The ducal chambers, which Canidy had claimed for himself, were large, beautifully furnished, and had an alcove with a desk and telephone he used as an office. Both for reasons of protocol and because he liked the old man, Canidy had originally planned to put the admiral in the ducal chambers, but Lieutenant Jamison talked him out of it. The apartment had so many entrances that guarding the admiral there would be more difficult than it would be in a smaller apartment with only one door.
Whittaker was in the connecting apartment, where the duchess of Stanfield had slept. Despite the warning Canidy had received from Colonel Stevens, Her Grace had not appeared at Whitby House, and neither had the British Army officer who was supposed to “liaise” with him. Canidy wasn’t sure exactly what that meant; and so far as he was concerned, he hoped neither ever showed up.
He wrote Ann Chambers a letter—exactly the same letter he had written her every day since his first night in Whitby House: “Having a smashing time, wish you were here. Love, Dick.”
The letters, all bearing the return address “Box 142, Washington, D.C.,” were sent to London, where they were put in a pouch and flown to the States. They would be stamped with a Washington postmark and mailed. Presumably, eventually there would be letters from Ann.
He was smugly pleased with the idea of sending her what amounted to a daily postcard the censors and letter readers could find no fault with. Ann’s incoming mail was not supposed to be intercepted, of course—actually, he was not entirely sure about that—and she would, he told himself, understand why he was not writing more than he was. He was sure she’d get the message that he was indeed thinking about her at least daily.
The truth of the matter was that he was thinking of her all the time, like a lovesick high-school kid. And the simple act of sitting down and writing those very few words to Ann had become enormously important to him.
Having finished this day’s letter to Ann, he decided to take a drink from one of the bottles of Chesly Whittaker’s twenty-four-year-old Scotch he had “borrowed” from the library in the house on Q Street just before they’d come to England.
He was sitting in a brocade-upholstered armchair with the almost untouched drink in his hand, his mind full of the myriad physical charms of Ann Chambers, when there came a knock at his door.
“Come!”
It was the officer of the guard, a southern second lieutenant with a double chin.
“Theah’s an officer heah wants to see Loo-tenant Jamison,” the officer of the guard said. “An English officer. I mean an English lady officer.”
“Lieutenant Jamison isn’t here. What does she want?” Canidy said. As he spoke he realized what was up:
Damn! Jamison’s gone, and now, of course, the missing British officer with whom I am supposed to “liaise” finally shows up.
“Ah don’t know, Suh. But she’s got the right pass to get inside the innuh perimetuh, Majuh.”
“Would you ask her to come in, please?” Canidy said.
The captain marched in, came to attention, and saluted crisply.
“Sir!” the captain barked, with an accompanying stamp of his boot heel.
The captain, Canidy judged, is about five feet four, weighs maybe 125 pounds, is about thirty-two, give or take a couple of years, and under that really ugly Women’s Royal Army Corps cotton uniform obviously has a splendid set of teats.
“I’m Major Canidy,” he said.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Major. I had hoped to report to Lieutenant Jamison.”
“The lieutenant’s off stealing a car in London, I’m afraid,” Canidy said.
Not willing to believe what she heard, the captain said: “I am reporting for duty, Sir. I am to liaise with you.”
That sounds vaguely obscene, Canidy thought, and became aware he was smiling. He was greatly tempted to pursue that line of thought, and gave in to it.
“You were expected a couple of days ago, Captain,” Canidy said, “I might as well tell you right now, Captain, that when people liaise with me, I expect them to be on time. There’s nothing I dislike more than working myself up to liaise and having no one to liaise with.”
The captain did not find that at all amusing.
“I’m sure the major will find my orders are all correct,” she said. She handed them to him, and he tossed them on the desk.
She has remarkable eyes. Very light blue. They disturb me, as if she read my mind and knew I was thinking about her body. Which, come to think of it, I am not supposed to be doing anymore.
And what the hell, that was a lousy joke, and she’s probably scared half to death of the American barbarians.
“As it has been explained to me, Captain,” Canidy said, “you have a dual mission here. You will handle the English for us, and for the English you will do your best to preserve this ancestral mansion from the ravages to be expected from the barbarians from across the sea.”
“Oh, I don’t think you’re all barbarians,” she said with a little laugh, “but that’s about the size of it, yes.”
“Your first responsibility, Captain,” Canidy said, “deals with duty A.”
“I don’t quite understand,” she said.
“We were supposed to be graced with a visit from the duchess herself a couple of days ago, when we expected you. I don’t suppose you have any idea where the old bat is, do you?”
“I do know exactly where she is, Major,” the captain said.
“Great!” Canidy said. “At my best, I would not be very good dealing with an elderly English noblewoman. I’m a simple American boy from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and we have very few noblewomen out there. And this one is apparently a holy terror.”
“Why do you say that?”
“My colonel warned me to handle her with kid gloves,” Canidy said. “I am herewith delegating that responsibility to you. You handle the old lady when she shows up. Tell her that we shall guard her furnishings as if they were our own, thank her for the use of this monstrosity, and then get rid of her as politely as possible.”
