W E B Griffin - Corp 08 - In Dangers Path

by In Dangers Path(Lit)

  "I'll walk you downstairs," Roosevelt said, putting an arm around his shoulders.

  [TWO]

  The Marquis de Lafayette Suite

  The Foster Lafayette Hotel

  Washington, D.C.

  1445 17 February 1943

  A soft chime sounded, announcing that someone was in the sixth-floor corridor seeking entrance. The three men in the sitting room of the six-room suite looked at the door. Major Edward J. Banning put his drink on the coffee table in front of the red leather armchair where he was sitting, walked to the door, and opened it. He was in uniform, but had removed his tunic, pulled his field scarf loose, and turned up the cuffs of his shirt.

  "Good afternoon, Senator," Banning said politely, and smiled at Captain McCoy.

  "Hello, Banning," Senator Fowler said. "I return this young man to your capable custody."

  "He looks to me as if he could use a drink," Banning said.

  "We both could," Fowler said, and stepped into the room.

  The other two men rose to their feet. One of them, Captain Edward Sessions, USMC, was a tall, lithely muscular, well-set-up Marine captain in his late twenties. He, too, had removed his uniform tunic. A ring on his finger identified him as a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. An intelligence officer assigned to the Office of Management Analysis, he had met McCoy during a covert operation staged by Banning in China before the war.

  The other was a tall, slight, pale-skinned, unhealthy-looking man, wearing glasses and an ill-fitting gray suit.

  "Good afternoon, Senator," Colonel F. L. Rickabee, USMC, said.

  "Good to see you, Colonel," Fowler said. "And to quickly put your mind at rest, Ken did himself proud."

  "I expected nothing less," Rickabee said, "but I think we can give him a drink nevertheless."

  "I'll even make them," Captain Sessions said. "What's your pleasure, gentlemen?"

  "I don't know about Ken," Fowler said. "But I think I will dip once again into General Pickering's bottomless well of Famous Grouse."

  "Ken?" Sessions asked. McCoy nodded.

  Sessions walked to a rolling cart on which sat a dozen or so bottles of whisky, glasses, a soda siphon, and the other paraphernalia of a bar.

  "It went well?" Colonel Rickabee asked as he sat down again.

  "I bear orders from the Commander in Chief," Fowler said. "This 'remarkable young man, this fine Marine' is to get 'some well-deserved time off.' "

  "Consider it done, Senator," Colonel Rickabee said.

  "I told you you'd live through it, Ken," Major Banning said.

  McCoy looked at him. "Specs was there," McCoy said. "That helped a lot."

  "Specs?" Banning asked.

  "Major Roosevelt," McCoy said. "He was the only guy on the Makin Raid who wore glasses. We called him 'Specs' behind his back."

  Sessions handed McCoy a squat glass dark with whisky.

  "You hungry, Ken?"

  McCoy nodded. "Yeah, a little."

  "You didn't have any lunch," Sessions said.

  "Get on the horn, Sessions," Colonel Rickabee ordered, "and order up a steak for this 'remarkable young man, this fine Marine.' "

  "Aye, aye, sir," Sessions said.

  "A large steak, Ed," Major Banning said, "big enough for two people, and a dozen oysters on the half shell."

  "I don't know about the oysters," McCoy said.

  "Don't let those brand-new railroad tracks go to your head, Captain McCoy," Colonel Rickabee said. "When a superior officer tells you to eat oysters, it's because he thinks you need oysters. What you say is, 'Aye, aye, sir. Thank you, sir,' and eat them."

  For some reason, Colonel Rickabee, Major Banning, and Captain Sessions looked very pleased with themselves.

  Sessions called room service and ordered a very large steak and a dozen oysters, the larger the better. Then he turned to Colonel Rickabee. "Can I fix you another drink, Colonel?"

  "No. No. thank you. We're going back to the office. I think this remarkable young man, this fine Marine, needs some time to himself."

  "Yes, sir."

  "I've got to go back to work, too," Senator Fowler said. "Ken, do I have to tell you if I can be of any help, in any way, all you have to do is call?"

  "Thank you, sir," McCoy said.

  "Duty calls, gentlemen," Rickabee said, stood up, and gestured for them to precede him out of the apartment.

  "If you get bored later on, Ken," Captain Sessions said, "call me at the apartment after seventeen thirty."

  "Why should he get bored?" Major Banning said. "He's a remarkable young man, a fine Marine. That means he should be able to find something to do to keep himself from getting bored."

  "I don't want to see your smiling face for at least two weeks, Captain McCoy. Consider that an order," Colonel Rickabee said. "Aye, aye, sir," McCoy said.

  "On the other hand, let us know where we can get in touch with you," Rickabee said.

  "Aye, aye, sir."

