MASH 14 MASH goes to Moscow

by Richard Hooker+William Butterworth

  “Are we alone, sir? Completely alone?”

  Jim-Boy, before replying, put his right hand behind his back and crossed his fingers.

  “Completely alone,” he said. “There’s nobody here but you and me and that oil painting of Shur-lee Strydent.” Jim-Boy indicated the picture of the actress-singer hanging on the wall.

  “Ah, yes,” the ambassador said, “the actress.”

  “The singer and actress,” Jim-Boy said. “Now there’s some who don’t appreciate Miss Strydent. My own brother calls her the world’s ugliest movie star, but he’s probably just saying that to make me mad. He gets his kicks making me mad. I keep that picture of her hanging there to remind me that I’ve got an obligation to the arts, if you know what I mean.”

  “The arts? Of course, sir, I know what you mean. And it is the arts about which I wish to speak to you.”

  “The arts? Funny, I thought you’d come to talk about those armored divisions you’ve been moving around Poland and East Germany.”

  “You know about that, sir?”

  “Got it straight from the horse’s mouth,” Jim-Boy said. “And from a source I can trust.”

  “Oh?”

  “From a classmate of mine. An Annapolis classmate. The navy academy. We take an oath, you know. Never lie to each other. Maybe to Congress and the army and the air force, but never to each other. That’s why I put him in charge over there in Virginia. In a job like that, you need somebody you can trust—you know what I mean?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I mean, I’d really hate to blow your country up, Mr. Ambassador, on the wrong information. If I’m going to do something like that ...” He stopped in mid-sentence and seemed to shift on his chair.

  “Is something wrong, sir?” the Russian ambassador asked. “It looked for a moment as if you were being pulled under your desk.”

  “My foot went to sleep is all,” Jim-boy said. “Now, we started to talk about the arts ...”

  “Indeed we did. May I ask, sir, if you are acquainted with the name Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov?”

  “Of course I am, Mr. Ambassador. I’d hate you to get the idea that just because I went to Annapolis and come from Georgia that we don’t know what’s going on in the world. I’m fully aware that whatever that name was you said is one of the most distinguished of your countrymen.”

  “Excuse me, sir,” the ambassador said, “but he’s one of your countrymen.”

  “What was that name again?”

  “Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov,” the ambassador repeated.

  “Of course, Boris Korsky-Rimsakov,” Jim-Boy said, crossing his fingers. “I must have been thinking of the other one, Alfred Korsky-Whatever. Well, what about him?”

  “Our beloved Chairman of the Supreme Soviet has a little favor to ask of you, sir,” the ambassador said. “Vis-à-vis Maestro Korsky-Rimsakov.”

  “I thought you said his name was Sergei, or something like that. One of those funny Russian names.”

  “Boris is his name, sir.”

  “Well, get to the point, Mr. Ambassador, I’m a busy man. With all those armored divisions being moved around Poland and East Germany, I’ve got to make up my mind which of your cities I’m going to blow up first ...” Again he stopped in mid-sentence and shifted downward in his chair, as if he were being pulled under his desk. “Have some more boiled peanuts,” he said.

  “Not just now, thank you, sir,” the ambassador said. “Is there something wrong, sir. Something under your desk?”

  “Just an old spittoon,” Jim-Boy said. “Sometimes it gets in my way. You were saying?”

  “I’ll get right to the bottom line, sir,” the ambassador said. “If you can give me your personal assurance that Boris Korsky-Rimsakov will appear, twice, at the Bolshoi, I am prepared to give you my personal assurance that the maneuvers of our tank divisions in East Germany and Poland will cease.”

  “Let me think about that,” Jim-Boy said. “My gut reaction is to say, hell, yes, you got a deal, but my Secretary of State warned me about you guys. Said you can’t be trusted as far as I can throw you.”

  And again Jim-Boy seemed to be struggling with something attacking his right leg.

  A disembodied voice spoke. “Tell him yes, for God’s sake.”

  “I beg your pardon, sir?” the Soviet ambassador said.

  “That was just me thinking out loud,” Jim-Boy said. “Now, let’s go over this again. If I give you my word that this Korsky-Borsky, whatever, comes to Moscow, you’ll give me your word that you’ll stop the hanky-panky with your armored divisions. Is that about the nut of it?”

