by Ross Thomas
“Not when I play poker.”
He gave me an amused look. “You like to win, don’t you?”
“It’s better than losing.”
“A beer?”
“Fine.”
Beverly Gay served us each a beer, but drank nothing herself. She sat on the severe couch with her father. I sat in a leather chair that was all angles and sharp edges.
“I’ve done some checking on you during the past week,” Gay said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“If it’s already done, there’s not much I can do about it. I don’t know whether I mind or not.”
“I’d mind,” Beverly Gay said. “There’re too many Paul Prys around as it is.”
“She doesn’t much care for the Senator from Wisconsin,” the colonel said. “What do you think of him?”
“Joe McCarthy? He’s a menace.”
“Why?”
“I don’t like being told what I should be frightened of. I like to find out for myself. Maybe I won’t be frightened. Maybe I’ll like it.”
“Such as a hot stove?”
“That’s an oversimplification, Colonel.”
“Hah,” his daughter said to him and smiled at me. She had a fine smile that came quickly and went slowly, leaving a warm afterglow. I thought that she was less than beautiful, but more than pretty. Appealing perhaps. It may have been her grace and poise and grooming, but that was only part of it. She looked as if she might have been made yesterday, still too new to be shopworn, and incredibly fresh and clean—not clean as the antonym of dirty, but in the sense that a meadowlark’s call at dawn is clean—if you’ve ever been up that early. Her gray eyes as she looked at the colonel seemed solemnly mischievous and her mobile face was seldom in repose. She used only a touch of color on her full, sensitive mouth, and somehow I forgave her for being able to wrinkle her nose like a rabbit.
“My daughter is hopelessly partisan,” the colonel said.
“They sometimes make the best cooks.”
“What does that mean?” she said.
“I’m not sure.”
“Probably that he’s hungry.”
“You’ll eat in fifteen minutes,” she said. “Besides, if I left you’d lose half your audience.”
Colonel Gay leaned back in the sofa and looked at me quizzically. His wide shoulders made him resemble an inverted isosceles triangle that was loosely hinged in two places.
“What do you intend to do?” he said. “You’re surely not going to make a career of working for that charming idiot in PIO?”
“I’m going to school in the fall.”
“Where?”
“Columbia, if I can get in.”
“To study what?”
“Oriental languages probably.”
“Then?”
“Teach.”
“That takes a Ph.D., unless you like to starve.”
“I have time.”
“How many prep schools have you gone to since 1942?”
I shrugged. “Eight or nine.”
“What happened?”
“I thought you’d been checking.”
“Let’s say that I’m confirming my research.”
“I got kicked out of most of them. Sometimes for gambling. Some times for drinking. Sometimes for what they called ‘incorrigibility’ and sometimes I just walked away.”
“Did you learn anything?”
“I learned how to read and write and I lost an Australian accent.”
“Your parents are dead, aren’t they?”
“Yes.”
“Were they all private schools?”
“All but the last.”
“Who paid your tuition?”
“There was a revocable trust fund that my guardian set up.”
“Gorman Smalldane?”
“Yes.”
“Is he really your guardian?”
“He is whenever I need one.”
“And the rest of the time?”
“I’m on my own. Sometimes I’ve stayed with Gorman in New York. Once I joined him in Paris for a summer after the war. Once in Athens.”
“Do you speak Greek?”
“No.”
“How many languages?”
“It used to be six or seven. But it’s less now. My Chinese, French, and German are still good. I’ve forgotten the rest.”
“Those were all ‘progressive’ schools that you attended. I use progressive in quotes.”
“Their catalogues didn’t.”
“Where did you finally get your high school diploma?”
“Reno. Smalldane fixed it up, I dealt blackjack there the summer I was sixteen. He fixed that up, too. Then I took an equivalency test and they put me in the twelfth grade. I finished the year and they gave me a diploma. Gorman flew out from New York for the graduation exercises but we got too drunk to attend.”
“Then?”
“Then I went to Montana.”
“To school?”
“For a year.”
“Where?”
“The University of Montana. At Missoula.”
“Why there?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because I was born in Montana.”
“But you left when you were an infant.”
“When I was nine months old.”
“And went to Shanghai.”
“Where my father got killed by dumb pilot error and where I grew up in a whorehouse. Why all the questions, Colonel, when you know the answers?”
Gay studied me for several seconds as if he were trying to decide something. “Who were your friends when you were growing up? Or playmates, if they’re still called that.”
“In Shanghai?”
“Yes.”
“Whores mostly.”
“No children?”
“A few street Arabs.”
“And back in the States?”
I shook my head. “No childhood chums, Colonel.”
“Not even your classmates?”
“They were children.”
“What were you?”
“I don’t know. I just wasn’t a child anymore.”
“Were you always treated as an adult?”
“In Shanghai?”
“Yes.”
“I wasn’t always treated as an adult, but I was talked to as one. There’s a difference.”
