Grim Tidings by Caitlin Kittredge Page A

counting out bills with the crisp snap of a casino teller, her puffy pink housecoat making her look like somebody had inflated her body but left her head the normal size. She barely looked up, smoke winding up from the ashtray next to her. The corpses of twenty or thirty smokes, most stained with the cheap, waxy pinks and reds the working girls favored, attested to the night’s business.
    â€œRough night?” she said. Kathleen—“Miss Kate” to most everyone who worked here—looked like eight miles of hard road but she sounded like the nightclub singer she’d been twenty years ago. Her voice could give the wallpaper goose bumps.
    â€œThat’s every night,” I said, slumping into the chair by the window, the one where Kathleen usually sat one of the younger girls to watch for cops. I wasn’t one to judge, but as brothels went Kate’s wasn’t half-bad—she didn’t turn out young girls, she didn’t let johns beat us, she didn’t tolerate people shooting dope in the bathroom or selling it out the back door. Most important, she let me be Phyllis and didn’t ask any questions about who I’d been before.
    I didn’t have to be here, unlike a lot of the girls upstairs. But I wasn’t educated enough to be a nurse or chipper enough to be a secretary. I couldn’t exactly furnish a driver’s license or a VA card to get a government job. Hard to explain why someone withmy name and description had been reported missing in Louisiana almost thirty years ago. If they’d ever found my body, my fingerprints would show up as a dead woman’s.
    Aside from finding a Clyde to my Bonnie, if I wanted to stay away from Gary I had to make money any way I could. And to stay away from Gary, I’d do a lot worse than work for Kathleen.
    â€œNights like this remind me of Germany,” I said. Kathleen made a sympathetic noise. She’d lost her husband the first time we did this dance with the Huns, when they’d been married for less than two years.
    â€œShame what they did to you WAC girls,” Kathleen grunted. “Real damn shame. My girl back home in Skokie, she worked in a factory. Welded plane parts to other plane parts. Kicked her ass out the door the minute the boys came back from Europe. Can’t find a job for nothing now.” She grunted again, slamming the lid of her lockbox and locking it with the key she kept around her neck in place of a cross. “Real damn shame.”
    I’d told Kathleen a few half-truths, but the basic story was right. When the war was over, we all came home—Gary and the rest of us. But after that, I’d just faded away, and for some reason he’d let me. At first I wondered if it was a game, if he was waiting for me to relax so he could show up and break me down again. But I think he sensed as much as I did that I was done. What Jacob and I had seen, what I’d seen in the camp before I found Kubler . . . I didn’t think that I could break into any more pieces after Gary found me, but I was wrong.
    I poured the gin I’d come downstairs for. Enough of it and I could mostly sleep without nightmares. The stuff I saw when I was awake was bad enough. Like now, with the snow falling gently,wafting down like sugar from a sifter, I could almost see Jacob’s face and feel the last time we’d touched before he’d run off.
    He was dead. I’d fooled myself for a while after I came back, but as more and more came out, more and more photos and film reels, and those sound recordings they played from Nuremberg almost every night during the news broadcasts, I knew Jacob was dead. The Nazis had started executing everyone they could when the Red Army and the Allies closed in. One man alone in the woods hadn’t stood a chance.
    The phone in the kitchen buzzed, making me jump. A little bit of gin sloshed onto my hand. “I ain’t answering,” Kathleen said, picking up