In Danger's Path Read online

“No. No, thank you. We’re going back to the office. I think this remarkable young man, this fine Marine, needs some time to himself.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ve got to go back to work, too,” Senator Fowler said. “Ken, do I have to tell you if I can be of any help, in any way, all you have to do is call?”

  “Thank you, sir,” McCoy said.

  “Duty calls, gentlemen,” Rickabee said, stood up, and gestured for them to precede him out of the apartment.

  “If you get bored later on, Ken,” Captain Sessions said, “call me at the apartment after seventeen thirty.”

  “Why should he get bored?” Major Banning said. “He’s a remarkable young man, a fine Marine. That means he should be able to find something to do to keep himself from getting bored.”

  “I don’t want to see your smiling face for at least two weeks, Captain McCoy. Consider that an order,” Colonel Rickabee said.

  “Aye, aye, sir,” McCoy said.

  “On the other hand, let us know where we can get in touch with you,” Rickabee said.

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  In a moment, McCoy was alone. He took off his tunic, tossed it on the couch, pulled down his tie, and carried his drink over to the windows overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue and the White House.

  Jesus H. Christ! I really was in that building, with the President of the United States.

  You’re a long goddamned way from the machine-gun section of Baker Company, 4th Marines, in Shanghai, Corporal McCoy.

  He slowly sipped his drink.

  When the chime sounded, he was in the process of making himself another.

  He opened the door and the floor-service waiter wheeled in a cart loaded with silver lidded dishes, cutlery, a vase holding a single rose, and a towel-wrapped bottle in a silver wine cooler.

  “May I open the champagne for you, sir?”

  “No. No, thank you.”

  I don’t want any champagne. I don’t even like champagne.

  “Is there anything else you require, sir?”

  “No, thank you. This is fine.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you very much, sir.”

  The waiter left.

  No check was presented. There was a standing rule in the Foster Lafayette Hotel from Mr. Foster himself. No check would ever be presented to anyone staying in the Marquis de Lafayette suite as a guest of Brigadier General Fleming Pickering, USMCR. Foster’s only child, his daughter Patricia, was married to Pickering.

  McCoy lifted the lids on the plates. The steak was enormous. And so were the dozen oysters on their bed of ice under another lid. He dropped the lid over the oysters back in place, sat down on the couch, and reached for the telephone on the coffee table. “Person-to-person to Miss Ernestine Sage,” he ordered. “Try her first at J. Walter Thompson, the advertising agency, in New York City. I don’t know the number. If she’s not there, try Gramercy 5-4777. If there’s no answer there, try the Sage residence in Bernardsville, New Jersey. I don’t know that number either.”

  He put the telephone in its cradle, leaned back against the cushions of the couch, and closed his eyes.

  He opened them quickly and sat up when he heard the sound of a door being opened.

  A young woman was walking across the sitting room toward him. She had jet-black hair, worn in a pageboy, and she was wearing a black negligee that was almost invisible in the light coming through the windows behind her.

  She picked up the telephone. “You can cancel that call to Miss Sage, please, operator,” she said.

  She looked down at McCoy. “Well, now I know,” she said.

  “You know what?”

  “That I am more important to you than eating a steak.”

  His face contorted. His chest shook. He began to sob.

  “Oh, baby,” Ernie Sage said, and went to the couch and put her arms around him.

  He tried to sit up. “I’m sorry, honey! I’m…”

  “Shut up!” she said, then held his face against her breast and ran her hands through his hair, until, after a moment, he stopped crying.

  “I wonder if they’ll work,” Ernie said.

  “What?”

  “The oysters. There’s a dozen of them.”

  “I wondered what those bastards were up to with that oyster business,” he said.

  “Those bastards called me the minute they heard you were in California—which is more than you did. And they called me again when they knew when you were due in Washington. If it wasn’t for those bastards, you’d still be trying to talk to me on the telephone.

  “Okay. Sorry. Are you really starved? Or would a couple of oysters hold you for a while?”

