“‘Mr. Caldwell,’ Henry said, handing Great-grandfather a check. ‘The line’s been running a little faster than I thought it would. Here’s a check for the nine thousand yards of your Clerical Black fabric that is already cushioning the bottoms of Lizzie owners, which means the line’s supply is down to about two thousand yards. So I urgently need more. How soon can you get another five thousand yards of Clerical Black out to Detroit?’
“‘Henry, two thousand yards will be on this afternoon’s Detroit Flyer, with more to follow in the immediate future,’” Great-grandfather said. ‘And I think the time has come that I may permit you to call me Abner.’”
“That, sir,” Phil said, “if I may be permitted to say so, is a fascinating bit of unknown Americana.”
“Why not? Well, where was I? Aha!
“So there I was, son, fresh from saving the world for democracy and having a hell of a good time doing it, and there’s my father telling me what he thinks I should do is enroll in MIT and get a Ph.D. in Polymer Science and Textile Technology so that I would be prepared to take over the business knowing a little something about fabric.
“I had no choice of course. I had to do what Daddy said, or go get a job like ordinary people, which of course was absolutely out of the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! question. So I went to MIT and got my doctorate in Polymer Science and Textile Technology.
“I never use the title, of course, out of modesty, except when I call my doctor’s office. I had quickly learned if I said, ‘Dr. Caldwell is calling Dr. Chancremechanic’ or whatever, they would put me right through to the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! pill-pusher. Otherwise they would put me on hold. Now when I need a doctor, I have that EXPLETIVE DELETED!! idiot Brewster, or another member of the West Point Ring Knockers Association who works for me, call up and order one to report to me.
“Where was I? Oh. Then Daddy put me in charge of the Detroit office. The only good thing I can say about that is that I met Victoria there at the Grosse Pointe Country Club.
“When people like you and I, Phil, look up ‘Hell on Earth’ in Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia or a similar reference work, what we get is a picture of either the Detroit Auto Club or the Grosse Pointe Country Club. The Detroit Auto Club has nothing to do with coming to help when your battery is dead or you have a flat tire. The Detroit Auto Club is full of men who work in the automobile business, and hang out there to talk about Guess What, and the Grosse Pointe Country Club is where their wives go to pick up a little romance.
“I forget why I went to the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! GPCC that day, as significant a day as it proved to be in my life, but I did. And I came across Victoria near the ninth tee, quietly weeping as she dabbed at her eyes with a lace hankie.
“As strange as I knew the customs of the people out there seem to people like us, Phil, I didn’t think any of their women looking for a little romance were so weird as to believe a good way to pick up a man while looking for romance was to stare coldly at him from bloodshot eyes while noisily blowing their nose.
“I took the chance. I tend to take chances where good-looking women are concerned.
“‘May I be of assistance?’ I inquired.
“Victoria replied: ‘I wouldn’t reply if I didn’t hear Harvard in your somewhat nasal voice. Please tell me it’s so.’
“‘It is. And please tell me that’s Wellesley I hear in yours.’
“‘It is. Until just now, I didn’t think there was anyone in Detroit who could distinguish between a Wellesley accent and Adamawa, which is what the poor Ubangi speak. Whatever are you doing in this terrible place?’
“I told her, and she told me, when I posed a counterquestion. Her father was a lawyer involved in the legal problems of failing automobile manufacturers. It was a lucrative practice, as they were falling like pins in a bowling alley, and as her PopPop, as Victoria calls him, naturally was following the lawyer’s creed of never getting far from the business entity or person which, or whom, a good barrister can easily shove into bankruptcy, and then onto the street, here she was surrounded by the GPCC and DAC barbarians.
“It was love at first sight, and I said, ‘My dear, let me take you somewhere away from all this.’
“What I had in mind was my suite in the Book Cadillac Hotel, and she came with me, but only as far as the Motor Bar Restaurant & Bar on the ground floor. She said she had a strict rule to never go above the ground floor on a first date.
“The way it turned out, what she meant was that she was going to hold off on getting onto the Book Cadillac elevator until I had, with appropriate ceremony, slipped both a diamond engagement ring—an emerald cut of at least five carats—and a matching wedding ring onto the somewhat bony third finger of her left hand.
