The Hunting Trip

by William E. Butterworth, III

  Although they presented to the world a picture of a loving, long-married couple who shared not only a business relationship but a trusting and faithful personal one, the latter was not exactly true.

  Both did indeed see in “The Excursion” both a cornucopia of kickbacks from all the providers of services to the Excursion-ees plus the chance to direct to ME&EVT, Inc., a great deal of business they didn’t presently have. The latter would come primarily, presuming things were handled properly, from Mr. Randolph C. Bruce, his business associate Señor Pancho Gonzales, and Cadwallader Howard III, president of the Muddiebay Mercantile Company.

  Mary-Louise had told Amos of her intention to get close to Randy Bruce during The Excursion for that purpose. Not knowing how really close Mary-Louise intended to get, Amos said he thought it was a splendid idea. He said if she worked on Randy Bruce, he would work on getting close to Cadwallader Howard III to the same end. After thinking about it for a moment, Mary-Louise decided Amos meant with regard to getting more business for ME&EVT, Inc., and nothing else. For one thing, Amos wasn’t inclined that way, and for another the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! had his lecherous eye on Bobbie-Sue Smith, the stockbroker’s wife.

  Mary-Louise had started to think about getting close to Randy Bruce while attending a Special Ladies Only Matinee showing of an old motion picture starring Errol Flynn at the Muddiebay Palace Theatre, Bowling Alleys & Flea Circus.

  While it was true that she’d had a couple of beers in the bowling area bar before perusing the flea circus offerings, and had smuggled a third can into the theater concealed in a Jumbo Cola insulated cup, when she thought about it later, it was not alcohol but rather a mental glitch that caused her to envision what she had envisioned.

  In the film, Errol Flynn, playing a nobleman turned pirate, had given up his life of high seas criminal to come to the aid of Queen Bess, a/k/a “The Virgin Queen,” when the Spanish Armada was approaching the White Cliffs of Dover with evil intent.

  There was a scene in which Flynn, attired in what on a female would have been white panty hose, knelt before Her Majesty. She laid a sword on his shoulder and ordered, “Go and save the British Isles from the Spanish monsters!”

  To which Errol Flynn replied, “I hear and obey, Your Virgin Majesty!”

  Her Majesty then tapped him on both shoulders and proclaimed, “Rise, Sir Richard!”

  He did so, and looked soulfully into the Virgin Queen’s eyes.

  At that point, Mary-Louise had two thoughts, one being that Mr. Flynn’s costume in the groin area was much too small for him. The second thought inexplicably called the diminutive of “Richard” to her mind.

  Several scenes later, Mr. Flynn appeared again. He was bare-chested and carrying a sword as he swung on a rope from his ship onto the deck of one of the Spanish ships.

  Moments later, as he began to behead Evil Spaniards with his sword, Mary-Louise noticed he was attired only in a leather loincloth, and again for some reason Mary-Louise inexplicably recalled the diminutive of “Richard.”

  “Death to those dirty Spaniards who would despoil my Virgin Queen!” Errol Flynn/Sir Richard declared as he lopped the head off another would-be despoiler.

  What apparently had happened then was that Mary-Louise’s mind had put that information together with some that was already stored. Among that information, especially, was an idle comment made by one of Amos’s cronies at their regular Wednesday Evening Fifty Cent Limit poker game. Mary-Louise had been innocently eavesdropping on the poker game in the hope that she would hear Amos boast to the boys about his relationship with Bobbie-Sue Smith. All she knew for sure about that was that whenever the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! was within fifty feet of Bobbie-Sue, he started breathing heavily and began to stroke his pencil-line mustache with his pinkie finger.

  Bobbie-Sue did not come up in the gentlemen’s conversation. Randolph C. Bruce did, to wit: “I’m not surprised that EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Randy Bruce gets so much EXPLETIVE DELETED!!. I saw the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! in the shower at the Muddiebay Country Club. The EXPLETIVE DELETED!! is hung like a EXPLETIVE DELETED!! horse.”