  “That’s it. Deal?”

  “Let’s not get carried away. If I give you my word, you got something. I never lie. Anybody will tell you that. If I say What’s-his-name will go to Moscow, you can bet your last two cents on it. But I’m not so sure about your word. I mean, what if I sent Korsky-Borsky all the way over there, and you didn’t stop fooling around with the tank divisions? You know where that would leave me? It would leave me standing there with egg on my face, that’s where it would leave me. God knows, the Republicans would just love something like that!”

  “Have you something in mind, sir?”

  “I think you should sweeten the deal a little,” Jim-Boy said.

  “How, exactly?”

  “You get in touch with your boss and tell him if he can get that fat fella who keeps calling me names in the UN to knock it off, and to keep his shoes on his feet instead of banging on his desk with them, I would accept that as proof of your good faith, and Ol’ What’s-his-name will be on the next plane to Moscow. How does that sound?”

  “You’ve got a deal, sir,” the Soviet ambassador said.

  “It’s a pleasure doing business with you,” Jim-Boy said. He opened his desk drawer, took a small paper bag from it, and handed it to the ambassador. “Take these home to your wife, Mr. Ambassador,” he said. “A little souvenir from me.”

  “Thank you so very much, sir,” the Ambassador said. He opened the bag. “Oh, boiled peanuts! My wife will be thrilled.”

  “My pleasure,” Jim-Boy said, beaming. “Thanks for coming to see me.”

  He walked the Russian ambassador to the door.

  “Y’all come back, hear?” he called after him in the Southern manner, and then he closed the door. “O.K., Cy-Boy, get out from under the desk. He’s gone.”

  The Secretary of State crawled out from under the desk.

  “Say what you like about Nixon,” he said, “but his Secretary of State got to eavesdrop on private conversations sitting in an upholstered chair with earphones on his head.”

  “There will be no bugging in my White House,” Jim- Boy said firmly.

  “Then you’re going to have to get a bigger desk,” the Secretary of State said. “That’s the last time I’m going to spend ten minutes with my nose in your spittoon.”

  “How’d I do, Cy-Boy?” Jim-Boy asked, to change the conversation.

  “On the whole, rather well, I would judge. I think we came out of that one on top.”

  “I thought so myself,” Jim-Boy said. “I didn’t get to be the Peanut King of the Tri-County Area giving things away, I’ll tell you that. There’s only one little problem.”

  “Which is, sir?”

  “Who’s this Korsky-Borsky character? And what do they want with him in Moscow?”

  “That’s Korsky-Rimsakov,” the Secretary of State replied.

  “If there’s one think I don’t like, Cy-Boy, it’s a smartass Yankee always correcting me,” Jim-Boy said. “Just tell me who he is and what they want with him.”

  “I haven’t the foggiest,” the Secretary of State confessed.

  “That figures,” Jim-Boy said. “You’re going to have to straighten up, Cy-Boy, if you know what I mean. There’s no room for dead wood around my White House. You keep that in mind.”

  He walked behind his desk, sat down, and picked up his telephone.

  “Let m
e talk to the Admiral,” he said a moment later. Pause. “What do you mean what admiral? How many have you got over there, anyway?” Pause. “That many? No fooling?” Pause. “The head admiral, then.” Pause. “Yeah, I mean the director.” Pause. “Who’s calling? Who do you think is calling on the direct line from the President’s desk, Ronald Reagan?”

  He covered the mouthpiece with his hand. “They’re getting him on the line. He’s at a little party they’re having for Annapolis alumni.” Then he took his hand off the microphone. “Admiral,” he said, “this is Your Commander-in-Chief.” Pause. “Yeah, who would have ever dreamed, when we were rowing those lousy lifeboats around Annapolis harbor in the rain!” Pause. “Yeah, well I’m sorry I wasn’t there, too, I would have liked to have rubbed it in some of their faces, but I’ve been busy-busy-busy.” Pause. “Listen, ol’ buddy, I’m sitting here with Cy and we’ve got a little problem. You ever hear of somebody named ... what was that name again, Cy?”

  “Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov,” the Secretary of State said.

