings and carry what appear to be daggers very much like the one Rio purchased.

“I thought towel-heads didn’t drink,” Tilo says. It is unlikely that any of the Goums speak enough English to understand his words, but they see the challenge in his eyes and then see that he is in company with women.

One of the Goums shoves Tilo, knocking him back against Rio. Stick moves quickly in front of Tilo, holding up his hands, palms out, and speaking in a soothing voice.

The Goum laughs, takes a step back, grins, and launches himself forward.

And the bar fight begins.

The first bar fight of the night.

5

RAINY SCHULTERMAN—NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK, USA

Rainy Schulterman is wearing a dress in the bathroom. It is a perfectly nice dress, a young woman’s dress, a navy-blue dress with a white collar. She puts it on, twists the collar into place, and performs the necessary gymnastics to raise the zipper from her lower back to her neck. Then she resets the collar, runs smoothing hands down the front of the garment, and stares at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. She moves this way and that, trying to see it from as many angles as possible, a little dance that causes her to brush against her mother’s brassieres, hanging from the shower curtain pole.

She last wore this dress to attend her cousin’s bar mitzvah. It is her good dress, the only thing she can wear to a place like the Stork Club.

“No,” Rainy says.

She considers, face solemn, and decides to try the look with her hair down. She pulls a few strategic hairpins and her black hair explodes out into its natural bristle brush.

“No.”

Her uniform hangs neatly from the hook on the back of the door, and in five minutes she is in her Class-A’s, complete with shiny men’s shoes and bright brass buttons. Three gold chevrons adorn each shoulder.

She sighs with resignation and begins pinning her mad tumbleweed of hair back into place. Finally she settles her service cap, steadying it with a hairpin as well.

Rainy steps out of the bathroom. Her mother is waiting.

Her mother says nothing—nothing in actual words—but with sighs, rolled eyes, a mouth opened as if in shock, and with gestures of shoulders and hands, manages to convey her weary disappointment.

“I was in uniform when he met me,” Rainy says defensively.

“Oy.”

“Mother.”