Call to Arms

by W. E. B Griffin

  Today, the Marine officer, with an armload of books, came directly to Carolyn Spencer Howell’s position behind the counter.

  “I wonder if you could just keep these handy?” he asked, “while I go have my lunch.”

  “Certainly,” Carolyn said, and then she blurted, “I see you’ve seen service in the Pacific.”

  For the first time he looked at her, really looked at her as an individual, rather than as part of the furnishings.

  “I was in the Pacific,” he said, and then, “I’m surprised you know the ribbons. Few civilians do.”

  “I know them,” Carolyn heard herself plunge on. “And you’ve been wounded twice. According to the ribbons.”

  “Correct,” he said. “You have just won the cement bicycle. Would you care to try for an all-expense-paid trip to Coney Island?”

  And then his smile vanished. He looked at her intently, then shook his head and started to laugh.

  “What were you about to do?” he asked. “Call the military police?”

  She felt like a fool, but she was swept along with the insanity.

  “I was just a little curious how you could have served in the Pacific and be back already,” she said.

  “Would you believe a submarine?” he asked, chuckling. He reached in his pocket and took his identity card from his wallet and handed it to her.

  It had a photograph of him on it, and his name: BANNING, EDWARD J. MAJOR USMC.

  “Now will you guard my books for me while I have lunch?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry,” Carolyn Spencer Howell said, flushing. Then she lowered her head and spoke very softly.

  There was no reply, and when she looked up, he was gone.

  Carolyn Spencer Howell shook her head.

  “Oh, damn!” she said so loudly that heads turned.

  Fifteen minutes later, she walked into a luncheonette on East Forty-first Street and headed for an empty stool. A buxom Italian woman with her hair piled high on her head beat her to it, and Carolyn turned in frustration and found herself looking directly at Major Edward J. Banning, USMC, who was seated at a small table against the wall.

  “You wouldn’t be following me, would you?” he asked.

  Carolyn flushed, and started to flee.

  Banning stood up quickly and caught her arm.

  “Now, I’m sorry,” he said. “Please sit down. I’m about finished anyway.”

  She sat down.

  “I have made an utter fool of myself,” she said. “But I wasn’t really following you. I often come here for lunch.”

  “I know,” Banning said. “I’ve seen you. I hoped maybe you’d come here for lunch today.”

  She looked at him.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Under the circumstances, I would have thought I was suspicious, too.”

  “Would you settle for ‘curious’?” Carolyn asked.

  “You were suspicious,” he said. “Why should that embarrass you?”

  A waitress appeared, saving her from having to frame a reply. She ordered a sandwich and coffee, and the waitress turned to Banning.

  “If the lady doesn’t mind me sharing her table, I’ll have some more coffee,” he said.

  “Please,” Carolyn said quickly.

  She looked at him. Their eyes met.

  “You remember me asking for stuff on Nansen passports?” Banning asked. She nodded. “The reason I wanted to find out as much as I can is that my wife, whom I left behind in Shanghai, is traveling on a Nansen.”

  “I see,” she said.

  “I wanted that out in front,” Banning said.

  “Yes,” Carolyn Spencer Howell said. And then she said, “I was married for fifteen years. My husband turned me in on a younger model. It cost him a good deal of money. I had to find a way to pass the time, so I went back to work in the library.”

  He nodded.

  We both know, she thought. And he knew before I did. I wonder why that doesn’t embarrass me? And what happens now?

  They walked back to the library together. Just before she was to go off shift, he walked to the counter and asked her how she would respond to an invitation to have a drink before he got on the subway to go back to Brooklyn. She said she would meet him for a drink in the Biltmore Hotel. She would meet him under the clock…he couldn’t miss the clock.

  And so after work they had a drink, and then another. When the waiter appeared again, she said that she didn’t want another just now. Then he asked her if she was free for dinner, and she told him she was, but she would have to stop by her apartment for a moment.

  In the elevator, she looked at him.

