"Good?" He glared at her with pain-filled eyes.
"It's good that you're showing some emotion. You've kept it frozen beneath the surface for too long. You've been acting more like a robot than a human being for the past five months."
Kinsman looked down at his hands. They were still trembling.
"It's all right, Chet. It's all over and done with. There's nothing you can do to bring her back. What you have to decide now is ... where do you want to go from here?"
He pressed his hands palms-down on his thighs. "What did Richard the Third say? 'Let's to it, pell-mell. If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell.'"
Marian gave an unladylike snort. "Neither one," she said, pointing off to her left. "It's only San Antonio."
The Alamo is the heart of San Antonio, but the four corners of the city are held by military bases. Colonel Campbell landed her plane at Kelly Air Force Base and they 130 commandeered a synfueled gray sedan from the motor pool to go to town.
GENTLEMEN WILL TAKE OFF THEIR HATS, read the sign above the Alamo's front entrance. Marian saw that most of the visitors crowding the old shrine this muggy late afternoon were either Mexicans or Mexican-Americans. The signs on the displays spoke of the great American triumph that won Texas its independence. But it was only a temporary triumph, Marian saw. The erstwhile losers of the Mexican-American battle were winning the war over the long haul, simply outbreeding the gringos and reclaiming the territory they had temporarily lost.
Outside, in the shade cast by the graceful trees beyond the old mission's battered walls, Kinsman suddenly asked, "May I take you to dinner?"
Marian felt pleased. "It's been some time since a young man has invited me to dinner."
He grinned at her. "Maybe you can help me with my problem."
Her cheeks went hot and she cursed herself for an idiot. He's joking with you, she told herself sternly. You're old enough to be his ... well, his big sister, anyway.
"You are qualified for I.F.R., aren't you?" Kinsman asked, suddenly serious again. "No problem if we stay out after dark."
Marian nodded. "I'd feel a lot safer, though, if you made the instrument landing. I don't like landing at night."
"Okay," he said. "So let's find some dinner. My treat."
They found a dinner theater in one of the hotels along the scenic riverway park. The ballroom floor was covered with small round tables jammed so close together that chair- backs touched each other whenever someone wanted to get up. Marian wrinkled her nose. This was too much like New York or Chicago. Where was the Old West, where cattle barons dined in the regal splendor of ornately paneled restaurants with high ceilings and crystal chandeliers?
The tiny stage set up at one end of the ballroom was for a revival of a show featuring songs written by a Parisian cafe entertainer named Jacques Brel. Only two men and two women, in street clothes. The management did not spend lavishly on the entertainment, Marian thought. But the 131 singers were excellent and the songs highly charged, emotion- al, theatrical, pointed.
Marian began watching Kinsman in the darkened ball- room as the singers hit antiwar themes again and again. He sat calmly, laughed at the right places, applauded along with everyone else. Until a song titled "Next."
He sat straighter in his chair as the theme of the song became clear: a young European soldier being marched along with his comrades into a mobile army whorehouse, "gift of the army, free of course." Marian felt her eyes burning brighter than the stage lights as she watched Kinsman's face freeze in something very close to horror.
His hand slowly reached out toward her and she grasped it tightly. He hung on as the lead male sang:
