Counterattack

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Hello, asshole, how the hell are you, you guinea bastard?”

  “Steve?”

  “Jesus!”

  “It’s Dianne.”

  “I know. I thought it was somebody else.”

  “I sure hope so,” she said.

  “I’m sorry about that.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “We left right after you did. Leonard lives in Verona and was worried about getting home in the snow.”

  “Oh.”

  “Your parents get home?”

  “They won’t be home until tomorrow sometime.”

  “Mine are in bed,” she said. “And so’s Joey.”

  Joey, Steve now recalled, was her little boy.

  There was a long, awkward pause.

  “You want to come up?” he heard himself asking.

  Oh, my God, what did I say?

  “To tell you the God’s honest truth, Steve, I’d love to,” Dianne said. “But what if anybody found out?”

  “Who would find out?”

  “I wouldn’t want Bernice to find out, for example. Not to mention my parents.”

  “She wouldn’t get it from me,” Steve said, firmly. “Nobody would.”

  “But, Jesus, if we got caught!” Dianne said, and then the phone clicked and went dead.

  He felt his heart jump.

  She wouldn’t come up. She’s had a couple of drinks, a couple of drinks too many, and it’s a crazy idea. Once she actually went so far as calling up, she realized that, and hung up. She absolutely would not come up.

  The doorbell rang.

  He ran and opened it, and she pushed past him, closing the door behind her and leaning on it. She was wearing a chenille bathrobe and slippers that looked like rabbits. She had a bottle of Scotch in her hand.

  “I saw that you liked this,” she said, holding it up.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m glad you came.”

  “Can I trust you? If one word of this got out, oh, Jesus!”

  “Sure,” Steve said.

  She leaned forward quickly and kissed him on the mouth.

  “Leonard is a good man,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “Leonard is a good man. I mean that. He’s really a good man, and he wants to marry me, and I probably will. But…can I tell you this?”

  “Sure.”

  “He thinks you should wait until you’re married,” she said. “I mean, maybe that’s all right if you’re a virgin. But I was married, you know what I mean?”

  “Sure.”

  “If I hadn’t come up here, were you going to do it to yourself?”

  “What?”

  “You know what I mean,” she said.

  “Yeah, probably,” he said. He had never confessed something like that to anyone before, not even to one of the guys.

  “You didn’t, did you?” she asked, and then decided to seek, with her fingers, the answer to her own question.

  “I think I would have killed you if you had,” she said a moment later, pleased with the firm proof she had found that he had not, at least recently, committed the sin of casting his seed upon the ground. “After I took a chance like this.”

  “You want to come in my room?”

  “There, and in the living room, and in every other place we can think of.” She pulled his head down to hers and kissed him again, and this time her tongue sought his.

  It took him a moment to take her meaning. It excited him. He wondered if she would be able to tell, her having been married and all, that he was a virgin.

  Jesus, I’m really going to get laid.

  (Four)

  121 Park Avenue

  East Orange, New Jersey

  0830 Hours 2 January 1942

  Dianne Marshall Norman woke up sick with the memory of what had happened between her and the kid upstairs. She knew why she had done it, but that didn’t excuse it, or make it right. She had done it because she was drunk. And she knew why she had gotten drunk; but that didn’t excuse it, or make getting drunk right, either.

  Maybe she really was a slut, she thought, lying there in her bed with her eyes closed, hung over. A whore. That’s what Joe had called her when he’d caught her with Roddie Norman in the house at the shore. She’d been drunk then, too, and that had been the beginning of the end for her and Joe. He had moved out of their apartment two weeks later and gone to a lawyer about a divorce. And been a real sonofabitch about it, too.

  His lawyer had told her father’s lawyer that Joe would pay child support, but that was it. He would keep the car and all the furniture and everything else, and he wouldn’t give her a dime. He would pay for her to go to Nevada for six weeks to get a divorce. If she didn’t agree to that, he would take her to Essex County Court in Newark and charge her with adultery with Roddie Norman, and it would be all over the papers.

  Dianne didn’t think doing it with just one man (two, actually, but Joe didn’t know about Ed Bitter) really made her a whore or a slut. And there was no question in her mind that Joe had been fooling around himself. She’d even caught him at the Christmas office party feeling up the peroxide blonde, Angie Palmeri, who worked in the office of his father’s liquor store. And there had been a lot of times when he’d had to “work late” at the store and couldn’t come home, and she had driven by and he hadn’t been there.

  What had happened with Roddie Norman wouldn’t have happened if everybody hadn’t been sitting around drinking Orange Blossoms all afternoon; it had been raining and they couldn’t go to the beach. And the real truth of the matter, not that anybody cared, was that she had been mad with Joe because he had been making eyes at Esther Norman all day and looking down her dress.

  And then, because Roddie was taking a nap on the couch and Joey was asleep, Joe and Esther had gone to get Chinese takeout at the Peking Palace in Belmar. God only knew what those two had been up to when they were gone, but that’s when it had happened. Roddie had awakened and the phonograph had been playing and they’d started to dance, and the first thing she knew they had both been on the couch and he had her shorts off, and Joe had walked in.