  “Boris Alexandrovich Korsky-Rimsakov,” Jim-Boy said to the Admiral. Pause. “What do you mean, no? You’re the head of the CIA, and when your Commander- in-Chief calls up and asks you a simple little question, you’re supposed to have the answer. You find out everything there is to know about this guy, and get right back to me.” Pause. “No, I can’t give you a hint. You just find out and get your tail over here with the answer at flank speed. You read me, Admiral?”

  He slammed the phone down in its cradle. He looked at the Secretary of State. “Just because he graduated ahead of me at the academy, he thinks he can get away with murder. I’ve always been suspicious of bookworms.” A look of annoyance crossed his face as the famous smile vanished. “Don’t just set there, Cy-Boy, like a boll weevil with his belly full of cotton.”

  “What would you have me do, sir?”

  “Get your tail over to Foggy Bottom and look in your files. That German fella must have left notes or something. If the Russians know this Rimsky-Bimsky fella, he must have ...”

  “That’s Korsky-Rimsakov, sir,” the Secretary of State said.

  “This is the last time I’m going to tell you, Cy-Boy, you’re only the lousy Secretary of State. You’re in no position to go around all the time correcting your Commander-in-Chief.”

  “Sorry, sir,” the Secretary said. “I’ll get right on it.”

  “When you’re riding over there in that fancy limousine, with the air-conditioning and all, on them foam rubber seats, you think about it, Cy-Boy. You don’t have a contract, you know. Keep that in mind.”

  Two hours later, the Secretary of State and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency met, both gentlemen loaded down with thick files, in the office of the appointments secretary.

  “Lester, he expects us,” the Secretary of State said.

  “The phrase he used was ‘at flank speed,’ ” the Admiral said. “Among us Annapolis men that means just as fast as possible.”

  “He’s in there with a delegation from India,” the appointments secretary said. “Friends of his mother. There’s no way you’re going to get in there until they finish getting that cobra back in its basket, and that’s that.” Five minutes later, they were admitted.

  “Permission to come aboard, sir?” the Admiral said, jocularly, as he stepped out of the way of the fakir carrying a wicker basket.

  “Y’all come in,” Jim-Boy said. “You just missed quite a show. Snake stood right up on its tail.” He walked behind his desk and sat down. “Well, let’s have it. Who is this Korsky-Whatever, and why do the Russians want him?”

  “We have an extensive file on him,” the Admiral said. “And so does the State Department,” the Secretary of State said. “Unfortunately, extracting information from them may pose a little problem.”

  “How’s that, Cy-Boy?” Jim-Boy asked.

  “My predecessor in office chose to keep them in Latin,” the Secretary of State said. “He was a schoolteacher, you know.”

  “That isn’t all he was,” Jim-Boy said. “Well, let’s have what you have.”

  “The news isn’t good, sir,” the Admiral said.

  “What is he, some sort of atomic scientist? They want to pick his brain, is that it?”

  “No, sir,” the Secretary of State said. “He’s the world’s greatest opera singer.”

  “Opera singer? Opera singer? You’re not putting me on, Cy-boy, are you? I wouldn’t like that at all.”

  “The Secretary’s information is correct, sir,” the Admiral said. “He’s also Une Tresor Officiel de la Belle France.”

  “Just tell me the facts, and knock off the Latin, Admiral,” Jim-Boy said.

  “He’s an Official Treasure of France, sir.”

  “I was told he was an American,” Jim-Boy said.

  “He is,” the Secretary of State said. “But he’s also an Official Treasure of France. And he’s ...”

  “I don’t have time for all the details—just answer the question. Is there any reason we can’t load this guy on an airplane and send him to Russia for a couple of days?”

  “Our preliminary information suggests that he may not wish to go,” the Admiral said.

  “I didn’t ask whether or not he wants to go—I asked is there any reason we can’t send him?”

  “We could ask him to go, as a patriotic duty ...” the Secretary of State said.

  “Get him on the phone,” Jim-Boy said. “I’ll ask him myself, personally.”

  “There is reason to believe that sending him to Moscow may not be such a good idea, sir,” the Admiral said.

  “Of course it’s a good idea. I promised that Russian, the one with the blue hair, that I’d send him.”

  “There are certain little details concerning the gentleman, sir,” the Secretary of State said, “of which I feel, in order to make a sound judgment, you should be fully apprised.” '

  “There you go again, Cy-Boy. When I offered you that job, you promised that you would speak English like a normal American. Now say that again, and simple.”