“Cutting to the chase again, Victoria and I tied the knot at a small ceremony at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan, presided over by the presiding bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the USA. The Philadelphia Orchestra played appropriate music, and the Metropolitan Opera sent over a massively bosomed mezzo soprano who sang ‘I Love You Truly.’
“As we came, now Dr. and Mrs. Jonathan Fitzwater Caldwell the Third, down the aisle to the strains of Felix Mendelssohn’s ‘Wedding March,’ I thought I was hallucinating, for I saw a face from my past among the Standing Room Only guests near the door.
“Because there was no question in my mind that the face belonged to a comrade-in-arms who was now looking up at the grass from an unmarked grave somewhere in what had been Nazi-occupied France, I attributed the hallucination to the several healthy belts of Famous Pheasant I had taken to give me the courage to go through the nuptials ceremony, and put it from my mind.
“A month later, shortly after returning from our honeymoon to what had been the Dodge Brothers Suite in the Book Cadillac but was now, having been so re-dubbed by Victoria ‘Our Passion Pit,’ I received a rather eerie telephone call.
“‘Fitzy, this is Dartmouth Billy,’ my caller said.
“‘Bill Colby?’ I asked incredulously. ‘It can’t be. You’re dead!’
“‘Yes, I am. What I want you to do now is tell those thugs guarding your elevator to pass a man named Ralph Peters and his two thugs.’
“‘Who the hell is Ralph Peters?’
“‘I can’t tell you that over a nonsecure line. And tell your thugs that if they even look like they’re even thinking about patting down me or my thugs looking for weapons, I’ll have to kill them. Acknowledge.’
“‘Fitzy acknowledges last Billy. Fitzy out,’ I said.
“The phrase brought back many warm memories of World War Two.
“Then I hung up and gave instructions to our security people, and finally turned to Victoria, who was standing there wearing a look that suggested bafflement and absolutely nothing else.
“‘Victoria, my precious,’ I said, ‘as much as I hate to say this, you’re going to have to put your clothes back on. We are about to receive our first guest. And two of his thugs.’
“Two minutes later, the door opened and two men burst in, weapons drawn, and moved quickly through the apartment.
“‘Clear!’ one of them called loudly. ‘Nobody else in here but a skinny bimbo pulling on her panty hose.’
“And then ol’ Bill came into the apartment.
“‘Fitzy,’ he said. ‘It’s been a long time.’
“‘No, it hasn’t, Bill. Not if that was you standing with the Standing Room Only people in Saint John’s.’
“‘That was me. But don’t call me Bill. Bill’s dead. Or at least we want people to think I am.’
“‘Well, whoever the hell you are, I’m delighted to see that you’re alive.’
“‘So delighted that you might have, after all these years, finally forgiven me?’
“‘Forgiven you for what?’ Victoria asked, as she swept into the room in her dressing gown. ‘More to the point, how dar
e you burst into the home of a just-returned-from-their-honeymoon couple?’
“‘My dear lady,’ ol’ Bill said. ‘Unfortunately, I was forced to conclude that asking your husband to answer again the trumpet’s call to duty and mount up and ride to the sound of AK-47 and other musketry in the bloodstained hands of the Red Menace had a greater priority than any middle-of-the-afternoon lascivious plans you might have had for him.’
“‘Huh!’ Victoria snorted, and then said, ‘When you speak, sir, you sound like my cousin LeRoy, who, when bounced from Harvard finished up at Dartmouth. How close does that arrow strike?’
“‘Bull’s-eye, my dear lady.’
“‘What did you say your name was?’
“‘They call me Ralph Peters. The Honorable Ralph Peters.’
“‘Then why did my precious Fitzy call you Bill when you came in? And, more important, what was it you did to him that you entertain the hope that he will, after all these years, forgive you for doing?’
“‘Why don’t you tell her, Fitzy?’
“‘If you like, Ralph.’
“‘You can continue, of course, Fitzy, to call me Bill, as our wartime service taught me that most of the time you can be trusted to keep secret our beloved nation’s most secret secrets. But when others . . . Got it?’
