Yossarian’s heart pounded with fright and horror at the pitiful, ominous, gory spectacle of the broken corpse.
He ducked into the hallway and bolted up the stairs into the apartment, where he found Aarfy pacing about uneasily with a pompous, slightly uncomfortable smile.
Aarfy seemed a bit unsettled as he fidgeted with his pipe and assured Yossarian that everything was going to be all right. There was nothing to worry about.
‘I only raped her once,’ he explained.
Yossarian was aghast. ‘But you killed her, Aarfy!
You killed her!’
‘Oh, I had to do that after I raped her,’ Aarfy replied in his most condescending manner.
‘I couldn’t very well let her go around saying bad things about us, could I?’
‘But why did you have to touch her at all, you dumb bastard?’ Yossarian shouted.
‘Why couldn’t you get yourself a girl off the street if you wanted one?
The city is full of prostitutes.’
‘Oh, no, not me,’ Aarfy bragged.
‘I never paid for it in my life.’
‘Aarfy, are you insane?’ Yossarian was almost speechless.
‘You killed a girl.
They’re going to put you in jail!’
‘Oh, no,’ Aarfy answered with a forced smile. ‘Not me.
They aren’t going to put good old Aarfy in jail.
Not for killing her.’
‘But you threw her out the window.
She’s lying dead in the street.’
‘She has no right to be there,’ Aarfy answered.
‘It’s after curfew.’
‘Stupid!
Don’t you realize what you’ve done?’
Yossarian wanted to grab Aarfy by his well-fed, caterpillar-soft shoulders and shake some sense into him.
‘You’ve murdered a human being.
They are going to put you in jail.
They might even hang you!’
‘Oh, I hardly think they’ll do that,’ Aarfy replied with a jovial chuckle, although his symptoms of nervousness increased.
He spilled tobacco crumbs unconsciously as his short fingers fumbled with the bowl of his pipe.
‘No, sirree. Not to good old Aarfy.’ He chortled again.
‘She was only a servant girl.
I hardly think they’re going to make too much of a fuss over one poor Italian servant girl when so many thousands of lives are being lost every day.
Do you?’
‘Listen!’ Yossarian cried, almost in joy.
He pricked up his ears and watched the blood drain from Aarfy’s face as sirens mourned far away, police sirens, and then ascended almost instantaneously to a howling, strident, onrushing cacophony of overwhelming sound that seemed to crash into the room around them from every side.
‘Aarfy, they’re coming for you,’ he said in a flood of compassion, shouting to be heard above the noise.
‘They’re coming to arrest you. Aarfy, don’t you understand? You can’t take the life of another human being and get away with it, even if she is just a poor servant girl.
Don’t you see?
Can’t you understand?’ ‘Oh, no,’ Aarfy insisted with a lame laugh and a weak smile.
‘They’re not coming to arrest me.
Not good old Aarfy.’
All at once he looked sick. He sank down on a chair in a trembling stupor, his stumpy, lax hands quaking in his lap.
Cars skidded to a stop outside.
Spotlights hit the windows immediately.
Car doors slammed and police whistles screeched. Voices rose harshly.
Aarfy was green.
He kept shaking his head mechanically with a queer, numb smile and repeating in a weak, hollow monotone that they were not coming for him, not for good old Aarfy, no sirree, striving to convince himself that this was so even as heavy footsteps raced up the stairs and pounded across the landing, even as fists beat on the door four times with a deafening, inexorable force.
Then the door to the apartment flew open, and two large, tough, brawny M.P.s with icy eyes and firm, sinewy, unsmiling jaws entered quickly, strode across the room, and arrested Yossarian.