Free The Girl From Nowhere by Christopher Finch Page B

the subway.” I didn’t argue. After all, the purpose behind this pretend date was to see if Sandy Smollett attracted any unwanted attention. That was much more likely to happen on the street or on a subway platform than inside a cab. We reached the Lexington Avenue IRT and rode uptown without incident, Sandy still clinging to my arm and pressing up against me.
    The Hauptman was a tiny movie theater in Yorkville, next to a German grocery store with bratwurst and blutwurst and Limburger cheese and big loaves of pumpernickel bread and bottles of Spaten beer in the window. Sandy could name them all—and seemed to have tried them all.
    “So you were in Germany too?”
    She nodded, and I fancied I saw a flicker of sadness in her eyes, but in a moment it was gone.
    The theater looked like it had been built about the time Fritz Lang was making Metropolis . I imagined it playing The Blue Angel ,and maybe during the heyday of the German American Bund, Triumph of the Will .I bought tickets from a little old lady in fluorescent-pink curlers, and we found ourselves in an almost empty auditorium with faded murals of castles on the Rhine just visible in the projector’s flickering light.
    “Let’s sit in the back row,” said Sandy. “That’s what you’re supposed to do on a date.”
    I went along with that. The movie had already started, but it didn’t seem to matter. In about ten seconds flat, Sandy was totally into the film, her eyes riveted to the screen like a child watching Snow White for the first time. At the point when Rizzo becomes ill she began to cry, and sobbed quietly till the conclusion of the film. As the end credits rolled and the lights came up, she just stared at the screen, tears still rolling down her cheeks.
    “I have to sit through the credits,” she said, “because you never know when the name of somebody you went to school with will show up.”
    I wanted to ask where that school had been, but instead I said, “Has that ever happened?”
    She said, “No—but I’ve seen names that were very similar.”
    The woman in the pink curlers appeared and began to sweep up spilled popcorn and cigarette butts. We stepped out into the night. Nobody opened fire with an assault weapon or attacked with a hatchet.
    “Now we go dancing,” said Sandy.
    My response must have lacked enthusiasm.
    “Is this a date or not?” she demanded. “If it’s a date, that’s what we have to do.”
    I was beginning to get freaked again, but I played along.
    “What kind of dancing? Jazz? Rock? Salsa?”
    “Cheek-to-cheek. Somewhere smoochy.”
    I told myself that this was all part of the job, managing to overlook the fact that there was none. I racked my brains to think of someplace that would fit the bill. Not easy in the era of The Electric Circus and Fillmore East. Then it hit me. Not far from where we were, on Lexington Avenue, was a neighborhood bar with a glass brick facade. I’d been in there once when it was held up by a couple of kids in Halloween masks. I couldn’t remember the name of the place, but recalled that on Fridays and Saturdays it had dancing to a piano-bass-guitar trio—standards doled out à la Nat King Cole. This wasn’t a weekend, but unless things had changed there was a jukebox in there with tracks by Sinatra, and Ella, and Tony Bennett, and smoothies like that. It was worth a try.
    The place was called the Bunny Hutch. There was a neon bunny over the door, assorted porcelain bunnies behind the bar, and framed cartoons of copulating and urinating bunnies on the walls. Despite this artfully themed décor, business wasn’t booming. A couple of middle-aged guys in warm-up jackets were drinking at the bar. Two morose older couples ate something that resembled schnitzel and drank pale beer in a booth upholstered in faded turquoise Naugahyde while squabbling in some Central European language. That was it, except for a sallow-faced woman who both worked the bar and served tables. But the jukebox was