The Hunting Trip

by William E. Butterworth, III

  But at this point, instead of draping a friendly arm around one of their shoulders or under the table bumping his knee, or knees, against the knee, or knees, of one or more of them as all expected, some with happy expectations, him to do, he continued to ignore them as he had from the moment he had led them into the Café Cricou.

  His extensive knowledge of women in sexual matters had taught him—or perhaps exposed to him—the greatest and most successful con job in recorded—and probably prerecorded as well—history.

  He had come by this knowledge intellectually, as opposed to physically, as the number of his actual physical sexual encounters with the gentle sex could still be counted on his fingers and toes with both thumbs and a pinkie left over.

  He had come by it professionally, that is to say when he had in his official capacity as editor in chief of the German-American Gospel Tract Foundation been charged with detecting ambiguities, grammatical errors, and strikeovers in reports filed by CIC agents regarding the alleged sexual misconduct of officers in the grade of major and above and their dependents.

  He most often had to read these reports several times, for several reasons, including the fact that the CIC agents preparing these reports seemed to make about twice as many strikeovers, and make two or three times as many grammatical errors, and be as blind to that many ambiguities as they did when making a report on, say, a Bulgarian Plan to Blow Up the Statue of Liberty.

  And then, when he had finally stripped the reports of all the strikeovers und so weiter and excess verbiage, he had to personally go through each and every one of them to extract what Pastor-in-Chief Caldwell referred to as the more pertinent passages.

  He told Phil that Mrs. Caldwell had a natural interest in that sort of thing because she had taken Elementary Sexual Deviation 101 at Wellesley and wished to keep up to date on the subject.

  “Now I understand this, Phil, but I don’t think others—in particular those EXPLETIVE DELETED!! West Pointers we’re surrounded by—would. So, to keep this between you, me, the lamp pole, and Victoria, what I want you to do is start a new file called ‘Daily Notes of Administrator P. W. Williams.’ In it you will record the more pertinent, in a lurid sense, of the sexual foibles of the majors and above and their dependents detected by the CIC agents investigating. Just the good stuff. Leave out kissing, public exposure, simple adultery, and that sort of thing. Think lurid. Got it, my boy?”

  “I’ll do my best, sir.”

  The Daily Notes of CIC Administrator P. W. Williams ultimately consisted of 722 single-spaced pages, which Phil mounted in three three-ring binders. He had kept them, as he thought Pastor-in-Chief Caldwell, now the Honorable Ralph Peters, might still be interested in them for historical, literary, or some other purpose, and ask for them.

  After he moved into the George V, he read through the whole 722-page file again, this time very carefully. And it confirmed what he had first suspected in Berlin.

  Women, not men, were the most determined sexual aggressors. Furthermore, they had managed to convince men of quite the opposite. Women encouraged men to think men were the pursuers of women, sexually speaking, when the reverse is true.

  Women didn’t ply men with flowers, champagne, diamonds, et cetera, to get them on the mattress for hanky-panky when they wanted a little, or a lot, of hanky-panky. They had learned that all they had to do was lower their eyes, blush, and show a little skin, and men would instantly start fighting with other men for the privilege of showering women with flowers, champagne, diamonds, et cetera, in the hope their philanthropy would entice the women to bestow upon them the hanky-panky the women wanted the men to provide in the first place.

  Their skill in blushing, lowering their eyes, and showing a little skin had been polished to near perfection over the centuries as it was passed down from mother to daughter over countless generations. It was nearly irresistible.

  Phil saw in “nearly irresistible” a potential chink in female armor. What would happen, he wondered, if instead of starting to pant and paw at the ground with his left foot when a member of the opposite sex batted her eyes at him, or showed him a little skin, he pretended not to be as interested in the woman doing that as he was in the woman sitting next to the woman, who was not batting her eyes and had her skirt in the modest place it was supposed to be?

  He put his theory to the test in the Café Cricou, which he’d heard about but hadn’t had the courage to enter, both because of its reputation and also because there was still burned in his memory the color motion pictures he had been shown at Fort Dix that showed what terrible things happened to one’s male appendage if one was so foolish as to stick it in a loose woman.

