The McBain Brief

by Ed McBain

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then why are you wearing moccasins?”

  “I told you, sir. My feet . . .”

  “Why are you wearing white socks, Peters?”

  “Sir?”

  “You heard me, goddamnit. Regulation is black socks. The uniform of the day is posted every day in the midships passageway, Peters. The uniform for today is dungarees, white hats, black socks and black shoes. Are you aware of that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you know that we are here on shakedown cruise, Peters?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you know that the squadron commander may pop in on this ship at any moment? Do you know that? What do you think he’d say to me if he found men in white socks and moccasins? What the hell do you think this is, Peters? A goddamn country club?”

  “No, sir.”

  “When’s the last time you had a haircut, Peters?”

  “Last week, sir.”

  “Don’t lie to me, Peters.”

  “Last week, sir,” I repeated.

  “Then get down to the barber shop after sweepdown, do you understand? And you’d better shave, too, Peters. I don’t like any man in my crew looking like a bum.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I . . .”

  “Get back to your station. And if I find you goofing off again, Peters, it’s going to be your hide, remember that. Now get going.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Change those socks and shoes first.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And on the double, Peters.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I left him and went down to the aft sleeping compartment. It was hotter down there, and you could feel the sweat clinging to the sides of the ship, dripping from the bulkheads. There was a stink down there, too, a stink worse than garbage, the stink of men living in cramped quarters. I went to my locker and lifted the top, and Ramsey, a Radioman Second, looked down from his sack. He was in his skivvies, and his bare chest and legs were coated with perspiration.

  “Man,” he said, “and I thought it was hot in Georgia.”

  “The Old Man is prowling,” I told him. “You better move your ass.”

  “Let him prowl,” Ramsey said. “That one don’t scare me none.”

  “No, huh?” I said. I took out a pair of black socks and the regulation black shoes, and then I kicked off the moccasins and pulled off the white socks. “Maybe you like losing liberty, huh, Ramsey? If the Old Man catches you sprawled out like that, you’ll get a Captain’s Mast, at least.”

  “You know what he can do with his Mast, don’t you?” Ramsey asked, smiling and stretching out.

  “How come you’re so brave, Ramsey?” I asked, putting on the black socks.

  “How come? I’ll let you in on a secret, Dave. You really want to know?”

  “Yeah, how come?”

  “I’m sick, man. I got me cat fever. The Chief Pharmacist’s Mate himself, he said I got to lay flat on my keester. That’s what he said. So let the Old Man come down here and say something, just let him. I’ll tell him just where the crowbar goes.”

  “You wouldn’t tell him nothing,” I said, smiling. “You and the skipper are buddies.”

  “Sure,” Ramsey said.

  “I think you really like the Old Man.”

  “Only one way I’d like him,” Ramsey said.

  “How’s that?”

  Ramsey rolled over. “Dead,” he said.

  I went up to the radar shack after changing, and I got to work, piddling around with a bucket and a rag, wiping off the radar scopes, fooling with the plotting boards, making like I was working. The radar shack was about as big as a flea’s nose, and I’d already cleaned it thoroughly after chow. That made no difference to the Navy. In the Navy, you cleaned it again, or you pretended to clean it again. Anything to keep you busy. Anything to keep you from enjoying a swim when the thermometer was ready to pop.

  Gary came in while I was behind the vertical plotting board, and he said, “What’re you doing, Peters?”

  “What the hell does it look like I’m doing?” I asked him.

  “It looks like you’re working,” he said, “but I know that can’t be so.”

  “Yeah, stow it,” I told him.

  “You shouldn’t be nasty to non-commissioned officers, Peters,” he said. He smiled a crooked smile, and his buck teeth showed in his narrow face. “I could report you to the Old Man, you know.”

  “You would, too,” I said.

  “He don’t like you to begin with.” Gary smiled again, enjoying the three stripes he wore on his dress blues, enjoying the three stripes he’d inked onto his denim shirt. “What’d you do to the old boy, Dave?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Well, he sure don’t like you.”