  “Oh, God, Ernie, I love you.”

  “If that’s the case, what are we doing here in the living room, with all your clothes on?”

  He stood up and looked down at her, then leaned over and picked her up and carried her toward the bedroom. Halfway to the door she kissed him, which caused him to lose his sense of direction, and he collided with the door frame.

  But he quickly made the necessary course corrections, passed through the door to the bedroom, and kicked the door shut behind them.

  [THREE]

  Officers’ Club

  U.S. Navy Hospital

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  1745 17 February 1943

  “Hi,” Captain James B. Weston, USMC, said to Lieutenant (j.g.) Janice Hardison, NNC, when she slipped onto the barstool beside him.

  “Hi.”

  “May I say that you do more for that uniform than any other member of the Naval Officer Corps I have ever met?”

  Janice blushed and was furious with herself.

  “I hope you’re hungry,” he said. “I didn’t get any breakfast, as you know, and what they offered for lunch was unfit for human consumption.”

  “I have something to tell you about me,” she said.

  Oh, shit. What? You’ve got a boyfriend? Hell, yes, you’ve got a boyfriend! Someone as good-looking as you are, in the midst of all these nice young men, is not going to be alone for long.

  “I’m all ears.”

  “I want you to promise, first, that you won’t make some smart-aleck reply.”

  He held up his fingers in the manner of Boy Scouts vowing the truthfulness of what they are about to say. “Boy Scout’s Honor,” he said.

  “I’m a virgin,” Janice said.

  Just in time, he stopped himself from saying what immediately came to his mind: No problem. We can fix that tonight.

  “If that was intended to surprise me, it didn’t.”

  “And I intend to stay that way,” she said. “So maybe you may want to change your mind about…”

  “What I am offering, Lieutenant Hardison, is a lobster dinner.”

  “You know what I mean,” she said. “I just wanted to have things clear between us.”

  “They are crystal clear,” he said. “Now, would you like a drink?”

  “Yes, please,” she said. “A weak scotch.”

  He signaled the bartender and ordered her drink.

  When it was delivered, she took a quick, small sip, put the glass on the bar, looked at him, found him looking at her, and quickly dropped her eyes to her glass.

  “How do you like it?” Weston asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Boiled? Broiled? Thermidor?”

  “I don’t know,” she confessed. “I’ve never had lobster before.”

  What does that make you, a lobster virgin?

  “Really?”

  “Kansas—Wichita—is a long way from the ocean,” Janice said.

  “It’s even farther from Scotland,” he said.

  “My father’s a doctor,” she said. “He taught me to drink scotch.”

  And how to keep it till marriage, right?

  “What kind of a doctor?”

  “A psychiatrist,” she said.

  “And that’s why you became a psychiatric nurse?”

  “I was in a tes
t program at the University…of Kansas, at the Medical School. The university offers a four-year course in nursing. You need an undergraduate degree to get into medical school. They wondered how well a B.S.N. would do in medical school—hopefully better than the usual B.S. or B.A.”

  “B.S.N.? Bachelor of Science, Nursing?”

  “Right. So I was one of the guinea pigs.”

  “How does one get to be a guinea pig?”

  “It helps if your father is a professor of medicine,” she said.

  “So why aren’t you in medical school?”

  “Well, the war came along, the Navy came around recruiting nurses, and Daddy said I should take it. Daddy said I could get more clinical experience as a nurse in the service than I would get as a psychiatric resident.”

  Daddy said? Daddy said, “Daughter Darling, go in the Navy, drink scotch, and hang on to your pearl of great price until you get married”?

  Well, what the hell is wrong with that?

  “What about you?” Janice asked.

  “University of Iowa,” he said. “I was raised in Des Moines. Offered a chance for flight school, joined the Corps, and here I am.”

  “Your parents?”

  “My mother died when I was a kid, and my father—he was in the insurance business—died when I was in college.”

  “Brothers and sisters?”

