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  “I’m always willing to do what I can to help out a fellow hotelier,” Pickering said. “That sounds fine.”

  They ceremoniously shook hands.

  The good-looking blonde who had come to Pickering’s table with the unsolicited Good Samaritan warning about Captain Carstairs stood up and walked out of the coffee shop. She had nice legs, and her skirt revealed much of the shape of her derriere. Pickering thought of himself, by and large, as a derriere man. This was one of the nicer derrieres he’d come across lately, and he gave it the careful study an object of beauty clearly deserved. Pity the owner was impressed with her role as an officer’s wife.

  And then he became aware that Gayfer was watching him stare.

  “Some things do tend to catch one’s eye, don’t they?” Pick said.

  There was not the understanding smile on Gayfer’s face that he expected.

  “I saw the wedding ring,” Pick said. “No offense intended. Just a statement of appreciation.”

  “She’s a widow,” Gayfer said.

  Pickering’s eyebrows rose in question.

  “Her name is Martha Culhane,” Gayfer said. “Martha Sayre Culhane.”

  “Is that name supposed to mean something to me?” Pickering asked.

  “Her father is Admiral Sayre,” Gayfer said. “He’s the number-three man at the Naval air station. Her husband is…was…a Marine pilot. He was killed at Wake Island.”

  “Oh, God!” Pickering said softly.

  “She’s not the only service wife around here to suddenly find herself a widow,” Gayfer said. “This is a Navy town. But when she went home to her family, it was back into admiral’s quarters on the base. I think that made it tougher for her. If she was back in Cedar Rapids or someplace, she wouldn’t be surrounded by uniforms.”

  “What was she doing here this time of morning?”

  “She hangs around the Marine fliers. The ones who were friends of her husband. They sort of take care of her.”

  Pickering would have liked an explanation of “hangs around” and “take care of her,” but he suppressed the urge to ask for one.

  No wonder, he thought, that she looked at me with such amused contempt.

  “When you’re through, I’ll show you the suite,” Gayfer said.

  “I’m through,” Pickering said, and stood up.

  “Where’s your car?” Gayfer asked as they entered the lobby.

  The widow was standing, sidewards to him, by a stack of newspapers on the marble desk. Nice legs, Pickering thought idly, again, and then he saw how her skirt was drawn tight against her stomach, and his mind’s eye was suddenly filled with a surprisingly clear image of her naked belly.

  Goddamn you! You sonofabitch! She’s a widow, for Christ’s sake. Her husband was shot down!

  “Out in front,” he replied to Gayfer.

  “The Cadillac with the California plates?”

  Pickering nodded.

  “Give me the keys,” Gayfer said, and Pickering handed them to him.

  There was a new clerk behind the desk. Gayfer walked over to him, gave him the keys, told him to have the bellman bring the bags in the Cadillac convertible outside up to the penthouse, and then to put the Cadillac in the parking lot.

  The widow (Martha Sayre Culhane, Pickering remembered), who couldn’t help but overhear what Gayfer said, looked at Pickering with unabashed curiosity.

  Gayfer, smiling, led Pickering to the elevator. When Pickering turned and faced front, Martha Sayre Culhane was still looking at him.

  (Three)

  Second Lieutenant Malcolm Pickering, USMCR, had learned from Second Lieutenant Kenneth J. McCoy, USMCR, a number of things about the United States Marine Corps that were not taught in the Platoon Leader’s Course at United States Marine Corps’ Schools, Quantico.

  One of them was that a commissioned officer of the United States Marine Corps was not required to use rail tickets issued to move officially from one place to another. Such rail tickets, Pickering had learned from McCoy, were issued for the officer’s convenience.

  “There’s two ways to do it, Pick,” McCoy had explained. “The best way, if you know they’re going to issue orders, is to request TPA—Travel by Private Auto—first. If they give you that, they also give you duty time to make the trip…four, five hundred miles a day. Three days, in other words, to get from Washington to Pensacola. Then they pay you so much a mile.

