Page 69 of The Little Liar
“Yeah.” He squeezed at his pants leg. “These uniforms are stiff.”
“No worse than the real thing.”
“I guess.”
“Richie?”
“Yes?”
The man squinted.
“You serve?”
“Serve?”
“The war.”
“Oh. Yeah. Yes. I was in the war.”
“Me, too. South Pacific. Guadalcanal. This beats the hell out of that, huh?”
“It does.”
“Where were you?”
“Europe.”
“Where?”
“Lots of places.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Richie?”
“Yes?”
The man sniffed. “You kill anybody?”
Nico blinked. For a moment, he thought about the train platform. The people swarming him, day after day, as he moved through the crowd, telling them lies.
“Only Nazis,” he said.
“Nazis?”
Nico turned his head. “Yes. Nazis. I killed lots of them.”
“Wow, Richie.” He shouted to some other actors, sitting in the dirt. “Hey, fellas! We got a bona fide war hero here! Killed lots of Nazis!”
The other men shrugged. A couple of them clapped.
“Are we set?” the director bellowed.
They did the scene. Nico yelled, “He’s gone!” and the director, satisfied, moved to another setup. A man approached Nico and told him where to go at the end of the day to get money for saying a line.
“Thank you,” Nico mumbled. But as soon as the others had departed, he walked straight to the parking lot, boarded a bus, and never again returned to a movie set.
