When the resident manager came on the line, Pickering told him there had been “another change in plans.”
“I will need that suite,” he said. “Lieutenant McCoy and I will be here for the indefinite future.”
They went down to dinner. There Pickering talked about flight school.
“I’m going to take a flight physical Thursday afternoon,” he said. “If I pass it, I think I’m going to go for it.”
And then they began a lengthy, and ultimately futile, search for a couple of skirts to lift.
It did not dampen their spirits at all. There was always tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and the week after that. There were supposed to be twice as many women as men in Washington….
Despite the legend, McCoy said, it had been his experience that a Marine uniform was a bar to getting laid. When he came back from Hawaii and Manila, they would do their pussy-chasing in civilian clothes.
(Four)
Security Intelligence Section
U.S. Naval Communications
Washington, D.C.
1540 Hours, Wednesday, 3 December 1941
The sign on the door said OP-20-G, and there was a little window in it, like a speak-easy. When McCoy rang the bell, a face appeared in it.
“Lieutenant McCoy to see Commander Kramer,” McCoy announced
“I’ll need to see your ID, Lieutenant,” the face said.
McCoy held the little leather folder up to the window. The man took his sweet time examining it, but finally the door opened.
“The commander expected you five minutes ago,” the face said. The face was now revealed as a chief radioman.
“The traffic was bad,” McCoy said.
He followed the chief down a passageway, where the chief knocked at a door. When he announced who he was, there was the sound of a solenoid opening a bolt.
“Lieutenant McCoy, Commander,” the chief said. “His ID checks.”
“I’m sure he won’t mind if I check it again,” a somewhat nasal voice said.
Commander Kramer was a tall, thin officer with a pencil-line mustache. He looked at McCoy’s credentials and then handed them back.
“I was about to say that we don’t get many second lieutenants as couriers,” Kramer said. “That is now changed to ‘we don’t get to see much identification like that.’”
“No, sir,” McCoy said.
“Are you armed, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you’re leaving when?”
“At sixteen-thirty, sir.”
“From Anacostia, you mean?”
“Yes, sir. Naval aircraft at least as far as San Francisco.”
“You normally work for Colonel Rickabee, is that it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I heard that they had levied him for officer couriers,” Kramer said. “I’m sorry you were caught in the net. But it wouldn’t have been done if it wasn’t necessary.”
“I don’t mind, sir,” McCoy said, solemnly.
Instead of heading around the world by airplane, I would of course prefer to be here in Washington inventorying paper clips. Or better than that, at Camp LeJeune running around in the boondocks, practicing “the infantry platoon in the assault.”
“Your briefcase is going to be stuffed,” Kramer said. “She was sealing the envelopes just now. I’ll have her bring them in.”
He pushed a lever on an intercom.
“Mrs. Feller, the courier is here. Would you bring the material for Pearl Harbor in here, please?”
Mrs. Feller?
Ellen Feller backed into Commander Kramer’s office with a ten-inch-thick stack of heavy manila envelopes held against her breast.
“Mrs. Feller, this is Lieutenant McCoy,” Commander Kramer said.
“The lieutenant and I are old friends,” Ellen said.
“Really?”
“We got to know one another rather well in China, didn’t we, Ken?”
“You don’t seem very surprised to see me,” McCoy said.
“I knew you were here,” she said. “I didn’t expect to see you so soon, but I did hope to see you.”
“May I suggest you get on with the document transfer?” Commander Kramer said, a tinge of annoyance in his voice. “Lieutenant McCoy has a sixteen-thirty plane to catch at Anacostia.”
There were thirteen envelopes in the stack Ellen Feller laid on Commander Kramer’s desk. There was a numbered receipt to be signed for each of them, and McCoy had to place his signature across the tape sealing the flap at the place where it would be broken if the envelope was opened.
It took some time to go through the paperwork and stuff the unyielding envelopes into the briefcase. Enough time for Commander Kramer to regret jumping on both of them.
“Ellen,” he said. “If you wished to continue your reunion with the lieutenant, there’s no reason you can’t ride out to Anacostia with him.”
“Oh, I’d like that,” Ellen said.
McCoy took the handcuffs from his hip pocket and looped one cuff through the handle of the briefcase, then held out his wrist for Kramer to loop the other cuff around it.
“Have a good trip, Lieutenant,” Commander Kramer said, offering his hand. He then held the door for both of them to pass through.
“My coat’s just down the corridor,” Ellen said.
A Navy gray Plymouth station wagon and a sailor driver waited for them at the entrance. McCoy had ridden over to OP-20-G in the front seat with him, but when the sailor saw Ellen Feller, he ran around and held the back door open for her. McCoy hesitated a moment before he got in beside her, holding the heavy briefcase on his lap.
“You were right,” Ellen said, as they drove off.
“About what?”
“That I could probably find a job because I speak Chinese.” She switched to Chinese. “The first place I applied was to the Navy, and they hired me right on. As a translator. But there’s not that much to translate, so I’ve become sort of office manager. I’m a GS-6.”
