The Corps I - Semper Fi

by W. E. B Griffin

  "Welcome to the Park, Mr. Pickering," he said. "It's a pleasure to have you in the house."

  "Thank you," Pick Pickering said, shaking his hand. "Is there some problem?"

  "Absolutely no problem. Would Penthouse C be all right with you?"

  "If you're sure we can't rent it," Pickering said. "Not at this hour, Mr. Pickering," the night resident manager said, laughing appreciatively.

  "Well, if somebody wants it, move us," Pickering said. "But otherwise, that's fine. We'll be here until Sunday afternoon."

  The night resident manager took a key from the rack and came from behind the marble counter.

  "If we had only known you were coming, Mr. Pickering…" he said. "I'm afraid there's not even a basket of fruit in the penthouse."

  "At half- past four this afternoon, it was even money that we would be spending the weekend with a brick and a pile of sand," Pick Pickering said. "I don't much care about fruit, but I wish you would send up some liquor, peanuts, that sort of thing."

  "Immediately, Mr. Pickering," the night resident manager said, as he bowed them onto the elevator.

  Penthouse C of the Foster Park Hotel consisted of a large sitting room opening onto a patio overlooking Fifty-ninth Street and Central Park. To the right and left were bedrooms, and there was a butler's pantry and a bar with four stools.

  When he went directly to answer nature's call, McCoy found himself in the largest bathroom he had ever seen.

  By the time he came out, there were two room service waiters and a bellboy in the room. The bellboy was arranging cut flowers in vases. One waiter was organizing on the rack behind the bar enough liquor bottles to stock a saloon, and the other was moving through the room filling silver bowls from a two-pound can of cashews.

  Pick Pickering was sitting on a couch talking on the telephone. He saw McCoy and made a gesture indicating he was thirsty.

  "Scotch," he called, putting his hand over the mouthpiece. By the time McCoy had crossed to the bar, the night resident manager had two drinks made.

  "We're glad to have you with us, sir," the night resident manager said, as he put one drink in McCoy's hand and scurried across the room to deliver the other to Pickering.

  When they were all finally gone and Pickering finished his telephone call, McCoy sat down beside him.

  "What the hell is all this?" he asked.

  Pickering leaned back against the couch and took a swallow of his drink.

  "Christ, that tastes good," he said. "Incidentally, I have located the quarry."

  "What quarry?"

  "The females with liftable skirts," Pickering said. "There's a covey of them in a saloon called El Borracho… which, appropriately, means 'The Kiss,' I think."

  "I asked you what's going on around here," McCoy said.

  "We all have our dark secrets," Pickering said. "I, for example, know far more than I really want to about your lady missionary."

  "Come on, Pick," McCoy said.

  "This is the Foster Park Hotel," Pickering said. "Along with forty-one others, it is owned by a man named Andrew Foster. Andrew Foster has one child, a daughter. She married a man who owns ships. A lot of ships, Ken. They have one child. Me."

  "Jesus Christ!" McCoy said.

  "It is not the sort of thing I would wish our beloved Corporal Pleasant, or our sainted gunny, to know. So keep your fucking mouth shut about it, McCoy."

  "Jesus Christ!" McCoy repeated.

  "Yes?" Pickering asked, benignly, as befitting the Saviour. "What is it you wish, my son?"

  (Two)

  They did not get laid. All the girls at the first night club had escorts. They smiled, especially at Pick Pickering, but it proved impossible to separate them from the young men they were with. The candy-asses were worried about leaving their girls alone with Pickering, McCoy thought, approvingly. He was sure they had learned from painful experience that if they blinked their eyes, Pickering and their girls would be gone.

  Most of the time McCoy didn't know what the hell anyone was talking about. Only one of the girls showed any interest at all in him. She asked him if he had been at Harvard with "Malcolm." When he said no, she asked him where he had gone to school. When he said "Saint Rose of Lima," she gave him a funny smile and ignored him thereafter.

  In the second place, which was called the "21" Club, McCoy thought they probably could have gotten laid: There were enough women around, but the son of the proprietor fucked that up. He wanted to hear all about the Platoon Leader's Course because he'd joined the Corps and was about to report for active duty.