  “Mr. Korsky-Rimsakov has—what shall I say?—a rather difficult personality.”

  “So does my brother. You learn to live with things like that.”

  “Sir, may I suggest that we give you a quick rundown on the gentleman and the problems he may pose?” the Admiral said.

  “Just make it quick,” Jim-Boy said. “I’ve got other things to do, too, you know.”

  Chapter Five

  While Dr. Benjamin Franklin Pierce, F.A.C.S., was well aware that his bride might be a little surprised to have him walk in the door of his home at half past two in the afternoon, he was not prepared for the reaction he got.

  Mary Pierce, dabbing at her eyes with a soggy Kleenex, threw herself, sobbing, into his arms and announced, “Oh, Benjamin, how glad I am to see you!”

  “Do I intuitively feel that something is amiss?” Dr. Pierce inquired.

  “Martha-Jane does have gangrene after all,” Mary Pierce said.

  “I’m really sorry to hear that,” Dr. Pierce replied. “Did the Pleasant Valley General Hospital Laboratory make another mistake?”

  “You know about it, then?” Mary Pierce inquired, having regained enough control of herself to be able to blow her nose.

  “Those things get around,” Dr. Pierce said. “Makes it a little tough on Martha-Jane, doesn’t it, with her in the family way, expecting triplets, her lover-and-soon-to-be- husband, Dr. Jerome Dashing, lost on the Upper Amazon, termites in her wooden leg, and now this diagnosis of gangrene of the bosom ...”

  “Who said anything about termites in her wooden leg?” Mary Pierce snapped. “Benjamin, I would hate to think that you were mocking me. You know how I hate being mocked!”

  “Perish the thought!” Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce said. “You know that I have come to think of Martha-Jane almost as a member of the family.”

  “If you really felt that way, you wouldn’t make jokes
about her having termites in her wooden leg,” Mary Pierce said.

  “Life must go on, you know,” Hawkeye said, somewhat piously. As his father had told him years before, the one verity of life was that females were different from men.

  “My advice to you, Hawkeye, when the time comes, and you enter what is sometimes jocularly known as the blissful state of matrimony, is that you expect your beloved to have at least two screws loose. If you can learn to live with those two loose screws, you may live through it.”

  For the first formative years of their union, Hawkeye had watched Mary carefully so that he would be able to identify the two loose screws as they came undone and be prepared to cope with them. He had, as the result of calm and scientifically objective analysis, just about come to the conclusion that his Mary was going to be the exception that proved the rule. She had gone through the end-of-the-honeymoon trauma and first (and second and third) pregnancy and delivery without even a hint of a hint of a loose screw. She had even passed through the whirlpool of the Seven-Year Itch and Sending-the-Baby- Off-to-Kindergarten trauma demonstrating a mental stability and all-around level-headedness and practicality that at once astonished him and permitted a degree of self-congratulation on his choice of a mate with whom to skip hand in hand down life’s rocky path.

  But then, eighteen months before, without warning, the first screw had come loose. Mary Pierce, together with some 41,890,078 of her gender, had innocently come in contact (Mary while waxing the kitchen floor) with the trials and tribulations of Martha-Jane McSweeney and immediately become what Dr. Pierce thought of as a hopeless addict, beyond any reasonable hope of cure or even remission.

  Martha-Jane McSweeney was the central character in a daytime television drama (or soap opera) entitled “Life’s Little Agonies, Part II.” Martha-Jane’s social, physical, psychiatric, and moral dilemmas occupied Mary’s thoughts from two to two-thirty every weekday.

  Dr. Pierce was well aware that if Mary knew what he really thought of Martha-Jane generally and “Life’s Little Agonies, Part II” specifically his previous happy marriage would come to an abrupt and painful end. For, the law of averages being what it is, of the other 41,890,078 other faithful female fans, at least two dozen could be found at any given time inside the Spruce Harbor Medical Center, where Dr. Pierce functioned as chief of surgery. Some “Life’s Little Agonies, Part II” addicts were patients and some were members of the staff. Indeed, Mr. T. Alfred Crumley, Spruce Harbor Medical Center’s somewhat less than beloved hospital administrator, was, in Dr. Pierce’s judgment, one of the worst of what he thought of as the “Little Agonies Freaks.”