The War Heist

by Ralph Dennis

  He dropped the ledger on top of the cashbox and locked the file drawer.

  He left the headquarters building whistling. There, dammit. That was real style. Let the cashbox be empty, let the ledger confirm it. Let them hang him for $532.27. They could only do it once, and while he was waiting he might as well have a few drinks at the Officers’ Club.

  It was a hazy London morning. Duncan MacTaggart awoke with the sun balanced on the window ledge like a soft fried egg. Old man, he thought, you have done one more time what you usually do.

  Not that he thought of himself as old. He was forty-six on his last birthday. That wasn’t the end of the world. He had most of his teeth and all his hair, and there wasn’t but a touch of gray in it; that was in the sideburns. The beer stomach was just beginning to lap over his belt. Not that there was much of it yet. He could still suck it in when he needed to. And on a man his size, six-four and about seventeen stone, it was hardly noticeable.

  Had he been sleeping again? The sun had edged its way up until it looked more like a Christmas orange, the thin bottom curve shaded by the window ledge.

  It was getting warm. The sun struck him directly in the eyes. The glare was there even with his lids squeezed closed. It was so warm he could smell his own bed sweat. No, it wasn’t that. It was more than his smell. He tried to concentrate. It would come to him when his mind started working. If it ever did. All those pints of beer, the Guinness too, and the nightcap of gin doubles. He had a foul mouth. Taste of a dog’s tail. A massive belch rumbled its way from the pit of his stomach and reached the back of his throat. He saw no reason to be polite and cheat himself of the pleasure. It thundered out. There now. Much better. That was half of the morning cure.

  “You awake, dear?”

  He recognized the other scent in his bed. Her perfume mixed with his sweat.

  “I said, are you awake, dear?”

  Peggy Sloan from down the hall.

  “Not yet,” he said. The second belch passed his breastbone. He choked this one and released it slowly. A hiss and a gurgle. He opened his eyes. Yes, he was in his own room at the boardinghouse. Paint flaked on the window frame, and there was the pint bottle of probably soured milk on the outside ledge. That confirmed it.

  He dug an arm under him, raised up, and flipped over on his back. The ceiling blurred. He gave himself time for his eyes to adjust. Past his feet he saw Peggy Sloan seated in the stuffed chair next to the table radio. She was wearing only her pink knickers.

  Her breasts were like Peckham pears. So that was what they were like. Blue veins in her skin, the thickness of pencil lead. She wore her red hair long. It brushed her shoulders. Slim legs with a slight bow to them. Her legs were crossed, and he could see the red nail polish on her toenails.

  The face wasn’t bad. Blue eyes in a child’s oval face with the chin just beginning to sag.

  “You might well ask me what I’m doing here,” she said.

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “You promised me tea.”

  MacTaggart rubbed grit from the corners of his eyes. “When was that?”

  “Last night.”

  “When?”

  “When you happened to pass my room,” she said.

  He couldn’t remember. It was true, however, that he had to pass her room to reach his. Hers was near the stairs, his at the far end of the second-floor hallway. In warm weather she had a habit of leaving her door open, she said to get a draft from her window. He thought he knew better. She’d had her eye on him for a year or better, from the time he’d moved into the boardinghouse. And, because she wasn’t careful about the way she dressed when the door was open, he had to admit he had a way of looking to his left when he reached the hallway. Now and then she heard him and came to the doorway to ask for a match or a cigarette or to ask if he’d like a cup of tea. She’d be wearing a red silk robe he could see through.

  He would furnish the match or the cigarette. He refused the offer of the tea. She lived too close. It could make problems. He’d never been in her room and this was the first time she’d been in his.

  “Been waiting long?”

  “For my tea? An hour.”

  “The water’s in the kettle and the tea’s in …”

  “I couldn’t find a match for the gas ring,” she said.