  Pick kept him fascinated with tales of Corporal Pleasant and slurping food from trays and doing the duck walk. When they left, he insisted on paying for their drinks and told McCoy that he was welcome any time. But that didn't get them laid either.

  The third place McCoy remembered hearing about somewhere. It was called the "Stork Club." When they got there, he didn't think they were going to get in because there was a line of people waiting on the sidewalk. But Pick just walked to the head of the line, and a bouncer or whatever lowered a rope and called Pick "Mr. Pickering," and they walked in.

  There was a table against the wall with a "reserved" sign on it, but a headwaiter snatched that away and sat them down there. Moments later a waiter with a bottle of champagne showed up, soon followed by the proprietor of the Stork Club. The proprietor asked about "Mr. Foster" and told Pick to make sure he carried his best regards to his parents.

  Like the guy at "21," he picked up the bill. That meant they got a decent load on without spending a dime.

  "Tomorrow, Ken, we will get laid," Pickering said as they got in a cab to return to the hotel. "Look on tonight as reconnaissance. The key to a successful assault, you will recall, is a good reconnaissance."

  As they were having breakfast the next morning, Pick had an idea.

  He called the Harvard Club and had the steward put a notice on the bulletin board: "Mr. Malcolm Pickering will entertain his friends and acquaintances at post-Thanksgiving Dinner cocktails from 2:30 P.M., Penthouse C, the Foster Park Hotel. Friends and acquaintances are expected to bring two girls."

  McCoy had a good time in the morning. He made some remark about what a nice hotel it was, and Pickering then took him on a tour. This was fascinating to McCoy; and it was a complete tour, kitchens, laundry, even the little building up above the penthouses where the elevator machinery was.

  McCoy saw that there was more to the tour than showing him around. Pickering looked inside garbage cans, even went into rooms with open doors. He was inspecting the place, looking for things that weren't as they were supposed to be. The other side of that was that he knew how things were supposed to be. He might be rich as shit, but he understood the hotel business.

  He wondered if Pickering had learned that in school, and asked him. Pick laughed and told him that the first job he'd had in a Foster hotel was as a twelve-year-rold busboy, cleaning tables.

  "I can do anything in the hotel except French pastry," Pickering said. "I've never been able to handle egg white properly."

  About one o'clock, as they sat in the sitting room in their shirts and trousers drinking Feigenspann XXX Ale from the necks of the bottles, the hotel started setting up for the cocktail party. There was an enormous turkey, and a whole ham, and a piece of roast beef. And all kinds of other stuff. Thinking of how much it was costing made McCoy uncomfortable. No matter how nice Pick was being, McCoy was beginning to feel like a mooch.

  It got worse when the people started showing up for the party: It wasn't hard to figure that if all the guests weren't as rich as Pick, they were still rich. And he had nothing in common with them. The only thing he had in common with Pick was the Marine Corps. And then there was one particular girl. She really made him uncomfortable.

  He had never seen a more beautiful girl in his life. She was fucking near-perfect. She had black hair, in a pageboy, with dark, glowing eyes that made her skin seem pure white.

  She wasn't dressed as fan
cy as the others, just a sweater and a skirt, with a string of pearls hanging down around her neck.

  His first thought was that he would happily swap his left nut to get her in the sack, and his second thought was that she wasn't that kind of female at all. She wasn't going to give any away until she had the gold ring on her finger-not because she was careful, but because that was the kind of woman she was. Once, when she caught him looking at her, she looked right back at him, as if she was asking, "What's a scumbag like you doing looking at me? I'm not like the rest of these people."

  And for some reason, she kept him from putting the make on anybody else. Not all of Pick's "friends and acquaintances" had shown up with two girls, but a lot of them had. And a bunch of women had come by themselves. One of them, a sharp-featured woman with blond hair down to her shoulders, had even come on to him, smiling at him and touching his arm when she asked him if he was in the Marines with Pick.

  But he saw the girl in the pageboy looking at them with her dark eyes and didn't do anything about the blonde. After a moment, she went away.

