Help I Am Being Held Prisoner

by Donald E. Westlake

  The Officer’s Club was the basic building in tan. We went up the wide outside wooden steps to the entrance, and as we did so I was suddenly flung back in memory to basic training when I was nineteen years old. Mail call. Only in basic was there an actual mail call, with a postal clerk who would stand on wooden steps like this and shout out last names to the trainees massed before him. For weeks my voice was raised forlornly: “Künt! With an umlaut! Sir!” And vainly. I merely called attention to myself, as though the name didn’t do that sufficiently all by itself. People who had only heard me pronounce my name but had never seen it written down would turn to me with comic curiosity, gleams beginning to sparkle in the corners of their eyes, and they would say, “How do you spell your name?” “With an umlaut,” I would say, in useless hope. “Kunt!” the mail clerk would cry.

  It had been years since I’d thought of all that but the memory could still make me wince. Bring on that drink, I thought.

  Inside the Officer’s Club some attempt had been made to disguise the raw functionalism of the structure, but to no avail. The curtains on the windows, the artificial potted plants scattered about, the Japanese screens used as room dividers, all managed to make the place look merely like an impoverished touring company of Teahouse of the August Moon. A goodly number of officers, most of them young and moustached and looking almost exactly like Max Nolan, sat at the bar or at formica-top tables across the way. A dining room was beyond this area, impossible to see through a labyrinth of Japanese screens.

  And now, inside the Officer’s Club, Eddie Troyn all at once blossomed into a completely new man. The silent, rigid, humorless military pastiche I was used to altered into what he had surely been before his fall from grace; a benign authority figure, crisp and assured, almost graceful. It was amazing to watch.

  Eddie had been coming to this base no more than a week, but half a dozen of the younger officers at the bar hailed him as an old-time comrade. “It’s Captain Robinson!” one of them called out, in respectful delight, and they all made room for him at the bar.

  “Afternoon, boys,” Eddie said, reserved but genial. “This is Lieutenant Smith.”

  “Call me Harry,” I said, because I knew if I was called Lieutenant Smith I’d never think to answer.

  The bartender, a big, heavy man with meaty shoulders, had come over at once to lean toward Eddie and listen respectfully to his order. “My usual, Jack,” Eddie told him. “And the same for Lieutenant Smith.”

  “Yessir, Captain.”

  One of the officers said, “How’s the count coming, sir?”

  “So far,” Eddie answered, with mock sternness, “you boys seem to have lost three tanks and a quonset hut.”

  They were delighted. As our drinks were brought—Eddie’s ‘usual’ turned out to be bourbon and water—the officers tried to top one another with suggestions about what had been done with the missing tanks and hut. One said the tanks had been stolen by gypsies, painted different colors, and used as wagons. One said the hut had been sent to New York City where it had become a four-story apartment building. Another said no, it was the tanks that had been sent to New York City and converted into five-room apartments, while the hut had been floated across the Atlantic to Africa where it was about to become an independent nation. Another said, “Right. They’re calling it Pattonagonia,” and everybody groaned.

  We spent an hour at the bar with the young officers, in a general aura of coltish hilarity. Most of the chatter came from the young men, who in an easygoing way were vying with one another for Eddie’s attention and approval, but Eddie too had his occasional small quips, most of them of a mildly right-wing nature. The young officers hung on his every word, whooping with laughter and clapping one another on the back at his little punch lines, while he stood swirling his drink, the small smile of the accomplished raconteur tugging gently at his lips.

  Eddie was so good at this easygoing paternalism, this enjoying of an informal chat with the boys after duty hours, that I could see he was absolutely wasted in prison. I still don’t know what crime he’d been sentenced for, but surely society was losing too much in refusing to permit him to be himself.