  “I can’t remember one thing we talked about in the Biltmore,” she said.

  “We were just making noise,” he said.

  “I don’t routinely do this sort of thing,” Carolyn Spencer Howell said softly, as they moved closer together.

  “I know,” he said.

  Afterward, she went to the Chinese restaurant on Third Avenue, and returned with two large bags full of small, white cardboard containers that Ed Banning said looked like they held goldfish.

  Then she took off her clothes again, and they ate their dinner where she had left him, naked, in the bed.

  (Two)

  Bachelor Officers’ Quarters

  U.S. Navy Hospital

  Brooklyn, New York

  0930 Hours, 26 March 1942

  The spartan impersonality of the bachelor officers’ quarters struck Major Edward J. Banning the moment he pushed open the plate-glass door and walked into the lobby. It was in some ways like a small hotel.

  There was a reception desk, usually manned by a petty officer third. But he wasn’t there. And the lobby and the two corridors that ran off it were deserted.

  The lobby held a chrome-and-plastic two-seater couch; a chrome-and-plastic coffee table in front of the couch; and two chrome-and-plastic chairs on the other side of the coffee table. There was a simple glass ashtray on the coffee table, and nothing else.

  The floor was polished linoleum, bearing the geometric scars of a fresh waxing. There were no rugs. Two photographs were hanging on the walls, one of the Battleship Arizona, the other of a for-once-not-grinning-brightly Franklin Delano Roosevelt. There was a cork bulletin board, onto which had been thumbtacked an array of mimeographed notices for the inhabitants.

  A concrete stairway led to the upper floors. Its railings were steel pipe, and its stair-tread edges were reinforced with steel.

  Banning went to the desk and checked for messages by leaning over the counter for a look at the row of mailboxes where a message would be kept. There was no message, no letter. This was not surprising, for he expected none.

  Banning went up the concrete stairs to the second floor. It was identical to the first, except there was no receptionist’s desk. That space was occupied by a couch-and-chairs-and-table ensemble identical to the one in the lobby, which left the center of the second floor foyer empty. There was an identical photograph of President Roosevelt hanging on the wall, next to a photograph of two now-long-obsolete Navy biplane fighters in the clouds.

  Halfway down the right corridor, his back to Banning, the petty officer who usually could be found at the reception desk was slowly swinging a large electric floor polisher across the linoleum. Banning walked down the left corridor to his room.

  The reason he noticed the spartan simplicity of the BOQ, he realized, was that forty-five minutes earlier, he had walked down a carpeted corridor illuminated by crystal chandeliers to an elevator paneled in what for some strange reason he had recognized as fumed oak, and then across carpets laid on a marble floor past genuine antiques to a gleaming brass-and-glass revolving door spun by a doorman in what looked to be the uniform of an admiral in the Imperial Russian Navy.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Howell,” the doorman had politely greeted Carolyn. “It’s a little nippy. Shall I call a cab?”

  “No, thank you,” Carolyn had said. “I’ll walk.”

  The do
orman’s face had been expressionless. Or at least his eyebrows had not risen when he recognized Mrs. Carolyn Howell coming out of the building with a Marine. Nevertheless, Carolyn’s face had colored, and Banning had seen that she was embarrassed.

  She had quickly recovered, however, and almost defiantly took his arm before they walked down the street.

  The sex had been precisely what the doctor had ordered. From the moment he had kissed her in the elevator on the way up, there had been no false modesty, no pushing him away, no questions about what kind of a woman did he think she was. She wanted him—or at least a man—just about as bad as he had wanted her—or at least a woman.

  She had told him later, and he had believed her, that it had been the first time for her since the trouble with her husband.

  “It is like riding a bicycle, isn’t it?” she had asked, with a delightfully naughty—and pleased—smile as she forked a shrimp from one of the little cardboard Chinese take-out containers. “You don’t forget how. Except that I feel, with you, like you’ve just won the Tour de France.”