  Ten or fifteen minutes later, the smoke in the place (there must have been a hundred people, and they were all smoking) got to him; and he realized he'd had more Scotch than he should have. He didn't want to get shit-faced and make an ass of himself and embarrass Pick in front of his friends. So he took another bottle of ale from the refrigerator, walked into "his" bedroom, where he interrupted a couple kissing and feeling each other up, and went out on the patio for a breath of cold, fresh air.

  The sun had come up, there wasn't much wind, and it wasn't as cold as he thought it would be. It was nippy, but that's what he wanted anyhow. He sat on the wall, carefully, because they were twenty-two floors up, and looked down at Fifty-ninth Street. When that started to make him feel a little dizzy, he looked into Central Park.

  He was pretty far gone from where he thought he would be on Thanksgiving afternoon, he thought, sanding the fucking deck. Then he remembered he was really far from where he had been last Thanksgiving, a PFC machine-gunner in Dog Company, First Battalion, 4th Marines, in Shanghai. He'd taken the noon meal in the mess hall. They always sent in frozen turkeys on Thanksgiving and Christmas, and that was the only time there was turkey in China. They even bent the rules for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and you could bring guests who weren't European. He remembered that Zimmerman had brought his Chinese wife and all their half-white kids to the mess.

  "Don't go to sleep," a female voice said to him. "That's a long step if you walk in your sleep."

  Startled, he stood up and then looked to see who was talking to him.

  It was the perfect fucking female in the pageboy haircut.

  "I wasn't about to go to sleep," he said.

  "You could have fooled me," she said. "You looked like you were bored to death and about to doze off.''

  "I was thinking," McCoy said.

  The string of pearls around her neck had looped around one of her breasts. It wasn't sexy. It was feminine.

  "About what?"

  "What?"

  "What were you thinking about?" she pursued.

  She sat down on the wall, and looked up at him.

  Jesus Christ! Up close she's even more beautiful!

  "Where I was last Thanksgiving," he said.

  "And where you might be next Thanksgiving?"

  "No," he said. "I wasn't thinking about that."

  "I thought you might be," she said, and she smiled. "Why?"

  "Well, you're a Marine," she said. "Don't they wonder where they'll be moved next?"

  "I don't," he replied without thinking. "Not any further than the Corps, I mean. I know I'm going to be in the Corps. It doesn't matter where I'll be. It'll still be the Corps."

  She looked as if she didn't understand him, but the question she asked was perfectly normal: "Where were you last Thanksgiving?" she asked.

  "Shanghai," he said. And added, "China."

  "So that's where Shanghai is," she said brightly. "I knew it was either there or in Australia."

  I knew fucking well that I would show my ass if I tried to talk to somebody like this. What a dumb fucking thing to say!

  She saw the hurt in his eyes.

  "Sorry," she said.

  "It's all right," McCoy said.

  "No, it's not," she said. "There are extenuating circumstances, but I shouldn't have jumped on you."

  "What are the extenuating circumstances?" McCoy asked. "I'm an advertising copywriter," she said. "I don't know what that is," McCoy confessed. "I write the words in advertisements," she explained. "Oh," he said.

  "Our motto is brevity," she said. "Oh," McCoy repeated.

  "We try not to say anything redundant," she said. "It's okay to jump on somebody who does." "Okay," he said.

  "I had no right to do that to you," she said. "I didn't mind," McCoy said. "Yes, you did," she said, matter-of-factly. When she looks into my eyes, my knees get weak. "What did you do in China, last Thanksgiving?" "I was in a water-cooled Browning.30 crew," he said. "Browning machine gun, you mean?" she asked. He was surprised that she knew. He nodded. "I somehow didn't think you were up in Cambridge with our host," she said.

  "I guess that's pretty obvious, isn't it?" She understood his meaning.

  "Different means different," she said. "Not better or worse." The door to the sitting room opened, and six or seven people came onto the patio and headed for them.

  They sure as hell don't know me, which means they're headed for her. Probably to take her out of here. And if she goes, that's the last I'll ever see of her. "Prove it," McCoy said. "Huh?"

