As Time Goes By Read Free

yet.
    "Sure, boss," said Sacha. He shot out one oversize hand and began worrying the radio dial until he man aged to find a station. "Blah blah blah is all that's on."
    "Then turn the blah blah blah up so we can at least hear it," Rick ordered. After all his time in Casablanca and in Paris, his French was still only passable, and sometimes he had trouble understanding on the tele phone or over the radio. If anything important was going on, Louis would tell nun soon enough. Or Sam, who learned languages the way he learned the piano, by ear.
    Renault was about to say something when something caught his attention. "Quiet!" he shouted in a tone that shocked everybody into silence.
    Sacha fiddled with the volume, and an excited voice suddenly filled the car. Even Rick knew what the an nouncer was saying. He just didn't want to believe it.
    In far-off Hawaii, the Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor.
    "Boss, we got trouble," Sam said from the front seat.
    "I know that," snapped Rick, trying to listen to the radio. He caught Sam's gaze in the rearview mirror.
    "I mean we got company," Sam explained calmly, slamming the car into high gear.
    Rick twisted in his seat. A pair of yellow headlamps was gaining on them.
    The silence was broken by the unmistakable sound of automatic weapons. A bullet ping ed off the trunk of the Buick.
    "Gimme a clip, Sacha," Rick said.
    "Right here, boss," said the Russian, happy at last.
    Rick slammed it into his Colt .45. He had always wanted to see if a phaeton with a 141-horsepower engine could outrun a Mercedes-Benz, and now he was about to find out.

 
    C HAPTER T WO

     
     
     
     
    Ilsa Lund turned to face her husband as their plane ascended into the night sky. They flew directly over the city at first, then banked steeply out toward the sea. Her last view of Casablanca was of Rick's place. Illumi nated only by the street lamps, it looked silent and for lorn.
    Traces of her tears remained on her cheeks. She didn't want to wipe them away. They were all she had left. "Everything's happened so fast," she murmured. Too fast. The surprise, the shock, the excitement, the danger, and now the relief—relief so tinged with sadness and regret.
    "I didn't know he would be in Casablanca!" she whispered, more to herself than to Victor. "How could I have? What fate led us to him—to him, who had the letters of transit! I know you're upset about what hap pened in Paris between Rick and me, but please try not to be. Didn't everything work out for the best? Where would we be without those letters? What would we have done?"
    She clutched his arm and imagined that the beating of her heart could be heard over the drone of the air plane's engines. "Oh, Victor," she said, "don't you see? I thought you were dead, and I thought my life was over, too. I was lonely. I had nothing, not even hope. Oh, I don't know. I don't know anything any more!" She started to cry again, but she was not sure why or for whom. She dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief as the plane bumped its way through the clouds.
    "Then I learned that you were alive, and how much you needed me to help you in your struggle," she said, regaining control. "You could have abandoned me a dozen times in the past eighteen months—in Lille, when I was having trouble with the authorities, in Mar seille, when I was sick for two weeks and you nursed me back to health—and in Casablanca, when you might have purchased one of those letters and fled. But you didn't. Now I understand why you have kept our marriage a secret even from our friends, so that the Gestapo would never suspect that I was your wife."
    She managed to look over at Victor, but he was star ing straight ahead again, as if lost in thought. She won dered, not for the first time, if he had heard a single word she had said. He had so much on his mind. "Tell me . . . tell me you're not too angry with me," she concluded.
    He reached over and patted her arm affectionately and a little distractedly.