“I don’t know what that means,” McCoy said, relieved that they could speak Chinese and the driver wouldn’t understand them. “Where’s your husband?”
“He’s in New York, busy with his work,” she said.
“You manage to smuggle the vase in all right?” McCoy asked.
She raised her eyebrows at the question, but didn’t answer it.
“I have a nice little apartment here,” she said. “You’ll have to come see it.”
“The last time I saw you, you-seemed damned glad to be getting rid of me.”
“Well, my God, you remember what happened the day before,” she said. “That was quite a shock.”
“Yeah,” he said, sarcastically. “Sure.”
“I was upset, Ken,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“Forget it,” he said. “Those things happen.”
“I understand why you’re…angry,” she said.
He didn’t reply.
She turned on the seat and caught his hand in both of hers.
“I said, I’m sorry,” she said.
“Nothing to be sorry about,” he said.
“If you’re still angry, then there is,” she said.
“I’m not angry,” he said.
She rubbed his hand against her cheek and then let him go.
“Not everything that happened the day before was unpleasant, of course,” she said.
He didn’t reply.
“Do you remember what happened just before?”
You were blowing me, that’s what happened just before.
“No,” he said.
“I often think about it,” she said.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” McCoy said.
Fuck you, lady. You get to screw old McCoy just once. I’m not about to start up anything with you again!
“Don’t you really?” Ellen asked, and then sat forward on the seat to give the driver instructions: “Stay on Pennsylvania,” she ordered. “It’s fast
er this time of day.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the driver said.
When she slid back against the seat, her hand went under the skirt of McCoy’s tunic and closed around his erection.
“Liar,” she said softly.
“For God’s sake,” he said, pushing her hand away.
“Pity there’s not more time, isn’t it? But you won’t be gone all that long, will you?”
At least with her, I know what she’s after. It’s not like with Pick’s rich-bitch friend.
And thirty minutes in the sack with the old vacuum cleaner, and I won’t even be able to remember Miss Ernestine Sage’s name, much less remember what she looked like.
“No,” he said. “A couple of weeks, is all. No more than three.”
“That’ll give us both something to look forward to, won’t it?” Ellen Feller said.
McCoy reached out for her hand and put it back under the skirt of his blouse.
XV
(One)
The Madison Suite
The Lafayette Hotel, Washington, D.C.
1410 Hours, 7 December 1941
Until this week, airplanes for Second Lieutenant Malcolm Pickering, USMCR, had been something like taxi cabs. They were there. When you needed to go somewhere you got in one and it took you.
That changed. The Navy medico (more properly, flight surgeon, which Pickering thought had a nice aeronautical ring to it) told him that he met the physical standards laid down for Naval aviators. General McInerney’s senior aide-de-camp, himself a dashing Naval aviator with wings of gold, then explained that while there might officially be, say, fifty would-be birdmen in any course of Primary Flight Instruction at the Pensacola Naval Air Station1, that was something of a fiction. More than the prescribed number were routinely ordered to the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. Experience had taught that a number of students would quickly prove themselves incapable of learning how to fly. By sending extras, the Corps wound up with the desired number after the inept had bilged out.
General McInerney was in a position to have Pickering sent as a member of the supernumeraries. Pickering knew his mother would have a fit when she heard that he was to become an aviator, which was a problem that would be a bit difficult to handle. On the other hand, there was a positive appeal about the prospect of swapping the slush-filled streets of Washington for the white sandy beaches of Pensacola.
On the way home from Anacostia Naval Air Station in McCoy’s LaSalle on Friday evening, he stopped at a bookstore, asked for books on aviation (starting with the theory of flight), and bought half a dozen that looked promising.
He was now reading one of them, one with a lot of drawings. The others, stacked up beside his chair, waited for his attention. A small table beside him held a silver pot of coffee. He was attired for a more primitive means of transportation than he was reading about: A tweed jacket with leather patches over the elbows; a plaid cotton shirt open at the collar; a pair of pink breeches; and a pair of Hailey & Smythe riding boots, which rested on a pillow (to preserve the furniture) on the coffee table before him.
He had spent the morning in Virginia aboard a horse. Sort of a fox hunt without either the fox or the ceremony that went with a hunt. Just half a dozen riders riding about the countryside, jumping fences of opportunity.
They were going to sit around in the afternoon and get smashed. Rather nobly, he thought, he had pleaded the press of duty and returned to the hotel to read the airplane books.
The telephone rang, and he looked around for it, a look of annoyance crossing his face as he spotted it, ten feet out of reach. It had taken him some effort to reach his present comfortable position, with his feet just so, and his back just so, and with The Miracle of Flight propped up just so on his belly.
He had just begun to grasp the notion that aircraft are lifted into the air because there is less pressure on the upper (curved, and thus longer) portion of a wing than there is on the bottom (flat, and thus shorter) portion of a wing. As the wing moves through the air, it simply follows the path of least resistance, upward, and hauls the airplane along with it. He wasn’t entirely sure he fully understood this. He was sure, however, that he didn’t want to chat just now with whomever was on the phone, especially since he had to get up to go answer it.
