His Training Group had begun training six weeks before Cynthia's. The way the school was set up (before she had come to Virginia Station as a trainee, Cynthia had read Eldon Baker's training syllabus), incoming trainees were placed under the supervision of trainees who had finished their training and were awaiting assignment. The announced purpose was to spare the training staff the mundane work of seeing to the issue of equipment, the first painful hours of calisthenics, the explanation of the rules, and so on. The real reason was so that the training staff could judge how well the "senior" trainees dealt with subordinates--to see if they could inspire cooperation. There was no place on an operational OSS team for someone who antagonized, intentionally or otherwise, the others on the team.
It. Horace G. Hammersmith had been as good and as natural a leader of his peers at Virginia Station as Greg Hammer had been a leader in the movies. Despite herself, Cynthia had come to like him. And she found that her first snap judgment of him had been almost entirely wrong. She had found Hammersmith to be really shy, rather than being arrogant. And she learned that, rather than being awed with himself as a movie star, he thought the whole movie business was rather funny.
Over the weeks, she had learned that he was an electrical engineer who had been sent to Los Angeles by the Murray Hill division of the Bell Telephone
Laboratories to supervise the installation of a recording studio at Continental Studios.
"Lana Turner," he told her one afternoon while they were taking a five minute break on a ten-mile run, "was discovered in Schwab's Drug Store. I was discovered having dinner with a vice president of Continental Studios, Stan Fine, at the Villa Friscati."
"Stanley Fine?" she asked, genuinely surprised.
"Uh-huh, "he said.
"We're not supposed to be talking about our private lives, you know," she said.
"I know," he said, "and I also know you know Stan."
Then he'd looked at his watch, and the five-minute break was over, and he'd jumped to his feet and blown his whistle, and they'd resumed the ten mile run. That night, at supper, he had sat down beside her and resumed the conversation where he'd broken it off.
"Over a steak, which Bell Labs was paying for, I was explaining to Stanley why it was going to cost Continental Studios a bunch of money more than they expected to get what they wanted, when this fat little bald-headed man walked up to the table and said, in an accent you could cut with a knife, "So tell me, Stanley, who's your friend? And vy I haven't zeen any film?"" "Max Liebermann," Cynthia said, laughing at Hammersmith's apt mimicry of the founder and chairman of the board of Continental Studios.
"Right," Hammersmith said.
"But I didn't know who he was. So Stanley said, "Uncle Max, he's the engineer from Bell Telephone."" "
"What I want to know is can he ride a horz?" Max said," Hammersmith went on. '"If he can ride a horz, I tink he's Major Porter. We god a hell uf a problem wit dat, Stanley, if I god to tell you."" By then, Cynthia was giggling at the mimicry.
"It didn't take much to corrupt me," Hammersmith had gone on.
"All it took to get me before the cameras was as much by the week, on a year's contract, as Bell Labs was paying me by the month. And luckily, I could ride a 'horz."" "I saw Calvary Raid," Cynthia said.
"You were very good."
"That's because my only lines were "Yes, Sir," and "Sound the Charge!"" Hammersmith said.
"Anyway, Stan and I became pals. And he got me into this, and he wrote me a letter saying if I got to Washington and desperately needed a place to stay, I should call a Miss Cynthia Chenowith and say I was a friend of his. Unless there is another Cynthia Chenowith?"
Horace G. Hammersmith had not so much as touched her hand, except in the line of duty. But neither had he for long taken his eyes off her whenever they were around each other.
And now he was going. He was going operational. She wondered where, and doing what. And she just wasn't up to spending his last night here with him. In the morning, she would have breakfast with him, and maybe even go to the station wagon with him, and kiss his cheek.
But she didn't want to see him tonight. Tonight, there would be just too much of a temptation to give him what he wanted, even if he didn't ask for it.
She didn't want him to go operational with her on his mind. She didn't love him, but she really liked him, and she was almost sure he thought he was falling in love with her. Whatever they were going to have him doing, the one thing he didn't need was her on his mind any more than she already was.
The bathtub was full. So when Cynthia sensed the water was cooling, she had to let water out before filling it again with hot water. She bent her left leg, in order to get a good look at her foot, then vigorously rubbed away a layer or two on the calluses. Then she repeated the operation on the right foot.
And finally she stepped out of the tub and toweled herself dry. Then she took the towel and wiped the condensation from the full-length mirror on the door and examined herself in it.
