MASH Goes to Morocco

by Richard Hooker

  She had a long way to go, she realized. She had just been given a rude warning that the Crash Course in Arabic for New Diplomats had been woefully inadequate. Penelope had no idea what the Sheikh had been saying as he blessed the crowd. “Mudden yuri” and “yurmudder waresar mishus” had not been in either the “basic vocabulary” or in the “list of common phrases” at the language school.

  She took her notebook from her purse and wrote the phrases down, so that she could, at the earliest possible moment, look them up in her English-Arabic dictionary.

  “What are you doing, Miss Quattlebaum?” Mr. T. Dudley Dulaney asked.

  “Writing down what the Sheikh said,” she said.

  “He said ‘mud in your eye’ and ‘your mother wears army shoes,’ ” Dudley replied, somewhat taken aback.

  “Yes, I know,” she said impatiently. “All I’m trying to do, Mr. Dulaney, is increase my vocabulary.”

  “Certainly,” Dulaney said. It was the first suspicion Dulaney had had that the lady might be a little odd. He told himself that he should have suspected that she was a little odd. Who ever heard of a gorgeous lady diplomat?

  His suspicion that she was strange was confirmed two hours later. He had passed the two hours plying her with brandy, which she said tasted just like “Papa’s hard cider” and drank with great gusto. He was sure that he would be able to work his wicked way with her; but when he tried to put his arm around the back of the seat in his MG, she suddenly revealed a nasty, hitherto-hidden-from-sight character trait.

  “You try that again, buster,” she snarled, “and you’ll be carrying your arm in a sling.”

  “I’m terribly sorry,” T. Dudley Dulaney said. “I’m afraid you mistook my intentions.”

  “I didn’t mistake your intentions,” Penelope said. “I recognize a dirty, rotten, male-chauvinist, sexist, improper advance when I see one. There’s a new breed of women afoot, Dudley, and you better not forget that we’ve come a long way!”

  “I’m very sorry,” T. Dudley Dulaney said, suddenly quite alarmed at what would happen should Foreign Service Officer Grade-Seven Penelope Quattlebaum report to someone that Foreign Service Officer Grade-Seven T. Dudley Dulaney had made improper advances toward her.

  “Sorry’s not good enough!” Penelope said. “Let me out of this car, you dirty, rotten, male-chauvinist, sexist pig!” They were stopped at the moment in traffic at the Rond Pont of the Champs-Elysées, which is about two blocks from the Crillon Hotel.

  Penelope seized the opportunity to climb out of T. Dudley Dulaney’s MG coupe. She stalked off in the direction of the Elysée Palace, the American Embassy and her suite in the Crillon Hotel.

  That she headed in the proper direction was a fortuitous circumstance; for, the truth of the matter is that Foreign Service Officer Grade-Seven Penelope Quattlebaum was in her cups up to the tip of her pretty little nose. Although she manifested none of the ordinary symptoms of being smashed—slurred speech, staggering gait or hard-to-focus eyes and so on—she was actually far more in the arms of Bacchus than she had ever been in her life. T. Dudley Dulaney’s campaign to get her loaded had succeeded, although Phase B of that plan was not to reach the fruition he had planned.

  The curious effect that alcohol had upon her had surfaced only rarely before in her life, for the very good reason that Penelope Quattlebaum had partaken of the spirits only rarely.

  On one previous occasion, when Penelope had been a freshman cheerleader at Slippery Rock, a young man with the same general purpose in mind as T. Dudley Dulaney had spiked her Seven-Up at the Down but Not Out Post-Game Get Together (Slippery Rock had gone down to defeat at the hands of Mauch Chunk 13-7) with gin.

  Shortly after draining the third cup, Penelope Quattlebaum had assaulted the right guard of the Slippery Rock offensive eleven, one Victor C. Grumplebacher, by first kicking him in the shins, and then as he bent over to clutch the wounded member, by belting him in the eye with a small, bony fist.

  At the time, her behavior was regarded as a manifestation of her disapproval of Mr. Grumplebacher’s football prowess. He had tripped over his shoelace and fallen flat on his face six yards shy of the Mauch Chunk end zone, thereby losing the game. An excess of school spirit, in other words, rather than an excess of the fermented kind.

