As Time Goes By by Michael Walsh

Author:Michael Walsh [WALSH, MICHAEL]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC021000
ISBN: 9780446549714
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2008-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

He knew what he promised Ilsa, and he cared. But not that much, and not right now.

Ilsa was in Prague. He was in London. A body of water and half of a bottle of Jack Daniel's lay between them, although not for long. She never had to know about it. Besides, he needed all the help he could get.

He drank straight from the bottle; this was no time to stand on ceremony. Demon rum had always helped him think before. After everything that had happened, after the worst that could happen had happened, it had still been his friend. It had protected him from the Italian bullets in Ethiopia, had shielded him from the gunfire of the Nationalists at the Ebro River, when victory had seemed so close and then evaporated so quickly, and had given him the courage to fight on, all the way to the end, when even the bottle could tell the difference between victory and defeat, if he still couldn't.

Rick the liberal. Rick the idealist. Rick the freedom fighter: what a laugh. Couldn't they tell the difference between a man on a mission and a man on a suicide mission? In Ethiopia he had thought death would be simple. There was a war on; all you had to do was wander out on the killing ground and wait for the one with your name on it to show up. Selassie's battle against the Italians had seemed hopeless, which suited Rick just fine; but the Africans had surprised everybody by holding off Mussolini for almost eight months. From late November 1935, when he washed up in Addis Ababa because it was the most remote place he could think of on such short notice, until May 1936, when the new Roman legions had occupied the country, he had fought as best he could—not expecting to win, hoping somehow not to lose, but not caring much either way, and always ready to take a bullet. Just as long as he could take out a few Italians, especially the ones who reminded him of Salucci. They all reminded him of Salucci.

He got to Spain three months later, just in time for the civil war. He hadn't intended it that way, but his bad luck seemed to be following him around. The Spanish Civil War taught him a few things. The first thing it taught him was that he was glad he wasn't around for the American Civil War. Practically overnight, brother fought brother, father fought son, and everybody killed everybody in the most horribly imaginable way.

He didn't like to think about what he'd seen in Spain. Hemingway had written a whole novel about it, about the place where futility married brutality and their offspring was called the International Brigade. Hemingway had made the war sound heroic, but what did a writer know? Rick had seen the Internationals used for cannon fodder, chewed up and spat out by Hitler's Condor Legion and the Italian Blackshirts, and there was nothing heroic about it.

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