  “But even if you don’t have TPA on your orders, you can take your car. You don’t get any extra travel time, all you get is what it would have taken you to make the trip by train. But when you get there, you can turn in your ticket, and tell them you traveled TPA, and they’ll still pay you by the mile.”

  There was more: “The duty day runs from oh-oh-oh-one to twenty-four hundred.”

  That had required explanation, and McCoy had furnished it.

  “Whether it’s one minute after midnight in the morning when you leave, or half-past eleven that night, that’s one day. And whether you report in after midnight or twenty-three-and-a-half hours later, so far as the Corps is concerned, it’s the same day. So the trick is to leave just after midnight, and report in just before midnight.”

  And there had been a final sage word of advice from McCoy: “And never report in early. You report in early, they’ll find something for you to do between the time you reported in and when they expected you. Something nobody else wants to do, like counting spoons, or inspecting grease pits.”

  Second Lieutenant Pickering’s orders, transferring him from U.S. Marine Barracks, Washington, D.C., to Navy Air Station, Pensacola, Florida, for the purpose of undergoing training as a Naval aviator, had given him a ten-day delay en route leave, plus the necessary time to make the journey by rail. The schedule for rail travel called for a forty-nine-hour journey. Since forty-nine hours was one hour more than two days, he had three full days to make the rail trip.

  He had flown from his Authorized Leave Destination—in other words, New York City—to Atlanta, and then driven through the night to Pensacola. He had two days of travel time left when he got to Pensacola; and taking McCoy’s advice as the Gospel, he had no intention of reporting in early and finding himself counting spoons or inspecting grease pits.

  He went to bed in the penthouse suite of the San Carlos and slept through the day, rising in time for the cocktail hour. He had a couple of drinks at the bar, then dinner, and then a couple of more drinks. He looked for, but did not see, the Widow Culhane, and told himself this was idle curiosity, nothing more.

  Suspecting that if he stayed in the bar, he would get tanked up, which would not be a smart thing for a just-reporting-in second lieutenant to do, he left the bar and wandered around downtown Pensacola.

  It was, as Chester Gayfer had told him, a Navy town. Every third male on the streets was in Navy blue. There were fewer Marines, though, and most of them seemed to be officers. There were more service people on the streets of Pensacola, Pickering decided as he saluted for the twentieth or thirtieth time, than there were in Washington.

  He went into the Bijou Theatre, taking advantage of the price reduction for servicemen, and watched Ronald Reagan playing a Naval aviator in a movie called Dive Bomber. He was fascinated with the airplanes, and with the notion—truth being stranger than fiction—that he might soon be flying an airplane himself.

  When the movie was over (he had walked in in the middle) and the lights went up, he kept his seat and stayed for the Bugs Bunny cartoon and The March of Time, much of which was given over to footage of the “Arsenal of Democracy” gearing up its war production.

  When Dive Bomber started up again, he walked out of the theater and back to the San Carlos Hotel bar.

  This time the Widow Culhane (Martha Sayre Culhane, her full name came to him) was there, in the center of a group of Marine officers and their wives and girl friends. All wore the gold wings of Navy aviators. Among them was Captain Mustache Carstairs, the one who had objected to his unshaven chin and mussed uniform th
e day before.

  As Pickering had his drinks, both of them looked at him, the Marine captain with what Pick thought was a professional curiosity (“Has that slovenly disgrace to the Marine Corps finally taken a shave?”) and Martha Sayre Culhane with a look he could not interpret.

  Pick had two drinks, and then left. He went to the penthouse suite and took off his uniform, everything but his shorts, and sat on the patio looking up at the stars and smoking a cigar until he felt himself growing sleepy. Then he went to bed.

  VI

  (One)

  420 Lexington Avenue

  New York City

  1135 Hours, 8 January 1942

  When her telephone rang, Miss Ernestine Sage was sitting pushed back in her chair with her hands—their fingers intertwined—on top of her head, looking at the preliminary artwork for a Mint-Fresh Tooth Paste advertisement, which would eventually appear in Life, The Saturday Evening Post, and sixteen other magazines; and on several thousand billboards across the nation.

