“Welcome home, Colonel,” he said. “How long will you be with us?”
“If I don’t leave tonight, I’ll be out of here before daylight,” Lowell said.
“I put things for breakfast in the refrigerator, Colonel.”
“You better come back tomorrow and freeze what you can, and get rid of the rest,” Lowell said. “And put the car back in the garage, too. I’ll leave it at the strip.”
“I saw that Air Force Lear come in. Was that you?”
“Yeah. And honest to God, this is business,” Lowell said.
“Yes, sir. Will there be anything else, Colonel?”
“That’ll do it. Thank you very much.”
“Good night, gentlemen,” the young man said, and walked to a golf cart and drove off.
“You didn’t tip him,” Portet said.
“No, we don’t tip here,” Lowell said. “Oh, God! JP, have you been trying to grease palms? I should have said something.”
“No problem,” Portet said. “But I didn’t know.”
And I thought that everybody’s refusal of a tip was another indication of Lowell’s family’s gratitude run amok.
“It’s a complicated system,” Lowell said as he walked to the bar. “I don’t really understand how it works; Helene Craig calls me once a year and tells me how much of a Christmas present I just made. Ask her to do the same for you until you learn the system.”
He pulled a bottle of a scotch Portet could not remember ever having seen before from an array behind the bar.
“I highly recommend this,” he said.
“Colonel, I don’t think we’ll be staying here, living here, at Ocean Reef,” Portet said.
"’Colonel’?” Lowell parroted. “There’s a certain icy I am pissed at you formality in that, Captain,” Lowell said. “You want to tell me what’s got your back up?”
He handed him a glass half full of scotch.
“If we ain’t buddies no more,” Lowell said, “fuck you, get your own ice.”
It was hard for Portet not to smile, but he managed not to.
“I thought I made it quite clear to Mr. Craig that his gratitude to Jacques for what happened at Stanleyville—”
“You’re stuck with that, JP, I’m afraid,” Lowell said. “My cousin’s only grandson, the apple of his eye, was in your Stanleyville apartment with a good chance of having really terrible things happen to him when Jack showed up and did his John Wayne routine. That happened. He has a reason to be grateful to Jack. We all do.”
“We don’t need a financial expression of that gratitude, Craig,” Portet said. “I made that point, I thought, to Porter Craig, but I apparently didn’t get through to him.”
“For example?”
“At first I thought I was being paranoid,” Portet said. “When I applied for a mortgage on the house, the banker told me I was stealing it. So I had it appraised. The price Porter quoted me was ninety thousand under the appraisal I paid for.”
“Okay. I’m beginning to see what’s going on in your mind. We have our own appraisers. Everything we own is appraised on a regular basis so we don’t get raped by the tax collector. When you told Porter you wanted to buy that house, he called me and said this should be the one exception to The Rule. And I agreed.”
“ ‘The Rule’? What rule?”
“The family buys property, but never sells it. We lease it, sometimes by the year, sometimes by the century, but we never sell it. I agreed we should break The Rule for you and Hanni. You’re more than friends—you’re family.”
“Ninety thousand under its appraisal value?”
“You’re going to have to trust me on this, JP,” Lowell said. “When I told him, sell it to JP, Porter called our appraiser and asked him what was on the books. Whatever figure Porter quoted you was the figure he got from our appraiser. We’re a bank, not a benevolent society.
Portet looked at him for a long moment.
He took his wallet from his pocket and handed Lowell a business card.
Gresham Investment Corporation
J. Richard Leonard Vice President
Suite 1107 27 Wall Street New York City 10022 212 555-9767
“What’s this?” Lowell asked.
“You don’t know?” Portet asked.
“No. I never heard of them.”
“I really want to believe you, Craig,” Portet said.
“I never heard of these people, okay?” Lowell said coldly. “Where’d you get it?”
“At the airport in Miami,” Portet said. “I’ve been going over there to see what’s available on the used-airplane market, maintenance facilities . . . you understand.”
“And?”
“This fellow came up to me while I was having a coffee—not in the terminal, across from it, in the cargo area. He knew who I was, called me Captain Portet, and said he heard I was at the airport, and that it was a fortunate coincidence, because he had been thinking of contacting me in the Congo.”
“He say why?”
“He said that he ‘and his associates’ were on the edge of setting a charter company, half a dozen convertible 707s; that they were not happy with the people they’d been looking at to manage it; and that a search had come up with my name as someone with just the experience they were looking for. My long-haul jet operations, between Europe and southern Africa, and my short-haul piston operations in the Congo area, he said, were just about what they wanted to start up between the States and the Far East—I think he meant French Indochina, Vietnam. If I was interested, they were prepared to really talk seriously about it, and were prepared to offer me participation, which I took to mean a substantial piece of the company, plus a salary ‘commensurate with my background.’”
“It sounded too good to be true, right?”
“I had talked to Porter Craig about buying into a small airline,” Portet said. “Yeah, Craig, it sounded too good to be true.”
