Semper Fi

by W. E. B Griffin

  He was probably a Marine from the Navy Yard, Dickie Golden decided. They looked somehow different from sailors. He was too young to be more than a PFC; but maybe, just maybe, he was a lance corporal; and the finance company would sometimes write up a lance corporal if he could come up with the one-third down payment. There was of course no way this kid could come up with one-third down on the LaSalle convertible, even though it was really one hell of a bargain at $695.

  Cadillac had stopped making LaSalles as of 1940, which really cut into their resale value. And the last couple of years Cadillac made them, they had practically given them away. But that hadn’t worked, and LaSalles were orphans now. A 1939 Cadillac convertible like this one, with the same engine…about the only real difference between a little Cadillac and a LaSalle was the grill and the chrome…would sell for twelve, thirteen hundred.

  The down payment on this would have to be at least $250, and the odds were the kid looking at it didn’t have that kind of money. Dickie Golden did the rough figures in his head. Say he had the $250, that would leave $500 over two years plus a hundred a year for insurance. A $700 note over two years at 6% was right at $29 a month. They paid Marine privates $21 a month. He didn’t know what they paid lance corporals, but it wasn’t much more.

  But, Dickie Golden decided, what the hell; it was an up. It was possible the kid had just come off a ship or something, with money burning a hole in his pocket from a crap game. He just might have $300 for a down payment. More likely, he could switch the kid over to something he could afford. If he wanted an open car, there was a ’37 Pontiac convertible at $495 and a ’33 Ford—a little rough, needed a new top—for $229.

  He walked over to the kid.

  “Good-looking car, isn’t it?” Dickie Golden said. “I’ve been thinking of buying it myself for the little woman.”

  McCoy didn’t reply to that.

  “You got the keys?” he asked.

  McCoy had just about decided to buy the LaSalle. Everything else was crazy, why not buy a crazy car?

  McCoy had just come from dinner with an officer and his wife. That was why he was wearing a suit. Maybe an apartment in a tall building at 2601 Parkway wasn’t like officer’s quarters on a base, and maybe there was some difference between a regular officer and an intelligence officer, but he was a corporal, USMC, and Sessions was a captain, USMC; it was the first time he had ever heard of a captain’s wife “insisting” that a corporal come to dinner.

  More than that. Grabbing him by the arms, and hugging and kissing him on the cheeks…with her husband watching.

  She was a good-looking woman. Decent looking. Wholesome. She looked a lot like Mickey Rooney’s girl friend in the Andy Hardy movies.

  “Ed told me what you did at the ferry, Ken,” Mrs. Sessions said. “I can call you ‘Ken,’ can’t I?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  “Well, you can’t call me ‘ma’am,’” she said. “I won’t have that. You’ll call me Jean.”

  He hadn’t replied. On the wall was an eight-by-ten enlargement of the picture he’d taken of Sessions in the black cotton peasant clothes.

  “I want to thank you for my husband’s life,” Mrs. Sessions said when she noticed him looking at it, and then when she saw how uncomfortable she had made him, she added: “I know he’s not much, but he’s the only one I have.”

  Then Captain Sessions put a drink in his hand, and soon afterward they fed him, first-class chow that McCoy had never had before: one great big steak for all of them served in slices. Mrs. Sessions (he was unable to bring himself to call a captain’s wife by her first name) told him they called it a “London broil.”

  Since they were both being so nice to him, he had been very careful not to say or do anything out of line. He watched his table manners and went easy on the booze (there was wine with the London broil and cognac afterward). And as soon as he thought he could politely get out of there, he left.

  Which had put him all dressed-up on North Broad Street at eight o’clock at night with no place to go but a bar; and he didn’t want to go to a bar. Drinking at a bar and trying to pick up some dame and get his ashes hauled did not seem like the right thing to do after a respectable dinner with a Marine Corps officer and his lady in their home.

  So he had figured he would walk up North Broad Street and maybe see if he could find a car in one of the used-car lots—at least get an idea of what they were asking for iron these days. And then he’d seen the LaSalle and decided, what the hell, why not see what he could do?