  Two years later, far from the campus, at the wedding of her cousin Agnes Quattlebaum to H. Howard Albumblatt, D.V.M., Penelope had caused something of a stir. After spending some time by mistake at the “wet” punch bowl (there had been a “wet” punch bowl and a “dry” punch bowl in deference to the feelings of the Albumblatts, who had recently taken the Total Abstention Pledge), Penelope had first thrown a cup of punch at the Reverend Buckley Templeton Lewis, II, D.D., the handsome young cleric who had performed the nuptial ceremony, and then slapped his face.

  The Rev. Mr. Lewis announced that he had no idea why he had been assaulted, but felt constrained to observe that when Godless people served the Devil’s Brew at festive occasions, things like that were bound to happen. Penelope’s father had taken the opposite tack. He rather loudly announced that not only was he highly suspicious of men who said they never took a drink, but also that he would feel no constraint whatever about taking a horsewhip to anyone who made an indecent advance to his little girl, Doctor of Divinity or not.

  There had been other incidents involving Penelope, attractive young men and booze; but they had been so far separated by time and distance that no one, least of all Penelope, had thought about them in depth and reached the obvious conclusion.

  In her cups, Penelope’s quite natural interest in an attractive member of the opposite sex surfaced. The surfacing so shocked her (she was that rara avis, someone entitled, when the time came, to march with head high, and in virginal white, down the aisle) with its rather livid and detailed imagery, that she was suddenly filled with a blind rage directed toward the party responsible for the imagery.

  Victor C. Grumplebacher, the Rev. Buckley Templeton Lewis, II, D.D., T. Dudley Dulaney and five or six others, in other words, had made a far more favorable impression upon Penelope than any of them, considering their encounters with her, would have been willing to believe.

  Penelope made her way past the Elysée Palace, glowering furiously at the gendarmes on duty outside, and then came to the American Embassy. A Marine Guard was, as always, on duty outside.

  “I am looking for the Crillon Hotel,” she announced.

  “If you can wait ten minutes, honey,” the Marine Guard replied, “I would consider it an honor and a pleasure to escort you there personally.”

  He got a kick in the shin for his interest in tourist welfare; but since he was a Marine, he did not howl in pain, although tears ran down his rosy cheeks. Penelope went farther down the street and came to what appeared to be a hotel lobby. Her feet, encased for the past four hours in tight shoes, hurt. She decided that she would go into the hotel lobby, sit down for a moment and then resume her search for her hotel.

  She made it to an armchair and slumped into it, not without attracting the attention of many people in the lobby. It was not that she staggered or lurched. To reiterate, as plastered as she was, she looked and behaved as if she had never so much as sniffed a cork.

  Once she had rested her feet, it seemed to her to be a good idea to rest her eyes. She closed them.

  A very tall, rather dark gentleman with a perfectly cropped British-style, brush mustache, who had been using one of the house phones and who had watched with more than casual interest her appearance at the hotel’s door, was concerned.

  He took the telephone from his ear and handed it to another rather dark man, telling him, in French, “Stay on here and see if you can stop the plane.” Then he walked to where Penelope dozed, snoring just a little, in the armchair.

  Up close, she looked even better than she had looked when he had first seen her. As something of an expert on European females, he quickly decided that she was not French. (Her complexion was too perfect for that, and she wor
e no powder or other facial make-up.) German, possibly, but a bit too finely featured for that. Scandinavian, probably. Even more probably, Swedish. Unfortunately, the Swedish he knew was not suitable for the first few words of what he hoped would be a long conversation, a conversation leading to a long and rewarding association. He did speak German.

  “Excuse me, Fraulein,” he said, in impeccable German, “may I be of some small assistance to you?”

  Penelope stirred but did not awaken. Ever so gently, the tall dark stranger touched her shoulder and pushed her, ever so gently. When her eyes opened, he repeated what he had said before.