“My first reaction is to tell you that Craig, Powell, Kenyon and Dawes does not employ people to wander around airports looking for people to loan money to,” Lowell said. “People come to us, usually on their knees. But sometimes Porter does go overboard. And we own Twenty-seven Wall Street, and that piques my curiosity.”
He pulled a telephone out from under the bar and dialed a number from memory.
Portet could barely hear someone answer the telephone.
“The Craig residence.”
“Hello, Stephen, is my portly cousin there?”
Lowell held the telephone away from his ear so that Portet could hear the conversation.
“What can I do for you, Craig?”
“Give me a straight answer. Have you been trying to help Captain Portet with his plans to buy an airline? Straight answer, please, Porter.”
“I would be happy to, but when I offered to help in any way I could, he politely but firmly told me no, thank you. I have respected his wishes. Does he want help now? Has he come to you?”
“What do you know about the Gresham Investment Corporation? ”
“I never heard of it.”
“How about a guy named J. Richard Leonard?”
“I don’t know the name.”
“They have offices in Twenty-seven Wall.”
“So do a hundred other firms. That’s a large building. I never heard of them, sorry.”
“Who can you call to find out?”
“If it’s important to you, I’ll make inquiries in the morning.”
“I mean right now.”
“Good God, Craig! For one thing, it’s after business hours.”
“This is important, Porter.”
“What would you like me to do?”
“See how much space they have, who they gave as credit references. That should be on the lease.”
“I don’t even know who manages that building.”
“Porter, if I let you off the hook tonight, will you make it your first business in the morning? I’ll be in the apartment in the Hotel Washington.”
“I heard you were going to be using it,” Porter Craig said.
“Geoff called me and told me you would be there.”
“And I can’t tell you why, Porter, except that there will be the usual complement of loose women. And seeing that tomorrow will be during business hours, check them out with Dun and Bradstreet—the confidential reports. I want to know who they’re loaning money to.”
“I’m beginning to think this is really important to you. You want to tell me why?”
“It is, and no.”
“All right. I’ll get on it first thing in the morning. Let me write all that down.”
Lowell put the telephone back under bar, picked up his drink, and looked at Captain Portet.
“Porter has not been playing Santa Claus,” he said. “And by ten o’clock tomorrow morning, I think we’re going to have a pretty good idea of just what the Gresham Investment Corporation is.”
“I guess you think I’m an ass,” Portet said. “I feel like one.”
“Yeah, JP, I do,” Lowell said. “But I will forgive you if you come to Washington with me, either tonight, after dinner, or in the very wee hours tomorrow morning.”
“What’s that all about?”
“Felter wants to pick your brains about Joseph Désiré Mobutu,” Lowell said. “Following which, he will return you here in the Lear.”
Lowell drained his drink.
“I’m for the shower,” he said, and walked toward his bedroom. “You think of some plausible reason you can give Hanni for rushing away with me in the middle of the night.”
“You seem pretty confident that I’ll go.”
“I think you’re almost as curious about the Gresham Investment Corporation as I am,” Lowell called over his shoulder.
[ THREE ]
Apartment B-14
Foster Garden Apartments
Fayetteville, North Carolina
2105 10 January 1965
Dinner had been a little late, and if Mrs. Marjorie Portet had been asked, she would have admitted that she would have preferred to dine alone with her husband, rather than with two of his fellow officers.
But just before five, when he had been expected home, Jack had called from Camp Mackall and said he would be a little late, he had to go to the PX at Bragg. He arrived at half past seven, both arms loaded with groceries, and trailed by Captain John S. Oliver and Warrant Officer Enrico de la Santiago, who were each carrying a case of beer.
They were all in fatigue uniforms.
Jack had kissed her, and she had returned the kiss with considerably less enthusiasm than she planned.
The groceries and the beer had been deposited in the kitchen, and the three had left the apartment, to return a few minutes later, staggering under the weight of an enormous cardboard carton.
“What the hell is that?” Marjorie had asked after they had pushed her new coffee table out of the way so they could set the carton down on her new carpet in the middle of the living room.
“I have a speech to make, Miss Marjorie, but first I need a beer,” Johnny Oliver said.
Beer bottles were opened and passed around. The officers, having declined the use of her new pilsner beer glasses, partook of them directly from their necks.
“That, Miss Marjorie, is a wedding present,” Johnny Oliver said. “From Mr. de la Santiago and myself. More precisely, two-thirds of it is a wedding present from Enrico and me. The other third is a small token of my appreciation to you personally for two things. First, for being the only general’s daughter in the history of the Army who did not make a royal pain in the ass of herself to her daddy’s dog-robber.”
“Oh, Johnny!”
“And the second for your deeply appreciated, if doomed to failure, efforts on my behalf with the Ice Princess.”
“Oh, Johnny,” Marjorie had repeated, genuinely surprised that tears had formed in her eyes.
“Unveil the present, Mr. Santiago,” Oliver ordered.
“Yes, sir,” Enrico said.
De la Santiago pulled a wicked-looking knife, which Marjorie hadn’t noticed before, from his boot and slit the carton open.
It held a not-assembled bottled-gas-powered grill, the largest one Marjorie had ever seen.
