W E B Griffin - Corp 01 - Semper Fi

by Semper Fi(Lit)

  "You still didn't know he was queer?"

  "I didn't find out about that, believe it or not, until just before the Alliance called him home for consultation. That was the reason I didn't go home with him."

  "How'd you find out?"

  "I walked in on him," she said, matter-of-factly.

  He was aware that she'd stopped manipulating him and he had gone down. She still had her hand on him, though, possessively, and he liked that.

  "What did he say?" McCoy asked.

  "Nothing," she said. "He didn't even stop. So I just closed the door and left. Very civilized."

  "Why didn't you leave him?" McCoy asked.

  "It's not that simple, my darling," Ellen said.

  McCoy liked when she called him "my darling," even though it embarrassed him a little. He couldn't remember anyone ever saying that to him before. It was a lot different from a whore calling him "honey" or "sweetheart" or "big boy."

  "Why not?" he asked.

  "Well, there's Jerry's detailed, written confession, for one thing," she said, as if explaining something that should have been self-evident.

  "So what?"

  "He would show it to my father."

  "So what? Tell your father he's queer."

  "I wouldn't be believed," she said. "He's a man of God. My father is very impressed with him. He would think I made the accusation in desperation, to excuse my own behavior."

  "Then fuck your father," McCoy said.

  Her eyebrows went up. "I know how you meant that," she said.

  "Jesus!" he said.

  "I'm thirty years old," she said. "I have no money. I can play every hymn in the hymnal from memory on the piano. I speak Chinese. Unless I could find a job as a Chinese-speaking piano player, I don't know how I could support myself."

  Thirty years old? At first I thought she was older than that. Then I thought she was younger. Thirty is too old for me. What the hell am I thinking about? In a week, she'll get on a ship, and that will be the last I'll ever see her.

  "Can you type?" McCoy asked. She nodded. "Then get a job as a typist, for Christ's sake."

  "For my own sake, you mean," she said. Then she added, mysteriously, "I have something else that might turn out. I won't know until I get to the States."

  "Like a couple of thousand-year-old vases, for example?" McCoy asked. "Or some jade?"

  Her face clouded, and she took her hand from his crotch and covered her mouth with it. "What did you do, look in the crates?"

  "No. A stab in the dark," McCoy said.

  "My God, does anybody else know?"

  "My officer thinks that's the real reason your husband came back to China," McCoy said. "He doesn't believe the selfless patriot business."

  "I have three Ming dynasty vases and some jade my husband doesn't know about," Ellen said. "I thought I could sell them and use the money to get a start."

  "You probably can, if you can get them through customs," McCoy said.

  "Your... officer... isn't going to say anything?"

  "It's none of his business," he said.

  "And the other officers? Do they know?"

  "You've just seen how smart they are," McCoy said.

  "It left us alone, my darling," she said.

  "I like it when you say that," McCoy said. She looked into his eyes and it made him uncomfortable. "And I like it when you put your hand on my balls."

  She stiffened. She didn't like him to talk that way, he thought. But she shifted on the bed and cupped her hand on him again.

  "I would like it, too, if you said that to me," she whispered.

  "Said what?"

  "My darling."

  "My darling," McCoy said, and flushed. It made him uncomfortable. "And I like to suck your teats," he added almost defiantly.

  She stiffened again, and he wondered why he said that, knowing it would piss her off.

  "I like the thought but not the vocabulary," she sighed. "Cows have teats, ladies have breasts."

  "Pardon me," McCoy said.

  "You're forgiven," she said.

  "Move closer, so I can play with them," McCoy said.

  "Why, you wicked little boy, you," she said, but she pushed herself closer to him, so that his hands and his mouth could reach her breast.

  The "my darling" business was over, McCoy realized. First with relief, then with sadness.

  She took her nipple from his mouth a moment later and kissed him lasciviously, then moved her head down his body. She was just straddling him when there was a knock at the door.

  "Come back later," McCoy called in Chinese.

  "It's Lieutenant Sessions, McCoy, open the door!"

  Breathing heavily, Ellen reluctantly hauled herself off him and scurried around the room, picking up her clothing. McCoy watched her moves-lovely and graceful. She was the best-looking piece of ass he'd ever had, he had realized sometime during the last twenty-four hours. And the best.

  He wondered how she was going to handle Sessions. She was not going to be able to holler rape, which was what usually happened when an American woman got caught fucking a Marine. Not only wouldn't she be able to get away with it (how could she explain being in his room?); but she had called him 'my darling' and he knew somehow that she meant it. He meant more to her than a stiff prick. She was not going to cause him any trouble, and he knew he didn't want to cause her any.

  "Come on, Corporal, I have business with you!" Sessions called. McCoy waited until she'd gone into the bathroom, then pushed himself out of the bed and went to the door, pulling

  on his shorts en route.

