“Sir?”
“Senator Iselin is the kind of a man who would work day and night to block the entire defense appropriation if he were crossed on a matter as close to him as this. Senator Iselin is capable of wrecking the entire military establishment if an investigation of his stepson’s glorious heroism were permitted to go through. He would undertake a war upon the United States Army which would be far more punishing and ruinous than any ever inflicted by any enemy force of arms in our history. To convey to you the enormity of the responsibility you carry, I have been ordered to tell you this, and it violates everything I stand for. Under orders, I will not threaten you.” His voice trembled. “If you persist in urging your court-martial for the purpose of examining Raymond Shaw’s right to wear the Medal of Honor, you will be placed in solitary confinement.”
Marco stared at the general.
“Have you ever had to threaten a private to force him to police a yard, Major? The Army, as we have known it, has heretofore functioned under a system utilizing orders. Do you remember? I must now tell you that I have not been permitted to consider this conversation a travesty on both our lives. I have been ordered not to halt at merely threatening you. Senator Iselin has decided that I was to be ordered to bribe you. If you will agree to ignore your honor as an officer and will sign a paper which has been prepared by Senator Iselin’s legal counsel which guarantees that you will not press for the investigation of this matter, I am to advise you that you will be advanced in rank to lieutenant colonel, then effective instantly, to the rank of full colonel.”
The nausea rose in Marco like the foam in a narrow beer glass. He could not speak even to acknowledge that he had heard. The general took a paper from his blouse and placed it on the desk, on the far side of it, in front of Marco. “So much for Iselin,” he said. “I order you to sign it.” Marco took up the desk pen and signed the paper.
“Thank you, Major. Dismiss,” the general said. Marco left the office at four twenty-one in the afternoon. General Jorgenson shot himself to death at four fifty-five.
Fifteen
THERE IS AN IMMUTABLE PHRASE AT LARGE IN the languages of the world that places fabulous ransom on every word in it: The love of a good woman. It means what it says and no matter what the perspective or stains of the person who speaks it, the phrase defies devaluing. The bitter and the kind can chase each other around it, this mulberry bush of truth and consequence, and the kind may convert the bitter and the bitter may emasculate the kind but neither can change its meaning because the love of a good woman does not give way to arbitrage. The phrase may be used in sarcasm or irony to underscore the ludicrous result of the lack of such love, as in the wrecks left behind by bad women or silly women, but such usage serves to mark the changeless value. The six words shine neither with sentiment nor sentimentality. They are truth; a light of its own; unchanging.
Eugénie Rose Cheyney was a good woman and she loved Marco. That fact gave Marco a large edge, tantamount to wiping out the house percentage in banker’s craps. No matter what the action, that is a lot of vigorish to have going for anybody.
Eugénie Rose had had her office route all business to her home that day, because she knew Marco would call whenever he woke up at Raymond Shaw’s apartment. Her boss, Justin, was overdrawn at the bank, and it irritated her that they would seek to bother him about such a thing. He was overdrawn for a tiny period every sixty days or so, at which time he always managed to make an apple-cheeked deposit that kept the bank not only honest but richer. The set construction company had called at about eleven o’clock about some bills that the general manager had questioned. She had all of his questions ready and a set of the only answers in Christendom so she was able to cut four hundred and eleven dollars and sixty-three cents from the construction of a fireplace for the main room of the castle. After that call sixteen persons of every stripe, meaning from quarter-unit investors in the next show down to press agents for health food restaurants, called to try to get house seats for specific performances, and she had to invent a new theatrical superstition to fit the problem, which was how the others had come into being, by saying that surely they knew it was bad luck to distribute seat locations for the New York run until the out-of-town notices were in. And so chaos was postponed again. When she hadn’t heard from Marco by seven-ten that evening she decided that he must have tried and tried to call her while all those other calls had been coming through, so she called Raymond at home, reading Marco’s handwriting as he had written the number down as though it had the relative value of the sound of his voice at her very ear. Before Raymond answered, as the instrument purred the signal, she heard the elevator door open, pause, then close in the hallway just outside her door. She decided she knew it must be Marco. She slammed the phone down and rushed to the door worrying about her hair, so that she could hold it open in welcome before he could have a chance to ring the bell.
He looked terrible.
He said, “Let’s get married, Rosie.” He stepped over the threshold and grabbed her as though she were the rock of the ages. He kissed her. She kicked the door shut. She started to kiss him in return and it turned his knees to water.
“When?” she inquired.
“How long does it take in this state? That’s how long.” She kissed him again and massaged his middle with her pelvis. “I want to marry you, Ben, more than I want to go on eating Italian food, which will give you a slight idea, but we can’t get married so quickly,” she breathed on him.
“Why?”
“Ben, you’re thirty-nine years old. We met three days ago and that’s not enough time to get a bird’s-eye view or a microscopic view of anyone. When we get married, Ben, and please notice how I said when we get married, not when I get married, we have to stay married because I might turn into a drunk or a religieuse or a crypto-Republican if we ever failed, so let’s wait a week.”
“A week.
“Please.”