  As for me, I kept quiet, smiled when everybody else laughed, pulled steadily at my bourbon and water, and kept listening for clues as to just who the hell Eddie and I were supposed to be. The general impression Eddie had apparently given was that he was here on some sort of accounting or inventory mission outside the normal sequence of such events, possibly from the Inspector General’s office, or maybe even from Army Intelligence. The story seemed to be concrete enough to satisfy idle curiosity, vague enough so he couldn’t be pinned down or contradicted on details, and broad enough to justify his turning up almost anywhere he wanted on the base.

  My own role was dealt with in a sentence: “Lieutenant Smith is here from DomBac to help finish up,” Eddie said, and of course the natural response to that was for the young men to fasten on the phrase ‘finish up,’ and to ask just how soon their friend Captain Robinson would be leaving, thus ending curiosity about me for good and all.

  “Possibly by the end of the week,” Eddie told them, “or, with Lieutenant Smith here, it could be even sooner.”

  One of them, grinning, said, “You’ll be giving us a clean bill of health, Captain?”

  “Considering the number of WAC uniform skirts that are missing,” Eddie answered, “not to mention female unmentionables, I’m not entirely sure every one of you boys could be considered completely healthy.” How they laughed over that, punching and poking one another. There’s nothing like a joke about homosexuality to make men rub each other’s shoulders.

  Promptly at six-thirty Eddie consulted his watch and announced, “I believe it’s mess call, gentlemen. If you’ll excuse me?”

  A chorus of courses followed that, and the bartender promptly presented his bill. With a restrained flourish Eddie wrote across its face ‘Captain Robinson,’ smacked the pen down on top of it, and pushed it back across the bar. “Thank you, Captain,” the bartender said. “Evening now.”

  “Evening, Jack,” Eddie said.

  We zigzagged through the Japanese screens to the dining room, which was less than half full. The management had dealt with the decorating problem in here by turning all the lights off and making do with candles on the tables; it was too dark to see what the place looked like.

  We took a table along the side wall, where I discovered that the walls were fronted by dark brown draperies, and Eddie said, “A fine group of young men, that. May they never have to face the guns of the enemy.”

  By God, he was Mister Chips!

  A waiter brought us menus and we ordered; Eddie had the sole meunière and I chose the veal parmigiana. In the waiter’s hearing, Eddie said, “Perhaps a half bottle of white, Lieutenant?” When I agreed, he ordered soave. The waiter departed and Eddie, glancing around in proprietary satisfaction, said, “Well, Lieutenant, what do you think of our little club?”

  It didn’t seem to me there were any occupied tables close enough for us to be overheard, but if Eddie wanted to maintain tight security that was fine with me. Particularly since, with all the bourbon I’d put away over the last hour and a promise of white wine to come, I was probably going to wind up as tight as the security. So I said, “It’s fine, sir. I particularly enjoyed meeting your young friends.”

  “Fine men,” he agreed. “They’ll make their country proud some day. They remind me of a Lieutenant Eberschwartz I once knew. Motor Pool officer. Fine ingenious young man. Someone had been siphoning fuel out of the two-by-sixes at night, and Lieutenant Eberschwartz set himself to catch the fellow. But the thief was clever; he would never come around on a night when Lieutenant Eberschwartz had posted himself there. So finally he came up with a solution. He rigged a camera with a flashbulb inside an office window, and ran wires connecting it to one of the trucks’ gasoline caps. When the cap was turned, the fellow’s picture would be taken.”

  “Very clever,” I said. “Did
it work?”

  “Beyond his wildest expectations. The thief already had several open cans of gasoline about himself when he turned that particular cap. The camera went off, but the electronic impulse of the flashbulb ignited the gasoline fumes in the air, and the explosion demolished the thief, seven vehicles and the Motor Pool office.”

  “Um,” I said.

  “Absolutely put a stop to pilfering on that base,” he said, and nodded with remembered satisfaction.

  “I can see where it would,” I said.