  Lieutenant Sessions wore two days' growth of beard, and his seersucker suit was badly soiled. The Japanese knew that it embarrassed Americans not to be clean-shaven, so razors were not made available. And there was evidence of an "accident" at a meal. McCoy was amused at the Japanese skill in embarrassing their unwanted guests (and so was Captain Banning), but it was apparent that Lieutenant Sessions

  was not.

  "Sergeant Zimmerman said he had no idea where you were," Sessions accused as he pushed past McCoy into the room.

  McCoy didn't reply.

  "I presume that you have reported our detention by the Japanese to Shanghai?" Sessions asked.

  "No, sir," McCoy said.

  "Why not, Corporal?" Sessions asked angrily.

  "I thought I'd wait to see what the Japs decided to do,"

  McCoy said.

  "You 'thought you'd wait'?" Sessions quoted incredulously. "Good God! And it's pretty clear, isn't it, how you passed your time while you were waiting? What the hell have you been doing in here, McCoy? Conducting an orgy?" McCoy didn't reply.

  "A round-the-clock orgy," Sessions went on, looking at the debris, food trays, bottles of beer, and towels on the floor. He sniffed the air. "It smells like a whorehouse in here. Is she still here, for Christ's sake?" McCoy nodded.

  "Goddamn it, Corporal, in my absence you were supposed to take charge, not conduct yourself like a PFC on payday. You are prepared to offer no excuse at all for not getting in touch with Shanghai and reporting what had happened to us?" "I was trying not to make waves," McCoy said. "And what the hell is that supposed to mean?" The bathroom door opened and Ellen Feller came into the room. She was in her bathrobe, and her hair fanned down her shoulders.

  She looked directly at Lieutenant Sessions as she walked through the room and out the door.

  "Well, that really does it," Sessions said coldly, almost calmly, when she had gone. "Instead of doing your duty... Jesus Christ! I'm going to have your stripes for this, McCoy. I'd like to have you court-martialed!"

  McCoy walked across the room to the chest of drawers and picked up the Leica camera.

  "Goddamnit, Corporal, don't you turn your back on me when I'm talking to you!" Sessions said furiously.

  McCoy rewound the film, opened the camera, and slipped the film out. He held the small can of film between his thumb and index finger and turned to face Lieutenant Sessions.

 
; "I hope you didn't lose your temper like that in Yenchi'eng," McCoy said. "So far as the Japs are concerned, you lose a lot of face when you lose your temper.''

  "How dare you talk to me that way?" Sessions barked, both incredulous and furious.

  "Lieutenant, as I see it, you have two choices," McCoy said. "You can make a by-the-book report of what happened: That against my advice, you went to Yenchi'eng and got yourself caught, and that when you came back here, you found out that I hadn't even reported that the Japs had you..."

  " 'Had completely abandoned your obvious obligations' would be a better way to put it," Sessions interrupted.

  "And had 'completely abandoned my obvious obligations' " McCoy parroted.

  "That's Silent Insolence (Prior to 1948 the Universal Code of Military Justice included the offense "Silent Insolence." Among the offenses therein embraced was a "mocking attitude" to military superiors) on top of everything else!" Sessions snapped.

  "And that you found Mrs. Feller in my room," McCoy said.

  "What the hell were you thinking about in that connection?" Sessions fumed. "Good God, man, her husband is a missionary!"

  "Who will say that his wife was in here reading the Bible to me," McCoy said calmly. "He's a faggot."

  Surprise flashed over Sessions's face.

  "She is a married woman, and you damned well knew she was," Sessions said, somewhat lamely. This confrontation was not going at all the way he had expected it would.

  "The other choice you and Lieutenant Macklin have," McCoy said, "is to report that you have proof the Japs don't have any German PAK38 50-mm cannons, at least not in the 11th Division." That caught Sessions by surprise.

  "What are you talking about?" he asked. "What proof?"

  "If they had German cannon, they would have turned in their Model 94s," McCoy said. "They didn't." He held up the can of film. "I took these at first light yesterday morning," he said. "I was lucky: The Japs were up before daylight lining them up and taking the covers off. Probably weekly maintenance, something like that."

  It took Sessions a moment to frame his thoughts.

  "So you went yourself. And of course didn't get caught. That was very resourceful of you, McCoy," he said.

  McCoy shrugged.

  "How the hell did you do it?" Sessions asked.

  "The German's got a truck," he said.

  "German? Oh, you mean the man who owns the hotel?"

  McCoy nodded.

  "You just borrowed his truck and drove into Yenchi'eng, that's it?"

  "Not exactly," McCoy said. "I went into Yenchi'eng last night. On a bicycle. I told the boy who drives the German's truck there was a hundred yuan in it for him if he picked me up at a certain place on the road at half-past six yesterday morning."

  "And then he just brought you back?"

  "No, we had to go into town first. He picks up stuff- vegetables mostly, sometimes a pig and chickens. I had to go in with him."

  "How did you keep from being seen?"

  "I didn't," McCoy said. "When I'm around the Japs, I play like I'm an Italian."