“‘Got it, Bill. And what would you like my beloved bride to call you? Bill or Ralph?’
“‘The former. Surprising me no end, you seem to have married well.’
“‘Well, my precious, what Bill here did, years ago, that did annoy me a little—’
“‘A little?’ Bill said. “What I recall was that when you finally sobered up and learned that I had gone to Norway without you, you stormed into David Bruce’s office and declared . . . What exactly did he say, Mulligan?”
“The larger of the thugs took a notebook and an S&W Detective Special Model .38 Special revolver from his briefcase. While dangling the revolver by his index finger in the trigger guard, he went through the notebook, then handed it to Peters.
“‘Here it is, Mr. Deputy Director, sir, on page nine of the things you said you might want to review on the Learjet.’
“Peters read it, as the man tried, and failed, to slip the revolver into the holster on his ankle.
Chief of London Station David Bruce: Caldwell, what brings you staggering into my office looking like death warmed over and smelling like a Scottish distillery?
Captain Caldwell: Is it true that EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Dartmouthian EXPLETIVE DELETED!! went to Norway without me to do all those things we discussed?
Bruce: Yes, it is. He put it to me that you were in no condition to go parachute jumping, much less skiing, and one look at you convinced me he was right. When I looked in on you in Claridge’s Hotel, you were in the bathtub with a rubber duck in one hand, a bottle of Famous Pheasant in the other, and singing “When the roll is called up yonder, I’ll be there” at the top of your lungs.
Caldwell: Be that as it may, I wanted to go, and he knew it. And now he’s having all the fun. So, be advised, sir, that if that EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Methodist Dartmouthian manages to get back alive from Norway, I’m going to turn him into a EXPLETIVE DELETED!! soprano with a dull EXPLETIVE DELETED!! bayonet before I kill him.
“‘May I have a peek at that, Bill?’ Victoria asked.
“‘I’d like nothing more than to show it to you, Victoria, but I’m afraid it contains some naughty words. Soldier talk, so to speak.’
“‘I’m a married woman now, Bill. And since our nuptials Fitzy has brought me up to speed on those few profanities, obscenities, and vulgarisms I somehow missed learning at Wellesley.’
“She put out her hand and Bill put the notebook in it. She read it. Then looked back at Bill.
“‘Well, my beloved Fitzy was really pissed off, wasn’t he? In addition to being simply pissed in his bathtub, I mean. What was that all about, my darling?’
“‘If you think I was angry when I had that little chat with ol’ Dave Bruce, my little dumpling, you should have seen me when I heard what Bill actually did when he went to Norway, leaving me behind.’
“‘And that was?’
“‘After skiing all over Norway’s absolutely wonderful slopes for a week, popping Krauts as he went, he ended up at a Kraut heavy water plant with a rucksack full of an explosive we called C-4. When Bill blew it up, there was what we in the profession call a secondary explosion. The next time the world heard an explosion and saw a mushroom cloud like that was when we vaporized Nagasaki, Japan, later in the war.’
“‘Well, I can certainly understand why you were a little miffed at being excluded from something like that, but as Alexander Pope has taught us, ‘to err is human, to forgive divine.’
“‘Frankly, Scarlett, I don’t give a damn what the Pope says,’ I said.
“‘Not the Pope, Precious. Alexander Pope.’
“‘Oh.’
“‘What I want to know is why Bill is here in Detroit,’ she said.
“‘And I want to know why his thug, who can’t even get his .38 in his ankle holster, called him “Mr. Deputy Director.” Deputy director of what?’
“‘The questions are interrelated,’ Bill said. ‘But I can’t answer either until I get an answer to a question of my own. Fitzy, are you prepared to answer again the trumpet’s call to duty and mount up and ride to the sound of musketry, the musketry this time being AK-47s, et cetera, in the bloodstained hands of the Red Menace, not Mausers and Schmeissers in the bloodstained hands of the Nazis, as was the previous case?’
“‘Didn’t you ask me that before?’
“‘Yes, I did, and you didn’t reply, so far as I can remember.’
“‘Bill, how far from Detroit is this place you’re asking Fitzy to ride off to?’ Victoria asked.