“I understand completely, Sir,” she said.
“Jamison handles room assignments,” Canidy said. “There’s a couple of rooms set up on the first floor, more or less for transients. I suggest you put up overnight in one of them, and then Jamison can place you where he wants you in the morning.”
“I believe I saw them as I came in,” the captain said.
“The lieutenant who brought you up here can show you,” Canidy said. “If you need anything, ask him.”
“Thank you very much, Sir,” she said. “Have I your permission to withdraw?”
“Good night, Captain,” Canidy said.
The captain stamped her foot, did an about-face, and marched militarily out of the room.
The captain had worn a wedding ring. Canidy wondered where her husband was—and whether the wedding ring would have an effect on Whittaker. All things considered, he’d rather the captain were a man.
He finished his drink, undressed, and went to bed.
5
SHANNON AIRFIELD
REPUBLIC OF IRELAND
AUGUST 14, 1942
One of the B-17Es in their flight had lost an engine over New Brunswick, left the formation, and turned around and landed safely at Presque Isle, Maine. A second experienced engine trouble over Cape Breton Island, but because of weather conditions at alternative airports, they decided to make the first scheduled stop at Gander Field, Newfoundland. Homer Wilson, who was convinced the B- 17 pilot was probably going to get lost flying by himself, got on the radio and told the other pilot he was above and behind him.
“Suggest you go on oxygen, climb to one five thousand, and get on my tail,” he said. “I’ll throttle back so you can.”
The B-17E pilot’s voice, even clipped by the radio, was emotional with gratitude.
Slowing down caused them to reach Gander two hours after the other B-17Es. And they were on the ground there only long enough to refuel, even though many of the B-17Es “requi
red attention.” One of the lead pilots told them this was standard practice. The mechanics would in fact find very little wrong with engines or anything else, once they investigated the reported red X’s12. But faced with flying a thirty-four-hundred-mile leg across the North Atlantic, pilots with only a couple of hundred hours could reasonably be expected to be a little nervous.
“I can’t say I blame them. When I had as much time as most of these kids, I thought New York to Boston was a dangerously long hop.”
They took off and headed east on the course the B-17Es would fly en route to their destination in Scotland. Wilson made the takeoff, but before they had even reached cruising altitude, he got out of his seat and turned it over to Fine. He needed rest, and there was no sense sitting there watching the fuel gauge needles move.
Twelve hours into the flight, after his second two-hour stint at the controls, Fine went aft, sat on the round, backless radio operator’s stool, and began cranking the radio directionfinder antenna, a circle of aluminum tubing mounted on top of the fuselage.
A half hour later, the needles of the direction finder jumped into life. Although he could not yet make out the Morse code through the static, Fine went forward and suggested to Wilson that he change course and try to pick it up on his own separate RDF system. When he did, the needle jumped, but the little X flag on the dial, indicating a signal too weak to be reliable, remained in view.
Fine returned to the radio operator’s station and rotated the RDF antenna again. Before long the needle jumped, and he could hear the Shannon identifier. The plane immediately began to bank in that direction.
Fine stood on the navigator’s stand and watched through the plastic navigator’s hemisphere on the top of the C-46 until the last of the B-17Es, on a course for Prestwick, had faded from sight.
The Irish coastline appeared twenty minutes later, a black blur on the horizon that gradually came into focus. An hour later, they made contact with the Shannon tower on the communication radio. They touched down at Shannon with forty-five minutes’ fuel remaining.
“I have just had a profound thought,” Fine said as he stood behind the pilots’ seats while Wilson taxied the C-46 down a taxiway toward the terminal buildings. “Mrs. Fine’s little boy, Stanley, has just flown the ocean.”
Wilson laughed.
“It may be routine to you,” Fine said. “But it’s extremely exhilarating. If I weren’t a happily married man, I would get drunk and chase immoral women.”
The Irish customs officials who met the plane were not the smiling, genial Irishmen of lore. There were four of them, pinch-faced and scowling, and they examined the C- 46’s papers and their passports suspiciously. Then they conducted a thorough search of the airplane itself, as if they had been tipped it was carrying contraband.
Fortunately, they did not go so far as to strip-search the crew, for if they had, they would have learned that Fine was wearing a money belt that held one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of assorted currency and a dozen Hamilton aviator’s chronometers. Possession of either the money or the wristwatches was not illegal, but it was unusual, and he would have been asked questions.
Two of the customs officers stayed with them when they went through the paperwork at the terminal, and stayed with them when they went to the shabby, unpleasant restaurant for dry rolls, artificial strawberry preserves, and tea, but no coffee. The custom officials even followed them into the men’s room, leaning impatiently against cracked and dirty washbasins until they had come out of the stalls.
They took off again after an hour and fifteen minutes on the ground. First they flew west, but then turned on a southeasterly course that would carry them over the southern tip of Ireland and then over the Atlantic on a straight course toward Lisbon.
