d and happy.” It was all there, the full moon, the small mild surf showing white, the pale sands of the tiny beach set down among the rocks and glowing weirdly in the moonlight, the low wind surfing through the kiawe trees across the highway, and he had brought a bottle and there was a thermos full of coffee and the sandwiches she had brought, and even blankets. It was really all there and very fine, he’d thought, just like he pictured it. She had slipped climbing down the rocks and skinned her arm, and after they had got down she tore her dress, one of her best ones she said, on a snag. They had waded, nude, out into the water, hand in hand, making, he remembered, a fine picture in the moonlight with the water that seemed to run uphill from the beach breathing heavily around their knees. She had gotten chilled and had to go back and wrap up in a blanket. It was then he had given it up altogether, deciding it had been a damn fool thing, his mistake, in the first place. And he had gone back with her, even in the painfulness of feeling so damned foolish, still eager, burning, not feeling any cold at all, and wanting it badly, needing it badly, but how could you have it, as you ought to have it, when you were struggling to keep a blanket over you to keep from chilling her again. That was when he wanted her to take the drink, up to then he had not made an issue of it, though it puzzled him. But she would not drink now at all, any. She had smiled sadly with the great sadness of a Christian martyr who forgives the Romans, and accused herself of how she always messed things up and ruined everything she touched, and how she guessed she just wasnt an outdoor girl, although it had seemed fine when they had talked about it, in the bedroom, back at Schofield, and she really truly thought it would be better if he would get some other woman for it, she wouldnt mind. Driving back to town she said she wanted to be fair and asked him if he wanted to give the picture back now, that she didnt mind, really she wouldnt mind. He had felt guilty then, because he had not asked her for the picture, and because he saw now the whole idea had been stupid in the first place, and had said he wanted to keep the picture very badly, which, he suddenly had realized, he did. It was then, somehow or other, without meaning to, that he had made this other date, for after payday, because, she said, she didnt get much money out of Holmes, and that only after petty squabbling. He had tried then, half heartedly, to get her to take only one small drink, hoping guiltily that if maybe he could get her drunk it would be better, hoping maybe they could go somewhere and get a room, or something, and salvage something. But she would not drink, and she had not fixed an alibi, not figuring to stay away all night, and she would not do it in a car, ever, because, she felt, it was degrading.
He had gone down to Wu Fat’s then, on Hotel Street, in the heart of the whorehouse district, after she had let him out, timidly reminding him of the coming date, and gotten very drunk and then made a studbull roaring raid on Mrs Kipfer’s Hotel New Congress that was intensely satisfying, determined there would be no more dates as far as he was concerned, no matter what he’d told her, and he was still puzzling on it now, with Mazzioli coming in the corridor, wondering what it was had happened and why it had happened anyway and most of all why he could not seem to put his finger on it at all, still completely stumped as he put the snapshot back in his wallet where he kept it hidden behind his SP pass card and could feel smugly conspiratorial every time he flashed his wallet at the MPs at the gate, or took it out in the Orderly Room in front of Dynamite. At least he could understand that much, anyway.
Mazzioli was looking smug and obviously chortling to himself as he handed over the stack of papers that he had hidden the transfer letter in the middle of. He stood around grinning and waiting for the explosion, while Warden leafed impatiently through the four fingers of Memorandums, General and Special Orders, and War Department Circulars he had brought, looking for something that might accidentally turn out to be important.
It was q