Sons of Thunder (18 page)

He tightened his jaw, his throat hot. “Please reply asap. Stop. Doctor Daniel Scarpelli. When will that go out?”

She glanced at the telegraph operators, each with a pile of telegrams, and raised a shoulder. Shook her head.

Right. Well.

Darkness had already begun to seep through the alleys, dust the city with a palpable doom. He read the faces of the people, grim, jaws tight, huddled against a biting northern wind, dodging the streetlights, the glow of the downtown bars. Tonight, they seemed louder than usual. He turned on Hennepin Avenue, trekked with his head down toward the trolley. Papers skittered down the gutters, smoke from the fires of alleyway vagabonds bit at his eyes.

Across the street, the Orpheum, with the poster for
Citizen Kane
in the window, remained dark. He passed another bar, heard voices, loud and angry.

He opted to walk instead of taking the trolley back to his boardinghouse.

Someone had swept the snow from the stairs. The tang of Elsie’s
Hansenpfeffer—
some sort of German stew, probably thick with carrots and potatoes, onions and garlic—twisted his stomach, but he’d probably lose it anyway. He climbed the stairs and found Beanie in their room.

Packing.

The skinny intern had taken out a leather case, begun emptying his bureau drawers.

Admittedly, Dino didn’t know him well—he reminded him, sometimes, of Lucien, tall, thin, dark, but without the charismatic smile. Beanie—Jim, Dino thought, might be his real name—was a mess of desperation and angst, the youngest of a line of brothers, the first to go to college. Dino had heard the entire story three months ago, when he’d moved in for the new academic year. And the occasional nights that Beanie stumbled in, whiskey on his breath.

Dino tossed his jacket on the bed, topped it with his fedora. “What are you doing?”

“I’m going home. I’m going to join up in my hometown—it’ll give me a chance to say good-bye to my folks.”

“Beanie—calm down. You don’t know—”

“They bombed us, Danny. Doesn’t that mean nothin’ to you? They killed a thousand of our boys, while they were sleeping.” He grabbed his lab coat and tossed it at Dino. “What are we doing, anyway? I’m already a doctor—now maybe it’ll be put to good use.”

“Just because we’ve spent the last month thawing feet and nursing drunks—” Dino shot his lab coat back at him. “You’re not going to do anyone any good getting killed. You have a perfectly good life here. Don’t wreck it.”

“What do you know, Scarpelli? You’ve never had to fight for anything in your life. You don’t know what it’s like to be Irish and poor.”

“I do know about regret. Don’t rush into this, Beanie.”

“What’s wrong with you, Scarpelli? Don’t you want to be a hero?”

You will be someone great, and leave your mark on the world.
Oh, his mother’s epitaph found him at the oddest moments. “Maybe I just have a different definition of hero.”

“I think a hero is doing what’s right, no matter what the cost.”

“Yeah, well, I think a hero thinks through the cost. I have a plan, and this isn’t it.”

Beanie picked up his lab coat, tossed it into the trash. “I certainly hope your plan turns out the way you hope.”

Dino stared at the address written on his palm and closed his fist over it.

CHAPTER 13

Tommy Dorsey, with his new lead singer, Frank somebody, was crooning out “This Love of Mine,” and with everything inside Dino, he wanted to put his fist through the tall Zenith radio in Elsie’s dining room.

He wasn’t sure what might be worse—the silky tones of a man who clearly had never been in love or he wouldn’t sound so unbroken—or the too-happy tones of Elsie and the brigade of boarders in the next room singing and pounding out “Auld Lang Syne” on the upright piano in the parlor.

At least that’s what he thought the song might be. With Elsie’s guttural German, the nasal accents of the two Swedish interns, and the two Scots who insisted on singing it in their native brogue, it sounded more like the inside of the general ward at midnight.

