Hamilton, Donald - Novel 01 by Date, Darkness (v1.1) Page A

would
it?"
          "It would," Branch said. He saw
his long dark face sharp and irritable in the bar mirror, and it seemed to him
that he was being silly and he paid the barman and picked up his drink and
turned.
          "Yes, I'm Branch," he said.
          "My name's Haskell, Lieutenant,"
the stout man said holding out his hand. "Frank Haskell,
from Evanston."
          Branch shook the hand. "I'm from
Chicago, myself," he said.
          "Yes," said the stout man.
"Mr. Sellers told me."
          "Oh?"
          "How about lunch,
Lieutenant? They told me you'd gone out early and I figured I'd
wait...."
          "Sure," said Branch. "Sure.
Let's eat."
          They carried their drinks across the
corridor to the dining room table by one of the fluted white wooden columns
that ran the length of the center of the room.
          "A lot of phony atmosphere," the
stout man said as they sat down. "And do they charge you for it!"
          Branch found himself suddenly quite happy, and it was like coming home. They called you Lieutenant
assiduously and they gave you cigars and there was sometimes a bottle produced
from a bottom drawer, and they asked you where you came from and how you liked
the Navy, and then, having given you the old line, the old salesmanship, the
old oil, rising abruptly as if recalling that they were busy men, they would
clap you on the shoulder. Well, you'll find everything all right, they would
say confidently, I'm sure you'll find everything all right, Lieutenant, haha , and Mr. Blank will take care of you. If you need
anything just ask Mr. Blank, he'll take care of you. And you would go down
there with Mr. Blank and you would make damned sure nothing was being put over
on you or the Navy before you let the material go out.
          "Are you a friend of Mr.
Sellers?" Branch asked the pink-faced man.
          "Well," said Haskell
judiciously, "Well, I've done business with him, haha .
A case of Scotch now and then and of course the other stuff..."
          "The Lalevy business," Branch said idly, gambling.
          "Oh, she told you. Yeah, Lalevy's shipped through Sellers. Wasn't any other way they
could get stuff through after they got on the State Department black list. We didn't like to handle it but, hell, you couldn't
take a chance. If the Nazis had come out on top over there we wouldn't have had
any contacts left if we'd got Lalevy down on us. It
was mainly cosmetics, anyway. The Germans let them do it to get the
dollars...." He went on almost without a pause, "I wouldn't say I was
a personal friend of Sellers', no, but when she went off like that I was pretty
sure she'd go to him, so I called him long distance-"
          "What made you think she'd go to
him?"
          "Hell, who else would she go to? She
doesn't know i anybody in this country except a few
people she met around Evanston while she lived with us." Haskell laughed.
"She'd hardly be likely to go to them, would she? What could she tell
them? After passing out that Free French line for three years she'd look mighty
funny explaining why those birds were after her. Hell, it's a pity they didn't
get her husband at the same time they got her old man, isn't it? I don't know
why she wants to waste time on saving his hide. From what I've heard he's had
five different women in the time she's been over here."
          Branch watched the waiter put the shrimp
cocktails in front of them. It seemed to him that he had spent interminable
lengths of time, learning a little more each time, while people gradually
worked around to the point of what they were going to say. But the pink-faced
man, although he had not yet got to his own point, was a rewarding source of
information.
          "I tried to talk her out of it,"
Haskell said cheerfully, filling his mouth with shrimp, but not ceasing to
talk. "For her own good, I tried to talk her out of it. Things are
different now, I told her, you don't want to