Sergeant Salinger

by Jerome Charyn

  The telephone sat in an alcove in the old dungeon that was now an underground canteen. The canteen was deserted except for a few Red Cross nurses who sat in a far corner, eating fish and chips in their fancy blue uniforms. Some wore officers’ caps; others wore coronets. They preferred captains and colonels, but the prettiest of them, Lt. Veronica Hamm, sensed that Sonny had a higher standing than most other staff sergeants. Yankee colonels kept clear of him, and she wondered why.

  A few volunteers from the Red Cross Motor Corps entered the canteen in their fancy shoulder straps and black leather boots. They considered themselves the lords of the canteen. With them was Capt. Norbert Whittle in his oxford gray tunic. He was commandant of the entire fleet of ambulances in South Devon. Short and blond, with bristling blue eyes and a scar that ran down one cheek, he abhorred this Yankee invasion of his countryside. And he couldn’t understand why a staff sergeant like Sonny had his own quarters at Tiverton Castle.

  “How are you, Yank? Having some fun with the natives? I’ve kept my eye on you. Chatting up young girls in knickers at a coffee bar near Angel Hill? Shame on you.”

  The nurses laughed and licked their fingers. “Ain’t he a naughty one,” said Lieutenant Hamm. “Sergeant Salinger, you have five girls at this table. Don’t you want to chat us up? You might not get another chance.”

  Sonny had little interest in Lieutenant Hamm; she was the Red Cross’s own Veronica Lake, a femme fatale with a dreamy, cross-eyed look and a grab bag of tricks. He had another kind of calamity to consider. He would have to brace himself for his mother’s call. She phoned him religiously once a week through the Devon exchange, sent him woolen socks and articles about Hollywood stars—Miriam was the Hedda Hopper of Manhattan. Sonny had to learn from his own mother the rituals of Oona’s romance with that miserable satyr, Charlie Chaplin, who was three times her age; she married him last June, the moment she turned eighteen. She’d gone out to Hollywood, while he was shunted from base to base, fort to fort, and no matter how hard Sonny petitioned, he couldn’t get past the barrier of OCS, as a potential officer candidate. Some of his persistence concerned Oona. He had wanted to descend upon Hollywood as a second lieutenant during one of his furloughs. He wrote her letters that were impassioned love songs, often twice a day, and soon she stopped replying. It was the satyr’s fault.

  He marched past the commandant and his little bump of Motor Corps boys and picked up a telephone receiver as black as the stonelike buttons on the commandant’s blouse.

  “Sergeant Jerome David Salinger,” the operator sang, “New York calling. Your party is on the line.”

  Sonny thanked the overseas operator and heard a click.

  “Mom, bless you for the socks. I have the warmest feet of any soldier boy in Devon.”

  But there was silence at the other end of the line and not that usual whimper of “Hello, hello, hello.”

  He heard a sniffle, then a sob.

  “Mother, is something wrong? I miss your Hollywood reports. Is Dad ill? Has he had problems moving over to the domestic ham and cheese market?”

  He could hear a sudden chirp. “Jerry, it’s me.”

  No one called him Jerry now. Jerry was another name for the Germans.

  The left side of his face froze. His tongue was trapped.

  “I just couldn’t have all that bitterness,” Oona said. “Some of the stuff you wrote me about Charlie—after our marriage, monstrous things. They didn’t sound like the Sonny I knew.”

  His face unfroze and all his tattered logic returned. “You aren’t in Hollywood. The operator said New York…. ”

  He listened to the little teasing laugh he loved so much. “Sonny, I’m at Table Fifty—with Uncle Walt.”

  “Big Ears,” Walter Winchell cackled into the phone, “I told ya to work for me. I’m considered essential to the United States. You could have sat out the war.”

  “But I like it here in Devon. I don’t have to watch you dance. Can you please put Oona back on the line?”

  “Mrs. Chaplin, you mean.”

  “Yeah,” Sonny said. “Mrs. Charlie Chaplin.” He was furious. The Stork Club had stolen Oona from him. She wouldn’t have become Debutante of the Year without the Stork, would have been just another girl from Brearley, who wasn’t photographed with Winchell and didn’t wear skin creams in women’s magazines. She would have stayed in Manhattan, with Sonny perhaps….