  After he had shown no interest in the first five of the Café Cricou girls who showed him a great deal of skin and batted their eyes with such skill that he was on the cusp of saying, “To hell with it! I’ll worry about what happens to my you-know-what later. Come here, ma chérie!” the sixth approached him and asked if she could ask him a question.

  He told her, “Certainly.”

  “If you’re a poofter, chéri, why do you come in the Café Cricou?”

  Phil knew what a poofter was, because Second Lieutenant Charles William George Michael Bertram of Her Majesty’s Own Scottish Light Lancers had told him that what he was wearing was a kilt, not a skirt.

  “Poofters wear skirts,” Bertie had explained, “and Scots wear kilts.”

  Phil had taken Bertie’s meaning.

  “Let me think,” Phil had said to the sixth Café Cricou girl.

  “What’s to think about, chéri? You’re either a man who likes women or a poofter who doesn’t. Simple question.”

  “Oh, I do like women,” Phil hastily assured her. “I am in love with a redheaded Hungarian named Magda, and my Magda is across the ocean. I came in here because you beautiful Café Cricou girls remind me of my beautiful Magda across the ocean.”

  “And you’re not fooling around because your Hungarian redhead is far away?”

  “I couldn’t do that to my beloved Magda,” Phil lied. “Fooling around would constitute infidelity.”

  The Café Cricou girl then kissed him on the forehead.

  “We don’t get many decent men in here,” she said. “The last one was six months ago, and he came in by mistake. So I’ll tell you what, chéri. Me and my professional associates will provide you with chaste companionship and conversation while you’re being faithful to your Hungarian. Please join us at the bar.”

  —

  So as Phil walked down Rue Pierre Charron to the Champs-Élysées, it was in anticipation of finding some nice American college girls thereon whom he could entice first into the Café Cricou and ultimately into the king-sized bed in his suite at the George V.

  That didn’t happen.

  As he crossed the Champs-Élysées and then turned left toward the Arc de Triomphe traffic circle, a block down from which was Rue Madeleine, on which the Café Cricou was located, he saw a blond young woman. While her skirt was not slit to the waist, it was short enough to provide a good view of her spectacular legs.

  She had on a leash a dachshund—a canine Phil thought looked like a hot dog with legs—and was engaged in conversation with two men who looked like Frogs, that is, looked like Frenchmen.

  The first thing Phil thought was a little unusual was that the blonde was doing what she was doing where she was doing it. The ladies of the Café Cricou regarded that area as their place of business and theirs alone.

  If that blonde with the spectacular legs isn’t careful, Phil thought, those spectacular legs are going to be broken when the Café Cricou girls throw her under the next Arc de Triomphe–to–Place Vendôme bus that comes down the Champs-Élysées.

  The next thing he noticed was that the languages being spoken by the girl with the spectacular legs—and by now he could see that she had a bosom quite as attractive as her legs—were Fren
ch and German, and that the Frogs apparently spoke no German and the girl with the nice knockers and spectacular legs apparently spoke no French.

  “Verzeih mir, Fräulein,” Phil said. “Kann ich etwas Unterstützung?”

  Which means, “Excuse me, miss, may I be of some assistance?”

  She looked at him, which caused their eyes to meet. His heart jumped.

  “Ich bin Brunhilde Wienerwald, Tänzerin im Corps de Ballet von der Wiener Staatsoper,” she said.

  “How interesting,” Phil replied, in German of course. “I’ve never actually met a ballet dancer before, although I have heard a good deal about the ballet dancers in Moscow and Budapest. And how may I assist you, Fräulein Wienerwald?”

  Before she could reply, one of the Frogs entered the conversation by saying, “Esprit vous propre EXPLETIVE DELETED!! entreprise vous EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Nazi!”

  To which Phil replied, in French of course, “Please, monsieur, do not be so rude as to try to tell me what my EXPLETIVE DELETED!! business is. Or call me a EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Nazi.”

  To which the Frog replied by throwing a right hook in the direction of Phil’s face.

