The Bride of Texas (81 page)

“Damn foolishness,” Padecky growled, but then he added softly and uncertainly, “I left my spectacles at home.”

The sergeant brought the book up to his eyes. The Negro opened the door for someone to the sound of little tin drums.

At first the sergeant failed to notice the glitter at the young woman’s throat. His attention was on the warmth coming from the cardboard box in his pocket containing the forget-me-not earrings he had come to Chicago to buy. They were genuine, imported from Bohemia, and he had paid all of two dollars for them in Mr. Pancner’s shop on Dearborn. So he didn’t really register the beautiful gleam at the young woman’s throat as he hurried along Lake Street towards the train station, eager to see the forget-me-nots in the tiny ears of his newborn daughter, Terezka. But in the light pouring out of the restaurant window a splendid stone glittered at the stranger’s throat —

He spun around. The girl in the fancy cloak and her companion in the derby hat were just turning to enter the restaurant
.

He hesitated, and looked down. His shoes were still shiny from the honest efforts of a shoeshine boy at the train station when he had arrived. He was wearing his Sunday suit and, though his hat wasn’t new, it was still quite dapper. He took a deep breath and followed them through the revolving door into the restaurant. He watched the waiter help the girl off with her cloak and take her companion’s derby. They sat down at a table, the gold light from the long bar shining on them from the left. He walked over to the bar, sat on a bar stool, and glanced at himself in the bar mirror that doubled the size of the already spacious restaurant. He was presentable. He even had a tie tack in his cravat that Vojta Houska had made from a Rebel belt buckle back in the hospital where they’d been treated for the Kansas quickstep. She was wearing a dress that revealed a lovely alabaster throat, but he could see only the gold chain. He glanced at her companion and was so startled that he didn’t hear the bartender saying, “What’ll it be, sir?”

Seated opposite the girl was Hauptmann von Hanzlitschek
.

“What’ll it be, sir?

“Pardon?”

“What will you have?”

“Oh,” he said. “Bourbon. With ice.”

He stared at von Hanzlitschek until his heart slowed down again. It couldn’t possibly be the Hauptmann, even if he’d risen from the dead. Today he would be in his fifties, perhaps even his sixties. He had been fifteen years older than Ursula. Then he remembered a park, a tiny girl, a pug dog, a lace bonnet, then a slap and a howling miniature of the Hauptmann. The young woman’s companion could only be that miniature, now grown up. Even the moustache was smaller, more American, and he wasn’t wearing a monocle. But he sat straight as a candle, as if he had a corset on, and he was smoking a slim cigar. Ursula’s son
.

He turned to the bartender
.

The bartender shrugged his shoulders. “But his lady friend is Miss Faber,” he said. “Eberhart Faber, don’t you know?”

“Faber?” he repeated absently
.

“Pencils.” The bartender’s eyes fell on his tie tack. “You a veteran?”

The sergeant nodded
.

“Twenty-first Michigan,” said the bartender, offering his hand over the bar
.

“Thirteenth United States.”

“I see,” said the barman. The sergeant shook the proffered hand
.

“You said Miss Faber?”

“Her uncle has a pencil factory in New York. Her father heads the branch here in Chicago.”

The girl rose, turned. A flash like a canister exploding
.

“Did you stay in the army?” asked the barman
.

The sergeant didn’t reply. The bartender followed his stare. He said, “Nice, isn’t she?”

But the sergeant wasn’t staring at the girl. He was staring at what she had around her neck
.

Diamonds, like a nest of crystal eggs
.

The bartender kept trying to engage him in conversation, but the sergeant sat there like a pillar of salt. The bartender gave up and poured him another drink. “This one’s on the house, buddy,” he said. “Because we won.”

A whirlwind was howling inside the sergeant’s head. Madam Sosniowski hadn’t known for sure. And diplomats get transferred. Ursula’s necklace, stolen by Fircut — now on the neck of the niece of a pencil magnate.… The sergeant’s head was spinning
.