  He had written awful things after her marriage, had made obscene drawings of Oona and the satyr—a shriveled old man with a swollen prick—and sent them to her, out of desperation as much as spite. He admired Modern Times and Chaplin’s other classics, had followed the Little Tramp from film to film—until Chaplin cast a spell over his girl.

  “Oona, are you still there? I shouldn’t have sent you those letters. But you didn’t write, and all I got from my mother were Cinderella stories.” And then he blurted like a little boy, “Love you, Oona, always did.”

  The sobbing grew violent. “Jerry, please don’t say that. We were comrades, good friends.”

  “Comrades,” he spat into the phone, remembering the touch of her silken hairs like some instrument flying out of a murder hole at a castle in Devon.

  “I was attracted to you, Jerry, but you heard Uncle Walt. I’m a married woman.”

  “Then why did you call?” He was a member of CIC, the Counter Intelligence Corps, had trained in Maryland and with a British team in Derbyshire, knew every trick of espionage and interrogation, could rip out a man’s jaw with a pair of hooked fingers, gut him with the prongs of a fork. Oona shouldn’t have been able to find Sergeant Salinger. He was considered a ghost with an armband, a pistol, and a gold badge, a CIC agent attached to the Twelfth Infantry of the Fourth Division. He’d given out his number to Miriam and Sol, no one else.

  “Jeez,” Oona said. “I was at the Stork, and—”

  “But how did you get this number?”

  “From Uncle Walt. He called up some general, and I don’t know, here we are. I wanted to say I’m sorry. I took advantage—a little. All the other girls at Brearley were jealous that I had a beau like you, with your Gypsy eyes. You met me outside of school like—”

  “Your own private prince.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “But it just wasn’t in the cards. I didn’t lie. I told ya I was going out to Hollywood, and that I wanted to be an actress.”

  “But you’re not an actress now.”

  “That’s my fate…. I heard from your doorman that you were overseas.”

  “You went to Park Avenue?”

  “The way I always did,” she said. “I thought of the Stanley, and that battle on the ice, and I wanted to wish—”

  The line went dead. He’d thought of her incessantly, maddeningly, for two whole years, wanted to murder her, kiss her, marry her, and she found the ghost of Tiverton Castle in a few minutes with the help of Uncle Walt. The overseas operator returned. “Sorry, Sergeant Salinger.”

  “Oona,” he shouted. He wanted to hold her there forever on that tenuous, crackling string. Her voice excited him, soothed him. He forgot all about her marriage to the satyr. He’d romance her at the Stork with the gifts of a counterintelligence agent—the wonder and secrecy of words, with their brittle truths and scabrous lies. All his feelings had become compromised since he’d entered CIC. The only scabbard and shield he had left were the stories he published in Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post about soldiers and civilians who wandered through some strange battlefield like lost children.

  “Oona, I could hop on a plane. I don’t care. We could meet at Table Fifty, do the rhumba …”

  He heard a sob that was all too familiar. “Hop on what? Sonny darling, are you insane? That little gold digger is gone from your life—gone.”

  A deep shiver went right through him like a jolt from the Buck Rogers ray gun he remembered as a boy. The overseas operator had lost Oona and returned with Sonny’s mom.

  “Did you get my last package?”

&nbs
p; “Yeah,” he whispered, cupping a hand over the receiver so that the commandant and his cohorts couldn’t listen.

  “Darling, I can’t hear you.”

  “Mom, I have enough socks to get me through the war.”

  “Then don’t be stingy,” she said. “Share what you have with your buddies.”

  “I don’t have buddies, Mom. I live in a tower—alone.”

  “Is that what you do in Devon?” she asked. “Then why are you there?”

  “I can’t talk about my training, Mom. You know that.”

  “Sure, sure,” she said in an operatic voice. “Sonny Salinger, America’s top secret. Your father wants to say hello.”

  And he went through that numbing ritual, the terrifying space between words, like hot coals tossed at him, one by one—that’s what he always had with Sol.

  “We—miss—you, son.”

  He was frightened of his father’s raw emotion. He couldn’t respond. “Dad, how’s ham and cheese?”