  The synapses in Mary-Louise’s brain coordinated this data and the images and then flashed a combined image, a collage, so to speak, to Mary-Louise’s visual senses, her theater of the mind, so to speak. That imagery caused her to spill most of the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! beer in the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Jumbo Cola insulated cup into her EXPLETIVE DELETED!! lap.

  The image was of Sir Randy Bruce, in white panty hose, one hand wielding his sword to behead Spaniards, and the other trying to stuff his you-know-what back into the panty hose from which it had burst free.

  From that moment, she had trouble keeping the image from her mind. This was true even while she was making other arrangements for The Excursion. While she was anxious of course to recruit others for The Excursion, to fill up the Twenty-Plus-Two, she was careful not to make the pitch to any of The Tuesday Luncheon Club girls in whom Randy, even in his cups, would be at all interested.

  Mary-Louise was now determined to have Randy, whom she now thought of as “Sir Randy,” all to herself at least once or twice for at least an hour of illicit union. She thought this might be possible in London, but it wouldn’t be easy.

  She had quickly come to a Twenty-Plus-Two arrangement with Claridge’s Hotel, and they had been very obliging insofar as room assignment was concerned. She and Amos would be at the center of their rooms on the third floor of the famed London hotel, so to speak. Sir Randy would be on one side of the Frathingham room and Señor Gonzales and his niece on the other. The other ladies and their husbands would be housed across the corridor according to seniority, with the ugliest and oldest females closest, and the youngest and better-looking farther away.

  Bobbie-Sue would find herself at the end of the corridor. Mary-Louise was a little worried about Bobbie-Sue. Ferdinand Smith was a stockbroker, and a stockbroker would stop at nothing to pick up a new gambler in capitalism. That certainly included telling his wife to be very nice to someone who could put a lot of chips into the pot of Wall Street, like Randolph C. Bruce.

  Neither could Mary-Louise dismiss the possibility that Bobbie-Sue had also heard that Randy had been very generously treated in the package department.

  The first priority of almost all the girls who weren’t thinking about hanky-panky on foreign shores was, of course, shopping, and Mary-Louise had spent long hours contacting retail merchandising establishments in London. Most of them, including Harrods, Marks & Spencer, and Selfridges, had been very obliging with regard to the ten percent “steerer’s fee” Mary-Louise had asked for.

  The second priority of almost all the girls was visiting Buckingham Palace. Mary-Louise understood this interest, which would allow them, once they returned to Muddiebay, to casually drop into their conversations with the less privileged that they had done so, e.g., The last time I was at Buckingham Palace, I learned that tea, Earl Grey, of course, is even better when brewed without those lower class toilet tissue bags one sees here, and is instead brewed au naturel and then poured through a sterling silver strainer into one’s cup.

  Or, The last time I was at Buckingham Palace, or “Buck House” as we frequent visitors call it, I learned that H.M.’s Little Darlings, by which I mean Her Majesty’s Corgis, really like to snack on bangers, which is what we Buck House frequenters call hot dogs and not what it sounds like.

  Et cetera.

  Here Mary-Louise ran into a problem that she had not yet resolved.

  After two letters to Buckingham Palace to ensure she would get her standard ten percent finder’s fee had gone unanswered, she had gotten on the phone. She was put through to the Palace, but when she asked to speak to the person in charge, and the person on the line asked “in regard to what?” and she told him, he laughed, said, “Bugger off, Yank, and sober up!” and then hung up.

  After this happened three times, Mary-Louise decided it
was a problem she would deal with once they got to Old Blighty, even if that meant slipping a few bucks into the hands of the guys with the funny hats who guarded the portals, and that in the meantime she would extol the virtues of Abercrombie Castle to the ladies. The pictures of the castle that came up in her research showed that it was just about as large as Buckingham Palace, and when she showed them to the ladies, they were delighted.

  Getting the ladies in there, Mary-Louise decided, would be a snap. Randy had told her the pheasant and grouse shooting would take place on the grounds of the palace and that she didn’t have to trouble herself with the financial arrangements as he would handle that himself as “Bertie and Maggie, the gamekeepers,” were old friends of his. All she would have to do, Randy said, was collect the thousand-dollars-per-shooter fee from the Excursion-ees, give it to him, and he would handle getting the money to the gamekeepers.

