Just then, from the harbor below, came the answer to Don Nasir’s stated wish. All four galleons thundered forth four broadsides, sending red-hot shot from every gun that would bear into ships, docks, wharves, quays, warehouses, stacks of supplies, and drydock facilities. The crews reloaded fast and did it all again, continuing the horrific bombardment at point-blank range until all the waterfront was become one blazing and lifeless inferno along all three sides of the harbor basin of Gijon-port.
CHAPTER
THE TENTH
Not bothering to summon a servant, the archbishop refilled Rupen’s drinking vessel with his own hand, then said gently, “Mr. Ademian, if this recountal is become unpleasant to you, there is no reason to continue it, not today. I simply was trying to learn of your life and experiences so that I might judge how best we can fit you into this world and society. I began with you because you seem to be far more responsible and adaptable than those other men and women who were projected here with you.”
“I’m sorry, Der Hal,” answered Rupen, wiping at damp eyes with the hairy back of a hand that was become a little tremulous. “It was more than twenty years ago, but still it hurts. Maybe if I’d talked of it more over the years. . . ? But 1 didn’t, couldn’t, it was just too painful to me.”
“My God, but I wish you’d let us know when you were coming into Richmond,” said Boghos Panoshian, with evident feeling. “Mariya and I would sure have met your train, brought you out here, and told you what you had to know, what you would have learned sooner or later, but given you the facts a lot easier than you got them today. What an utterly rotten, traumatic thing to come home from a war to!”
“It’s hard to believe, even with all I saw, all I’ve been told. Why, Boghos, why? Marge is … was … a bright, smart young woman, a former naval officer with a decent profession which, while it was not as lucrative as some others,.
certainly offered a steady income and was highly respected by everyone. For her to have become in only two years a dope fiend, a whore, and a les . . . lesbian just seems completely unreal, some dark fantasy from the sick mind of a lunatic. How could it have happened? How could she have fallen so low so fast, Boghos?”
But Mariya answered him first. “Rupen, we—Boghos and I—hired an investigator about a year ago, shortly after Marge’s first arrest for prostitution. …”
Listening to his sister, Ilupen shuddered, the words— “arrest,” “prostitution”—smashing into him like the bone-jarring blows of heavy cudgels. Marge, his Marge, sweet, pretty, blond Marge. His wife, the woman around whom he had woven all his lonely dreams for the nearly two years in Korea. How? Why? Had it been in some way his fault? What could he have done so far away?
lesbian thing apparently came first, when this Evelyn Mangold moved in to share your apartment with Marge. The Mangold creature had a record of abusing narcotics when she could get at them, and after she and Marge had become lovers—”
“But, dammit, Mariya,” burst out Rupen in some heat, “Marge was never . . . that way! I was married to her, you know, lived with her for four damned years—you think I wouldn’t have known a thing like that?”
“Probably not, Rupen,” said Boghos dryly. “I discussed the whole matter, all that our investigator turned up, with one of my associates, Dr. Saul Fishbein, a neuropsychiatrist down at MCV Hospital. He says that not only can bisexuals be very cagey, cover their dual natures very cleverly and well, but that quite a few of them never realize that they are what they are until a situation arises which brings their aberrations to the surface. That might well have been the case with Marge, this Mangold woman being merely the catalyst.”
“And all because they took me away into the goddamned army to fight a war that we weren’t allowed to win, in the end,” said Rupen bitterly. “Chalk up another one for the fucking politicians and the Commie-loving fellow travelers in the State Department!”
Many a shifted in her chair and clasped her hands tightly, then said, “It may not have been just that way, Rupen. There . . . there were some . . . ahhh, rumors, years ago, during the war, on shipboard. The way I first wound up with Marge as a roommate was because her roommate moved out the day before I was logged in. Marge always said that it was a case of the other girl’s disliking Armenians, and that particular nurse was very intolerant of any person who was not of pure-English descent, preferably born and bred in Boston, Massachusetts, which made her stones about Marge sound like just some more of her racism.
“Rupen, as you know, women hug and kiss each other normally, but Marge seemed always to be touching me, brushing against me, and once, when we had both come in very drunk from a dance in Norfolk, it … it went a bit farther than that. She was still in my bed when I woke up the next morning, too, though she always swore she had no memory of anything from shortly before we left that dance. But now, for over a year, now, I’ve wondered. …”
“The investigator’s report states, Rupen, that after Marge and this Evelyn Mangold became lovers, Marge began to acquire drugs for her, then started using them herself, it appears. I even wrote her prescriptions before I started to become suspicious. It seems that when she finally had exhausted all legal means of laying her hands on drugs, she commenced to steal them from the hospital at which she then worked, and eventually she got caught at it. They declined to report it to the authorities or to prosecute, but they did fire her and quietly blackball her at every other facility in the area.
“She tried working private duty, nursing in patients’ homes, for a while. It was during that period that she went through all of your savings buying drugs illegally. When that money was gone, she borrowed from your father, from me, from Mariya, from damned near everybody she knew and quite a few she didn’t. She sold both your cars and everything else of
any value, then she and this woman moved out of the apartment and into that place on Floyd Avenue. With her mind occupied entirely on ways to get more drugs, she was not able to do a very good job of nursing, of course; a number of patients let her go after thefts of small valuables and sums of money. Then she was apprehended trying to get a forged prescription filled and the State Board of Nursing lifted her license. It was shortly after that that she began to sell herself.”
“And this, this Mangold woman,” demanded Rupen, “she was whoring, too?”
“No.” Boghos shook his head. “She apparently does no work of any kind. There’s not even a record of her having a Social Security card. She’s had two husbands that we know of. One was killed in the Pacific during the war. The other is in prison up north, serving a ninety-nine-year sentence for a murder he swore his wife actually committed, very grisly one, too, or so the investigator said.
“No, Rupen, her modus operandi seems to be to move in with a woman—there were at least three others before Marge-seduce her sexually, get her addicted to drug use, then live off her as long as she can keep her.”
“Well, for the love of God, Boghos,” burst out Rupen, “if you and Mariya knew all this a year ago, why didn’t you do something about it? Why didn’t you write and tell me about it, man? With a letter like that to show, I could probably have gotten the Red Cross on it, maybe gotten compassionate leave to come back here, even.”
Mariya sighed, reached over, and laid her hand on Rupen’s. “Don’t you think we tried, my brother, my poor brother? But Marge had convinced herself that she was deeply, passionately in love with Evelyn Mangold, that she couldn’t live without her. Boghos pulled every medical and political string he could get hold of to try to get her nursing license restored so that she might give up her new profession, but it developed that the board had discovered more and more heinous offenses than the forged prescription that she had perpetrated, and they wouldn’t budge.
“Finally, all else failing, Boghos’s attorney was instructed to offer the Mangold woman money on the condition that she leave the state permanently. She took the money, some thousands of dollars in cash, and even let herself be seen boarding a Greyhound bus . . . but she only stayed on it until she got out into Henrico County, then she took a local bus back into town.