The next bourbon was no longer on the house. Nor was the one after that. He was drinking for courage. When von Hanzlitschek rose and the waiter placed the fancy cloak around Miss Faber’s lovely neck, the sergeant slipped down from the barstool, waved the couple through the revolving door ahead of him, and then pretended to look surprised. “Excuse me, aren’t you Mr. von Hanzlitschek?”

Von Hanzlitschek looked at the sergeant suspiciously, not recognizing him. How could he? He had been a tearful ball of rage in a sailor suit at the time —

“Yes?” von Hanzlitschek replied tentatively
.

“You’re the living image,” said the sergeant, “of your father. I served under” — von Hanzlitschek was now staring at him intently — “served with your father many years ago, in Austria.”

“Ah,” said von Hanzlitschek, “In Helldorf? Or in Viertal?”

“In Viertal,” said the sergeant quickly. “I was — a sergeant back then,” he said, wondering how much von Hanzlitschek knew about his father’s demise. But the young man smiled, his hard Austrian eyes softening, and he shook the sergeant’s hand
.

“Sergeant —” Kapsa started to introduce himself, and stopped. Then he translated his name into German. “— Tasche.”

“Tasche?”

“That’s right,” said Sergeant Kapsa. “What are you doing in Chicago?”

He gave his head another shake. He was back in The Witches’ Kitchen. Meanwhile, the famous lady author and her companion had made their way over to the doorman and the companion was introducing him to the author. The sergeant opened Mr. Ohrenzug’s book. On the title page, in an alphabet the sergeant couldn’t read, in a language he didn’t know, it said,
The English Language for Émigrés from Russia
. He looked at Padecky, smiled to himself, then he shut the book and put it back down in front of Mr. Ohrenzug.

“Who’s that fellow, Mr. Ohrenzug?” asked Molly.

“You mean the nigger?” asked Mr. Ohrenzug.

Padecky said, “Nigger, German, Babylonian, as long as he’s wearing trousers.” Molly decided to ignore him.

“That’s Jasmine’s hubby,” said Mr. Ohrenzug. “I hired him as a waiter back in the old place on Dearborn, but he had two left hands so I put him to washing dishes. That was even worse. Fortunately that woman of his —” Mr. Ohrenzug hesitated and looked around at the ladies present. “Are any of you from Chicago?”

The three women exchanged glances. “No,” Ruzena Houska said, and shook her head. “We’re the closest and we have a farm south of Manitowoc.”

“What was fortunate about his woman?” asked Molly Schroeder eagerly.

“Well,” said Mr. Ohrenzug, “she opened a — place of her own. So she hired him. I just kept his mother on. He offered to help out today because of the gala opening, so I put him at the door with orders only to bow. He knows how to bow. That’s what he does at his wife’s place, at her — restaurant. Even so, he slipped once already and broke the glass in the door. It’ll cost me at least twenty bucks to fix. It’s special glass.”

The famous author was laughing heartily at something the doorman had said, her red locks swinging over her iridescent shoulders. “He’s a talker,” said Mr. Ohrenzug, “but that’s all he’s good at. The truth is that before Jasmine gave him a job in her place, he was what you might call my silent partner.”

“Why silent?” asked Molly.

“Mrs. Schroeder!” Mr. Ohrenzug sounded surprised to have to explain. “In Chicago it’s bad enough being a Jew. If a Jew is known to be in business with a nigger —”

“Where did he get the capital, Mr. Ohrenzug?” asked Shake. “Compensation, so to speak, for years of slavery somewhere in the South?”

“Just let me finish,” said Mr. Ohrenzug. “He invested, so to speak, his mother into the business.” And he proceeded to tell how he’d wanted to get rid of him, after the débâcle at the door and the damaged dishes, but it turned out that he wasn’t totally useless, though the one skill he had was useless in the restaurant business. Mr. Ohrenzug had actually hired him as a tag-along with his mother. She’d moved from the South to Chicago with him after the war and soon became famous as a cook, but when Mr. Ohrenzug fired her son she started scorching the sauces. She said that her son knew black magic and that he’d put a spell on her as revenge for getting fired. There was nothing left for Mr. Ohrenzug to do but take him on as a silent partner. And then the spell-caster’s wife had opened her own establishment.