  All she was going to have to do, Mary-Louise decided, once she had lured Randy into her bed, was get him to ask his friend the chief gamekeeper to let the ladies into the castle. She thought that if she could get Randy into a good mood—and she certainly intended to try—he might even reconsider his blunt refusal to even consider giving Mary-Louise her standard ten percent finder’s fee.

  [ TWO ]

  In sunny Miami, Señor Pancho Gonzales had had time to consider his last conversation with Randy, during which Randy had pointed out that no one was going to believe that Ginger Gallagher was his niece and that he had announced he had no intention of letting Ginger EXPLETIVE DELETED!! up his romantic plans.

  He gave the problem more thought. Even if he took Ginger to Scotland, and ol’ Phil was there, there was no way Ginger was going to feign a mysterious illness treatable only by Harley Street medical professionals and allow herself to be flown to London for treatment.

  If ol’ Phil was in Scotland, that’s where Glamorous Ginger was going to be. If she couldn’t get ol’ Phil in the sack, it would be her first failed seduction in her entire twenty-five years, and she had her reputation to uphold.

  He concluded that, for once, Randy was right about something: Ginger could not go to Scotland, or even to Atlanta or London as waypoints on the way to Scotland. Ginger was going to have to stay in Miami.

  Pancho bit the bullet, so to speak, and called Ginger in her penthouse apartment, which overlooked Biscayne Bay. He told her that on reflection he had come to conclude that her going to England and Scotland was not such a good idea.

  “I must beg to disagree,” Ginger said. “First, Pancho, I should tell you that I have just finished reading Dear Phil’s latest book, Love and Lust in the Kremlin Necropolis, which confirmed yet again my belief that Tolstoy, Dickens, Hemingway, and Pat O’Malley are vastly overrated.

  “My dream now is to sit at the master’s feet, or perhaps in his lap, and absorb through osmosis, or, preferably some other more intimate contact, some of his saintly genius.

  “Since Master Philip is going to be in Scotland, perhaps researching a book on the subject of Zen and pheasant shooting, I am going to be in Scotland, and you, you EXPLETIVE DELETED!! fried banana eater, are going to take me to him, or you will wish that you had fallen off of that EXPLETIVE DELETED!! shrimp boat on which you escaped from EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Cuba with five EXPLETIVE DELETED!! dollars and the shirt on your EXPLETIVE DELETED!! back and EXPLETIVE DELETED!! drowned. Please tell me that we understand each other, Pancho, baby.”

  After that conversation, Pancho had realized that unless he took some other action, Ginger and ol’ Phil were going to be in Scotland and he was going to be all alone in London except for Randy and his new bimbo.

  So he called Guatemalan Air, got Pilar on the line, and asked her how she would like to go to London and Scotland.

  Once everybody was in Atlanta, he reasoned, they could sort things out.

  VIII

  PHIL VERSUS THE RED MENACE

  [ ONE ]

  Berlin, Germany

  Saturday, August 9, 1947

  While it could not be truthfully said that Phil was ever in any real danger of being named an Honorary Member of the Berlin Garrison Chapter of the West Point Protective Association, it is true that he soon worked out a harmonious relationship with those members associated with the German-American Gospel Tract Foundation.

  For one thing, he used the respectful term “sir” a good deal when conversing with them and, for another, when he came to work in the morning, he fell into the habit of taking his U.S. Pistol, Cal. .45 ACP Model 1911A1, from his shoulder holster and laying it on his desk for all to see.

  Within a very short time, most, if not all, of the West Pointers realized that it was really better to hand their reports of investigations and other activities over to the man they described—behind his back, of course—as “a EXPLETIVE DELETED!! enlisted man who didn’t even finish EXPLETIVE DELETED!! high school” for his red pencil, than the alternative, which was to send them directly to SSA Caldwell, with the inevitable result there, presuming undetected ambiguities and errors of grammar would surface, as they inevitably would, of having a new anal orifice reamed by SSA Caldwell, who could and did ream such orifices as only a lieutenant colonel of cavalry, pay grade O-5, can ream them.