  “Business—is—slow,” Sol said. “We’ve had to take a beating. Cut our headquarters in half.”

  “Say, Salinger,” Captain Whittle shouted, “don’t hog the line. We have one telephone at the castle, you know. We all want a little piece of the pudding.”

  Sonny ignored him.

  “You Yanks,” the commandant said, performing for his entourage, “you come here and think you have the entire show.”

  “Dad,” Sonny said like a CIC man, “the market will come back, you’ll see.”

  He said good-bye to Miriam and Sol and put back the receiver. He couldn’t strike the commandant of the Motor Corps in front of a dozen witnesses. He would have been ripped from the ranks of CIC, and sentenced to sit out the war. But the commandant was seething about the little gambol at the phone. He stood in Sonny’s way.

  “We don’t want you at the castle, Yank.”

  He tore the telephone right out of its socket in the wall, grinning like a jackanapes. “Now you’ll have to have your little tête-à-têtes at some call box on Blundell’s Road.”

  Sonny’s jaw was rippling.

  “Look at him, lads,” the commandant chortled. “He’d love to scalp me, he would. He’s as wild as a Red Indian.”

  Sonny barreled past the commandant and marched out of the castle with the same ripple in his jaw.

  2.

  TIVERTON, A LITTLE TOWN IN DEVON that had gone to the dogs until the Fourth Division arrived with its general staff, usurped several buildings on the cobbled stones of Barrington Street, grabbed the ruins of Tiverton Castle for itself, and established its headquarters with armed guards, but without much secrecy, at a manor house on a greensward at the very edge of town. Now Tiverton hummed with the noise and currency of GIs, staff officers, and Red Cross personnel. The town sat at the ford of two rivers, but there was such a scarcity of river traffic that Tiverton might have disappeared without the Fourth Division. And it fell upon Sonny and several other CIC agents to keep townsfolk and members of the Fourth apart. Officers and their bodyguards could sit in cafés or tearooms and buy vegetables and tins of deviled ham from the greengrocer on William Street, but they were discouraged from having long chats, which might provide some clue about where and when the Allies intended to strike. Sonny himself could wander about. The CIC had free reign over Tiverton. His own unofficial headquarters was a café on Gold Street, the Blue Mermaid—the name must have come from some imaginary creature that had risen out of the river Exe. She was pictured in the window of the café with a blue mouth and a blue tail, and somehow this goddess reminded Sonny of Oona O’Neill, at least the Oona he recalled, as her lips turned blue in the cold. The café had different-colored stones on its outer wall, like a solid, compacted rainbow.

  Many schoolgirls congregated at the café, and Sonny must have seemed exotic to them wearing his red-and-black CIC armband, like some royal chamberlain or military man who could oblige a general to cut off a conversation with a greengrocer. The schoolgirls ravished him with questions. But he never spoke about the war. Not one of these girls was as voluptu-u-u-u-u-ous as Oona in her Brearley uniform. They did the boogie-woogie to their own musical beat, in their flats and high socks. They called him “Billy the Kid.”

  “Do you have a bride in the States, Billy?”

  “No,” he nodded.

  “Then you must be on the prowl,” said the prettiest of the schoolgirls.

  “Someday perhaps. But you get very cautious once your heart is broken.”

  And they all wanted to hear about Billy the Kid’s broken heart.

  The owner of the café got them to scat and they went off like a tiny legion to the café across the street.

  “They are very cheeky, Sergeant. Might I refill your cup?”

  Sonny thanked the owner, Ralph, who was in his fifties, and couldn’t become a crusader in this war.

  “A bit of ersatz cream and sugar, Sergeant? And what about a lemon tart, made by the wife’s own lovely hand?”

  Sonny sat there with a notebook. He’d started a novel about a prep school boy who went on the prowl and never returned to school. He’d taken a course at Columbia with the country’s foremost literary editor, Whit Burnett, who had published two of his stories in a prominent quarterly, and had encouraged him to write a novel. But Sonny preferred to sprint across narrow terrain, and go on to the next narrow terrain and the next; still, he went down several rabbit holes in his novel and was left with a useless clot of words. And while he sat at the Blue Mermaid with his notebook and his untouched tart, Corporal Benson appeared.