  Dianne sometimes thought that if Joe had been able to beat Roddie up, it wouldn’t have gone so far as the divorce. What actually happened was that Roddie knocked Joe on his backside with a punch that bloodied Joe’s nose. Getting beaten up by Roddie was the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak.

  So she’d gone to the Lazy Q Dude Ranch, twenty miles outside of Reno, Nevada, for the six weeks it took to establish legal residence. Then she’d gotten the divorce and moved back home, where her parents treated her as though she had an “A” for “Adultery” painted on her forehead.

  And then her father brought Leonard Walters home. Leonard sold dry cleaner’s supplies, everything from wire hangers and mothproof bags to the chemicals they used in the dry-cleaning process itself. She had seen him around, seen him looking at her, and knew that he was interested. That was really one way to get her life fixed up, she thought. But Leonard was the single most boring male human being Dianne had ever met.

  Dianne’s father brought him home to a potluck supper. That was so much bull you-know-what. They just happened to have a pot roast for supper, and Bernice just happened not to be there, and they ate at the dining room table off the good china and a tablecloth, all usually reserved for Sunday dinner, if then.

  It had been carefully planned, including a little dialogue between her mother and her father to explain Dianne’s situation. The story they fed Leonard used the phrase “Dianne’s mistake” a lot. But “Dianne’s mistake,” the way they told it, was not getting caught letting Roddie Norman in her pants, but in “foolishly running off to get married.”

  In her parents’ version, Joe Norman had stolen her out of her cradle. And then, once he got her to elope with him—in the process throwing away her plans for college and a career—he started to abuse her and drink and run around with a wild crowd who drank and gambled an
d did other things that could not be discussed around a family dining table.

  Leonard Walters not only swallowed the tale whole, but embarked on what he called “our courtship.” The courtship had not moved very rapidly, though. The reason was that Leonard’s name had been Waldowski before his parents changed it when they were naturalized. The Waldowskis were Polish and Roman Catholic, and Leonard’s mother was a large and formidable woman who did not believe Roman Catholics should marry outside The One True Faith. She knew that Dianne was a Methodist, but Leonard hadn’t told her about Dianne’s marriage, and she didn’t know about Little Joey either.

  It was not now the time to tell her about it, Leonard said. “Let her learn to know you and love you.”

  Leonard was pretty devout himself, and he did not believe in premarital or extramarital sex. In his view, the thing to do about sex and everything else was “wait until things straighten themselves out.”

  On the day that PFC Stephen Koffler, USMC, entered her life, Dianne and Leonard had dinner, served precisely at noon, at the Walters’ house in Verona. It was a strain, relieved somewhat by several large glasses of wine.

  Then they went to East Orange, where Dianne’s mother had promptly dragged her into the bedroom to deliver a recitation about how badly Joey had behaved while she was gone. After that she demanded a play-by-play account of all that was said at the Walters’ dinner. When Dianne explained that Leonard had not yet told his mother about Dianne and Joe, and, more important, about Joey, there followed a two-minute lecture about why Dianne should make him do that.

  Once her mother let her go, Dianne went from the bedroom to the kitchen and made a fresh pot of coffee. She laced her cup with a hooker of gin. By the time Steve Koffler marched in, looking really good in his Marine Corps uniform, she was on her fourth cup.

  At first he remained the way she always had remembered him—“the kid upstairs,” a peer of Bernice’s, one of the mob of dirty-minded little boys who always came up to the deck on the roof to smirk and snicker behind their hands whenever she and Bernice tried to take a sunbath.

  It was difficult for her to believe that he was really a Marine. Marines were men. Stevie Koffler, she thought, probably still played with himself.

  That risqué thought, which just popped into her mind out of the blue, was obviously the seed for everything else that happened. A seed, she realized after it was over, more than adequately fertilized by the gin in her coffee.

  It was immediately followed by the thought—not original to the moment—that playing with himself was what good old Leonard must be doing. Either that or he just didn’t care about women, another possibility that had occurred to her. She had tried to arouse Leonard more than once; and she’d worked at that as hard as she could without destroying his image of her as the innocent child bride snatched from her cradle by dirty old Joe Norman. But she’d had no luck with him at all.

  Maybe Steve doesn’t play with himself. Marines are supposed to have women falling all over them.

  When Steve Koffler walked into the Ampere Lounge & Grill an hour after that, there was proof of that theory. Dianne saw several women—all of them older than she was—look with interest at the Marine who walked up to the bar in that good-looking uniform, his hat cocked arrogantly on the back of his head.

  And then, if you wanted to look at it that way, Leonard himself was responsible for what had happened. If he hadn’t gone to Steve at the bar and practically dragged him back to the table, Steve would have had a couple of drinks and gone home. Maybe with one of the women who had been looking at him.

  But Leonard dragged him back to their table. And then she felt his leg. And it was all muscle. The couple of times she had squeezed Leonard’s leg, playfully, of course, it had been soft and flabby. Steve Koffler’s leg was muscular, even more muscular than Joe’s, and Joe had played football.