  Phil’s response to this was Pavlovian. And he was of course a Master (Beginner Class) of Taekkyeon. One quick kick to the Frog’s groin area and the Frog was on the ground, his hands on his crotch and moaning piteously.

  On seeing his compatriot so distressed, the second Frog entered the fray. He produced a switchblade knife with a 28-centimeter (approx. 11-inch) blade sharpened on both sides and began to wave it around in a manner Phil considered menacing.

  It took an array of elbow strikes, pressure point attacks, and grapples to do it, but shortly Frog Two was also on the ground moaning piteously. As Phil leaned over him to relieve him of the switchblade knife, the dachshund, whose name Phil was later to learn was Heisse Wurst, took advantage of the situation. Brunhilde had taken him for a walk in search of a Parisian version of a Vienna Feuerhydrant and they hadn’t been able to find one. Since the Frogs on the ground smelled like a fire hydrant—as many Frogs do—Heisse Wurst decided he would have to go with what he had. And go he did.

  Phil looked into Brunhilde’s eyes again.

  He said, “Ich denke, wir sollten hier raus. Mein Hotel ist gleich um die Ecke.”

  Which meant, “I think we should get out of here. My hotel is right around the corner.”

  —

  In consideration of the fact that this is a romantic, as opposed to pornographic, novel, the author will draw a curtain of discretion and modesty across what happened in Phil’s George V hotel suite that night, except to state that what happened that night began about thirty seconds after the door was closed and that it lasted until noon the next day.

  At that point, Brunhilde said she had to put her clothing back on and get to the Place de l’Opéra as quickly as possible as she had a 1:30 p.m. performance in the Palais Garnier, as the opera house in Paris is known.

  Because he was a St. Malachi’s Old Boy and thus expected to be a gentleman, he had the Cadillac brought up from the garage and he drove her to the opera. There she said, “Thank you very much, and goodbye.”

  “You mean we’re not going to see one another again?”

  “I told you before that I am a dancer in the Corps de Ballet of the Vienna State Opera,” Brunhilde said. “Although I am grateful for what you did for me on the Champs-Élysées last night, and to me later in the George V, the cold facts are that dancers of the Corps de Ballet of the Vienna State Opera, such as myself, simply do not become involved with unsophisticated . . . one might say ohne kultur barbarians . . . young Americans such as yourself. Think of what happened between us as two ships which have passed going in opposite directions in the middle of the night in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and auf Wiedersehen!”

  And then she got out of the Cadillac and disappeared into the stage door of the Palais Garnier.

  —

  Truth to tell, Phil wasn’t all that surprised or disappointed. For one thing, he had heard from both Angus McTavish and G. Lincoln Rutherford—and of course from Magda—what terrible people ballet dancers often were. For another, now that he was about to become First Lieutenant Williams, he really shouldn’t be fooling around with ballet dancers, even ballet dancers like Brunhilde, who ranked as maybe a twelve or thirteen on the one-to-ten scale vis-à-vis the enthusiasm of sexual partners. And for a third reason, he was going to have to go on a delivering-classified-documents mission to Istanbul, Turkey, in the next day or two and had to pack.

  He put Brunhilde Wienerwald out of his mind.

  Just over five weeks later, Phil picked up the funny-looking telephone in his suite in the George V.

  “Hello?” he said.

  The calling party said, “Könnten Sie mich an Herr Williams? Hier ist Brunhilde Wienerwald von der Wiener Staatsoper.”

  “Brunhilde, baby! How nice of you to call!”

  “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to get you for days.”

  “Well, first I was in Istanbul, and then I went to Athens, and then to the Isle of Capri in the Tyrrhenian Sea. What’s on your mind, Brunhilde, baby?”

  “‘Baby’ ist eine sehr unglückliche Wahl der Wörter.”

  “Why is ‘baby’ a really unfortunate choice of words, Brunhilde, baby?”

  “Denn in nur acht Monaten ich werde noch eine sie EXPLETIVE DELETED!! EXPLETIVE DELETED!!.”

  “Did you just say you’re going to have a baby in eight months, Brunhilde?”