“I think we have two little problems,” Johnny said. “First, the assembly of that device will require tools, and second, it may not fit on the balcony.”
“There’s a tool set in the Jag,” Jack said.
“You go get it,” Oliver said. “And if Miss Marjorie can come up with a piece of string, for use as a measuring device, we will determine whether or not it will fit on the balcony.”
Jack went to fetch the tool kit. Marjorie found a ball of twine and gave it to Johnny, who gave it to Enrico.
When they were alone in the living room, Marjorie asked softly, “You haven’t heard from Liza at all?”
“When she hears my voice, she hangs up,” he said.
“Keep trying,” Marjorie said.
“Yeah,” he said. He met her eyes. “I really miss Allan; that makes it worse.”
Jack appeared with the tool roll from the Jaguar and handed it to Oliver.
“It’s my wedding present—”
“Our wedding present,” Marjorie corrected him.
“—you put it together.”
“Can the bride handle putting aluminum foil around the spuds?” Johnny asked.
“I’ll supervise,” Jack said.
Marjorie guessed correctly that it would take Enrico and Johnny at least as long to assemble the grill as it would take to bake the potatoes; they were done five minutes before the gas under the artificial charcoal lit.
This was followed by the smell of the preservative being burned off the interior parts of the stove, which lasted about five minutes. Cooking the thick steaks from the commissary took another fifteen minutes, but finally they were all sitting at her new dining-room table, and Jack was pouring wine into her new wineglasses.
The new telephone rang.
An hour after the dead telephone she had found on her first day in the apartment had been brought to life by a man from the phone company, another man from the phone company arrived at her door.
“It’s already working, thank you very much,” Marjorie had told him.
“Is this B-14, Lieutenant Portet?”
“Yes, it is.”
He handed her his Installation Order:One unlisted private line telephone to be installed Apt B- 14, Foster Garden Apartments (Lieutenant Portet) Bill to Finance Officer, JFK SWC Fort Bragg. No deposit required. (US Govt).
Jack reached over his shoulder and picked up the new telephone from her new dining-room sideboard.
“Hello?”
The acoustics were such that the caller’s voice could be clearly, if faintly, heard.
“Jack, is Johnny Oliver there with you?” General Hanrahan asked without any preliminaries.
“Yes, sir.”
“De la Santiago?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Would it be reasonable of me to presume that all of you have had a couple of beers?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Put Oliver on.”
“Yes, sir.”
Jack held out the phone to Oliver, who got up, went to the sideboard, and took the telephone from him.
“Captain Oliver, sir.”
“I just had a call from Felter. He wanted you up there tonight,” Hanrahan said.
“Up where, sir?”
“I will now call him back, and tell them that none of you are in any condition to fly tonight. Tomorrow’s Special Orders will contain a paragraph confirming and making a matter of record the following verbal order of the commanding general. You, Portet, and de la Santiago are placed on five days’ temporary duty to Headquarters, Department of the Army, Washington, D.C. Travel by U.S. government aircraft is directed.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Supplemental orders: Take Felter’s L-23. You serve as instructor pilot for de la Santiag
o, as the flight will also serve as his cross-country check ride in L-23 aircraft.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Schedule your flight so that you can present yourself, in suitable civilian clothing, to Lieutenant Colonel Lowell, at the National Aviation Club— you know where that is, Johnny?”
“Yes, sir. In the Hotel Washington. General Bellmon goes there a lot.”
“—not later than noon. Reservations have been made for the three of you in the hotel.”
“Yes, sir. For five days, sir?”
“That’s not set in concrete,” Hanrahan said. “When was de la Santiago supposed to finish his parachute qualification?”
“Two more jumps tomorrow afternoon, sir, and the night jump tomorrow night.”
“I’ll have Ski reschedule that. Any questions, Johnny?”
“No, sir.”
“Good night, Johnny.”
Hanrahan hung up.
Oliver hung up the telephone.
“Everybody get that, or do I have to repeat it?” he asked.
“Five days?” Marjorie asked.
What the hell am I going to do here by myself for five days?
“He said he wasn’t sure about that,” Oliver said, and then went on, thinking out loud: “It’s about two-twenty up there. Call it two-thirty. Another hour to get them to give us a car and get into Washington, three-thirty. Thirty minutes to change clothes. Four hours. Plus an hour for the You Damned Well Better Not Be Late factor, five hours. So we want to break ground at 0700.”
He looked down at the table.
“The twelve-hour rule be damned,” he said. “I’m going to have wine with my steak.”
He sat down and reached for his knife and fork.
“As part of your flight training, Mr. de la Santiago,” he said, “you can get on the horn and check the weather for us.”
“Did he say what Uncle Cr—what Colonel Lowell wanted?” Marjorie asked.
Johnny shook his head.
“Now that you’re married to a junior officer, Miss Marjorie, you better understand that they don’t tell us peasants nothing.”
“I’ll call when I know something, baby,” Jack said.
De la Santiago went to the telephone and dialed a number from memory.
Special Ops Page 31