  “The feelings are mutual,” I said.

  “You like mid watches, Dave?”

  “Whattya mean?” I asked.

  “We got to stand voice radio watch in port, you know that. Not enough radiomen. I showed the Old Man the watch list. Had you slated for a four to eight this afternoon.”

  “So?”

  “The Old Man told me to put you on the mid watch.”

  “The mid watch? What the hell for? Why . . .”

  “Nobody likes to drag up here at midnight, Dave,” Gary said. “But don’t be bitter.”

  “What the hell did he do that for?” I asked.

  Gary shook his head. “He just don’t like you, chum. Hell, he don’t like any enlisted man on this ship—but you he likes least of all.”

  “The hell with him,” I said. “I’ve stood mid watches before. Ain’t no mid watch going to break me.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Gary said drily. He paused a moment, and then said, “But you know something, Dave?”

  “What?”

  “If I had a character like the Old Man riding my tail, you know what I’d do?”

  “No. What would you do?”

  “I’d kill him,” he said softly. He looked at me steadily, and then turned. “Don’t want to interrupt your work, chum,” he said, and then he was gone.

  I thought about that mid watch all morning and, when the chow whistle sounded, I dropped the bucket and rags and headed down for the main deck. I got in line and started talking with one of the guys, Crawley, a gunner’s mate. I had my back to the railing so I naturally couldn’t see what was going on behind me. Nobody yelled, “Attention!” either, so I didn’t know what was happening until I heard the Old Man’s voice say, “How about it, Peters?”

  I turned slowly, and he was standing there with his hands on his hips and a smile on his face, but the smile didn’t reach those cold blue eyes of his.

  “Sir?” I said.

  “You know what this leaf on my collar means, Peters?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. I was standing at attention now, and the sweat was streaming down my face, and my feet were sweating inside the black socks and black shoes.

  “Do you know that an enlisted man is supposed to come to attention when an officer appears? Do you know that I am the captain of this ship, Peters?”

  “Yes, sir. I know that.”

  “I don’t think I like the tone of your voice, Peters.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “Hereafter, Peters, you keep your eyes peeled, understand? And whenever you see me coming, I want you to shout, ‘Attention!’ in case there are any other members of the crew who don’t understand the meaning of respect. Do you understand that, Peters?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. And so you won’t forget it, Peters, perhaps we’ll forego liberty for a week when we get back to the States.”

  “Sir, I . . .”

  “That’ll do, Peters. I’ll discuss this with the Communications Officer, and you’ll be restricted to the ship for a week after we return to Norfolk.”

  “I didn’t even see you, sir,” I said doggedly. “My back was . . .”

  “It’s your bus
iness to see me, Peters. And from now on, you’d damn well better see me.”

  “You’re the boss,” I said angrily.

  “Yes, Peters,” the captain said coldly. “I am.”

  He looked at me steadily for another moment, and then addressed the other guys standing in line. “At ease,” he said, and walked through the passageway near the mess hall.

  I watched his back disappear, and then I slouched against the bulkhead, and Crawley, the gunner’s mate, said, “That rotten louse.”

  I didn’t answer him. I was thinking of the mid watch, and now the loss of a week’s liberty, after three weeks of shakedown cruise when we’d all been restricted to base. The swabbies on the base all got liberty in Havana, but not the poor slobs who came down to play war games, not us. We roamed the base and bought souvenirs for the folks at home, but you can buy only so many souvenirs in three weeks, and after that you don’t even bother going ashore. Sure, Norfolk was a rat town, but it was a town at least, and there were women there—if you weren’t too particular—and Stateside liberty wasn’t to be sneezed at, not after three weeks in Guantanamo.

  And tomorrow we’d be going out with the cruiser again, and that meant a full day of Battle Stations, the phony General Quarters stuff that was supposed to knit us together into a fighting crew. I didn’t mind that business because it wasn’t too bad, but after a mid watch—even if you went to sleep right after evening chow, which you never did—it was a back breaker. You got off at four in the morning, provided your relief wasn’t goofing, and you hit the sack until reveille. If you averaged two hours sleep, you were doing good. And then Battle Stations all day.