“Well, all right. There is such a thing as being over-mature about decisions like this but we won’t get married for a week. But we’ll get the papers and take the blood tests and post the banns and plan the children’s names and buy the ring and rent the rice and call the folks—”
“Folks?”
He stared at her for a moment. “You neither?”
“No.”
“An orphan?”
“I used to be convinced that, as a baby, I had been the only survivor of a space ship which had overshot Mars.”
“Very sexy stuff.”
“You look a different kind of awful from yesterday. Mr. Shaw told me you slept all night. Quietly.”
“Ah. You talked to Raymond.
“This morning. He is very formal about you.”
“Poor Raymond. I’m the only one he has. Not that he needs anybody. Old Raymond has only enough soul to be able to tolerate two or three people in his life. I’m one of them. There’s a girl I think he weeps over after he locks the doors. There’s room for just about one more and he’ll be full up. I hope it’s you because having Raymond on your side is not unlike being backed up by the First Army.”
“Did you have a bad time today?”
“Yeah. Well, yes and no.”
He sat down as suddenly as though his legs had broken. She descended like a great dancer to rest on the floor beside his chair. He rubbed the back of her neck with his right hand, absent-mindedly, but with sensual facility.
“You are the holiest object I have in the world,” he said slowly and with a thick voice, “so I swear upon you that I am going to get even with Senator John Iselin for what happened today. I don’t know how yet. But how I will do it will always be somewhere in my mind from today on. From today on I’ll always be thinking about how I, Marco, am going to make him pay for what he did today. I probably won’t kill him. I found out today that I will probably never make a murderer.”
She stared up at him. His face glistened with sweat and his eyes were sad instead of being vengeful. Her own eyes, the Tuar
eg eyes, were black almonds with blue centers; a changing blue, like mist over far snow. They were the eyes of a lady left over from an army of crusaders who had taken the wrong turning, moving left toward Jarabub in Africa, instead of right, toward London, after Walter the Penniless had sent them to loot the Holy Land in 1096, to settle forever in the deep Sahara, to continue the customs of the lists, knight errantry, and the wooing of ladies fair for whose warm glances the warriors sang their songs. She stared at him steadily, then rested her head on the side of his leg and sat quietly.
“Iselin is Raymond’s stepfather,” Marco told her. “He sits right there in his office on the Hill. He’s the most accessible, available senator we have, you know, because most of our newspapers are published right in his office nowadays. Senator Iselin is really fond of Raymond because Johnny is a terrific salesman. Raymond has no use for him, and a lack of buyer feeling about the product has always been a tremendous challenge to a salesman. All I needed to do was to call Johnny, tell him Raymond sent me, be shown right into his office, lock the door, and shoot him through the head. Or maybe beat him to death with a steel chair.” Marco was talking quietly, through his teeth. He thought about his lost opportunity for a moment.
“Did you know Raymond was a Medal of Honor man, Rosie?” he asked almost rhetorically. She shook her gray-white head without answering. “I wish I could explain to you what that means. But I’d have to find a way to send you back to grow up on Army posts and put you through the Academy and find you a couple of wars and a taste for Georgie Patton and Caesar’s Commentaries and Blücher and Ney and Moltke, but thank God we can’t do any of that. Just believe it because I say it, that a Medal of Honor man is the best man any soldier can think of because he has achieved the most of what every soldier was meant to do. Anyway, after Raymond got the medal, I began to have nightmares. They were pretty bad. I had come to the worst of them when I found you, thank God. The nightmares were always the same for five years and they took a lot of trouble to suggest that Raymond had not won the medal rightfully after I had sworn he had won it and the men of my patrol had sworn to it. In the end, the dreams have convinced me that we were wrong. I am sure now that the Russians wanted Raymond to have the medal so he got it. I don’t know why. Maybe, if I’m lucky, I never will know why. But I’m an officer trained in intelligence work. I filled a notebook with details about furniture and clothing and complexions and speech defects and floor coverings. I talked everything over with Raymond. He got the idea that I should request a public investigation so that the enemy, at the very least, would think we knew more than we knew. That idea ended this afternoon with a lieutenant general putting a bullet into his head because it was the only possible thing he could have done to make Iselin hear the Army’s protest against what Iselin had done to us. I knew that general. He liked living and he had a big time at it but he saw that protest as being an important Army job and he had been trained to accept responsibility.” Marco’s voice got bleak. “So I swear on you, on my Eugénie Rose, that the day will come that I, Marco, will make Senator John Iselin pay for that, and if he has to be killed, and I can’t kill him, I’ll have someone kill him for me.” He closed his eyes for a few beats. “We got any beer in the house?” he asked her.
She got some. She drank plain warm gin.
Marco drank a can of the beer before he spoke again. “Anyway I was stopped,” he said at last. “Before he shot himself the general ordered me to forget the court-martial, so that is that. I’m frozen with my terrible dreams inside of a big cake of ice and I’ll never get out.”
“You’ll get out.”
“No.”
“Yes you will.”
“How?”
“Do you remember that thing I told you which no girl in her right mind would ever tell a man she had gone limp over, about how I called up the man I was engaged to and resigned from the whole idea because you happened to smell so crazy?”
“I thought you just said that to get me to kiss you.”