PART ELEVEN
1
WHITBY HOUSE
KENT, ENGLAND
0400 HOURS
AUGUST 15, 1942
Captain the Duchess Stanfield, WRAC, was not at all surprised when wakened by the sound of a whistle, and then a cheerful voice bellowing, “Awright, awright, drop your cocks and pick up your socks, it’s that time, haul your ass out of the sack!”
There had been an essentially identical announcement the night before at 10:00 P.M., shortly after she had gone to sleep on an American Army folding canvas cot in a nine-by-twenty-foot room that had been, she recalled, her downstairs housekeeper’s broom closet.
Similar whistle blowing and picaresque admonitions to the guard came at midnight and at 2:00 A.M. The racket lasted about five minutes. The whistle blowing and obscenities—some clever, some simply vulgar—roused the thirty-odd men of the guard relief from their cots in tents erected close behind her window.
After they were up, the guards were formed in ranks and loaded aboard two large trucks. The trucks were then driven off with loud clashes of gears and roaring whines of transmissions. Ten minutes or so later—just long enough for her to begin to fall asleep—the trucks returned with the just-relieved guard, who, following another picaresque announcement from the sergeant, entered the tents, exchanged colorful obscenities as they removed their boots, then slept.
The difference between the British Army and the American Army, she concluded afterward, is that the British Tommy suffers the obscene exhortations of his sergeant in silence, while the American GI, to the delight of his peers, is quick to exchange obscenity for obscenity, and he apparently does it with impunity. She could scarcely imagine a British sergeant accepting a suggestion shouted from the ranks that he “knock off the fucking bullshit!”
Captain the Duchess Stanfield, WRAC, whose Christian names were Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, knew by now she would probably not get back to sleep. She usually was a sound sleeper. But once woken it was hard for her to get back to sleep. This was the third time she had been awakened.
She was naked between the American Army sheets. It had either been that or sleep in her underwear. She did not like to sleep in a brassiere, and her slip was standard issue, which meant it was skimpy and abrasive. One of the supplemental benefits of her new assignment would be access to her own linen, presuming she could find it.
When Whitby House had been requisitioned, the staff had of course carefully packed away all her personal things. But the staff was now gone, and she had not a notion where in the house her trunks had been stored.
And because I wasn’t able to go looking for them last night, she thought, I was forced to sleep naked in the broom closet while a young and distinctly unpleasant American major slept in my husband’s bed.
But then she came to realize that there was no reason why she could not turn her wakefulness to her own advantage. She would start looking for her things right now. In seconds she was standing on the balls of her feet on the cold, gritty stone floor and reaching for her discarded underwear.
Then she decided to ignore the soiled undergarments. In five or ten minutes she would have her own fresh, clean, soft underwear. In the meantime, all she had to do was pass the officer of the guard in the adjacent room and head down the corridor to the rear stairs. It was entirely likely that he would not even come out of his little office.
She slipped her bare feet into her oxfords and tucked her shirt into the waistband of her khaki skirt. She was reminded of what she thought of as the “bloody sexual injustice in women officers’ uniforms.”
Despite the shortages, prewar-quality material was somehow made available to gentlemen’s tailors. Male officers had at least several uniforms of prewar quality, while officers’ uniforms of the Women’s Royal Army Corps came from the same manufacturer who made uniforms for enlisted men, and were of much lower quality and fit.
It had been possible for a seamstress to tighten her uniform skirts where they bagged over her rear end, but there had not been enough material to let out her shirts and tunics to make room for her bosom. Unless she wore a tight brassiere, she strained buttons.
She looked down at her shirt now. The buttons looked about ready to pop.
With her nakedness now more or less covered, she carefully opened the door, found no one in the foyer, and slipped out, walking quickly down the corridor toward the kitchen. From there stairs led upstairs.
With no one in it, the kitchen seemed enormous. The six huge black stoves—now cold—were larger than she remembered them. The Americans apparently were not going to trouble themselves with coal stoves, as there were now two stainless-steel field ranges where the butcher blocks had been. And still in a crate addressed to Quartermaster ETO—European Theater of Operations—was a huge, restaurant-size refrigerator. Beside it, the Whitby House refrigerator looked incongruously small.
She gave in to the temptation to see if there was something to eat in the old refrigerator. She had missed supper the night before, and she would be damned if she would ask Major Canidy for a meal.
Inside she found an almost unbelievable cornucopia of foodstuffs. There were, for starters, at least six dozen fresh eggs. The British ration was one fresh egg per week—when available. There were two-gallon containers of milk marked “Container Property US Army Quartermaster Corps.”
Only children under four, pregnant women, and nursing women were given a milk ration.
There were steaks, chickens, two enormous tinned hams, pound blocks of fresh butter “[Butter, 1 lb Block, Grade AAA, Schmalz’s Dairy, Oshkosh, Wisc. USA],” and, the most incredible thing of all, a wooden crate marked “Sunkist Florida Oranges.”
My God, there must be eight, ten, twelve dozen oranges!
The Secret Warriors Page 30