Another Green World Read Online Free Page A

him. His eyes were wide, almost imploring.
    Ka-boom
, she thought. The bomb had found its target. Ingo Miller, the last isolationist, was about to go to war.

BUZZARDS POINT
    JULY 1944
    D amn him, Ingo thought. He hauled himself leadenly up the four steps to Connecticut Avenue and for half a minute stood tuning his senses to the rhythms of the city, the afternoon dragging toward a muggy evening, the jostle of pedestrians and steady crawl of traffic uptown. You could never find a cab at this time of day but Ingo guessed it didn't hurt to try.
    Four steps. Roughly the depth, so he had read, of a regulation foxhole. The war was less than five years old—three if you counted from when the Yanks came in—yet Ingo's mind, like everyone's, was cluttered with its ephemera. He could open a map and point to Lidice, Coventry, Sebastopol, Saint-Lô. He could tick off the leaders of the Nazi regime and rank them in order of loathsomeness. He knew what an MG-42 was, which army used it, what its shells did when they entered human flesh. Yet he had never
felt
the war, not in a personal way, as a tug in his own well-fed gut, a looming cloud in his future. Never until now.
    Isaac. A name, and then the rest: puppet limbs, sarcastic smile, faint and ever-receding voice.
See you next time, pal.
Suddenly a presence—real, unsettling, troublesome as ever, nosing into Ingo's life. His timing characteristically bad. Like a ghost from an unconnected lifetime, the vanished world of youth.
    The taxi, a late-model Nash bearing the livery of Earnest's Hackney Service, idled in front of a hydrant at the corner of R, the driver pulling on a cigarette. Ingo had not yet reached the stage at which he would wonder whether such a thing were altogether plausible. Was the cab a timely coincidence or an epiphenomenon, a ripple on the surface that hinted at some dangerous current beneath? Safe on his home turf, protected by a shiny plating of summer sweat, Ingo merely flagged the driver, semaphoringwith one finger:
Hang on just a minute.
The cabbie favored him with a nod and a smile made memorable by ghastly yellow teeth.
    He found Marty in the kitchen, distracting Vernon from the preparation of
Hühnchenwurst
, a spicy sausage of the chef ‘s own invention made from unrationed chicken trucked in every Saturday by farmers from the Eastern Shore. Thank God Edna, the night waitress, had agreed to come in three hours early. Skinny and tall, with scarlet nails, she was laughing at something Marty had said. At a look from Vernon—head tilting quickly toward Ingo—the kitchen fell quiet. Except for Marty, whose laughter had not really ceased since the 1932 election.
    Out on the street, the cabbie flicked away his cigarette and slapped the Nash in gear. Without waiting for instructions he eased forward into traffic. Didn't bat an eye when Ingo read out the address. Perhaps in his job you developed a higher threshold of alarm.
    When he spoke, his accent conjured some godforsaken hamlet in the Balkans. “Been another hot one, yes?”
    Ingo saw no ground for comment. The weather was Sodomic. But he liked to think it separated real Washingtonians from the other kind, the
arrivistes
, salesmen and budding bureaucrats, illiterate Appalachians on the construction sites and transient junior officers awaiting assignment, a human goulash from all known corners of the world and a few as yet uncharted.
    The cabbie at least had been here long enough to manage a rapid zigzag down one-way streets, then to turn south on Seventeenth toward the river. Traffic was thick as usual near Constitution Hall, where the Daughters of the American Revolution had forbidden Marian Anderson to sing on that summer evening five years back, on account of her being colored. She had sung instead on the Monument grounds, coming up on your left, before a crowd of eighty thousand, including Negro families with tiny children gotten up in their Sunday best, hearing an operatic singer for the