  And then, when she danced with him, and that happened to him, and she knew that he wanted her, too…

  She tried to talk herself out of it. She even went so far as to put on her nightgown after Leonard took her home and gave her the standard we-can-wait-until-we’re-married goodnight kiss. But then she decided to have a nightcap, so she could sleep. And when she stood in the kitchen drinking it, the telephone was right there, on the wall, in front of her nose.

  Things, she told herself, always looked different in the morning. They did this morning. What they looked like this morning was that she’d gotten drunk and gone to bed with the kid upstairs. Marine or not, that’s what he was, the kid upstairs.

  Christ, he can’t be any older than eighteen!

  And what they’d done! What she’d done, right from the start, right after the first time, when it had been all over for him before she even got really started.

  Joe had taught her that, and from the way Steve acted, she had taught him. That, and some other things she knew he had never done before.

  Jesus, what if he starts telling people?

  She had another unsettling thought: Sure as Christ made little apples, Steve Koffler is going to show up at my door.

  She got out of bed and took a shower. When she came out, her father was in the kitchen.

  “I promised Joe’s mother that I would take Joey over there,” she said. “Can I borrow the car?”

  “Sure, honey,” her father said. “But be back by five, huh?”

  “Sure.”

  When she got back, a few minutes after five, she met Steve coming out of the apartment with his mother and his mother’s husband.

  Steve’s mother didn’t like her. Dianne supposed, correctly, that Steve’s mother knew what had really happened with Joe Norman. So, as they passed each other, all Dianne got was a cold nod from Steve’s mother, and a grunt from the husband.

  Steve didn’t know what to do. But then he turned around and ran back to her.

  Dianne told him that she had to do things with her family that night and the next day. And she managed to avoid him the rest of the time he was home.

  IV

  (One)

  Office of the Chairman of the Board

  Pacific & Far Eastern Shipping Corporation

  San Francisco, California

  16 January 1942

  The ten-story Pacific & Far Eastern Shipping Corporation Building had been completed in March of 1934, six months before the death of Captain Ezekiel Pickering, who was then Chairman of the Board. There were a number of reasons why Captain Pickering had two years before, in 1932, ordered its construction, including, of course, the irrefutable argument that the corporation needed the office space.

  But it was also Captain Pickering’s response to Black Tuesday, the stock market crash of October 1929, and the Depression that followed. Pacific & Far Eastern—which was to say Captain Pickering personally, for the corporation was privately held—was not hurt by the stock market crash. Captain Ezekiel Pickering was not in the market.

  He had dabbled in stocks over the years, whenever there was cash he didn’t know what else to do with for the moment. But in late 1928 he had gotten out, against the best advice of his broker. He had had a gut feeling that there was something wrong with the market when, for example, he heard elevator operators and newsstand operators solemnly discussing the killings they had made.

  The idea of the stock market was a good one. In his mind it was sort of a grocery store where one could go to shop around for small pieces of all sorts of companies, or to offer for sale your small shares of companies. Companies that you knew—and you knew who ran them, too. But the market had stopped being that. In Ezekiel Pickering’s mind, it had become a socially sanctioned crap game where the bettors put their money on companies they knew literally nothing about, except that the shares had gone up so many points in the last six months.

  The people playing the market—and he thought “playing” was both an accurate description of what they were doing and symbolic—often had no idea what the company they were buying into made, or how well they did so. And they didn’t r
eally understand that a thousand shares at thirty-three-and-a-quarter really meant thirty-three thousand two hundred fifty real dollars.

  And it was worse than that: they weren’t even really playing craps with real money, they were buying on the margin, putting up a small fraction of the thirty-three thousand two hundred fifty and borrowing the rest.

  Ezekiel Pickering had nothing against gambling. When he had been twenty-nine and First Mate of the tanker Pacific Courier, he had once walked out of a gaming house in Hong Kong with fifty thousand pounds sterling when the cards had come up right at chemin de fer. But he had walked into the Fitzhugh Club with four thousand dollars American that was his, not borrowed, and that he was prepared—indeed, almost expected—to lose. To his way of looking at it, the vast difference between his playing chemin de fer with his own cash money at the Fitzhugh Club and the elevator man in the Andrew Foster Hotel playing the New York stock market with mostly borrowed Monopoly money was one more proof that most people were fools.

  The stock market was a house of cards about to collapse, and he got out early. And he took with him his friend Andrew Foster. So that when Black Tuesday struck, and people were literally jumping out of hotel-room windows, both the Pacific & Far Eastern Shipping Corporation and Foster Hotels, Inc., remained solvent.

  Of course, the Depression which followed the crash affected both corporations. Business was down. But retrenchment with cash in the bank is quite a different matter from retrenchment with a heavy debt service. Other shipping companies and hotels and hotel chains went into receivership and onto the auctioneer’s block, which gave both Ezekiel Pickering and Andrew Foster the opportunity to buy desirable properties, ships and hotels, at a fraction of their real value.

  There never had been any doubt in Ezekiel’s mind that the domestic and international economies would in time recover. In fact, he agreed with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1932 inaugural declaration that the nation had “nothing to fear but fear itself,” and he said so publicly. Thus, when a suitable piece of real estate went on the auction block, he put his money where his mouth was and bought it.