“His name was Lou Amjac and you happen to be right.
“You know, you weren’t attracted to me irrevocably only because I smell this way. Don’t forget I cried like a little, lost tyke the instant I looked at you. Stuff like that is a steam roller for a potential mother.”
“Have you ever done that with another woman? The smell you can’t help, but I don’t think I could stand sharing your sniveling with another woman.”
“Never mind. That’s the kind of stuff that’ll come out after we’re married. What about Lou Amjac?”
“He’s an FBI agent. They are good at their work. I have a whole intuitive thing about how they can help you with that notebook—The Gallant Major’s Gypsy Dream Book.”
“I’m Army Intelligence, baby. We don’t take our laundry to the FBI. Macy’s definitely does not tell Gimbel’s.”
“The way you told it to me, you were Army Intelligence. If the FBI can prove you have something worth going on with, then your side will take you back and you can run the whole thing down yourself.”
“Jesus.”
“Isn’t it worth trying?”
“Well, yeah, but still, I don’t see Lou Amjac going out of his way to help me. After all, you were his girl.”
“He might not be pleasant about it, that’s true, but he’s an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and if you’ve got something in his line, you’re not going to be able to shake him.”
Amjac wasn’t entirely pleasant about Marco. In fact, he was particularly surly. Amjac was a skinny man with watery eyes and when Marco saw them for the first time he had a hot flash of jealousy go through him, feeling that maybe Eugénie Rose was nearsighted and that perhaps when she had first seen this guy she had thought he was crying. Amjac was tall. He had florid skin and sandy hair, freckles all over the backs of his hands, and looked as though he had a tendency to boils on the back of his neck. His hair was fine lanugo and he couldn’t have grown a mustache if he had stayed in bed for a year. He had a jaw like a crocodile and as he sat in Rosie’s small, warm, golden-draped room, which had horrible, large cabbage roses woven into the carpets and ancient northern European brewery posters on all walls, separated by mountain goat heads mounted on stained ash, he looked as though he would be happy to be invited to bite Marco’s right arm off.
When he entered the apartment and had stood staring down, repelled, at Marco, Eugénie Rose had said serenely, “This is Bonny Benny Marco, the chap I was telling you about, Lou. Benny boy, this here is a typical, old-time shamus right out of Black Mask Magazine name of Lou Amjac.”
“Did you bring me all the way over here in the rain just to meet this?” Amjac inquired.
“Is it raining? Yes, I did.”
“What am I supposed to do? Arrest him for impersonating an officer?”
Marco figured it would be better just to let the two old friends chat together.
“Would you like a nice plebeian rye highball, Lou?”
“Plebeian? Your friend is drinking beer right out of the can.”
“Wow, you FBI guys don’t miss a trick, do you?” Eugénie Rose said. “Do you want a rye highball or don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, what?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“That’s better. Give me your coat. How is your elbow with the weather changing like this? Now sit down. No. Walk with me to the kitchen whilst I decant. Did your mother get back from Montreal?”
Amjac took off his coat.
“You know, I think if I was right-handed I would have had to quit the Bureau, Rose. I could hardly bend my elbow this afternoon, believe it or not. This Dr. Weiler—you met Abe Weiler, the specialist, didn’t you, Rose?—he may be a good man at certain things—you know what I mean—but I don’t think he even knows where to grope when it comes to arthritis.” He followed her into the tiny kitchen and Marco watched them go, goggle-eyed. “My mother decided to stay over another week,” he could hear Amjac say. “They sell very strong ale up there
and since my sister’s husband won’t be home from the road until Monday, why not?”
“Of course, why not?” Rosie’s voice said. “Just make sure she’s out before he’s home, is all. He’d love to punch her right on her sweet little old-lady nose, he told me.”
“Aaaah, that’s a lot of talk,” Amjac said petulantly. “Thanks.” He accepted the stiff highball.
“Are your lads still interested in this and that about the Soviet lads? Spy stuff?”
Amjac jerked his head back toward Marco. “Him?”
“He knows a couple,” she said. They walked back into the living room with Rosie carrying four beer cans at stomach level.
“Can he talk?” Amjac asked.
“He talks beautifully. And, oh Lou, I wish you could smell him!” Amjac grunted and stared hard at Marco who seemed considerably embarrassed. “Just the same I’d like to tell you the story,” Rosie said, “because you are gradually making Major Marco believe that after eleven years of rooming with you at the Academy he has stolen your wife, and as you know the very best in the world that just isn’t the case.”
“So tell!” Amjac snarled.
She told it. From the patrol forward. She went from the Medal of Honor to the nightmares, to Melvin in Wainwright, to the Army hospitals, to Chunjin and Raymond, to Raymond’s mother and Senator Iselin, to Marco’s court-martial project and General Jorgenson’s suicide. They were all quiet after she had finished. Amjac finished his highball in slow sips. “Where’s the notebook?” he asked harshly.
Marco spoke for the first time. “It’s with my gear. At Raymond’s.”
“You think you can remember any of the faces of the men in your dreams?”
“Every man, every face. One woman.”
“And one lieutenant general?”
“With Security service markings.”