  In a moment, McCoy was alone. He took off his tunic, tossed it on the couch, pulled down his tie, and carried his drink over to the windows overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue and the White House.

  Jesus H. Christ! I really was in that building, with the President of the United States.

  You're a long goddamned way from the machine-gun section of Baker Company, 4th Marines, in Shanghai, Corporal McCoy.

  He slowly sipped his drink.

  When the chime sounded, he was in the process of making himself another. He opened the door and the floor-service waiter wheeled in a cart loaded with silver lidded dishes, cutlery, a vase holding a single rose, and a towel-wrapped bottle in a silver wine cooler.

  "May I open the champagne for you, sir?"

  "No. No, thank you."

  I don't want any champagne. I don't even like champagne.

  "Is there anything else you require, sir?"

  "No, thank you. This is fine."

  "Yes, sir. Thank you very much, sir."

  The waiter left.

  No check was presented. There was a standing rule in the Foster Lafayette hotel from Mr. Foster himself. No check would ever be presented to anyone staying in the Marquis de Lafayette suite as a guest of Brigadier General Fleming Pickering, USMCR. Foster's only child, his daughter Patricia, was married to Pickering.

  McCoy lifted the lids on the plates. The steak was enormous. And so were the dozen oysters on their bed of ice under another lid. He dropped the lid over the oysters back in place, sat down on the couch, and reached for the telephone on the coffee table.

  "Person-to-person to Miss Ernestine Sage," he ordered. "Try her first at J. Walter Thompson, the advertising agency, in New York City. I don't know the number. If she's not there, try Gramercy 5-4777. If there's no answer there, try the Sage residence in Bernardsville, New Jersey. I don't know that number either."

  He put the telephone in its cradle, leaned back against the cushions of the couch, and closed his eyes.

  He opened them quickly and sat up when he heard the sound of a door being opened.

  A young woman was walking across the sitting room toward him. She had jet-black hair, worn in a pageboy, and she was wearing a black negligee that was almost invisible in the light coming through the windows behind her.

  She picked up the telephone. "You can cancel that call to Miss Sage, please, operator," she said.

  She looked down at McCoy. "Well, now I know," she said.

  "You know what?"

  "That I am more important to you than eating a steak."

  His face contorted. His chest shook. He began to sob.

  "Oh, baby," Ernie Sage said, and went to the couch and put her arms around him.

  He tried to sit up. "I'm sorry, honey! I'm."

  "Shut up!" she said, then held his face against her breast and ran her hands through his hair, until, after a moment, he stopped crying.

  "I wonder if they'll work," Ernie said.

  "What?"

  "The oysters. There's a dozen of them."

  "I w
ondered what those bastards were up to with that oyster business," he said.

  "Those bastards called me the minute they heard you were in California- which is more than you did. And they called me again when they knew when you were due in Washington. If it wasn't for those bastards, you'd still be trying to talk to me on the telephone."

  "Okay. Sorry. Are you really starved? Or would a couple of oysters hold you for a while?"

  "Oh, God, Ernie, I love you."

  "If that's the case, what are we doing here in the living room, with all your clothes on?"

  He stood up and looked down at her, then leaned over and picked her up and carried her toward the bedroom. Halfway to the door she kissed him, which caused him to lose his sense of direction, and he collided with the door frame.

  But he quickly made the necessary course corrections, passed through the door to the bedroom, and kicked the door shut behind them.

  [THREE]

  Officers' Club

  U.S. Navy Hospital

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  1745 17 February 1943

  "Hi," Captain James B. Weston, USMC, said to Lieutenant (j.g.) Janice Hardison, NNC, when she slipped onto the barstool beside him.

  "Hi."

  "May I say that you do more for that uniform than any other member of the Naval Officer Corps I have ever met?"

  Janice blushed and was furious with herself.

  "I hope you're hungry," he said. "I didn't get any breakfast, as you know, and what they offered for lunch was unfit for human consumption."

  "I have something to tell you about me," she said.

  Oh, shit. What? You've got a boyfriend? Hell, yes, you've got a boyfriend! Someone as good-looking as you are, in the midst of all these nice young men, is not going to be alone for long.

  "I'm all ears."

  "I want you to promise, first, that you won't make some smart-aleck reply."

  He held up his fingers in the manner of Boy Scouts vowing the truthfulness of what they are about to say. "Boy Scout's Honor," he said.

  "I'm a virgin," Janice said.

  Just in time, he stopped himself from saying what immediately came to his mind: No problem. We can fix that tonight.

  "If that was intended to surprise me, it didn't."

  "And I intend to stay that way," she said. "So maybe you may want to change your mind about."

  "What I am offering, Lieutenant Hardison, is a lobster dinner."

  "You know what I mean," she said. "I just wanted to have things clear between us."

  "They are crystal clear," he said. "Now, would you like a drink?"