  “Sorry to disturb you, sir, but you’re wanted at the castle.”

  “Wanted by whom?”

  “It’s all hush-hush, sir. I think it’s a bit of treason.”

  3.

  THE RUINS RESEMBLED A FORTRESS that had been eaten alive, sucked apart from its own interior, since half the towers still stood, with barred windows, brazen mortar and brick. There were no sentries about, amid this little twitch of treason. Sonny climbed up to the southeast tower and was never challenged once—the tower served as an interrogation room. Both his arms were tingling. Inside, he found one of his mentors, Col. Byron Rose, headmaster of Sonny’s training school in Derbyshire. Byron had several broken knuckles. He’d survived a horrific fire at Dunkirk and had blisters under both eyes that had all the decorative swirls of a mask. With him was the little commandant of the Red Cross Motor Corps and Nurse Hamm, handcuffed to a single chair that couldn’t accommodate them and their buttocks—the chair shivered under their weight. The room itself was barren except for a lamp and that shivering chair. The captain had red bumps under both eyes. Sonny went to clean the snot and blood that ran down the nurse’s nostrils.

  “Don’t,” Byron said in a menacing whisper. He handed Sonny a sketchbook. “What do ye see, lad?”

  Sonny was puzzled. “I see my regiment on maneuvers—somewhere in the hills of Devon.”

  “Now turn the page.”

  There were other sketches of the same riflemen in full battle gear, done in charcoal. Sonny himself was among them. “Has Derbyshire examined the drawings?” he asked.

  “Yes—infinitely.”

  “And what have your cryptos uncovered?”

  “Not a clue,” Byron said with scorn. “But that’s not the issue. The commandant of our Motor Corps out on a lark, sketching your boys? Come on, Salinger, isn’t that a rotten kettle of fish?”

  Sonny was still confused. “The terrain is barely identifiable, sir.”

  “That’s the whole point. We’re massing for a big push. And Mr. Ambulance here and his whore are providing proof of that push. Did ye know that they met with Jerry before the war?”

  “It was a Red Cross conference—in Berlin,” Captain Whittle said.

  Bryon wrapped him once with the full force of his knuckles, and the chair toppled over. Whittle and Nurse Hamm landed on the stone floor all in a tangle, while Byron hovered over them like a mountainous hawk.

  “Did I ask you t
o speak, old son?”

  “No, sir, you did not,” Whittle said, his nose running like Nurse Hamm’s.

  Byron took out a file from an enormous cardboard sleeve, shuffled several photographs, and revealed them to his captives. “Do ye recognize any of these chaps?”

  “Yes,” Nurse Hamm said with a whistling sound. “They were part of the German delegation.”

  “And members of German military intelligence—Abwehr agents posing as Red Cross maharajas. Did they attempt to recruit you, offer some silver and gold?”

  Nurse Hamm stared into his mean little eyes, and they frightened and bewildered her. “Money was never discussed. We exchanged addresses … and then we had the blitz.”

  “I’m talking about another blitz,” Byron said. “Captain, did you prepare your pictures for our German friends?”

  “No,” the commandant insisted. “I would never do that. They’re for my portfolio.”

  “Look at him! Our local Toulouse-Lautrec. And what about Lieutenant Hamm? How long have you been shagging her, old son? We have you both on our lists, gadding about like lovebirds. Is she your contact with Jerry and the Abwehr?”

  Sonny looked inside the cardboard sleeve. The first three Abwehr agents were dead. The fourth had been blinded on the Eastern Front, and was convalescing at a soldiers’ home in Manheim, permanently removed from the war.

  “Salinger,” Byron said, “take over the interrogation. Slap them, and slap them hard. We can’t afford any slipups. Time is precious.”

  Sonny had to accommodate this half-mad colonel, who could have demoted him and left him to rot in Devon.

  He stepped on Whittle’s hand.

  “I like that, lad,” Byron said, “I like that a lot.”

  Then Sonny kneeled over Captain Whittle. “Are you arrogant—or just dumb?”

  “I can’t follow you,” Whittle muttered, whipping his head back and forth.

  “Why would you draw pictures of a regiment on secret maneuvers?”