  “The down payment on a car like this would be $300, maybe a little more,” Dickie Golden said, not wanting to let the kid take the car for a ride if there was no way he could handle it, “and the payments, including insurance, about thirty bucks a month over two years. Could you handle that much?”

  “Yeah,” McCoy said. “I could handle that much.”

  “You’re a Marine, aren’t you?” Dickie Golden said. One more fact out of him, and he would go get the keys.

  “Yeah,” McCoy said.

  “The finance company don’t like to make loans on a car like this to anybody’s not at least a lance corporal.”

  “I’m a corporal,” McCoy said. “And I can make the down payment, okay? You want to let me hear the engine, take it for a ride?”

  Dickie Golden put out his hand. “I’m Dickie Golden, Corporal…I didn’t catch the name?”

  “McCoy,” McCoy said.

  “Well, I’m pleased to meet you, Corporal McCoy,” he said. “You really know how to spot a bargain, I’ll tell you that.”

  You bet your candy-ass I do, you sonofabitch. I grew up on a goddamned used-car lot. You’re about to be had, buster, presuming the engine isn’t shot in this thing.

  “Seven hundred dollars seems like a lot of money for an orphan like this,” McCoy said.

  “Well, maybe we can shave that a little, if you don’t have a trade,” Dickie Golden said.

  The battery was almost dead, and went dead before the engine would crank. A colored man with a battery on a little wheeled truck was called. Dickie Golden said he would replace the battery.

  “Maybe all it needs is a charge,” McCoy offered helpfully.

  You dumb sonofabitch, if you knew what you were doing, you’d not only make sure there was a hot battery in here, but you’d start it up every couple of days. These flat-head 322-cubic-inch V-8s are always hard to start.

  “No,” Dickie Golden said, grandly, “I want this car to be right.” He told the colored man to replace the battery. And then “while they were waiting” he suggested they take the information for the finance company down on paper.

  He was obviously pleased with the facts McCoy gave him: That he was a corporal, unmarried, and had no other “installment loans” outstanding. McCoy decided he was going to come down $100 from the $695 and make it back by slipping the paper to some finance company who would give him half of the fifty back and make it up by charging eight percent, maybe ten. That would make the car $595. Then he would sell him insurance through some shyster outfit that would charge twice what it was worth—making it part of the easy payments—and slip Dickie Golden another twenty-five bucks back under the table. Then there would be a credit-check charge, and Christ only knew what else.

  After McCoy’s first look at the LaSalle, he went to another used-car lot and gave the wash boy there a dollar to go in the office and borrow the Blue Book for him. The Blue Book told him the LaSalle was worth $475 wholesale, the average retail was $650, and the average loan value was $400. McCoy decided he would pay $525 for the car.

  Dickie Golden wanted to ride along with him, of course, when he took the test drive. McCoy handled that by passing the salesman three hundred in cash—enough for the down payment—“to hold.” And when Dickie Golden said he still thought he’d better go along, McCoy turned indignant and asked if Dickie Golden didn’t think he could drive; and Dickie Golden backed down.

  McCoy drove up Broad Street until the engine was w
arm and then pulled in a gas station on a side street and gave the guy running it a buck to let him put it up on the grease rack and lend him some tools.

  He could find nothing wrong with the car and would have been surprised if he had. It needed points and a condenser, and an oil change, and the wheels aligned, but there was nothing seriously wrong with it. The heads had never been off, and the engine was just as dirty as it ought to be. If it had required work it would have showed.

  He drove back to Golden’s Pre-Owned Motor Cars.

  Dickie Golden told him he had been getting worried.

  McCoy told him he thought the clutch was going.

  Dickie Golden said he didn’t think so, but that it was not much to worry about anyway, since they had a thirty-day fifty-fifty fix-anything policy. That meant they would pay half of the cost of anything that needed fixing or replacing in the next thirty days. And besides he was going to knock $100 off the price because Corporal McCoy didn’t have a trade-in.

  He showed McCoy the papers, already made out. With everything included, after a $300 down payment, the payments would come out to $27.80 over thirty months.”