  He kicked the twisted sheet from his legs and rolled to the side of the bed. He was naked, and when he stood he looked in Peggy’s direction and saw her eyelids flutter. A flutter and another flutter and her eyes were wide open. He wobbled past her to the low shelf next to the door. The gas ring was there and right below it, as he’d thought, a box of kitchen matches. He broke two matches getting one struck. When the fire burned under the kettle, he measured tea into the pot. One cup for you and one cup for me and one for me after you’ve left.

  His robe, threadbare and greasy, was on the hook on the door. He pulled it down and shoved his arms into the sleeves. He belted it. There now. A man felt better when there was something between himself and his nakedness. Unless he was passionate. And he wasn’t. All he felt were aches and the bloat.

  “Tea coming up, love,” he said to the back of her head.

  Peggy turned in the stuffed chair. Her head just cleared the high back of it. “I like the way you say that, Duncan.”

  “What?”

  “Love.”

  MacTaggart stared at her.

  “It means you remember last night.” She hesitated. “You do remember last night, don’t you?”

  “Certainly,” he mumbled. “Most of it.”

  “It’s not my place to remind you, Duncan.”

  “It’s foggy about the edges,” he admitted.

  “You said … it was just like it is in the films.”

  “Between us?”

  She nodded.

  “It’s coming back to me,” he said. It was bloody likely he had said that. Love at first sight. Like in the films. It was what he told a woman even when he hadn’t been drinking. With some drinks in him it was as good as automatic.

  “And later, much later …”

  “We’re engaged?”

  Her eyes fluttered. A yes was in there somewhere. But, dammit, she wasn’t supposed to believe it. That was baby talk to make a woman warm and loving.

  “I wasn’t sure you meant it, Duncan.”

  “I stand by my words,” he said. “And we’ll make it official as soon as I’m back from an important business trip.”

  Until that moment he wasn’t sure he was going. It was between him and three others, which one would have to accept the rotten job. The other three were married. He thought he could make the argument that the single man ought to take the dangerous work. That it was only right and proper.

  “You didn’t tell me your business, Duncan.”

  “Banking.”

  “How long do you think it will be before …?”

  “A month. It could be two months. It’s so hush-hush I can’t even talk about it. Not even to you. But you’ve my word of honor that as soon as it’s completed …”

  She stood and whirled to face him. Her arms were open.

  MacTaggart knew it was going to happen. It was always like that after a night of hard drinking. Hangovers seemed to make it worse.

  Peggy knew. Her eyes were on his face, but she knew. “After all, we are engaged,” she said in a soft voice.

  By the time he unbelted his robe and threw it aside, her pink knickers were in a pile at her ankles.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Fort Belwin Officers’ Club had been a gymnasium until the old Club burned to the foundations in the fall of 1936. The peacetime Army didn’t have the money to rebuild it. The newer gym, the one the officers had used, was opened to all ranks. Exact scheduling assured that enlisted men and officers would not perspire in the weight room at the same time.

  The old enlisted-men’s gym was converted into the new Officers’ Club. The basketball backboards were removed and the bleacher seats dismantled. A bar was placed a
gainst the wall between the twin entrances at the south end.

  The floor was glass-slick where the basketball court had been. In the center of the dance floor the center jump circle remained. Crossed sabers and a springing-puma design filled the circle. The Pumas were the enlisted-men’s basketball team.

  An enlisted man working as bartender took the call from the Main Gate. He had his look to be certain that Major Renssler was still at his table. Then he returned to the phone and said, “He’s here. I’ll tell him.” Captain Marsh was at the bar insisting upon a refill right away. By the time the bartender had mixed his drink and taken Captain Marsh’s money, he’d forgotten one important part of the message. He couldn’t, for the life of him, remember the name of the man who was waiting for the major at the Main Gate.

  Major Renssler took it well. He didn’t seem to care one way or the other. Of course, the enlisted man had heard the skinny on the major. The guys in D Company said the major might be regular Army but he wasn’t dogshit the way some of the officers were.