  And it had been, aside from the sex, a very interesting (or perverse?) experience to lie naked in Carolyn’s bed and tell her about Milla, while she, with genuine sympathy in her eyes, was kneeling naked beside him. To think that Milla would like Carolyn, and Carolyn would like Milla. And to wonder if he was really a sonofabitch for feeling that somehow Milla, if she knew about Carolyn, would not be all that hurt, or pissed off. That she might even be happy for him.

  He reached his room, found the key, and pushed the gray metal door open.

  The BOQ room was furnished with a bed; a straight-backed chair; a chest of drawers; a chrome-and-plastic armchair; a small wooden desk; and a framed photograph of a broadly smiling Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

  Lieutenant Colonel F. L. Rickabee, USMC, in uniform, was sitting in the straight-backed chair, his feet on the bed, reading the New York Times. He had removed his uniform blouse, revealing that he used suspenders to hold up his trousers. There were other straps around his torso, which only after a moment Banning recognized as the kind that belonged to a shoulder holster.

  “Ah, Banning,” Rickabee said, “there you are. All things come to him who waits.”

  “Good morning, sir.”

  “I feel constrained to tell you that I caught the four A.M. milk train from Sodom on the Potomac in the naive belief that by so doing I could catch you before you went out.”

  “If you had called, sir…” Banning said.

  Rickabee swung his feet off the bed, refolded the newspaper carefully, and tossed it on the bed. When he faced Banning, Banning saw the butt of what he thought was probably a Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special in the shoulder holster.

  “No problem,” Rickabee said. “It gave me the chance to talk with Captain Toland about you, which was also on my agenda. And it also gave me my very first chance to play secret agent.”

  “Sir?”

  “I asked the white hat on duty downstairs to let me into your room. He told me it was absolutely against regulations.” He bent over the bed, took what looked like a wallet from his blouse, and tossed it to Banning. “So I got to show him that. He was awed.”

  Banning caught it and opened it. Inside was a gold badge and a sealed-in-plastic identification card. The card, which carried the seal of the Navy Department, held a photograph of Rickabee, and identified him as a special agent of the Secretary of the Navy, all questions about whom were to be referred to the Director of Naval Intelligence.

  Banning looked at Rickabee.

  “I think I could have ordered him to set the building afire,” Rickabee said. “It had an amazing effect on him. You could almost hear the trumpets.” He held his hand out for Banning to return the identification.

  Banning chuckled and tossed the small folder back to him.

  “Very impressive, sir,” he said.

  “In the wrong hands, a card like that could be a dangerous thing,” Rickabee said.

  “Yes, sir, I can see that,” Banning said.

  A leather folder came flying across the room. Banning just managed to catch it.

  “That’s yours,” Rickabee said. “You’re a field-grade officer now, so I suppose it won’t be necessary to tell you to be careful with it.”

  Close to astonishment, Banning opened the folder. It held the same badge and card, except that his photograph peered at him from it.

  “You also get a pistol,” Rickabee said, pointing to a large, apparently full, leather briefcase. “Since I didn’t think you’d have to repel boarders between here and San Diego, I took the liberty of getting you a little Smith & Wesson like mine.”

  A dozen questions popped into Banning’s mind.

  “Sir—” he began.

  “Let me talk first, Ed,” Lieutenant Colonel Rickabee interrupted him. “It will probably save time.”

  “Yes, sir,” Banning said.

  “General Forrest sent me here,” Rickabee said. “My first priority was to settle to my own satisfaction the question of your mental stability. Dr. Toland’s diagnosis—that there is nothing wrong with you that a good piece of ass wouldn’t cure—confirmed my own. Toland told me that the way you handled yourself when you thought you were blind was as tough a test of your stability as he could think of.”

  Banning waited for Rickabee to go on.

  “So you are now officially certified as an officer who, because of the extraordinary faith placed in his ability and trustworthiness by both the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence of the Marine Corps, and the Commandant, can be entrusted with the highest-level secrets of the Corps, and with some extraordinary authority,” Rickabee said.