  “I talked them into going thirty months,” Dickie Golden said, “to keep your payments down.”

  You just hung yourself, Buster. You must really get kickbacks from every sonofabitch and his brother. So much that you won’t mind going down another $70 on the basic price.

  “I’ll give you $500 for it,” McCoy said.

  “You got to be kidding,” Dickie Golden said.

  “That’s all I can afford,” McCoy said.

  “Then I guess we don’t have a deal,” Dickie Golden said.

  “I guess not,” McCoy said. “You want to give me my $300 back?”

  “I guess I could ask my partner,” Dickie Golden said. “I don’t think he’ll go along with this, but I’d like to see you in the LaSalle, and I could ask him. If I can catch him at home…”

  If you’ve got a partner, at home or anywhere else, I’ll kiss your ass at high noon at Broad and Market.

  “Why don’t you ask him?” McCoy said.

  Dickie Golden was gone twenty minutes. When he came back, he had a whole new set of papers all made out.

  “My partner says $525 is as low as we can go,” Dickie Golden said. “That’s less than wholesale.”

  McCoy read the finance agreement with interest. Then he handed Dickie Golden $225.

  “Deal,” he said.

  “What’s this?” Golden said, looking at the money but not picking it up.

  “I already gave you $300,” McCoy said. “That’s the other $225.”

  “No, this deal was to finance the car and for you to buy your insurance through us.”

  “What do you want me to do, call a cop? It’s against the law in Pennsylvania to take kickbacks from finance companies and insurance companies.”

  “What are you, some kind of wise guy?”

  “You just write on there, paid in full in cash,” McCoy said. “Or we call the cops.”

  “Give me those papers back and get your ass off my lot!”

  “I’ll walk just as far as the pay-phone booth down the block,” McCoy said. “With the papers.”

  “I ought to kick your ass!” Dickie Golden said, but when McCoy handed him the papers, he wrote “paid in full” on the Conditions of Sale.

  McCoy was pleased with himself when he drove the LaSalle off the lot and onto North Broad Street. Not only was the LaSalle a nice car, but he had just screwed a used-car dealer. McCoy hated used-car dealers: Patrick J. McCoy of Norristown, Pennsylvania, Past Grand Exalted Commander of the Knights of Columbus, Good ol’ Pat, everybody’s pal at the bar of the 12th Street Bar & Grill, Corporal Kenneth J. “Killer” McCoy’s father, was a used-car dealer.

  (Two)

  The next morning was a Saturday, but there was no reveille bugle, at least not one the enlisted members of the Philadelphia Detachment of the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence had to pay any attention to. Reveille sounded and ten minutes later first call; and the truck drivers and mechanics of the 47th Motor Transport Platoon went down and out on the street and lined up for roll call.

  But the seven enlisted men in the three rooms on the attic floor set aside for the “Special Detachment” didn’t even get out of bed until the bugler sounded mess call. In addition to McCoy, there were two gunnery sergeants, a staff sergeant, and three PFCs. The PFCs were clerks. The staff sergeant worked for Captain Sessions. McCoy didn’t know where the gunnery sergeants worked. The only time one of the gunnery sergeants spoke to him since he reported in was when one of them told him he didn’t have to stand any formations, but that he had to be in the red-brick office building every morning at oh-eight-hundred.

  What happened there was that from the very first day they sat him down in an upholstered chair he suspected had been stolen from a Day Room and talked to him about what he knew about the Imperial Japanese Army in China.

  There were usually three of them: Captain Sessions, another captain, and two lieutenants. The other captain was pretty old—and an old Marine—because the first thing he asked McCoy was whether he had known Major Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller in Shanghai.

  “He commanded the Second Battalion, sir,” McCoy said. “I knew who he was.”

  Puller was a real hard ass. Fair, but a hard-ass. He acted as if he thought the Second Battalion was going to war the next day and trained them that way.

  “He’s pretty good with a Thompson himself,” the old captain said. “I thought maybe you two had got together and compared techniques.”

  Aside from recognizing it as a reference to the incident at the ferry, McCoy didn’t know what the old captain was driving at.

  “No, sir,” he said.