  “Sind Sie taub und mehr als in einen Ewigkeitszustand hinein Sie EXPLETIVE DELETED!! EXPLETIVE DELETED!!?”

  “I am neither deaf nor oversexed, Brunhilde. And please try to remember that you’re a lady, and ladies just don’t call gentlemen EXPLETIVE DELETED!! EXPLETIVE DELETED!! as you just did.”

  “EXPLETIVE DELETED!! you, you EXPLETIVE DELETED!! ohne Kultur Amerikaner EXPLETIVE DELETED!!.”

  “To change the subject, Brunhilde. You are not implying that I have some connection with your upcoming blessed event?”

  “You’re EXPLETIVE DELETED!! right I am,” Brunhilde replied in German. “I’ll admit that I had a little to do with it. Being familiar with the statistic that conception occurs only once in 11,455 times when a virgin loses her pearl of great price, I took a chance in Paris with you. My EXPLETIVE DELETED!! mistake. On the other hand, you EXPLETIVE DELETED!!, you should not have taken advantage of my innocence and virginal state the way you did.”

  “Well, Brunhilde, what do you suggest we do about the problem we face?”

  “I suggest you get in your EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Cadillac and get your EXPLETIVE DELETED!! to Vienna right EXPLETIVE DELETED!! now.”

  “Of course. And where will I find you in Vienna?”

  “The EXPLETIVE DELETED!! opera house, where else? God, what a stupid EXPLETIVE DELETED!! question!”

  —

  Thinking that his status would change forever—as it did—when he married Fräulein Wienerwald, but knowing that as a St. Malachi’s Old Boy, and thus a gentleman, he had no choice but to turn her into an honest woman by marrying her, he packed all of his personal belongings into the Cadillac before heading down French National Route 7 toward Vienna. All his personal belongings of course included the three three-ring binders containing The Daily Notes of CIC Administrator P. W. Williams.

  [ THREE ]

  Vienna, Austria

  Monday, November 14, 1949

  Phil had no trouble finding the Vienna State Opera. It was right where the concierge of the George V told him it would be, i.e., in front of the Hotel Sacher and right across the street from the Hotel Bristol.

  When he went to the stage door and identified himself and inquired of the stage doorman for Fräulein Wienerwald, the stage doorman replied, in Hungarian, which Phil now of course understood, “What I would really like to do is
turn you into a EXPLETIVE DELETED!! soprano with a really dull saw, you EXPLETIVE DELETED!! EXPLETIVE DELETED!!. But I will get her, as what Brunhilde wants Brunhilde gets.”

  With a welcome like that from the stage doorman, Phil wondered, what kind of a welcome will I get from Brunhilde?

  What he got from Brunhilde was not at all unpleasant.

  Crying “Philip, my darling!” she threw herself into his arms and then cried, “Kiss me, my darling!” and pressed her lips against his.

  Then she whispered in his ear: “Show some enthusiasm, you EXPLETIVE DELETED!!. People are watching.”

  He complied by kissing her again, both because he liked it and because he was afraid of what she might do to him if he didn’t show the proper enthusiasm.

  After a minute or so, she let him loose, whispered, “Smile, you EXPLETIVE DELETED!!,” and turned him to face the stage door.

  There, a number of people were looking at them. Some with tears running down their cheeks and others with cold hate in their eyes.

  “Friends, coworkers, fellow dancers, and childhood friend Waldo Pfefferkopf, this is my beloved Philip, who I am now going to take to the bar in the Hotel Sacher, where I will discuss the details of our upcoming nuptials with him.”

  She then picked up Heisse Wurst, who had been growling and gnawing at Phil’s ankle during the passionate embrace, and then led Phil by the hand to the Hotel Sacher, which is right across the street from the stage door of the Vienna State Opera, and into the bar.

  There she ordered a double Slivovitz, straight up, water on the side, and told the waiter to give Phil the same.

  When the drinks were served, she tossed hers down.

  “Well, that’s the last of those I get for a while,” Brunhilde said. “Thanks to you and my stupidity.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Women in the family way should not imbibe intoxicants,” Brunhilde said. “Why am I not surprised you don’t know that?”