She "made muscles," as she had seen men do, and was surprised--and not sure whether she was pleased or disappointed--that she could see no development in her biceps. With all the push-ups and pull-ups she'd done, she had expected some.
She had bruised, ugly blue areas in several places. The largest area was in her right shoulder, from the recoil of the Springfield rifle, and the Garand rifle, and the Winchester shotgun, and the Thompson submachine gun she had fired on the range. She had fallen twice on the obstacle course. There was a bruised area on her lower stomach, a souvenir of an encounter with a peeled log when she had tripped running up an obstacle, and another on her right leg, just above her knee. She had earned that battle stripe just by stumbling, exhausted, and landing on the goddamned Springfield.
Finally, there was a raw spot on the web of her right hand, where the Colt45 automatic pistol had "bitten" her.
She dried that spot very carefully with a wad of toilet tissue and then applied Merthiolate and a Band-Aid. And then she took a large economy-size tube of Ben-Gay and applied it liberally to all the bruised areas.
If Greg should come up here, she thought, / will smell like the men's locker room, and maybe that will dampen his ardor.
Still naked, she washed and dried her hair, wrapped her head in a towel, and then finally put on what she considered a grossly unfeminine set of pajamas.
They were from the PX, too. Flannel, with a particularly ugly red and brown pattern. She put a bathrobe over the pajamas, examined herself a final time in the mirror, stuck her tongue out at herself, and then went into her bedroom.
She sat down at a government-issue gray metal desk, which was conspicuously ugly in comparison to the rest of the furniture, turned on the desk lamp, and took a brown-paper-bound book from a rack. The book was titled, U.S.
Field Manual, FM 21-10: The Law of Land Warfare.
There would be a written examination to make sure the trainees knew what the Hague and Geneva Conventions had had to say about where the line was between a soldier, who was entitled to treatment as a prisoner of war, a partisan, and a spy. Under the law of land warfare, partisans and spies could be shot.
Cynthia had serious doubts that either the Germans or the Japanese were going to pay much attention to the fine print, but the course was a part of the curriculum, and she had to pass it to graduate. And she was determined to graduate.
Thirty minutes later, just after she had opened a can of Vienna sausages and was trying without much success to get one of the tightly packed little obscenities out of the can, there was a knock at her door.
She didn't respond. If it was Horace G. Hammersmith and she didn't respond to his knock, he might take the hint and go away.
But after a moment, there was another knock, this time far more demanding.
"Who is it?"
"Eldon Baker."
"Come on in," Cynthia called.
Baker entered the room.
"Studying," Cynthia said unnecessarily.
She saw that Baker had seen the hot plate and the jar of Nescafe and wondered if he would turn her in. He knew that she had a close relationship with Colonel Donovan and Captain Douglass; the other training personnel did not.
"Have you got a minute so that we can talk?" Baker asked.
"I should study, Eldon," she said, "but sure."
"Don't worry about the examination," he said as he closed the door.
"You won't be taking it."
"Oh?"
"I have just had a telephone call from Chief Ellis," Baker said.
"You are to go to Washington to the house on Q Street with the station wagon in the morning."
"Oh?" she repeated.
"You will take your things with you," Baker said.
"According to the Chief, you will not be coming back. At least as a trainee."
"What's this all about?" Cynthia asked.
She was sure she knew.
Oh, goddamn you, Jimmy!
"Chief Ellis did not elect to tell me," Baker said.
"But I think we can both make an educated guess, can't we?"
"Whittaker?" Cynthia asked.
"Doesn't it seem that way to you? "Baker said.
"I can't tell you how annoyed this makes me."
"Why should it bother you? He's not offering you his unasked-for male protection."
"After some thought," Baker said, "after Captain Whittaker's visit, I decided I could not overlook it. That, in other words, I had to make an official issue of it."
"I don't think I quite follow you," Cynthia said.
"In addition to what he did to you," Baker said, "he had a run-in with me.
He was insubordinate. Technically, I suppose, he's A.W.O.L.. He was ordered to report here for training. He decided, on his own, that he'd really rather not do that. I wrote a letter reporting what had transpired to Colonel Donovan."
Cynthia wondered why that bothered her, why she felt a surprising flash of anger. Baker was right. Jimmy Whittaker was an Air Corps officer. Officers do what they are told to do. And there was absolutely no excuse for his having kissed her the way he had, making a fool of her in front of the others.