  “Jesus Christ,” Banning said. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Just what I said,” Rickabee said. “Secret one is that General Forrest at this time yesterday morning was cleaning out his desk and wondering how he was going to tell his wife that he was being retired from the Corps in disgrace—a disgrace that was no less shameful because the reasons were secret.”

  “Forrest? Christ, he’s a good man. What the hell—”

  “At two yesterday afternoon, the Commandant summoned General Forrest to his office and told him that he had reconsidered; that the needs of the Corps right now—there being no one available with his qualifications and experience to replace him—were such that he would not be retired.”

  “Colonel,” Banning said, “I don’t have any idea—”

  “Major General Paul H. Lesterby was retired from the Corps as of oh-oh-oh-one hours this morning,” Rickabee went on. “Colonel Thomas C. Wesley—”

  “Used to be with Fleet Marine Force Atlantic?” Banning interrupted.

  Rickabee nodded. “And more recently, he was Plans and Projects in the Commandant’s office. Wesley is now on a train for California, where he will function as special assistant to the commanding officer of the supply depot there until the Commandant makes up his mind whether he will be retired, or court-martialed. The Commandant was honest enough to tell Wesley that he would prefer to court-martial him, and the only thing that was stopping him was the good of the Corps.”

  “What the hell did he do?”

  “You know Evans Carlson, I understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “From this point, Ed, as you will see, we are getting into an even more sensitive area,” Rickabee said, and went into his briefcase. First he took out a small revolver in a shoulder holster and laid it on the bed. Then he handed Banning a thick stack of papers. “These documents were given to the Commandant the day before yesterday. I can’t let them out of my hands. You’ll have to read them now. When I get back to Washington, the whole file will be burned, and I am to personally report to the Commandant that it has been burned.”

  The first document in the stack was stamped SECRET. It was entitled, “Report of the Activities of Evans Carlson, late Major, USMC, during the period April 1939–April 1941.”

  Halfway down the stack was Captain J
ames Roosevelt’s letter to the Major General Commandant of the Marine Corps. At the bottom of the stack, also stamped SECRET, were transcripts of telephone conversations between Lieutenant Colonel Rickabee or Captain Edward Sessions and Second Lieutenant K. J. McCoy.

  “I wondered what McCoy was doing at Elliott,” Banning said when he had finished reading everything and was tapping the stack on his chest of drawers to get it in order.

  “Any other questions?” Rickabee asked.

  “You want an honest response to that?” Banning asked.

  “Please,” Rickabee said.

  “This is a despicable thing to do to Carlson,” Banning said.

  “Yes, it was,” Rickabee said. “And that was one of the more printable terms used by the Commandant to describe it.”

  “Was?”

  “Was,” Rickabee confirmed. “Just as soon as the Commandant saw it, it was over. Except for cleaning up the mess, of course.”

  “How did it happen?” Banning asked. “How did it get started in the first place?”

  “The goddamned Palace Guard got carried away with its own importance,” Rickabee said. “Wesley took it upon himself to save the Corps from Carlson. He enlisted General Lesterby in that noble cause, and then the two of them went to Forrest with their little idea. When Forrest balked, they led him to believe they were acting for the Commandant.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “And that goddamned Wesley suckered me, too,” Rickabee said. “There was no question in my mind that he was working for the Commandant. Otherwise—”

  “It’s hard to believe,” Banning said. But when he heard what he had said, he offered a quick clarification. “I mean, a colonel and a major general. Jesus Christ!”

  “I think the real reason the Commandant’s mad at Forrest is that Forrest was apparently willing to believe the Commandant was capable of something like that. Fortunately, I’m only a lieutenant colonel, and lieutenant colonels are supposed to be stupid. The Commandant treated me with condescending contempt, and spelled out very slowly and carefully what he wants me to do about cleaning up the mess.”