  And then firearms, in particular smooth bore shoulder arms, often called “shotguns,” entered the picture.

  On a Saturday morning about three months after Administrator Williams had assumed his duties as chief, Literary Division, German-American Gospel Tract Foundation and as bodyguard to the pastor-in-charge, Phil went to his office after driving Pastor-in-Charge and Mrs. Caldwell in their Cadillac to Tempelhof Airfield, where they caught the 10:20 a.m. Pan American flight to Frankfurt am Main.

  They were headed for the Frankfurt International Book Fair, which was to be the beard for a meeting between Pastor Caldwell and the Reverend Phineas Logan, which was the beard ol’ Bill Colby, now Ralph Peters, was using for the moment.

  After making a quick stop to examine the religious tomes on display at the book fair, they were going to Baden-Baden, in the Black Forest, where they would discuss Intelligence Business, and then put to the test on the vingt-et-un tables of the Baden-Baden Casino a new theory of mathematical probability ol’ Bill had developed.

  On the way from the Caldwell residence to the airfield, they had made a quick stop at an apartment on Onkel Tom Allee the German-American Gospel Tract Foundation maintained to house very senior NKGB officers, or very senior officers of other Eastern Bloc nations, and/or their families, following their defection until they could be moved to Palm Beach, Florida, or Palm Springs, California, or wherever they would begin their new lives in the United States.

  “Be a dear, Philip,” Mrs. Caldwell said, “and pop in there for me. The countess is going to loan me her Persian lamb to wear in Baden-Baden. She knows you’re coming.”

  Phil understood that Mrs. Caldwell meant Persian lamb fur coat, not a live animal, as his mother had a Persian lamb fur coat. And he looked forward to popping in and getting the coat from the countess, a/k/a Magda, Countess of Kocian, who was a redheaded older Hungarian woman—probably twenty-eight, maybe even twenty-nine—but remarkably well preserved, especially in the bosom department.

  Angus McTavish had spirited the countess across the border hidden in a cage with an aging gorilla and an about-to-expire python. She had brought with her only the clothes on her back and a small pigskin suitcase holding the Kocian family jewels, mostly diamonds but with a sprinkling of rubies and pearls.

  The countess had left her husband, a colonel in the Hungarian Secret Police, behind in Budapest. She would wait in Berlin for him to join her.

  The countess had met the pastor’s wife, and soon they were chums, spending long hours together comparing the socio-sexual foibles of the Hungarian aristocracy with those of the aristocracies of Detroit, Michigan, and Boston, Massachusetts, while sipping at Slivovitz, a Hungarian plum brandy with w
hich the pastor’s wife had previously not been familiar, but had quickly come to really appreciate.

  Phil had overheard the pastor’s wife confide in her husband, “Don’t push that EXPLETIVE DELETED!! dwarf of yours, McTavish, too hard about getting Magda’s husband out. For one thing, I’m going to miss the countess terribly when she’s gone to Palm Springs, or wherever, and for another Magda has confided in me that their marriage was one of convenience. The EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Reds had taken over her castle and it was either marry him or move out. And the only reason he married her was that his hanky-panky with barely pubescent girls of the Magyar Állami Operaház Corps de Ballet was getting to be too much of an embarrassment for even the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Hungarian Secret Police to keep overlooking and he needed a beard.”

  —

  The countess answered Phil’s buzz at her door with both her flaming red hair, which reached her waist, and her dressing gown askew. Before she pulled her neckline together, he inadvertently happened to notice perhaps eighty percent of the left of her bosom.

  “Good morning, Countess. I’m here to pick up the Persian lamb.”

  “Nem vagyok grófné, az én kis szilva cukor,” the countess replied, taking her hand from where it was holding her gown closed and using it to pinch his cheek.

  Phil now had what was known to intelligence professionals as a one hundred percent clear with zero obstructions visual of both of the countess’s mammary glands.

  His heart jumped. When he could find his voice, he confessed, “Countess, I’m afraid I don’t speak Hungarian.”

  “What I said, my little dumpling,” she said in English, “was that you don’t have to call me countess.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You may—when the pastor and his wife are not around, of course—call me Magda.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Magda.”