Outside, a blizzard was in the making, with the wind at least in league with him as it moaned against the glass. Twinkles from the Christmas tree burned against the window, a blur of red, blue, and white. The tree showed more patriotic fervor than he could muster, despite half his fellow classmates heading off to be slaughtered by the Japs—and now Germany and Italy, thanks to Hitler’s declaration of war on America. The daily reports of war preparations—not to mention the cleanup of Pearl Harbor—only made him want to hide in his room.

Not that he didn’t care about America and her battles. But, well, he wasn’t a citizen, was he? A fact the draft board would notice the minute
he signed his name. Besides, he wasn’t going anywhere. Not until he found out what happened to Lizzy.

Twenty-four days and nine hours since he’d heard the news about Pearl, and not one word.

He tried not to imagine the worst. Really. Tried to dislodge the image of her burned body, perhaps buried under the debris in the shipping yard, from his thoughts. Tried to batter from his mind her bloated and decaying corpse, pinned under a sunken battleship.

Thirteen telegrams. To the naval base. To the nearby hospitals. Even to local hotels. No one had seen Lizzy.

Missing. Like she’d been misplaced.

It didn’t mean she was dead.

Even though they’d found and identified her mother and father. He’d read their names among the obituaries listed in last week’s Tribune. Apparently they’d been visiting their son aboard the USS
Arizona
when it went down. Captain Jerry Spenser had also perished in the attack.

But apparently, no sign of sister Elizabeth.

Please, she couldn’t be trapped inside the ship, one of the 1300 who went down…

He stared out the dark window, his chin in his folded arms balanced atop the back of a straight-backed chair. His stomach pushed against his spine, and for a moment he longed for his mother’s—no, he meant
Mrs. Scarpelli’s,
turkey. Of course, she never cooked it herself, but he thought of it as hers since she did the carving, Dr. Scarpelli looking on, a beam on his face.

They’d forgone a New Year’s celebration this year to visit children in a local orphanage. Of course, they’d invited Dino.

He’d never done well at the orphanage, the desperate eyes of the children reaching too deep inside.

He blew on the window, watched a mist form.

“Come and join us, Danny.” Elsie touched his shoulder. A rounded woman with hair so white he thought it might be spun from cotton batting, she wore her shoes sensible, her dresses long, her collars to her chin. She had a list of rules that a nun might find a challenge to keep, and he usually heard about his infractions in her native German tongue. Still, he’d do just about anything for her beef stew, sauerkraut, and
brötchen
.

Usually.

“No thank you, Miss Elsie.” He continued to stare into the blackness.

She gave his shoulder a squeeze. “If you change your mind, we’re having
weihnachtsstollen
in the dining room.”

He nodded. He loved her Christmas loaf, could smell the lemon and the rum from here.

The festiveness made him ache. Laughter drifted in from the next room, and it choked him, the air suddenly stale.

He got up, turned the chair back to the round table, and strode through the house to the entry where he slipped on his coat, grabbed his hat.

Elsie’s voice trailed him out. He closed the door on it.

The frigid air closed his lungs for a moment, even as he stamped down the stairs. The stars above the cloudless night sprinkled across the blackness, pinpricks of light so close he felt he could reach out and grasp one if he wanted.

He shoved his hands into his pockets, tucked his chin into his collar, and followed his breath into the night.

The ruckus from the other boardinghouses and the few corner bars chased him as he dragged out of his neighborhood and kept
walking. Down the trolley line, through the park, and along Hennepin Avenue.

He didn’t have a destination, not really. Just anywhere to break free of the quiet that fisted him the moment he closed the door of his boarding room.

High, tinkling laughter preceded a couple spilling out of an establishment with frosted windows. The dame looped her hand through her escort’s arm, tipping on her heels. Music—

Benny Goodman, he thought, trailed them out and he watched them pass, the woman staring at her man with shiny eyes.

The door began to close and he caught the handle, stepped inside.

The heat of too many bodies, gin, and cheap perfume sucked him in. A group of already lacquered collegiate-types bumped him off his feet, and he grabbed at the bar, sloshing the drink of a patron with glassy eyes and the arms of a steel-worker.