  “He rides everybody,” Crawley said. “Everybody. He’s crazy, that’s all.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I come off a DE,” Crawley said. “We hit more Pacific islands than I can count. This was in the last war, Peters.”

  “Yeah,” I said dully.

  “We had a guy like this one, too. So we were coming in on Tarawa the night of the invasion and three quartermasters got ahold of him, right on the bridge, right in front of the exec and a pile of other officers. They told that boy that he better shape up damn soon or he was gonna be swimmin’ with the sharks. He looked to the exec and the other brass for help, but they didn’t budge an inch. Boy, he read the deep-six in everybody’s eyes.”

  “What’d he do?” I asked.

  “He gave the con to the exec, right then and there, and we were never bothered by him again. He transferred off the ship inside a month.”

  “He must’ve come onto this tub,” I said.

  “No, he couldn’t hold a candle to our Old Man. Our Old Man is the worst I ever met in the Navy, and that includes boot camp. He’s a guy who really deserves it.”

  “Deserves what?” I asked.

  “A hole between the eyes maybe. Or some arsenic in his goddamned commanding officer’s soup. Or a dunk in the drink with his damn barracuda.”

  “You can land in Portsmouth for that,” I said.

  “Not if they don’t catch you, Peters,” Crawley said.

  “Fat chance of getting away with it,” I said.

  “You think they’d know who did it?” he asked. “Suppose the Old Man gets a hole in his head from a .45 swiped from the gun locker? Suppose . . .”

  “You better knock that kind of talk off,” I warned. “That’s mutiny, pal.”

  “Mutiny, my ass. Suppose the .45 was dumped over the side? How would they prove who did it? You know how many guys are on this ship, Peters?”

  “Yeah,” I said slowly.

  “You wait and see,” he said. “Someday, somebody’ll have the guts to do it. Goodbye, Old Man. And good riddance.”

  “Yeah, but suppose . . .”

  “The line’s moving, Peters,” Crawley said.

  The base sent out a drone that afternoon, and we went out and shot at it. We didn’t get back to the bay until about 1930, and then we had a late chow, and the Old Man announced that no movies would be shown on the boat deck that night because we’d missed the launch that brought the reels around. Findlay, the Chief Bo’sun asked him if we couldn’t see the same movie we’d seen the night before, but he said, “I don’t like seeing movies twice,” and that was the end of it.

  I suppose I should have gone straight to bed because the mid watch was coming up, but instead I hung around abovedecks, trying to get some air. Guys had dumped their mattresses all over the ship, sleeping up there under the stars in their skivvies. There was no breeze, and it was hot as hell, and I’d already taken more salt pills than I should have. The sweat kept coming, the kind of sweat that stuck all your clothes to you and made you want to crawl out of your skin. A poker game was in session near the torpedo tubes amidships on the boat deck, and I watched it for a while, and then climbed the ladder down to the main deck.

  Mr. Gannson was OD, and he slouched against the metal counter and threw the bull with Ferguson, the gunner’s mate who was on with him as messenger. They both wore .45’s strapped to their hips, and I passed them silently, nodding as I went by. I leaned over the rail just aft of the quarterdeck, looking down at the fluorescent sprinkles of water that lapped the sides of the ship. The water looked cool, and it made me feel more uncomfortable. I fired a cigarette and looked out to the lights of the base, and then I heard Mr. Gannson say, “You got a clip in that gun, Ferguson?”

  I turned as Ferguson looked up with a puzzled look on his face. “Why, no, sir. You remember the ditty bag thing. We . . .”

  “This is shakedown, Ferguson. The captain catch you with an empty sidearm, and you’re up the creek.”

  “But the ditty bag . . .”

  “Never mind that. Get to the gun locker and load up.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ferguson said.