  "How do you do that? Do you speak Italian?"

  McCoy nodded.

  "Christ, you're amazing, McCoy!" Sessions said.

  "It was stupid, me going in there like that," McCoy said. "I should have known better."

  "Why did you go?" Sessions asked.

  "You acted like it was important," McCoy said. "Anyway, it's done. And if you were to tell Captain Banning that you and Macklin and the Reverend were making a diversion, that you knew I was going to Yenchi'eng, I wouldn't say anything," McCoy said.

  "You're not, I hope, suggesting, McCoy, that I submit a patently dishonest report," Sessions said.

  "Rule one, doing what we're doing," McCoy said, "is don't make waves. Either with the Corps or with the people you're watching. You tell them what really happened, you're going to look like a..."

  The next word in that sentence was clearly going be ' 'horse's ass," Sessions thought. He stopped himself just in time from saying, "How dare you talk to me that way?"

  A small voice in the back of his skull told him quietly but surely that he had indeed made a horse's ass of himself already-in China ten days and already grabbed by the Japanese doing something he had been told not to do, and digging himself in still deeper every time he opened his mouth.

  He had been a Marine eleven years. Never before had an enlisted man-not even a Master Gunnery Sergeant when he had been a wet-behind-the-ears shavetail-talked to him the way this twenty-one-year-old corporal was talking to him now.

  And the small voice in the back of his skull told him McCoy was not insolent. Inferiors are insolent to superiors. McCoy was tolerantly contemptuous, as superiors are to inferiors. And the painful truth seemed to be that he had given him every right to do so.

  He had been informed-and had pretended to understand- that he would have to learn to expect the unexpected. And he hadn't. Because he was a thirty-two-year-old officer, he had presumed that he knew more than a twenty-one-year-old enlisted man.

  If he followed the book-the code of conduct expected of an officer and a gentleman, especially one who wore an Annapolis ring-he would immediately grab a telephone and formally report to Captain Banning that-against McCoy's advice-he had taken the Reverend Feller and Lieutenant Macklin to Yenchi'eng, been detained by the Japanese, had a pot of some greasy rice substance dumped in his lap, and then had returned to find that not only was Corporal McCoy fornicating with the missionary's wife (conduct prejudicial to good military order and discipline) but was silently insolent to boot. And that he just incidentally happened to have a roll of 35-mm film of the 11th Japanese Division's artillery park.

  "I need a bath, a shave, and a clean uniform, Corporal," Lieutenant Sessions said. "We'll settle this later." "Aye, aye, sir."

  "I'd like to get started again first thing in the morning," Sessions went on. "Will there be any problems about that?" "No, sir," McCoy said. "Now that you're back, we can move anytime you want to."

  Sessions realized he was still making an ass of himself and that he had to do something about it.

  "What I intend to do when we get somewhere with secure communications, Corporal McCoy," he said, "is advise Captain Banning that I went to Yenchi'eng against your advice and was detained by the Japanese. I will tell him of your commendable initiative in getting the film of the Japanese artillery park. I can see no point in discussing your personal life. I would be grateful, when you make your own report, if you would go easy on how I stormed in here and showed my ass."

  "I hadn't planned to say anything about that, sir," McCoy said.

  "And I'm sure," Sessions said, searching for some clever way to phrase it, ' 'that... you will not permit your romantic affairs to in any way cast a shadow on the Corps' well-known reputation for chastity outside marriage."

  "No, sir," McCoy said, chuckling. "I'll be very careful about that, sir." And then he added: "I'd be grateful if you didn't tell Lieutenant Macklin about Mrs. Feller."

  Sessions nodded. "Thank you, McCoy," he said, then turned and walked out of the room.

  Chapter Five

  (One)

  The Hotel am See Chiehshom, China 2215 Hours 18 May 1941

  McCoy could not sleep. The smell of Ellen was inescapably on the sheets. And her image was no less indelibly printed on his mind.

  Earlier, he found himself next to her at dinner. The moment he sat down, her knee moved against his.

  There wasn't anything particularly sexy about her touch, and she didn't try to feel him up under the table-or he her-or anything like that. She just wanted to touch him. She didn't say two words to him either, except "please pass the salt." But she didn't take her knee away once.

  All too soon, the Reverend Feller announced, "Well, we have a long day ahead of us." Ellen rose after him and followed him out... leaving McCoy with a terrible feeling of loss.

  Later, McCoy and Zimmerman went to the European servants' quarters to make sure none of th
e drivers had shacked up in town. Afterward, Zimmerman asked matter-of-factly, "Sessions find out you're fucking the missionary lady?"

  He had not been "fucking the missionary lady." It had started out that way, but it wasn't that way now. McCoy couldn't bring himself to admit he was in love, but it was more than an unexpected piece of ass, more than "fucking the missionary lady." And she had called him "my darling," and had meant it. And he had meant it, too, when she made him say it back.