  Penelope Quattlebaum spoke, of course, since her mother tongue, Pennsylvania Dutch, whose roots, as linguists and philologists are well aware, lay with German, not with the language spoken in the Netherlands.

  She understood what he was saying. She focused her eyes on him. A wild, blind rage swept through her.

  “Get away from me, you sex maniac,” she said, in Pennsylvania Dutch. “What kind of city is this, anyway, when a girl can’t find her hotel without being accosted by every male-chauvinist, sexist pig on the streets?”

  Pennsylvania Dutch, fortunately, does not readily translate in Hochdeutsch, or High German, which is the language the gentleman understood. All he really understood of the outburst was that she was looking for a hotel.

  “If das gnadige Fraulein (roughly: “the charming miss”) will give me the name of her hotel, I will be honored to send her there in my car,” he said.

  Penelope did not understand all of that, but enough to know that he had asked for the name of her hotel.

  “The Crillon,” she said. Certainly, there could be no harm in revealing that much.

  “Aber, mein liebe gnadige Fraulein, das ist die Crillon” he said. (Roughly: “But, my dear, charming miss, this is the Crillon.”)

  Penelope got to her feet. A cloud of her perfume filled his nostrils.

  “No thanks to you, you masher!” she said, this time in English. She looked at his face and into his deep, dark eyes. A dark-red mist of rage filled her very soul. Her right arm, the same one she had used to give Victor C. Grumplebacher the shiner that had become a permanent part of Slippery Rock football lore, swung in an arc toward his face. He reached out and stopped the swing with his hand by clutching her wrist. Unsuspecting, she was thrown off balance and fell into his arms.

  They stood that way for a moment, immobile, and then Penelope finally remembered where she was, what she was doing and what, most importantly, she wished to remain. She suspended herself on one foot and sent the other sailing into the gentleman’s shin.

  With a howl of pain, he let her go.

  “How dare you put your filthy, rotten, male-chauvinist, sexist-pig arms around me?” she said, and swung at him again, this time connecting, fortunately with an open palm. The sound of the slap rang like a pistol shot through the corridor, and two assistant night managers came running, as did the man to whom the gentleman had earlier handed the telephone.

  The mustachioed, tall, dark stranger raised his hand, and they all stopped in their tracks.

  “This young lady,” he said in French, “is a guest of this hotel. Please be good enough to see her to her room.”

  One of the assistant night managers was old enough to be her great-grandfather, and Penelope allowed herself to be led away as he very politely asked for her name.

  The other night manager, very timidly, said, “Is there anything else I might do for you, Excellency?”

  “Have a dozen long-stemmed roses delivered with her breakfast,” he said. “No card.”

  “Certainly, Excellency,” the assistant manager said.

  The mustachioed gentleman turned to the man to whom he had given the telephone.

  “What did you find out?” he asked.

  “The French authorities have contacted the plane, Your Highness,” the man said. “And there is word from your grandfather.”

  “Which is?”

  “We are to return home immediately, Your Highness, so that we may meet your grandfather’s guests and extend to them all hospitalities.”

  “Is that all?”

  “There is something else, Your Highness. I have no idea what it means, but I am assured that it is part of the message.”

  “Well, what is it?”

  “The last sentence of the message, Your Highness, is ‘Mud in your eye.’ ”

  The tall, dark man looked thoughtful for a moment and shrugged his shoulders. Then a look of genuine annoyance mingled with profound regret crossed his handsome features. He snapped his fingers to attract the attention of the assistant night manager who still hovered by.

  “Make that two dozen long-stemmed roses,” he said.

  Then he turned on his heel and walked out the door. A Rolls-Royce was sitting at the curb. He got in, and the other man got in beside him. The chauffeur closed the door after them, and the car made an illegal U-turn and headed across the Place de la Concorde in the general direction of Orly Field.

  Chapter Nine

  As all this was going on, there was also extraordinary activity in the Elysée Palace. Monsieur le President had returned from the Opera in great high spirits. The sale of flowers, one at a time, from the fifty-one baskets of flowers delivered to, and personally sniffed by, Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov, had been a complete success. The coffers of St. Imogene’s School, Madame le President’s alma mater, were about to bulge.

