A Flag for Sunrise Read Online Free Page B

medical missionaries dug him out.
    And on one occasion, Holliwell, visiting from the Central Highlands, had found a manuscript sheet in Nolan’s portable typewriter with a single sentence at the top of the page and the sentence had read: “The Jew is at home in the modern world.” Whether or not this was a libel depended entirely upon one’s sense and experience of the modern world—but the business about “the Jew” was distinctly sinister. Can of worms there, Holliwell had thought.
    But his ties to Nolan were old and strong. They had both gone to Regis in the fifties—it was a Jesuit high school that took in the smartest kids from the city’s parochial grade schools. They had both been released into the nineteen sixties from prestigious secular universities.They had both been to Vietnam on their government’s service.
    Marty was peering over his glasses at the room in which they sat.
    “I’m in transports of Brooklyn nostalgia,” he told Holliwell. “I come from Bay Ridge, you remember.”
    “Of course I remember. What brings you up here? I thought you worked down in Washington.”
    “Oh yeah,” Marty said, “in the Washington area. I’m visiting my mother.”
    Holliwell inquired after Marty Nolan’s mother, wondering if he had ever married and whether or not to ask.
    “Mom’s O.K. She gets around.”
    “Well, it’s a great place, this,” Holliwell said. “It’s really old Brooklyn.”
    They ordered more martinis, a bottle of Barbarousse. Holliwell asked for a steak and salad, Nolan the veal piccata.
    “Did you know,” Nolan asked as a waiter opened the wine, “that Paul Robeson died this morning?”
    “I thought he died in Russia about ten years ago.”
    “This morning,” Nolan said. His eyes flashed a thick whimsy which Holliwell remembered very clearly from the past. “It was on the radio.”
    “Well,” Holliwell said, cutting his steak, “I hardly know how to react.”
    “I wasn’t trying to goad you to malicious satisfaction, Frank. After all, everybody dies. It just brings back old times. I’d like to go to his funeral.”
    “You mean officially?”
    “Don’t be ridiculous. I’d just like to go. To see it.”
    “Think the FBI will be there? Taking everybody’s picture?”
    “I wouldn’t think so. But who knows with those guys?”
    Holliwell, chewing his steak, became aware of Marty’s eyes on him again.
    “How’s your life, Frank? Quiet desperation? Self-fulfillment?”
    Holliwell nodded and finished chewing.
    “Last month,” he told Nolan, “my oldest daughter burned herself slightly. It was the winter solstice and she was jumping over a flaming log with her boyfriend.”
    “Is that the way they get married now?”
    Holliwell poured them both some Barbarousse.
    “How about you, Marty? Ever get married?”
    “I was married in Nam, didn’t you know that? In the Saigon cathedral.”
    “It must have been after I left,” Holliwell said. “What’s the lady like?”
    “Neat,” Marty said.
    Holliwell found himself touched. “Is she Vietnamese?”
    “From Worcester. We’re separated now. We don’t have any kids.”
    Holliwell nodded to convey comprehension, sympathy, whatever might be called for.
    “And you,” Nolan said. “You’re off to Compostela for a little something different.”
    “I fiddled it. I invited my friends at the university down there to invite me. How did you come to hear about it?”
    “I had a letter from Oscar Ocampo. He said you’d be coming down.”
    Holliwell realized then that there would be a pitch. He must, he thought, have realized all along that there would be one. But it would not disturb him, he decided; it was part of a game, an artifact of his friendship with Nolan, a little fencing between gentlemen. Neither of them would take it too seriously.
    “How come Oscar’s writing to you? I thought he was a leftist.”
    “Sure he’s a leftist. But we’re not enemies. We have a dialogue going.”
    Ocampo was a government