Frenzy

“It’s us,” Harold confirmed. “We were just talking to Wanda—what’s your real name, hon?”

“Wanda Te

“I wanted to be in on the conversation,” Qui

Wanda didn’t seem particularly impressed by Qui

She described how Duke went to the door and peeked out, how the knocking was on the door across the hall, and what Duke told her he’d seen.

When she’d run down, she took a sip of her water that smelled like vodka.

“That it?” Qui

Wanda looked from Sal to Harold and back at Qui

Qui

“Duke just suddenly stopped,” Wanda said.

“Stopped what?” Qui

“What he was doing. What we were doing up on the room. He just suddenly froze and said he couldn’t stop thinking about what he thought he’d heard coming outta that other room. And something else—he looked scared.”

“What did Duke say he heard?” Qui

“Thought he heard,” Wanda corrected. “He tried to explain it to me, said it sounded like an injured animal wailing, only it was soft like. That’s when he told me he’d seen somebody entering the room across the hall. He said maybe the guy had forced his way in. The reason he hadn’t said what he’d seen earlier was . . . he had other things on his mind.”

“Did you hear the sound?” Qui

“No.”

“Could it have been a woman who was gagged and screaming?” Harold asked.

“I suppose. Looking back on it, that’s what he mighta heard. Anyway, it gave Duke the creeps, and he didn’t want to play anymore.” She raised a shoulder in an elegant shrug that made Qui

“And you didn’t see the man who might have forced his way into the room across the hall?”

“That’s right. I was on the bed, still tending to my ankle.” She wagged a shoe, making her calf muscle flex. Half smiling. Knowing they were looking. “I’d damn near turned an ankle in these heels when Duke answered my knock and hustled me into his room. I was like, what’s this all about?”

“He say he was sorry?” Harold asked. One of his seemingly inane questions that sometimes later proved of value. But only sometimes.

“No.” Wanda smiled. “They get eager.”

Harold just bet they did.

Bo

“What did you and Duke do after he heard the first noise?” Qui

“The mood had changed.”

Qui

“He got dressed and I got out of uniform,” Wanda said.

“Uniform?” Harold asked.

Qui

“Then Duke stuffed his clothes and Dopp kit in a suitcase,” Wanda said, “and we went down to the lobby. He went over to the desk and he asked to be moved to another room. More like demanded. Didn’t say why, and nobody asked him. The desk clerk just gave him a different key card and room number, and had a bellhop take his suitcase up.”

“Then what?” Qui

“Then I came in here and had some drinks.”

“What time was that?”

“I’m not sure. Sometime around seven thirty. I was already here, and had been for a little while, before Duke came back down from moving things into his new room. He was with some convention friends.”

So around seven o’clock Duke had heard the torture and multiple murder in progress.

There was a pause in the conversation while everyone sipped his or her drink, maybe thinking about three hotel rooms, one unoccupied, one where murder had happened, and one that had contained a prostitute and her customer, worrying about what people would think and say and do if they were found out.

Something about that infuriated Qui

Harold gazed at Wanda and said, “Do you have a business card?”

Wanda looked at him as if he’d grown another head. Then she got a wrinkled scrap of paper from her purse and jotted down her address and phone number. She handed it to Qui

“You go

“Around the hotel, if you guys don’t mind.”

They didn’t.

“None of us heard that,” Qui

Wanda smiled.

“One thing,” she said, “so you don’t get confused when you talk to people. I was a redhead last night, not a brunette. I see some of the same clients, pass them in the lobby or halls, and changing my look kinda minimizes men doing double takes.”

“You mean triple takes,” Harold said. “One take because you look familiar, a second to make sure you’re really who they think you are, and a third because there’s something different about you.”

“You know, that’s right!”

Qui

Wanda Woman smiled at Sal and Harold and touched Qui

Qui

As they were leaving the hotel, Harold said, “Hide the key. How do you suppose—”

Sal said, “Forget it, Harold.”

PART TWO

I have heard the mermaids singing each to each.

—T. S. ELIOT, “The Love Song of

J. Alfred Prufrock”

15

England, 1940

In small ships and large, the evacuees kept arriving from Dunkirk. They staggered or were carried onto shore from ships tied up at docks along the coast, and sometimes where there were no docks.

Some of the evacuees were physically whole, but with hollow features and vacant stares, and memories that would haunt them forever. They were defeated men. Overjoyed to be home, but beaten. Some of them were French, but most were from the British Expeditionary Force, which, according to gossip that Betsy Douglass picked up from the other nurses, had almost ceased to exist on the continent. Where the Germans were.

Many of the men were physically wounded, some in ways fatal that wouldn’t claim their lives for weeks, but nonetheless would take them.

Betsy Douglass found herself holding a compress to a head injury to a man in a BEF uniform. He would have been soaked in blood were it not for the work of the Cha

He looked up at her, smiled, and said what some nurses were accustomed to hearing. “Am I in heaven?”