  "Go somewhere else with me," McCoy said. "Where?" she asked, warily.

  "I don't know," McCoy said. "Anywhere you want." She was still looking at him thoughtfully when Pickering's friends came over to her.

  "We wondered what had happened to you," one of the girls said. "We're going over to Marcy's. You about ready?" "You go along," the most beautiful female McCoy had ever seen said. "I've other plans."

  She looked into his eyes and smiled. He realized that his heart was throbbing. Like the water hose on a Browning.30.

  (Three)

  "Where are you taking me?" she asked, as they walked through the lobby of the Foster Park.

  "I don't know anyplace to take you," he said. "I've never been in New York before."

  "I have sort of a strange idea," she said. "Chinese food."

  "Huh?"

  "I guess your 'Thanksgiving in Shanghai' speech triggered it," she said. "Or maybe I'm over my ears in turkey."

  "You'll have to show me," he said. "I don't know anything about this town," he said.

  "I think we could find a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown," she said.

  "Let's get a cab," he said.

  "Let's take the subway," she said.

  "I can afford a cab," McCoy said.

  Which means, of course, that you can't.

  "I like to watch the people on the subway," she said, took his arm, and headed him toward Sixth Avenue.

  "Why?" he asked.

  "You ever been… No, of course, you haven't," she said. "You'll see."

  His eyes widened at the variations of the species homo sapiens displayed on the subway. And they smiled at each other, and somehow she wanted to touch him, and did, and put her arm in his, her hand against the rough fabric of his overcoat.

  Maybe it is the uniform, she thought. Men in uniform are supposed to get the girls.

  She let herself think about that. It was not her style to leave parties with men she had met there. Especially friends of people like Malcolm Pickering. What was there about this young man that made him different?

  A drunk, a young one in a leather jacket and a knitted hat with a pom-pom, walked past them and examined her with approval.

  And something happened to the eyes of the young man whose arm she was holding. And, my God, whose name I don't even know! His eyes narrowed, just a little, but visibly. And they brightened and turned alert. And menac
ing. She was more than a little frightened. My God, he is a Marine! And all I need is to have him get in a fist fight with a drunk on the subway.

  She watched, fascinated, as the drunk sensed the menace, put on a smile, and walked further down the car. McCoy's eyes followed him until he was sure the threat had passed. Then his eyes moved to her, and they changed again. The menace disappeared and was replaced by something much softer. It was almost as if he was now frightened. My God, he's afraid of me! "I don't know your name," she said. "McCoy," he said.

  "McCoy Smith?, McCoy Jones?" she asked. "Kenneth McCoy," he said.

  She took her arm from under his and gave him her hand. "Ernestine Sage," she said. "My parents obviously hoped for a boy. Please don't call me either 'Ernestine' or 'Ernie.' " "What can I call you?" Kenneth McCoy asked. Not ' 'what do I call you,'' she thought, but, ' 'what can I call you." He's asking permission. He doesn't want to offend me. I don't have to be afraid of him.

  "Most people call me 'Sage,' " she said. "Sage means wise."

  "I know," he said.

  She slipped her hand back under his arm. And she saw the skin of his neck deepen in color.

  They walked down Mott Street with her hand very much

  aware of the warmth of his body, even through the overcoat.

  "There is a legend that young white women should not

  come here alone," Sage said. "That they will be snatched by

  white slavers."

  He did not sense that she was teasing him. "You'll be all right," he said. When she looked into his face, he averted his eyes. "They say the best food is in little places in the alleys," Sage said. "That the places on Mott Street are for tourists. The trouble is that they speak only Chinese in the little places."

  "I speak Chinese," he said, and while she was still wondering whether or not he was trying to pull her leg, he led her into one of the alleys. Fifty feet down it, he stopped in front of a glass-covered sign and started to read it.

  He's really very clever. If I didn't know better I'd almost believe he knew what he was looking at.

  "See anything you think I'd like?" she asked, innocently.

  "No," he said. "This is a Szechuan restaurant. Most Szechuan food is hotter than hell."