“And when you got back to the States they tried to talk to you as a child.”
“Something like that, but it was too late.”
“What about Smalldane?”
I smiled. “I think I’ve always been a contemporary to him. A fellow orphan. Which says something either about his childishness or my maturity.”
The colonel nodded as if satisfied on some important point. He turned to his daughter and smiled. “I think Mr. Dye and I could have another beer without endangering our poker skill.”
She rose, started toward the kitchen, and then stopped. “How long do you want it to take, five minutes or ten?”
“Five will do nicely,” Gay said.
When she had gone he put his head back on the couch and looked at the ceiling. “You’re set on Columbia?”
“I like New York,” I said.
“Sometimes I’m in a position to recommend full scholarships for deserving students. Not to Columbia unfortunately.”
“Where?”
He named a small, rich private school on the Eastern seaboard, not too far from Washington. “Interested?”
“Go on.”
“It has an excellent reputation in your field—Oriental studies and languages. Even Joe McCarthy thinks so. He’s having the chairman of the department hauled up before his committee next week.”
“Why?”
“He thinks the man caused us to lose China.”
“We never had it to lose,” I said. “Nobody did.”
“This guy can take care of himself,” Gay said. “We’re not worried about him. But it’s going to destroy some others and we’re going to have to replace the
m. And then we’ll have to replace our replacements.”
“I’m not following you.”
“I didn’t expect you to.”
“Then what’s the point?”
“I want to find out if you’re interested in a scholarship. It pays four hundred a month plus all fees and tuition. You can double the four hundred with poker.”
“All right,” I said. “I’m interested, but I never knew the army to be so generous.”
“I didn’t mention the army.”
“I’ll guess again. State Department.”
“Hardly.”
“That leaves the CIA.”
“They’re even more frightened of McCarthy than State. They’ve already started dumping and he hasn’t even mentioned them yet.”
“Just spell it out, Colonel.”
He lit a cigarette and leaned back on the couch so that he had a good view of the ceiling again. “It hasn’t got a name really, so we’ll just call it Section Two. Okay?”
“What’s Section One?”
“There isn’t any.”
“I see.”
“The Section is going to lose some of its best people as replacements for those who McCarthy will get through his witch-hunt. We can’t do anything about the witch-hunt. It’s got to run its course. All we can do is fill in the gaps that it creates at State and CIA with our own talent. In the meantime, we have to recruit new blood that four, five, or even ten years from now will start recruiting its own replacements. Do you follow me?”
“It’s perfectly clear,” I said. “The scholarship has strings.”
“No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”
“You mean I can collect the four hundred dollars a month, pick up a degree, and then wave goodbye?”
“Or two degrees. Even three.”
“And no strings?”
“None,” he said.
“How much can you tell me about it?”
“Section Two?”
“Yes.”
“Not much. It doesn’t exist on paper.”
“And it’s not CIA?”
“Definitely not. It’s what you might call an intelligence bank. When the others run short, they borrow from us.”
“Borrow what?”
“Whatever they need.”
“When was it set up?”
“In 1945 when we knew China was going.”
“You didn’t anticipate McCarthy eight years ago.”
“No,” he said. “We anticipated the reaction, not the person. Some would be blamed and that we could predict fairly well. The individuals, I mean. Somebody, of course, would have to do the blaming and it turned out to be Joe McCarthy. If it hadn’t been him, it would have been another. We knew that valuable men would be lost and that they’d have to have replacements. Pure ones, if you follow me.”
“I do.”
“So we started recruiting them.”
“And now that you’re lending them out, you need some more.”
“We always need more,” he said.
“Just for China?”
He shook his head. “For everywhere.”
“You’re more than a central bank then?”
“Let’s just say that we have branch offices in a lot of places.”
“And what do they do?”
“Whatever’s necessary.”
“Who runs it?”
“Section Two?”
“Yes.”
“I do.”
“Then you’re not in the army?”
“I’m on detached service.”
“Those two generals we played poker with last week seemed to know what you do.”
“No,” the colonel said. “They think I’m CIA. I don’t discourage it.”
“You’re telling me a lot.”
“Not really.”
“All right,” I said. “What do I have to do?”
“Nothing. You’ll get a letter of acceptance from the university next week.”
“And that’s all there is to it?”
“That’s all. Your check will come every month from a foundation. When you’ve decided that you’ve had enough school, somebody’ll be around to see you.”
“But not until then?” I said.
“No. Anything else?”
“I’d be a fool to say no.”
The colonel looked at me thoughtfully. “Yes,” he said. “You would be, wouldn’t you? But if you were a fool, you’d never have been asked.”
CHAPTER 20
Beverly Gay and I were married that September in the living room of Major and Mrs. Albert Schiller. Colonel Gay reluctantly gave the bride away and Gorman Smalldane flew in from New York to be best man and to give his legal consent as my guardian. I was still under twenty-one and in Texas the man then had to be of age before he could marry without consent. The woman had to be eighteen. If they had consent, the man could be sixteen, the girl fourteen. They may have changed the law by now, but I doubt it.
