Free As Time Goes By by Michael Walsh

Luftwaffe continue to fall almost nightly as Adolf Hitler attempts to bring Great Britain to her knees. Last night, the docks of London's East End took a terrific pounding from the forces of Field Marshall Goering. Bombs fell throughout the evening, ranging as far west as Cheapside and Whttechapel, Not even the majestic dome of Christopher Wren's architectural masterpiece, St. Paul's Cathedral, was spared the assault.
    But even amid the rubble, there yet springs hope. For London is home to every anti-Nazi resistance movement in Europe, and their numbers are growing daily. Led by the exiled general Charles De Gaulle, the Free French are waging a fierce rear guard campaign against the Germans across North Africa and in the Middle East, striking first, unsuccessfully, at Dakar and then in Syria. The Norwegian govemment-in-exile is also here, work ing day and night to overthrow Vidkun Quisling's collaboration ist government. Czech partisans are now calling the city home as well. Having seen their country first partitioned by the Ger man annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938, and then de stroyed by the establishment of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in 1 939, they have sworn to overthrow bath the Protectorate and the Nazi satellite state of Slovakia.
    "Let the puppetmasters in Berlin be advised," exiled Presi dent Eduard Bene š has declared. "We shall not rest until our beloved Czech homeland is fully restored."
     
    "Shut it off, Sam."
    "Don't you want to hear the news?" asked Sam.
    "Not unless it's good," said Rick.
    "There ain't no good news these days," Sam ob jected.
    "That's what I'm trying to tell you," said Rick.
    Sam switched off the radio, plopped himself into a chair, and picked up his book. He was reading Bleak House by Dickens, which he had found in the hotel library. Reading about white folks worse off than him self made him feel better.
    Over the past six years he had sometimes doubted the wisdom of what he had done, of escaping with Rick across the ocean, one step ahead of disaster, when he might have sat the whole mess out in New York and waited for the smoke to clear; there was always a mar ket in Manhattan for a good singing pianist. . . not to mention a first-class driver. How he longed for his fa vorite lake in the Catskills or, if he allowed his mind to drift back that far, his boyhood in the Missouri Ozarks, where the fish were always jumping, or his young man hood in New Orleans, where Lake Pontchartrain al ways beckoned.
    Then he remembered Paris and all those French girls with their small bosoms and their big noses, and their insatiable curiosity about all things n è gres, and that was the end of that particular reverie. Who was to say that if he had stayed in New York he wouldn't have ended up like Horowitz and Meredith and the rest of them? All things considered, he hadn't made out so bad. Except that he didn't care for London very much. The buildings were monochrome, the skies were slate gray, and there was hardly a black face in sight. He went back to his book.
    Rick, too, relaxed in reverie. With the money from the sale of the cafe to Ferrari, he had taken a suite of rooms at Brown's Hotel. Rick was posing as a theatrical agent, part of the fiction being that Sam was his manservant. The funds would not last indefinitely, but they would last long enough, or so Rick hoped, for them to find Victor and Ilsa. More than a month had already passed, however; despite their best efforts, neither Rick nor Renault had succeeded in locating Victor Laszlo.
    What if Laszlo had played him for a fool? He'd like to think he'd learned a few lessons in treachery over the years, but it wouldn't be the first time he'd been had. What if Laszlo knew that Rick would be able to resist neither his appeals to Rick's patriotism nor his love for Ilsa and so had conned him out of the exit visas? Laszlo was just pigheaded enough to think he could take on the entire Third Reich all by himself.
    What if that note in Lisbon