  “There was nothing left of the thief, of course,” he said. “We had to find him by a process of elimination, scanning the Morning Reports for missing men until we’d narrowed it down to just one possibility. Then we got some sheep parts from the mess hall, put them in a plastic bag, and shipped them home to the fellow’s parents. Said he died falling out of a jeep.”

  “Uh huh,” I said.

  “That’s the standard explanation, of course, for all noncombatant Army deaths. Died falling out of a jeep.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “I’ve seen that in newspaper reports.”

  “The odd thing is,” he said, “I once knew a fellow who did die from falling out of a jeep.”

  “Oh?”

  “He was having intercourse with a nurse at the time,” he said. “At a given moment she lunged upward so vigorously she flipped him completely out of the jeep.”

  “Was it moving?”

  “Hm? Oh, the jeep. No, he landed on a mine.”

  “Um,” I said.

  “Speaking of landing on mines,” he said, “that reminds me of another funny story.” And he proceeded to tell it. Soon our food came, and so did the wine, but Eddie kept on telling me his reminiscences. Friends of his had fallen under tanks, walked into airplane propellers, inadvertently bumped their elbows against the firing mechanism of thousand-pound bombs and walked backwards off the flight deck on an aircraft carrier while backing up to take a group photograph. Other friends had misread the control directions on a robot tank and driven it through a Pennsylvania town’s two-hundredth anniversary celebration square dance, had fired a bazooka while it was facing the wrong way, had massacred a USO Gilbert and Sullivan troupe rehearsing The Mikado under the mistaken impression they were peaceful Vietnamese villagers, and had ordered a nearby enlisted man to look in that mortar and see why the shell hadn’t come out.

  It began after a while to seem as though Eddie’s military career had been an endless red-black vista of explosions, fires and crumpling destruction, all intermixed with hoarse cries, anonymous thuds and terminal screams. Eddie recounted these disasters in his normal bloodless style, with touches of that dry avuncular humor he’d displayed during our hour at the bar. I managed to eat very little of my veal parmigiana—it kept looking like a body fragment—but became increasingly sober nonetheless. A brandy later with coffee, accompanied by a Korean War story about a friend of Eddie’s trapped in a box canyon for nine days by a combination of a blizzard and a North Korean offensive, who kept himself alive by sawing off his own wounded leg and eating steaks from it, but who later died in Honolulu from gangrene of the stomach, didn’t help much.

  Or maybe it did, in a way. By the time we left the Officer’s Club, shortly before nine o’clock, I was numb with horror, but the subject of my numbness had been transferred from the laser larceny to Eddie’s memoirs. I suppose I was in the best possible frame of mind for the events to follow: cold sober, and actively anxious to be distracted, even if that distraction had to be the commission of a felony.

  The streets of the camp were well illuminated, but there was very little traffic. Eddie and I strolled along, he pausing at last in his recital to puff a cigar in the crisp night air and to take an obvious sensual pleasure from his surroundings; he was like the captain of a great steamship out for a promenade around the deck. This was his environment, well-understood and well-loved. All it lacked to make it really homey for him, I thought, was a few burned bodies and the distant rattle of machine-gun fire.

  After three or four blocks we moved out of the housing and administrative area clustered in the vicinity of the main gate. From here on sprawled the storage section, starting with great hulking curved quonset huts, looking like headless armadillos. The ordinary streetlights were replaced here by floodlights at the corners of the buildings, and sentries stood guard at many of the doorways.

  Judiciously Eddie said, “Wouldn’t like an explosion around this area.”

  I looked at him, apprehensive. “Why’s that?”

  He motioned to the quonset huts around us. “Some cyanide compounds,” he said. “Other poison gases, some defoliants, a few sterilizing agents. Enough chemical weaponry right here to strip the Earth naked.”

  “Oh,” I said, and for a while after that I found it very difficult not to walk on tiptoe.

  19

  The building we wanted was just beyond the cylinders full of plague germs. “There it is,” Eddie said. “The structure on the right.”

  “Uh huh,” I said, and stopped scratching to look. Ever since he’d told me about the plague germs, I’d been itching all over. Also my lungs felt wrinkled.