  "Yes, please," she said. "A weak scotch."

  He signaled the bartender and ordered her drink.

  When it was delivered, she took a quick, small sip, put the glass on the bar, looked at him, found him looking at her, and quickly dropped her eyes to her glass.

  "How do you like it?" Weston asked.

  "Excuse me?"

  "Boiled? Broiled? Thermidor?"

  "I don't know," she confessed. "I've never had lobster before."

  What does that make you, a lobster virgin?

  "Really?"

  "Kansas-Wichita-is a long way from the ocean," Janice said.

  "It's even farther from Scotland," he said.

  "My father's a doctor," she said. "He taught me to drink scotch."

  And how to keep it till marriage, right?

  "What kind of a doctor?"

  "A psychiatrist," she said.

  "And that's why you became a psychiatric nurse?"

  "I was in a test program at the University. of Kansas, at the Medical School. The university offers a four-year course in nursing. You need an undergraduate degree to get into medical school. They wondered how well a B.S.N. would do in medical school-hopefully better than the usual B.S. or B.A."

  "B.S.N.? Bachelor of Science, Nursing?"

  "Right. So I was one of the guinea pigs."

  "How does one get to be a guinea pig?"

  "It helps if your father is a professor of medicine," she said.

  "So why aren't you in medical school?"

  "Well, the war came along, the Navy came around recruiting nurses, and Daddy said I should take it. Daddy said I could get more clinical experience as a nurse in the service than I would get as a psychiatric resident."

  Daddy said? Daddy said, "Daughter Darling, go in the Navy, drink scotch, and hang on to your pearl of great price until you get married"?

  Well, what the hell is wrong with that?

  "What about you?" Janice asked.

  "University of Iowa," he said. "I was raised in Des Moines. Offered a chance for flight school, joined the Corps, and here I am."

  "Your parents?"

  "My mother died when I was a kid, and my father-he was in the insurance business-died when I was in college."

  "Brothers and sisters?"

  "Neither. Just an aunt."

  "I have two brothers," she said. "Both doctors. One surgeon and one proctologist. My mother was a nurse before she married my father."

  "What's a proctologist?"

  "It deals with the lower intestines," she said after a brief hesitation.

  His face lit up. "I know what it means!" he remembered.

  "I thought you might," she said, and smiled at him.

  Goddamn, she's really sweet.

  Well, why not? Good solid family. Daddy's a doctor, Mommy's a nurse, she was baby sister to two brothers. Either of whom would probably cheerfully break both my legs if! changed her virginal status. Or pull my tonsils through the terminus of my lower intestines with surgical forceps.

  "We ate lobster in Iowa," Weston said. "God only knows how it got there, but there it was."

  "I'm sure we had them in Kansas, too," she said, loyally. "My family just never ate them."

  "Charley Galloway told me to go where we're going tonight," Weston said. "Caroline took him there. Place called Bookbinder's."

  "I've been there," she said, "a couple of times. I've gone as far as clam chowder and broiled flounder, but so far I haven't had the courage for lobster or oysters. Raw oysters."

  "I'd stay away from raw oysters if I were you," Weston said without thinking first.

  Janice blushed.

  Oh, shit. You and your big mouth. She's heard what oysters are supposed to do to you.

  And she blushed. She's a nurse, she's heard everything, seen everything, and it hasn't touched her, otherwise she wouldn't be blushing.

  "Yes, thank you, Captain Weston," Commander Jerome J. Kister, MC, USNR, said, as he took the barstool beside Janice Hardison, "I will permit you to buy me a drink. I spent most of the afternoon on the telephone about you."

  "Do I have to buy you the drink before you tell me what happened?"

  "Jim!" Janice said.

  "Yes, you do," Kister said, "and let me say how delighted I am that you two have reached some sort of armistice."

  "It was love at first sight," Weston said. "But she's having trouble adjusting to that."

  "Oh, Jim!" Janice said.

  "You mean all you wanted was a lobster?"

  "I'm still not sure I want a lobster," she said.

  "The Junior Assistant Deputy Surgeon General of the United States Navy." Kister said, hoping to turn their attention away from each other to him. When he had their attention, he went on, "Or was it the Deputy Assistant Junior Surgeon General?"

  "You tell me," Weston said. "I'm all ears."

  "Whatever his title," Kister said, "he's now the guy who makes decisions in cases like yours. He's a captain." He paused. "I suspect the sonofabitch was an obstetrician in civilian life," he sighed, "and I'd be very surprised to learn he's ever been afloat in anything larger than a canoe. Be that as it may, the Captain is absolutely unwilling to accept my professional opinion that you are no crazier than any other Marine."

  "Oh, shit!" Weston said bitterly, and then, remembering the company, quickly added, "Sorry, Janice."