  One reason it didn’t matter to Tom Renssler was that he had a good bourbon glow going. He’d spent $4.00 from the $32.27, and with the best bourbon going at 25ȼ a shot, it was as much a forest fire as a glow. He had, however, had some help from the couple sitting at the table with him. He’d bought each of them two drinks. Captain Johnny Whitman was in his Company, and the woman with him was his wife, Lila.

  “Ring the gate and say I’ll be right there,” he told the enlisted man.

  The bartender said, “Yes, sir,” and almost saluted before he walked away.

  “A man, Tom?” Johnny grinned at him.

  “That’s what the kid said.”

  “Not the Simpson sisters?”

  The Simpsons weren’t sisters. They were cousins. They lived in a farmhouse on the outskirts of Fort Belwin. The land around the house was fallow, unplowed. The information was that the Simpson women charged some people and didn’t charge others. Tom never paid, and one drunken night he’d escorted both of them to a dance at the Club. One colonel had been so angry that he’d stalked out, dragging his wife with him. His wife hadn’t wanted to leave. She’d wanted to see how scarlet women conducted themselves in a real social situation.

  “Not the Simpson sisters?” Lila Whitman put a hand on her husband’s arm and pretended to be shocked. “You wouldn’t, Tom. Not after the last time.”

  “You’re not listening, honey,” Johnny said. “It’s a man.” He gave Tom a sly wink. “Might be that Tom’s going to change his luck.”

  Tom braced himself. He didn’t react. The mention of luck, it could be casual, unintended, a fortunate hit. But, knowing Johnny’s ways, it could be a dig at the card games last week at BOQ. Johnny hadn’t been at the games the three nights when Captain Marsh cleaned him. It wasn’t to say that Johnny hadn’t heard about it from one of the other players.

  “My luck’s fine,” he said. “How’s yours?”

  Johnny nodded and winked.

  Johnny Whitman was the golden boy gone some three or four years toward seed. At the same time that Tom was at West Point, Johnny had been a big man on campus and an All-Southern Conference halfback at Duke. In his senior year he made one All-America team, third string, and several Honorable Mentions. Even now he tried to keep himself in shape. He worked out with weights and ran mornings on the beach. At his last duty station, Fort Benning, he coached the base team and played a part of each game—at least a quarter—at his old position.

  He gave the impression that he was taller than he was. On the base infirmary scales, in bare feet, he was exactly five-ten and one-quarter. What made him seem larger, especially when he was seated, were the wide, square shoulders with the twin humps of corded muscle that merged into his neck.

  Everybody assumed that the weight training had produced Captain Whitman’s thick upper torso. Johnny did nothing to discourage that belief. The truth was that most of the development had taken place in the coal mines in Walker’s Creek, Kentucky. He’d gone into the mines for the first time when he was fourteen. He was big for his age. The shift foreman, a friend of his father, winked at the labor laws. Johnny worked a full night shift for the next four years. He’d come out of the mine at eight in the morning and blink into the daylight, and he’d wash the coal dust away and dress in his good clothes. He’d eat fatback and bread on the walk to school.

  On top of school and the shift in the mine he played basketball and football. When he found time for sleep it was two or three hours at a time. Those nights when they didn’t have a late practice or a game he got six hours of unbroken rest before he put on his work clothes and headed for the mines.

  He knew there were better things ahead for him. They couldn’t be worse than those four years. He believed this with the fervor of a primitive Baptist preacher talking about heaven and hell.

  In his senior year, when the football scholarships were offered to him, he turned his back on the colleges and universities close to Walker’s Creek. He rejected the University of Kentucky and West Virginia. He wavered between the University of Virginia and Duke. He couldn’t decide. Finally he flipped a coin and Duke won.

  The summer after he finished high school, he worked in the mines. He saved his money, all he could. That September he wore his best sport shirt and jeans on the bus trip to Durham, North Carolina. He checked his suitcase at the bus station and walked around town until he found a clothing store that had Duke emblems in the window. He bought two jackets and four pairs of trousers and a new pair of shoes.