“Watch it!”

“Sorry.” He wove into the crowd, wheedling through to the back, past men dressed in zoot suits, women in swing skirts, some even in trousers—many of them jitterbugging on the tiny wooden dance floor as a couple of saxophones and a drummer cranked out a fast swing beat.

He squeezed onto a stool. Next to him, a kid held up his empty draught glass for another. Although his jeans and collegiate sweater marked him as a student at the local university, he appeared no older than the evangelist he’d met a month ago—or less? It seemed a decade since the night he nearly confessed all to Lizzy.

The bartender, a bully of a man who reminded him of too many of Uncle Jimmy’s thugs, his dark hair Brylcreemed straight back and wearing only an undershirt, grabbed the glass. Beer spilled over his hand as he filled it from the tap, slid it back to the too-eager student.

“What ya drinking?” he asked Dino.

Dino opened his mouth, nothing escaped. He glanced at the kid’s beer, and something inside him seized.

He shouldn’t be here—

A second later the bartender delivered a tall draft, foam lapping over the edge, pooling in an ocher puddle beneath his glass.

Dino picked it up. Smelled it. Gave a sip. It burned, the taste sharp, bitter.

The co-ed lifted his glass. “Happy New Year!”

Indeed. Dino took another sip. It reminded him of Elsie’s brown bread, the kind with molasses that she served with her potato soup.

He drank the rest of the beer without stopping. Held out the glass to the bartender.

The next went down easier, and after the third one, he switched to whiskey.

That burned, at first. Then it heated him through to his marrow. For the first time, Lizzy drifted from his brain—

“Are you here all by yourself?”

Certainly the voice couldn’t be directed at him—but yes, he turned, following the nudge on his arm, right into the smile of a doll-faced co-ed, her hair parted to one side and curled down to her shoulder. She wore a pretty black dress, something shiny, and she grinned up at him with bright brown eyes. “It’s the New Year, and you look glum.”

He pulled his arm from her hand. “I’m fine—”

“Aw, c’mon. Let’s dance.” She turned her mouth down and gripped him again.

“No—I said no.”

It came out sharper than he intended, that and the force with which he pulled his arm away.

It didn’t help that probably she’d already packed in too much celebration. She cried out as his gesture swept her off balance, and she grabbed at the arm of the university student next to him.

Who caught her as she slipped, pulling him with her.

They landed on the ground with a shout.

Oh—Dino stood up, held out his hand. “Sorry—I—”

The kid launched off the floor swinging. He caught Dino on the chin. Pain exploded in his head, quick, hot, and he plowed into the row of thirsties behind him. One caught him, shoved him back into the fist of University Boy.

Dino spun around at the blow, something loosing inside him. His fist had already found a home by the time he’d cleared his mind—University sprawled on the deck, holding his nose.

The bar erupted. A blow to his kidneys and Dino crashed to his knees. He rolled, kicking, hit his feet, and dished it back out.

For the first time in a month, he could breathe, feel himself move, roar without wanting to crumple. His body came alive, adrenaline hot inside him. He slammed his fist into cheekbones, sucked breath as knuckles found his ribs, lashed out with a kick, and howled. Around him, brawlers turned on each other. Glasses crashed. Women screamed.

Dino soared. He swung his fists, tasting blood in his mouth. He slammed his fist into the soft mass of a doughy patron, head-butted a man as he wrapped burly arms around him, dropping him hard. He rolled off him, found his feet, and grabbed another body around the waist. They crashed together onto a tabletop.

The music stopped as Dino beat his way through the room.

Yes. The violence consumed him, he drank it in even as two men plucked him up by the arms. He kicked out his legs, raging, feasting on the heat that coursed through him.

He jerked his knuckles back, connected with the face of one captor. Pounded his foot into the ankle of the other. The man howled.

Then, the bouncer-slash-bartender—and yes, he’d probably done time with some northside Minneapolis gang—grabbed him by the lapels, and suddenly Dino crashed through the front doors, winging into the street.