I got married because of the usual reason: I was in love with a girl who loved me. The colonel had been a stickler for form. “Goddamn it, Dye, you’re going to have to ask for her hand. You’re going to have to convince me. She’s the only daughter I’ve got and by Jesus Christ you’re going to play by the book.”
“My prospects are excellent,” I said.
“I know what your prospects are.”
“My income is assured for the next several years.”
“I know what your income will be down to a dime.”
“What about dowry?” I said.
The colonel rose and began to pace the living room that was furnished with the junk of all the world. “I had it all figured out,” he said, as if to himself. “Three months with Beverly in San Antonio while I got rid of the bug and then back to work, and you turned up.” He spun around. “I’m not sure I want you as a son-in-law.”
“I’m not sure that I give a damn what you want.”
“It could hurt your career.”
“Marrying the boss’s daughter? It’s the well-known path to success.”
“You’re both too young,” he said, paused, and then smoothed his gray hair back with a thin, hard hand. “No. That’s not right either. You re not too young. You’re too old for her. It’s like marrying her off to the town rake.” He turned toward me quickly. “How many girls have you laid?”
“How should I know?” I said. “I never kept score. Did you?”
He ignored the question and paced some more. It was the only time I ever saw him even slightly agitated. He whirled once more and aimed his right forefinger at me like a district attorney who’s long on style and short on evidence. “Goddamn it, do you love her?”
“Do you expect me to say no?”
Gay resumed his pacing for a while and then stopped and faced me again. He stood quite still and looked at me carefully, as if he hoped that what he saw wasn’t as unsavory as it seemed. When he spoke, his tone was low, soft, and controlled. It sounded almost dangerous. It may have been. “Something might happen to me,” he said. “If it does, take care of her. I mean good care. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“If something happens to me and you’re in Section Two by then, get out. If you’re not yet in, don’t go. Is that clear?”
“Yes.”
He raised his voice slightly and nodded toward the dining room. “She’s in there, you know. Ear to the keyhole.”
“There’s no door,” I said.
“It didn’t go right,” he said. “I was lousy as the forbidding father.”
Beverly came in from the dining room. “I thought you were fine.”
The colonel shook his head. “No, you didn’t,” he said. “It should have been a Sunday afternoon. All bad domestic scenes should take place on Sunday afternoon, the worst time of the week. Agreements for divorce. Accusations of infidelity. If a husband’s going to beat his wife, he should do it on Sunday afternoon.” He turned toward me. “You weren’t right either. You should
have been more nervous.”
“What the hell for?” I said.
“Because, goddamn it, I deserve my slice of American banality. I’ve never had my share.”
“It doesn’t happen that way,” Beverly said.
“I know it doesn’t happen that way,” the colonel said. “I know that as well as I know that you’re not a virgin and probably haven’t been one since two weeks after you met the cocksman here.”
“Three weeks,” she said. “I held out.”
“Three weeks. I’d just like something tried and trite, something banal in my own borrowed living room. Something that looks like it stepped out of an ad or MGM. I’m thirsty for the insipid.”
“How about a martini?” Beverly said.
“If he wants something insipid, champagne would be better,” I said.
The colonel sighed. “We don’t have any champagne, we’ve run out of vermouth, and it’s not even Sunday afternoon.” He grinned at Beverly. “What the hell,” he said. “Just make it a hooker of gin.”
It was a small, if not quiet wedding. Ruby cried throughout and Major Schiller pinched Beverly three times, once during the ceremony, which caused her to jump and say “ouch” when she should have been saying, “I, Beverly.” The major got a little drunk and played the piano and sang. The colonel looked morose throughout while his daughter looked as if she were about to succumb to a fit of giggles. The groom was hungover and testy. Smalldane, twenty or thirty pounds heavier than when I’d seen him last, performed as best man with more gusto than was really necessary, but he seemed to enjoy his role. A fat army chaplain, a major who claimed to be a Baptist, mumbled the ceremony so that I had to ask him “What?” twice. Afterwards, he drank eleven glasses of champagne and wept a little, perhaps for his own sins as well as for ours.
When it was over the colonel dragged me into the kitchen and produced two items. The first was a set of keys to a new Chevrolet. He did it brusquely, as if embarrassed by his own generosity, or perhaps because he thought he was playing it a shade close to the hearty father. He made up for that with the second item, a .38 Colt automatic. “Keep it handy,” he said.
“You mean carry it?”
A pained look spread across his face. It was the look of a man who has just discovered that he has a lout for a son-in-law. “Just handy. Around the house.”
I nodded and because I didn’t know what to do with it, I shoved it into a hip pocket and later transferred it to a suitcase.