  The structure on the right was a one-story version of the basic building, with fewer windows than normal. A rifle-bearing sentry marched back and forth in front of the entry door. That is, he marched back and forth the instant he saw the two of us, a Captain and a Lieutenant, approaching his post; before then he’d been more mooching than marching. And now, as we neared him, he came smartly to a halt, did a right face toward us, snappily converted from right shoulder arms to port arms, and announced in a very young voice, “Who goes there?”

  “Captain Robinson,” Eddie told him. “At ease, soldier.”

  The sentry’s body slackened a bit, but the rifle remained more or less at port arms while Eddie fished out the documents Bob Dombey had forged for him. I spent the time studying the sentry; did they really let a boy like this have bullets for that gun?

  “Here you are, soldier.”

  The boy wouldn’t take the papers. He stuck his head forward over his clutched rifle and read them as Eddie held them up in front of him. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Very good, sir. You want to enter?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I don’t have a key,” he said doubtfully.

  “I have,” Eddie assured him. A week ago Eddie had returned from the base with various wax impressions, and Phil had arranged to have keys made for him in the prison machine shop. Now, Eddie took out a ring of keys, selected one, and used it with casual confidence to open the door. “Return to your post, soldier,” he said, not harshly, and the two of us entered the building, pausing only for Eddie to hit the light switch beside the door, turning on a double row of fluorescent lights extending all the way down to the other end of the building.

  There were no interior partitions. It was almost exactly like my old basic training barracks, a long rectangular room with square wooden pillars at intervals to support the roof. The only difference was that my barracks had been lined with windows all the way around, while this structure only sported a pair of windows flanking the main entrance and three more windows spaced along each side. No windows, so far as I could see, were in the rear wall.

  There was no furniture in the building, just cartons stacked up so as to make aisles. Most of the stacks were no more than waist-high, but here and there one loomed as high as my head. Reading the stencilled notations on various cartons I learned that I was standing among machine guns, mortar shells, night sights, hand grenades…

  “Ah,” Eddie said. “Here they are. Find an empty carton, Lieutenant, there ought to be one around here somewhere.”

  That was the second time he’d done that. The first, back in the Officer’s Club dining room, I’d put down to excess caution. But who could overhear us this time? Looking toward the front windows I saw the sentry marching smartly back and forth out there, with the door closed between us and him; surely there was no way he co
uld hear anything being said in here.

  Or was Eddie afraid these storage buildings were bugged? It was possible, after all; put the sound-activated microphones in, have a central listening location, and know at once if anybody was planning anything he shouldn’t.

  Smart, Eddie, I thought, and aloud I said, “Yes, sir,” and went off looking for empty cartons.

  There was a bunch of them at the very rear, all neatly stacked inside one another. They were a hell of a job to separate, and when I finally went back to where Eddie had ripped open some of the full cartons, I found he had assembled several things other than the laser. There were four Colt .45 automatics, shining wickedly black in the fluorescent lighting, plus a dozen extra clips full of bullets. There were five hand grenades. And finally there was a box about fifteen inches long and six inches square, stencilled in black with all that indecipherable lettering and numbering the military likes so much, but with one word showing absolutely plain: laser.

  I said, “What’s all the rest of this?”

  “Useful materiel,” he said. “Is that the empty carton? Fine.”

  He took the carton from me and carefully packed it, wedging all the items in together so that nothing would bounce around loose. Considering what the items were, it was a precaution worth taking.

  “All right, Lieutenant,” he said, when he was finished. “If you’ll carry that, we can be off now.”

  “Right, sir,” I said. I picked up the carton, which weighed a ton, and followed him back down the central aisle to the front door. He opened it, stepped to one side to let me precede him out, and the sentry took one look at the carton in my arms, halted, switched his rifle to port arms, and said, “I’m sorry, sir, I won’t be able to let you take that.”