“Yes?” he snapped impatiently, “what is it?”
Oh, shit! It’s probably General McInerney. And I was supposed to have answered that, “Lieutenant Pickering speaking.”
“Pick?”
It was a female. And a half-second later, he knew which one.
“Hello, Ernie,” he said.
“Are you alone? Can you talk?” Ernestine Sage said.
“You have interrupted a splendid orgy, but what’s on your mind?”
“I want to talk to you,” Ernie Sage said.
“Then talk,” he said. “Just make it quick.”
“I’ll be right up,” Ernie Sage said.
“You’re here?” he asked, genuinely surprised. “In the hotel?”
“I just happened to be in the neighborhood and thought I’d just pop in,” she said, and the phone went dead.
Between the time she hung up and the time he answered her knock at the door, he had considered the possibilities: Certainly this had to do with Ken McCoy. But what would bring Ernie all the way to Washington except true love? And the possibility, not as astonishing when there was time to think it over, that Ernie was in the family way. Could she be sure, so soon? To the best of his recollection, it took several months to be sure about that. It hadn’t been that long since he had seen Juliet kissing Romeo in the Grand Central Oyster Bar.
“Hi,” Ernie said, when he opened the door. “Don’t you look horsey?”
For the first time in a long time, Pickering looked at her as a female, and not as part of the woodwork.
Damned good-looking, he judged. Marvelous knockers. They had obviously grown a good deal since (he now remembered with somewhat startling clarity) he had last seen them, looking down her bathing suit in Boca Raton. He and Ernie must have been thirteen or fourteen at the time.
“Come into my den, as the spider said to the fly.”
“You’re a hard man to find,” she said. “I called your mother, or tried to, and they said she was in Hawaii. So I called your grandfather, and he told me where you were.”
“Why do I suspect that you weren’t suddenly overcome with an irresistible urge to see me?” Pickering asked.
She looked into his face.
“Where is he?” she asked.
“Where’s who?”
“Come on, Pick,” she said.
“Ken, you mean?”
“Where is he?”
“In Hawaii, too, come to think of it,” Pick said.
“Oh, hell,” she said.
“Not to worry,” he said. “He will be back.”
She looked at his face.
“That’s important to you, isn’t it?” Pickering asked.
“Don’t be a shit about this, Pick, please,” Ernie Sage said.
“Okay,” he said. “It will be an effort, obviously.”
“Do you have something I could have to drink?”
He gestured to the bar.
“Help yourself,” he said.
She walked to the bar and made herself a Scotch.
“You want one?” she asked.
“I want one, but…oh, what the hell. Yes, please.”
She made him a drink, handed it to him, and then sat down on a couch and stirred the ice cubes in her glass with her index finger.
“I never imagined myself doing this,” she said, without looking at him.
“Doing what?”
“Running after a boy,” she said, and corrected herself: “A man.”
“I’m not surprised,” Pick said.
She looked at him quickly.
“For one thing, McCoy’s quite special,” Pick said. “And for another, I saw the two of you in the Oyster Bar.”
She did not s
eem at all embarrassed to hear that. Just curious.
“What were you doing there?”
“McCoy had led me safely through the wild jungles of Quantico,” Pickering said, “protecting me from unfamiliar savage beasts. I thought it only fair that I return the favor.”
“Protect him from me, you mean? Thanks a lot.”
“I didn’t know who it was until I saw you,” Pickering said.
“Where did you meet him?”
“On a train from Boston,” Pickering said. “He had just escorted prisoners to the Naval Prison at Portsmouth. And then he showed up, wholly unexpected, at Quantico.”
“Why unexpected?”
“Because our peers were…our peers. McCoy was a noncom of the regular Marine Corps, just in from years in China.”
“He told me about China,” she said. “He took me to a tiny little Chinese restaurant off Mott Street, where he talked Chinese to them.”
“As I say, he’s something special.”
“Isn’t he?” she said. Then she looked up at him. “Four hours after I met him, I took him to bed.”
“He told me,” Pickering said.
“I don’t know what you think of me, Pick,” Ernie Sage said. “But that’s not my style.”
“He told me that, too,” Pickering said, gently.
That surprised her. She looked into his face until she was sure that she had not misunderstood him.
“Pretty close, are you? Or did he proudly report it as another cherry copped?”
“Actually, he was pretty upset about it,” Pickering said.
“But not too upset to tell you all about it?”
“We are pretty close,” Pickering said. “I don’t know. It’s something like having a brother, I guess.”
“You heard about his brother? The one who was offered the choice of the Marine Corps or jail?”
“I even know that was the choice they gave him, too,” Pickering said. “Like I say, Ernie, we’re close.”
“Okay, so tell me what happened? I have six letters, all marked ‘REFUSED.’”
“He found out you were rich,” Pickering said.
“Oh, God!” she wailed. Then the accusation: “You told him. Why the hell did you have to do that?”
Pickering shrugged his shoulders helplessly and threw up his hands.
“Now I’m sorry that I did,” he said.
Semper Fi Page 36