  Before he returned to the bus station for his suitcase he found his way to the YMCA. He sat in the steam room for a couple of hours until he was certain he’d sweated all the coal dust out of his pores.

  He never went back to Walker’s Creek again.

  Tom squeaked his chair away from the table. He picked up his glass and measured the level of the bourbon. Too much to leave.

  “Tom’s in no hurry to get to the gate,” Johnny said. “Maybe it’s not even a white man.”

  “Could be.”

  Lila gave a little gasp and said, “Johnny, that’s not nice.” The shocked gasp was one of Lila’s major accomplishments. She had perfected it during the time, as she liked to say, she’d been on Broadway. It was an all-purpose reaction. It could register the punch line of an obscene joke. It could show her shock at the hand that moved under the table and settled between her thighs. That was back in New York.

  At Fort Sam Belwin nobody touched Lila under the table. Nobody touched her at all. They were afraid of Johnny Whitman. But she found ways to hand out her small pleasures. From the young second lieutenants to the colonels, all of them danced with her. These were the slow dances when the colored lights in the rafters were dimmed. Never to Johnny’s face, always to his back, Lila knew how to do the pelvic ruffle. Around the Fort they called her Miss Dry Hump of 1940.

  If Johnny Whitman noticed he didn’t make a scene about it. Both of them knew, without having talked about it, that the marriage was almost over. He had courted her when he was on leave in New York and she’d been in the chorus line of the Broadway musical Here Come the Girls. The show only lasted three weeks. By that time Johnny had decided that Lila had more talent off the stage than on it. And she’d decided that any man who dressed as he did and threw money around, any man with his polish and manners, just had to be rich.

  Of course, she was wrong. Johnny had only his captain’s pay. Loans and some gambling winnings paid for the clothes and furnished the cash he spent on her. The polish and the manners were free. During the three years in the frat house at Duke he’d learned from his brothers how to dress and how to talk and what to drink—all the social graces that the rich learned at home.

  Lila gave up her career and married him before she found out the truth.

  Johnny accepted her complaints for three or four months. After a while she thought she had him cowed. She didn’t. The bed was still good and he hadn’t tired of her. Then she made the same complaint and he
blacked both her eyes.

  She screamed and cried, and he had to shout to be heard. “What career did you give up? Screwing fat Jewish producers?”

  That was true to a degree. At least there was enough truth in it to make her stop and think. But not for long. She gave her practiced shocked gasp and cried on.

  Her stage name had been Lila Browne. “With an e,” she always said. Her real name had been Lillian Wychiek. As a child she had been skinny and all knees and elbows. At fourteen she stopped growing upward and started filling out.

  It didn’t take her long to discover that her body was a commodity. She could get anything she wanted by knowing when to withhold it and when to give it freely. At seventeen she was runner-up in the Belvoir, Michigan, beauty contest. Everybody, the M.C. and the young men from the Chamber of Commerce who ran the pageant, said she was a sure thing to win the next year. Each of them in his own way offered to help her prepare, to work with her to improve her speech and her poise and her talent. After she was Miss Belvoir she was a sure thing for Miss Michigan and on her way to becoming Miss America.

  She believed them, but she didn’t want to wait that long. In August, when she was about to start her final year of school, she decided she’d had enough education. Over a two-week period she borrowed from the young men who’d offered to help her. In return, she gave each of them an evening of her time. She had a train ticket to New York and a nest egg put aside. None of the men asked for her IOU. All they needed was her word that she would repay them when she could.

  She reached New York and started going to the tryouts. She couldn’t sing and could only master a few of the basic chorus-line dance steps. It didn’t seem to matter at first. New York wasn’t that different from Belvoir. Men would always do what they could for a girl with high breasts and a behind that didn’t have a wrinkle on it.