"It would appear that the rules which apply to everyone else in the OSS, myself included, do not apply to Captain Whittaker."
"We don't know that's what's happened," she said.
"I felt sure that Colonel Donovan would understand my motives in making an official report of what happened," Baker said.
"That, rather than trying to get Whittaker in trouble, my concern was for the overall discipline of the organization.
I felt confident he would understand that it was not a personality clash between Captain Whittaker and myself, but rather an impersonal incident in which an agent willfully disobeyed his superior, with the result that the authority of the Director of Training was seriously undermined."
He waited for her to respond to that, and then, when she did not, went on, "Obviously, I was wrong. The only response to my letter was the telephone call just now. When Whittaker left here, after telling me that I was 'out of my mind' for having you in the school, he said that he was going to see the colonel.
I had the impression he meant both about his coming here and about you."
"He's known Colonel Donovan all his life," Cynthia said softly.
"And so have you," Baker said.
Cynthia looked at him.
"You want me to go to Colonel Donovan?" she asked.
"I thought you might consider it," Baker said.
"For what a fraternal organiation would call 'the good of the order."" "I'm going to see Colonel Donovan," Cynthia said.
"I intend to graduate from this school."
"I thought perhaps you could make it clear to him why this whole sequence of events is so distressing to me," Baker said.
Cynthia's mind 'was rushing ahead.
"If I'm to go to Washington in the morning," she said, "what do I do about turning in my equipment, settling things?"
"I'll take care of that for you myself," Baker said.
[TWO]
It had taken a long time for Cynthia to go to sleep, and she had gone to sleep angry.
And she had awakened still angry, and had grown angrier with the realization that there was not going to be time to pack and dress and eat breakfast, too, and that she was just going to have to miss breakfast.
There was a small silver lining to the black cloud, she thought. It would be the first time that Greg had seen her dressed up in anything fancier than a skirt and a sweater, or wearing any makeup except a faint touch of lipstick. She had a moment to enjoy that before thinking that it probably would be better if he didn't get to see her that way. It would fuel what she suspected he felt for her.
When she carried her luggage downstairs, he was in the entrance foyer. It was the first time she had seen him dressed up, too. He was in his pink-and green lieutenant's uniform, wearing his new silver parachutist's wings.
He smiled when he saw her.
"Baker said you would be going to Washington," he said.
"He didn't say why, and he didn't tell me how pretty you are in your civilian clothing."
"Good morning, Greg," she said.
She wondered what his destination was, and when they had passed the checkpoint, she asked him.
"I don't know," he said.
Cynthia leaned forward and asked the driver, "Where are you taking Lieutenant Hammersmith?"
"The house on Q Street," the driver replied.
"He's to see Chief Ellis."
"What's the 'house on Q Street'?" Greg Hammersmith asked.
"It's a mansion near Rock Creek Park," she said.
"We use it as both a safe house and sort of a hotel for transients."
"You've been there before, I gather."
"I used to run it," she said.
"And am I permitted to ask where you're going?" he asked.
"I'm going there too," she said.
"And am I permitted to ask why?"
"No," she said.
"I'm sorry."
"Then, in the short time remaining to us, Miss Chenowith--" he began.
"Don't, Greg," she said.
"Please don't--" "What I was going to say, you have apparently figured out all by yourself," he said.
She looked at him and met his eyes, then averted her eyes and avoided looking at him on the rest of the way to Washington.
When she walked into the kitchen, she asked the cook if Chief Ellis was around.
"In the dining room with Captain Whittaker," the cook replied.
"Come on, Greg," Cynthia said, aware that her temper was up and not caring.
Captain Whittaker and Chief Ellis were eating either a late breakfast or an early lunch. They were having eggs with their steaks, she saw, so it had to be breakfast.
"I think you know Miss Chenowith, Chief," Whittaker said when he saw her.
"Otherwise known as "Superwoman." And I don't know the name of the gentleman with her, but he is the one who almost came to her aid when I publicly humiliated her."
"Damn you!" Cynthia flared.
"My name is Hammersmith," Greg said coldly.
'"My name is Hammersmith, Sir,"" Whittaker said.
"We try very hard to observe the military amenities around here, don't we. Chief?"
"Yes, Sir," Ellis said.
"That we do, Sir."
"Sit down, Cynthia," Whittaker said.
W E B Griffin - Men at War 4 - The Fighting Agents Page 15