  “Neither. Just an aunt.”

  “I have two brothers,” she said. “Both doctors. One surgeon and one proctologist. My mother was a nurse before she married my father.”

  “What’s a proctologist?”

  “It deals with the lower intestines,” she said after a brief hesitation.

  His face lit up. “I know what it means!” he remembered.

  “I thought you might,” she said, and smiled at him.

  Goddamn, she’s really sweet.

  Well, why not? Good solid family. Daddy’s a doctor, Mommy’s a nurse, she was baby sister to two brothers. Either of whom would probably cheerfully break both my legs if I changed her virginal status. Or pull my tonsils through the terminus of my lower intestines with surgical forceps.

  “We ate lobster in Iowa,” Weston said. “God only knows how it got there, but there it was.”

  “I’m sure we had them in Kansas, too,” she said, loyally. “My family just never ate them.”

  “Charley Galloway told me to go where we’re going tonight,” Weston said. “Caroline took him there. Place called Bookbinder’s.”

  “I’ve been there,” she said, “a couple of times. I’ve gone as far as clam chowder and broiled flounder, but so far I haven’t had the courage for lobster or oysters. Raw oysters.”

  “I’d stay away from raw oysters if I were you,” Weston said without thinking first.

  Janice blushed.

  Oh, shit. You and your big mouth. She’s heard what oysters are supposed to do to you.

  And she blushed. She’s a nurse, she’s heard everything, seen everything, and it hasn’t touched her, otherwise she wouldn’t be blushing.

  “Yes, thank you, Captain Weston,” Commander Jerome J. Kister, MC, USNR, said, as he took the barstool beside Janice Hardison, “I will permit you to buy me a drink. I spent most of the afternoon on the telephone about you.”

  “Do I have to buy you the drink before you tell me what happened?”

  “Jim!” Janice said.

  “Yes, you do,” Kister said, “and let me say how delighted I am that you two have reached some sort of armistice.”

  “It was love at first sight,” Weston said. “But she’s having trouble adjusting to that.”

  “Oh, Jim!” Janice said.

  “You mean all you wanted was a lobster?”

  “I’m still not sure I want a lobster,” she said.

  “The Junior Assistant Deputy Surgeon General of the United States Navy,” Kister said, hoping to turn their attention away from each other to him. When he had their attention, he went on, “Or was it the Deputy Assistant Junior Surgeon General?”

  “You tell me,” Weston said. “I’m all ears.”

  “Whatever his title,” Kister said, “he’s now the guy who makes decisions in cases like yours. He’s a captain.” He paused. “I suspect the sonofabitch was an obstetrician in civilian life,” he sighed, “and I’d be very surprised to learn he’s ever been afloat in anything larger than a canoe. Be that as it may, the Captain is absolutely unwilling to accept my professional opinion that you are no crazier than any other Marine….”

  “Oh, shit!” Weston said bitterly, and then, remembering the company, quickly added, “Sorry, Janice.”

  “He said that he was surprised that someone of my experience would risk his reputation by making a snap judgment.”

  “So what happens now?” Jim asked, quietly furious.

  “That was the bad news,” Kister said. “Or almost all of it. I told you they—they being this obstetrician drunk with his own power—would challenge the physical you had at Pearl Harbor.”

  “And he did.”

  “And he did. But the good news is that he did agree to accept the opinion of the medical staff here vis à vis your general physical condition.”

  “I don’t understand,” Weston said.

  “Presuming nothing bad shows up on your lab work—your blood, urine, that sort of thing, and I don’t think it will—on the physical you took this morning, I can certify you as physically fit to enter upon your convalescent leave and get orders cut for you to go to the Greenbrier. You can be out of here in a couple of days, in other words.”

  The downside to that is that if I’m out of here, I will also be away from Janice.

  “Explain that ‘orders cut to go to the Greenbrier’ to me.”