  The preliminary artwork showed a good-looking, wholesome blonde with marvelous teeth saying something. A balloon was drawn on the preliminary drawing. When Miss Sage decided exactly what Miss Mint-Fresh was going to say (and after that had been approved by her senior copywriter; her assistant account executive; her vice president and account executive; the vice president, creative; and, of course, the client) it would be put inside the balloon.

  Right now the balloon was empty. The preliminary artwork gave the impression, Miss Sage had just been thinking, that someone had just whispered an obscenity in Miss Mint-Fresh’s ear, and Miss Mint-Fresh had been rendered speechless.

  Miss Ernestine Sage took one hand from the top of her head and reached for the telephone.

  “Mint-Fresh,” she said to the telephone. “Ernie Sage.”

  “Hello, honey,” her caller said. “I’m glad I caught you.”

  “Hello, Daddy,” Ernie Sage said. She had been expecting the call. She had, in fact, expected it yesterday.

  She spun in her chair so that she could rest her feet on the windowsill. The window in Miss Ernestine Sage’s closet-sized office at J. Walter Thompson Advertising, Inc. offered a splendid view of the roof of a smaller building next door, and then of the windows of the building next to that.

  Miss Sage was a copywriter, which was a rank in the J. Walter Thompson hierarchy as well as a description of her function. In the Creative Division, the low man on the corporate totem pole was a “trainee.” Next above that came “editorial assistant,” then “junior copywriter.” Above “copywriter” came “senior copywriter.” Beyond that, one who kept one’s nose to the grindstone could expect to move upward over the years to “assistant account executive” and “account executive” and possibly even into the “vice president and account executive” and plain “vice president” categories.

  It had taken Miss Sage about three weeks to figure out that JWT, as it was known to the advertising cognoscenti, passed out titles in one or both of two ways. The first was in lieu of a substantial increase in salary, and the other was with an eye on JWT’s clients. Just as JWT sold a myriad of products to the public by extolling their virtues, so it sold itself to its clients with manifestations of the degree of importance in which it held them.

  A very important client, “a multimillion biller,” for example, such as American Personal Pharmaceutical, Inc., who the previous year had spent “12.3 mil” in bringing its array of products before the American public, had one JWT vice president, four JWT vice presidents and account executives, eight JWT account executives, and God only knew how many JWT assistant account executives and senior copywriters devoting their full attention to American Personal Pharmaceutical’s products.

  Miss Sage was in the “Mint-Fresh” shop. Mint-Fresh was the third best-selling of American Personal Pharmaceutical’s family of five products intended to brighten America’s (and for that matter, the world’s) teeth.

  Miss Sage was one of three copywriters reporting to a senior copywriter, who reported to the Mint-Fresh account executive, who reported to the vice president and account executive, APP Dental Products. There were three other vice presidents and account executives, one for APP Cosmetic Products (shampoos, acne medicines, hair tonics, et cetera); one for APP Health Products (cold remedies, cough syrups, et cetera); and one for APP Personal Products (originally nostrums for feminine complaints, but now—after APP had acquired controlling interest in the companies involved in their manufacture—including three brands of sanitary napkins and eleven brands of rubber prophylactics).

  Each of the vice presidents and account executives had his own empire of account executives, assistant account executives, and so on through the hierarchy, under him.

  Miss Sage knew more than just about any other copywriter about the upper echelons of the “APP Family” for the same reason that she had had very little trouble getting herself hired by JWT. That was not, as the vice president, creative personnel had publicly announced, because she had proved herself to be a very bright girl, indeed, by coming out of Sarah Lawrence with a summa cum laude degree (BA, English), just the kind of person JWT was always on the lookout for. Rather it was because the grandson of the founder of American Personal Pharmaceuticals (Ezekiel Handley, M.D., whose first product was “Dr. Handley’s Female Elixir”) was now chairman of the board and chief executive officer. His name was Ernest Sage, and he was Ernie’s father.