  The ditty bag he’d referred to had been hanging from one of the stanchions in the forward sleeping compartment. Davis, on fire watch, had gone down to relieve Pierto. The fire watch is just a guy who roams the ship, looking for fires and crap games and making sure all the lights are out in the sleeping compartments after taps. I don’t know why he rates a .45 on his hip, but he does. When you relieve the watch, you’re supposed to check the weapon he gives you, make sure it’s loaded, and all that bull. So Pierto handed Davis the gun, and Davis probably wasn’t too used to .45’s because he’d just made Radarman Third, and only non-commissioned officers stood fire watch on our ship. He yanked back the slide mechanism, looked into the breach the way he was supposed to, and then squeezed the trigger, and a goddamn big bullet came roaring out of the end of his gun. The bullet went right through the ditty bag, and then started ricocheting all over the compartment, bouncing from one bulkhead to another. It almost killed Klein when it finally lodged in his mattress. It had sounded like a goddamned skirmish down there, and it had attracted the OD.

  Well, this was about two months ago, when we were still in Norfolk, and the skipper ordered that any sidearms carried aboard his ship would have no magazines in them from then on. That went for the guys standing gangway watch when we were tied up, too. They’d carry nothing in their rifles and nothing in the cartridge belts around their waists. Nobody gave a damn because there was nothing to shoot in the States anyway.

  I watched Ferguson walk away from the quarterdeck and then head for the gun locker right opposite Sick Bay, the key to the heavy lock in his hands. I walked past the quarterdeck, too, and hung around in the midships passageway reading the dope sheet. I saw Ferguson twist the key in the hanging lock, and then undog the hatch. He pulled the hatch open, and stepped into the gun locker, and I left the midships passageway just as he flicked the light on inside.

  “Hi,” I said, walking in.

  He looked up, startled, and then said, “Oh, hi, Peters.”

  The rifles were stacked in a rack alongside one bulkhead, and a dozen or so .45’s hung from their holster belts on a bar welded to another bulkhead. Ferguson rooted around and finally came up with a metal box which he opened quickly. H
e turned his back to me and pulled out a magazine, and the ship rolled a little and the .45’s on the bar swung a little. He moved closer to the light so he could see what the hell he was doing, his back still turned to me.

  I threw back the flap on one of the holsters and yanked out a .45, the walnut stock heavy in my hand. I stuck the gun inside my shirt and into the band of my trousers, cold against my sweating stomach. I heard Ferguson ram the clip home into his own .45, and then he said, “Come on, Peters. I got to lock up.”

  I followed him out, and even helped him dog the hatch. He snapped the lock, and I said, “Think I’ll turn in.”

  Ferguson nodded sourly. “You can sleep in this heat, you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.”

  I smiled and walked back aft toward the fantail. I wanted to sit down someplace and feel the gun in my hands. But it was so damned hot that every guy and his brother was abovedecks, either hanging around smoking or getting his mattress ready for the night. I went into the head, and the place was packed, as usual.

  The gun was hot against my skin now, and I wanted to take it out and look at it, but I couldn’t do that because I didn’t want anyone to remember they’d seen me with a .45.

  I kept hanging around waiting for the crowd to thin, but the crowd didn’t thin. You couldn’t sleep in all that heat, and nobody felt like trying. Before I knew it, it was 2345, and Ferguson was coming around to wake me for the mid watch. Only I wasn’t sleeping, and he found me gassing near the aft five-inch mount.

  “You’re being paged, Peters,” he said.

  “Okay,” I told him. I went forward, and then up the ladder to the passageway outside the radar shack. Centrella was sitting in front of the Sugar George, a writing pad open on his lap.

  “Hi, boy,” I said. “You’re liberated.”

  “Allah be praised,” he said, smiling. He got to his feet and pointed to a speaker bolted into the overhead. “That’s the only speaker you got, boy,” he said. “Nothing on it all night. Just static.”

  “You’re sure it’s plugged in?”

  “I’m sure. You take down anything for Cavalcade. That’s ‘All ships.’ You also take down anything for Wonderland. That’s us.”

  “No kidding,” I said.