  And, although Madame le President had been naturally disappointed that Cher Boris Alexandrovich had not been at the post-performance reception, she had had a good time and had taken aboard several bottles of champagne.

  Monsieur le President had high hopes of ending the evening in connubial bliss. As Madame le President (whom he referred to as “Mon Petit Chou-Chou,” the loose translation of which is, unfortunately, “my little brussels sprouts,” and does not quite reflect the tender affection implicit in the French version) prepared for bed, commenting again and again on the vocal artistry of the singer, Monsieur le President went into the Presidential bath, showered, liberally doused himself with eau de cologne and wrapped himself in a silk dressing gown.

  No sooner had he entered the Presidential bedchamber, however, than the telephone rang. Not the white bedside telephone, which could be ignored or, under the circumstances, ripped from the wall and thrown out the window. What rang infuriatingly was the official, bright-red telephone pour les affaires d’Stat, which was kept in a rather elegant piece of furniture used during La Belle Epoque to store a porcelain container for the personal use of Louis XIV.

  “I suppose I must answer that,” Monsieur le President said.

  “Duty above all,” Chou-Chou replied, understandingly.

  He opened the cabinet and picked up the telephone.

  “Yes, what is it?”

  “M’sieu le President,” his caller (whom he recognized to be the Deputy Chef de Cabinet of the Deuxième Bureau) said, “I hope I have not disturbed your sleep.”

  “Not at all,” M’sieu le President said. “It was necessary for me to be awake to hear the telephone.”

  “M’sieu le President,” the head of the Deuxième Bureau said, “one of the ushers attending Sheikh Abdullah ben Abzug at the Opera was not an usher.”

  “You call me in the middle of the night, disturb my sleep, to talk about an imposter usher? And who is Sheikh Abdullah ben Abzug? Was he that crazy Arab in the next box who insulted my wife?”

  “The usher, M’sieu le President, who attended the Sheikh of Abzug was Col. René Franchise de la Montsacre—one of my men.”

  “Then why did not the good Colonel do something when that crazy Arab insulted my wife, the wife of your President, with the allegation that her mother wore army shoes?”

  “Colonel Montsacre, M’sieu le President,” the head of the Deuxième Bureau went on, “overheard the conversation between Sheikh Abdullah and Sheikh Hassan ad Kayam.”

  “That’s the fat little one who kept le
ering at my wife?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And what did those two Arab degenerates say about my Petit Chou-Chou?”

  “May I remind M’sieu le President that France imports thirty-eight percent of its oil from the Sheikhdom of Hussid?”

  “You think I don’t know that?” M’sieu le President said. “Get to the point.”

  “Your Excellency will recall, I am sure, that the government, the Foreign Ministry, has been exerting great pressure upon the government of Morocco to insure that when the oil of Abzug is exploited it will be exploited for the benefit of France?”

  “Yes, of course,” the President said. “My dear Minister,” the President said, “I am delighted that you bring me such good news, even at this ungodly hour. You have my thanks and my congratulations. And now, if there is nothing else …”

  “Excellency, what Colonel Montsacre overheard was that the Sheikh of Abzug has decided to permit oil exploration by the Chevaux Petroleum Corporation.”

  “The details of the matter are none of my concern,” the President said, “so long as it is a good French corporation, as Chevaux is … ”

  “M’sieu le President,” the head of the Deuxième Bureau went on, “the head of the Chevaux Petroleum Corporation is Jean-Pierre de la Chevaux.”

  “And he wants a medal? O.K. Tell him he’s as good as a Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur. I’ll even give it to him myself.”

  The head of the Deuxième Bureau bit the bullet: “Jean-Pierre de la Chevaux is an American!” he said. “You should excuse the expression!”

  “Impossible!”

  “He is an American,” the head of the Deuxième Bureau repeated.

  “How could you let this happen?” the President said. “What are we paying you for, anyway—to go around playing usher?”

  “If Colonel Montsacre had not been … as you put it, Excellency … ‘playing usher,’ we would not know of this development. We would have been presented with a fait accompli.”