“How did she get to be friends with Mrs. Lee?” asked Bozenka. The sergeant glanced at his wife.

She had been so exhausted then, after two years of bad harvests. And it had rained all summer, and then the hailstorms had come, and then a tornado had collapsed the barn, and little Cyril needed a doctor, and she was worried to death that the farm her late husband, Kakuska, had built up was going to go under now that she was in charge.

He had decided to go and talk to Cup, and so he took the train to Chicago. The grocery store, Cup & Co., had survived the war under the management of an honest man from Nebraska too nearsighted for the army, and then the business had expanded, growing from one store into five
.

At one of the stops, a fellow in a ten-gallon hat and a chequered suit got on the train and sat down opposite him. It was hot. The man took off his big hat and —

“Fircut,” said the sergeant. The man blinked and then cringed, as though expecting a slap in the face
.

“Kapsa!” he exclaimed. “Man, you don’t know how hard I looked for you!”

“Me too,” said the sergeant. “And I never could find you either.” He examined Fircut’s face. It had grown jowly, but the eyes were still shifty. “Till now,” said the sergeant. “That’s what I call a coincidence.” He raised his hand and pulled up his sleeve a bit. The war had marked the sergeant, but differently from Fircut. The scoundrel had grown a belly and was soft and flabby. He looked scared. He’s afraid I’ll hit him, thought the sergeant
.

“I owe you, Kapsa,” said Fircut, his double chin trembling
.

“Really?” said the sergeant, irony in his voice
.

“With interest, I figure it’ll be seven, eight hundred” — he assessed the look in the sergeant’s eye — “say a thousand —”

“It’ll be more than that,” said the sergeant, “even without interest.” He gave his sleeve another tug. Fircut stared at him with his puffy eyes. He’s certainly afraid I might hit him, the sergeant thought. But he soon discovered that that wasn’t what Fircut feared most. “Fifteen hundred,” he said
.

Later the two of them sat in a saloon at Clinton and Monroe and ordered drinks while “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” jangled loudly on a player piano
.

Fircut pulled out a thick wad of bills held together with a gold money clip. “Here, take two.”

The sergeant looked at him in amazement. The puffy eyes were swimming. Should I have asked for more, he wondered. Fircut in tears? And the money — well, it was heaven-sent, he thought to himself. From Ursula. It solved the problem of the farm he had inherited, along with the farmer’s wife, from poor Kakuska, and there would be enough left over for a new reaper
.

“It’s three times what I got for them,” Fircut was saying. “You can imagine, I had to go to the Jew with them, I didn’t know my way around yet. But they brought me luck back then, Kapsa, and I —”

“So they brought you luck,” said Ursula
.

“In the long run they did.”

“Exactly what do you mean, in the long run?” Ursula pouted, but she didn’t sound particularly serious. By then it was just — a legend
.

“They brought everyone luck,” he said, and started enumerating. “Your boy Georg was lucky that you saw them on Hannelore; that was lucky for Hannelore, too —”

“That is, if Georg is good luck for her,” she said. “There are days when he’s far too much like the Hauptmann, and not just in the way he wears his moustache. But for you they did bring luck.”

“Didn’t they for you?” he asked boldly, and immediately felt like a wretched sinner, but still he reached over to cover her hand sporting the single glittering diamond. Gulls stared down at them from the sky as they sat on the bench by the edge of Lake Michigan, surrounded by hedges
.

She pulled her hand away and said, “In the long run they did. I was afraid for you. Afraid they’d catch you, you know? But it turned out all right. And they brought you luck. Of course, he cheated you.”

“I could get back at him. It’s just that —” He stopped. He didn’t have to finish his sentence
.