  Sometimes it was all the officers at once, sometimes it was a couple of them, and sometimes it was just one of the young lieutenants by himself. Always there was one of the PFCs to take care of changing the tubular records on a Dictaphone.

  However many of them there were, the interrogation went generally the same every day.

  They came with folders, notebooks, and pencils. And they had thumbtacked maps of Kiangsu, Shantung, Honan, and Hopeh provinces to a cork board. The locations of Japanese units were marked on each map. The wall beside the cork board was painted white, and they used that as a screen for a slide projector. Sometimes there were photographs, including some he took himself. Some of these were blowups, and some had been converted to slides.

  And they asked question after question about the Japanese forces. McCoy was surprised at how wrong their information was about the Jap order of battle. And he could tell they didn’t like some of his answers about the Japanese. It was as if they hoped he was going to tell them the Japs were nothing but a bunch of fuck-ups who had done so well against the Chinese because the Chinese were fucked up even worse.

  But he told them what he knew and what he thought: The Chinese were not lousy soldiers, but they just didn’t give a damn because they knew they were getting screwed by their officers, who would sell the day’s ration if they could find a buyer. The Jap officers, on the other hand, were generally honest. Mean as hell, they thought nothing of belting the enlisted men—sergeants, too—in the mouth. But they didn’t sell the troops’ rations, and the rest of the Jap system seemed to work well. If a Jap soldier was told to do something, he did it, period.

  One of the young lieutenants had studied Japanese in college. When he was alone with McCoy, he spoke a few words of Japanese to him. He didn’t speak it all that well, but he spoke better Japanese than the old captain (who had done eight years, 1927–1935, with the 4th Marines in Shanghai) spoke Chinese.

  McCoy learned (they didn’t tell him, but he learned) that none of the young lieutenants was a regular. They had all come into the Corps right after college. McCoy wondered what the hell they were doing sitting around asking an enlisted man questions. As young lieutenants without any experience, they should instead have bee
n out with troops in the field.

  Once, a couple of civilians, an old one and a young one, dropped in while he was standing in a skivvy shirt by a map of Honan Province (the room was right under the roof and was hot as hell). When they entered the room, McCoy stopped talking, not knowing who they were.

  “Don’t let me interrupt,” the older civilian said.

  “Carry on, McCoy,” the old captain ordered. So he carried on.

  That was the day he was straightening them out about how good the Japanese soldiers were, and he went on with that. From time to time the old civilian would snort, as if he didn’t think McCoy knew what the hell he was talking about, but McCoy decided to let the old guy fuck himself. The civilians stuck around until he was finished. When they were gone, McCoy asked who they were. For some reason, the officers thought that was funny. They laughed at him, and he never got an answer.

  McCoy had no idea how long the “interviews” were going to go on. At first, he’d hoped they would go on forever. But by the end of the second week, he knew he was just about talked-out. If there was something he knew about China they hadn’t gotten out of him, he couldn’t think of what it was.

  When first call blew that Saturday morning, he got out of bed and took a shower. Standing under the shower, shaving, reminded him of China and made him a little homesick for it. The only time in China he’d had to shave himself was when he was on a convoy. The rest of the time there’d been Chinese boys to do it for him.

  After he was dressed, he went down to the mess for breakfast, and then he walked to the gate. When he had tried to bring the LaSalle onto the Yard the night before, the guard at the gate wouldn’t let him, because he didn’t have either a Yard sticker, license plates, or proof of insurance. But the guard had let him park the LaSalle inside the gate and had explained to McCoy that he could get a sticker on Saturday morning from the provost marshal if he got there before noon with proof of insurance and license plates.

  McCoy started the LaSalle and drove to an office of the Pennsylvania Motor Vehicle Bureau, where he registered the car and got a cardboard temporary license plate until they mailed him a real one from Harrisburg. Then he went to an insurance agency and bought insurance. It was still early, and he didn’t like the way the wear on the tires looked, so he found a Cadillac dealer. While they were aligning the front end, he went to the parts department and bought a set of points and condensers and a set of spark plugs and a carburetor rebuild kit.