A Flag for Sunrise Read Online Free Page A

cigarette. He eased the Volvo into the next turnoff, and sat, with the motor running, staring through the windshield at a row of green refuse cans until he had stopped sobbing.
    So much for morning drinking. An hour and a half from homeand he already had an anecdote for his wife, one that would engage her sympathy and attention, one to save for his return home—providing, of course, that both of them returned alive.
    We’re getting pretty shaky, he told himself, wiping the foolish tears from his face with a Kleenex. It was being forty, marriage, soft suburban living.
    She gets tougher and smarter, he thought, and I get shaky—a pattern of class and culture. Perhaps he might tell her about the country song but not about his breaking up at the wheel.
    In the snowy woods beyond the paved rest area and the green garbage cans, a young black man in city clothes was carrying a paper parcel toward the road. He saw the parked Volvo with Holliwell at the wheel and turned quickly back into the maze of pines. Holliwell sighed, put the car in gear and rolled back onto the turnpike, headed for lunch and New York.
    An hour later, he was crossing the Narrows bridge; the harbor and the Manhattan skyline were bright with January sunshine. Holliwell’s spirits had lifted in the wastes of Bayonne; except for a palpable desire for more alcohol, he felt that he was doing fairly well. It would be a drinking day—the morning stirrup cup had set off an old mechanism. But his habits had become so generally temperate that it seemed to him he could afford some reasonable indulgence in the field.
    He took the Belt Parkway northward and fought his way into the traffic around the King’s County Courthouse. He had not been to Brooklyn for years and being there gave him the mild elation that came with a new and unfamiliar town. The restaurant was on Court Street; it had valet parking and a few sumac trees out back and he found it on the first pass. He brushed the cigarette ashes from his jacket, put his suitcase in the trunk and handed the keys to a uniformed Puerto Rican attendant.
    McDermott’s was the name of the place, three huge rooms of cut glass, oak and dusty ceiling fans. McDermott’s, Holliwell decided, was great fun—and when he thought back on the business later, it seemed to him that it was largely the prospect of dining in downtown Brooklyn that had persuaded him to lunch with Marty Nolan in the first place.
    A captain in a tuxedo escorted him among the seated landlords and deputy inspectors, leading him to a round table on which reposed a half-finished martini and a rumpled paisley napkin. He ordered a martini for himself and admired the huge mirrors on the paneled walls. The drink had arrived and Holliwell was taking his first sip when he saw Marty Nolan step out of the gents’ in the next salon and proceed nearsightedly across the hall.
    As Marty walked, his left hand absently brushed an area below the belt of his double-knit trousers; he was checking to see if his fly was unzipped. When he saw Holliwell, his round face brightened. Holliwell stood up to shake hands with him.
    “Herr Professor,” Marty Nolan said.
    His hand was damp, his thick horn-rimmed glasses seemed almost about to steam and although it was not at all hot in McDermott’s there was a band of perspiration below the line of his fair curly hair.
    “Good to see you, Marty,” Holliwell said.
    It would be possible, he thought, to describe Nolan as fastidious—yet there was always something faintly gross about the man, the suggestion of unwholesome secrets.
    Nolan raised his glass and they drank.
    “I’m delighted that you made the time for lunch. I’m honored.”
    “Not at all,” Holliwell said. “I looked forward to it.”
    He was privy to a few of Marty Nolan’s secrets. One was that during the Tet offensive, the Viet Cong forces who overran Hue had buried him alive—and he had lain in the earth half conscious for six hours until a party of German