  This is not to suggest that Ernie Sage regarded her job as a sort of hobby, a socially acceptable, even chic, way to pass the time until she made a suitable marriage and took her proper place in society. She had decided in her freshman year at Sarah Lawrence that she wanted to make (as opposed to inherit) a lot of money. And after an investigation of the means to do that open to females, she had decided the way to do it was in advertising.

  She had learned as much about the business as she could while in college, and she had taken courses she thought would be of value to that end. When she graduated, she had two choices. The summa cum laude would have been enough to get her a job on Madison Avenue if her name hadn’t been Sage. But she decided two things about JWT. First, that they were arguably the best and biggest of all the large agencies and would thus offer her the opportunity to learn all facets of the business; and, second, with APP as their next-to-largest client, she would have certain privileges, while learning her chosen profession, that she would not have elsewhere.

  It was her intention—once she felt secure, once she had learned the way things worked in the real world, once she had a portfolio of work she had done—to open her own agency. Just her, and an artist, and a secretary. She would find some small manufacturer of something who was bright enough to figure out that he wasn’t getting JWT’s full attention with billings under a hundred thou and convince him that she could give him more for his money than he would get elsewhere. She would build on that; she grew more and more convinced that she could.

  Everything had gone according to plan, including the exercise of special privilege. She had almost bluntly told the vice president and account executive, APP Personal Products, that, substantial jump in pay or not, promotion to senior copywriter or not, she would not want to “move over into his shop” and put her now-demonstrated talents to work there.

  There were a number of nice things about being rich, she told herself, and one of them was not needing a job so badly that she would have to spend her time thinking up appealing ways to sell Kotex-by-another-name and rubbers.

  And then Ken McCoy had come along. And the best-laid plans of mice and men, et cetera.

  The call she was taking from her father right now came about as a result of a call he had made to her the day after Thanksgiving. You were not supposed to make or receive personal calls at JWT, and rumor had it that there was official eavesdropping to make sure the rule was obeyed. No one had ever said anything to Ernie Sage about her personal calls.

  “Honey, am I interrupting anything?” he’d said that Thanksgiving Fr
iday.

  “Actually, I’m flying paper airplanes out the window,” she’d told him, truthfully. The way the air currents moved outside her window, paper airplanes would fly for astonishingly long periods of time.

  “Has Pick called?”

  “Any reason he should?” she’d replied. “I didn’t even know he was in town.”

  Malcolm “Pick” Pickering had grown up calling her father “Uncle Ernie.” Ernie Sage knew that sometimes her father wished she had been born a boy, since there was to be only one child. But since she was a girl, there was little secret that everybody concerned would be thrilled to death if Pick suddenly looked at her like Clark Gable had looked at Scarlett before carrying her up the stairs.

  “He is,” Ernest Sage had said. “He’s at the Foster Park.”

  “He called you?” she had asked.

  “He left a message on the bulletin board at the Harvard Club,” her father had said.

  “Why didn’t he just call?” she had asked. “Wouldn’t that have been easier?”

  “He didn’t leave a message for me,” her father had said, as realization dawned that he was having his leg pulled. “Don’t be such a wise-ass. Nobody likes a wise-ass in skirts.”

  “Sorry,” she’d laughed.

  “He’s having a party.”

  “I thought he was in Virginia playing Marine,” she’d replied.

  “I don’t think he’s playing Marine,” her father had said, more than a little sharply.

  “Sorry,” she’d said again, this time meaning it.

  “He’s giving a party,” her father had said. “Cocktails. I think you should go.”

  “I haven’t been invited,” she’d replied, simply.

  “The thing on the bulletin board said ‘all friends and acquaintances.’ You would seem to qualify.”

  “If Pick wanted me, he knows my phone number,” she’d said.