“‘A great distance, I’m afraid, Victoria. At this stage of the recruitment interview, I can only give you a hint. Across a wide, wide ocean.’
“‘We enlist,’ Victoria said. ‘I can only hope you are referring to the Pacific Ocean, which is wider than the Atlantic.’
“‘In that case, welcome to the CIA, of which I am the deputy director for Soviet Affairs.’
“‘The what?’ I said.
“‘The CIA. It is the successor organization to our beloved Oh, So Social. It stands for Central Intelligence Agency. Surely you’ve heard of it.’
“‘Now that you mention it.’
“‘And what did you say Fitzy and I will be doing for the CPA?’
“‘That’s CIA, Victoria. I not P.’
“‘Whatever. What will my precious Fitzy be doing for the CIA once he rides off to wherever he’ll be doing it, and where precisely will that be?’
“‘What he will be doing, Victoria, with your assistance, is causing senior Russian, Hungarian, and other Eastern Bloc officers to realize the error of their ways and change sides.’
“‘I don’t have a clue how I could do that, and I don’t think Fitzy does, either.’
“‘I’m afraid you underestimate your soul mate, Victoria.’
“‘I don’t think that’s possible, but I’m willing to be corrected.’
“‘I have seen his mind at work.’
“‘Give me an example.’
“‘Well, there are so many examples to choose between it’s hard . . . Well, I suppose Cannes is as good as any.’
“‘As in Cannes, France?’ she asked.
“‘That one. Try to picture this, Victoria. A bright early spring day in 1944. A month or so before D-Day. Fitzy and I are sitting in the sidewalk café of the Carlton in Cannes.’
“‘The one at 58 La Croisette in Cannes?’ Victoria asked.
“‘That one. We are sipping at a very nice Sauvignon Saint-Bris, ’38 if memory serves, our little gift to ourselves for just having blown a tunnel on the Paris-Cannes
lines of Chemins de fer Français as a train containing three sleeping cars full of senior German officers and their mistresses was passing through it.
“‘Two SS officers—you know, the ones who wore black uniforms and riding boots and carried riding crops although few of them had ever been near a horse—come to the table and with that exaggerated courtesy they thought was so clever say, ‘Good afternoon, gentlemen. Perhaps you would be kind enough to explain what you are doing here wearing U.S. Army Paratrooper boots and carrying a bag full of what looks to me like Composition C-4.’
“‘What you have your dirty fingers in, Señor,” Fitzy replies, off the top of his head, “is the Buenos Aires empanada dough my wife prepared as a small gift to Herr Himmler, whom she calls Heinie Baby, and who really appreciates a good empanada. What my friend Señor Gonzalo and I have on our feet is what all we Argentine gauchos wear on the pampas. Is there anything else you’d like to know?”
“‘No, sir, I don’t think so. Thank you very much, and pardon the interruption. If there is anything the SS can ever do for you, all you have to do is ask.”
“‘Your Fitzy, Victoria, was on a roll,’ Bill said. ‘Fitzy went on: “Hauptstandartenführer, actually there is something you can do for me. Take that bag of empanada dough and have one of your underlings deliver it to Heinie Baby . . . Herr Himmler . . . in Berlin, thus sparing Señor Gonzalo and myself that boring train ride.”
“‘An hour later, still chuckling about what was going to happen in Berlin when Frau Himmler tried to bake, or fry, anything at all with the empanada dough—C-4 goes boom at 325 Fahrenheit—we were in the speedboat and on our way back, via Gibraltar, to Claridge’s Hotel in London.’
“‘Good times,’ I said. ‘I remember ol’ Sterling . . . Whatsisname? The actor? Great big guy.’
“‘It’s on the tip of my tongue, but . . .’
“‘Anyway,’ I went on, ‘ol’ Sterling was driving the speedboat that day. As I was saying, Bill, good times.’
“‘Yes, they were. But as I was saying, Victoria, I remembered Cannes and some other places where Fitzy had manifested his amazing talent to lie so convincingly off the top of his head and decided all he could do was say no if I tried to enlist him for duty again. And here I am.’
The Hunting Trip Page 13