  “The Greenbrier is a luxury resort hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, which you could not possibly afford under normal circumstances. In the abnormal circumstances existing today, however, you can, because it’s free. The government has taken the place over, thrown out the undeserving rich, and made it available for the rest and rehabilitation of returned heroes such as yourself.”

  “And if I don’t want to go to this luxury hotel in the wilds of West Virginia?”

  “You don’t seem to understand. You will be placed on orders. You will, on temporary duty for a period of thirty days, proceed to the Greenbrier Hotel. You will rest and recuperate, and incidentally be psychologically evaluated.”

  “By who? I thought you were the head doctor.”

  “By a fellow practitioner of the Freudian medical arts. Who enjoys, I think I should warn you, his reputation as one mean sonofabitch. Excuse me, Janice.”

  “In other words, this luxury hotel is a funny farm?”

  “No. But the Navy wants to make absolutely sure that you are in possession of your faculties before you are turned loose on the public. They don’t, for example, want you to slit the throat of your friendly neighborhood policeman because you think he is a Japanese soldier.”

  “Jim,” Janice said, “some of the men who have gone through what you have gone through are really disturbed.”

  He looked at her, and found her compassion-filled eyes both disconcerting and pleasing.

  That is not a professional, be-nice-to-the-loony look. I think she really likes me.

  By “really disturbed” Janice means loony-tune time. I suppose that explains the ambulance and the two Corpsmen at the airport, and those two gorillas who took me to Ward Five-B.

  “I’m not disturbed,” he said.

  “No,” Dr. Kister said, “you’re not. But the obstetrician in the Navy Department doesn’t want to take any chances. From his point of view, he’s just taking a routine precaution. And he has the authority.”

  “Damn!”

  “So you will undergo at least four sessions of counseling and evaluation at the Greenbrier over a thirty-day period. Then you will return here, and presuming you can convince Dr. Bolemann that you pose no threat to the cop on the beat, or anyone else, I will be able t
o certify you as both physically and psychologically fit for flight status. Then you will go to Pensacola, Florida, where, according to General McInerney, you will be taught to fly all over again.”

  “Jesus.”

  “And I also have for you some advice from General McInerney—actually, it’s more in the way of an order. You will do what you’re told and keep your mouth shut. Are there any questions, Captain?”

  “No, sir,” Weston said. “Thanks, Doc.”

  “Nothing to thank me for,” Commander Kister said. “I would have done whatever was necessary to get you out of my smooth-running hospital, and get you away from my nurses.”

  Janice chuckled.

  “Can I drive to this place? Or is Janice going to take me there, strapped down to a stretcher in the back of an ambulance?”

  “You could, if you had a car,” Commander Kister said. “You don’t, do you?”

  “I was thinking of buying one,” Weston said.

  “I can see some problems with that,” Kister said. “For one thing, have you got a driver’s license?”

  “I think mine has probably expired,” Weston said.

  “I’ll bet it has,” Kister said, chuckling. “Don’t tell me you’ve been carrying it around all this time? In the steaming jungles of Mindanao?”

  “No,” Weston said, chuckling. “I’m going to have to get one.”

  “I could take you for your test,” Janice said. “They give the test in Fairmount Park.”

  “Next problem, Doctor?” Weston asked, smiling at her.

  “There’s gasoline and tire rationing,” Kister said. “The war, you know.”

  “I can deal with that,” Weston said.

  “And there is a nationwide thirty-five-mph speed limit,” Kister said.

  “Now, there’s a problem,” Weston said.

  “Why the hell do you want a car?” Kister asked.

  “So I can drive from this luxury funny farm you’re sending me—”

  “I’m not sending you,” Kister interrupted. “A grateful nation is sending you. So far as I’m concerned, I’d put you to work. You’ve had a whole year off, lying around a tropical paradise, eating pineapples.”

  “And other interesting tropical fruit. Not much meat, but all the pineapples I could eat.”

  “Really?” Janice asked.

  “This time, really really,” he said. “We operated around the Dole pineapple plantations.”