W E B Griffin - BoW 03 - The Majors Page 9

  "I have a Major Felter on the line, Major," a voice Lowell recognized to be that of his cousin's, Porter Craig's, secretary said. "May I transfer it?"

  "By all means," Lowell said.

  He heard her say, "One moment, Major Felter, I have Major

  Lowell for you."

  "Mouse, you little bastard!" Major Lowell said.

  "I'm at LaGuardia," Major Felter said. "Where are you?"

  "What the hell are you doing at LaGuardia?"

  "I came to see you off," Major Felter said.

  "Hold on, Mouse," Major Lowell said. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and turned to face the other man in the room, his "stepfather," Andre Pretier. "Can I use your car?"

  "Yes, of course."

  "Mouse, go to the Pan American counter and give them my name," Lowell said. "Tell them I'm going to meet you.

  "They have taxicabs," Major Felter said.

  "Go to the god damned lounge," Lowell said. "I'll be there in twenty minutes." He hung up before Felter could protest further.

  "The chap they thought had been killed?" Andre Pretier asked.

  "Uh huh," Lowell said. "He came to see me off."

  "Will you see that we can take care of the major's guest?"

  Andre Pretier said to the butler.

  The butler dipped his head, and walked silently out of the room.

  "You want some more of this, Andre?" Lowell asked, holding up the bottle of cognac. Andre Pretier shook his head,

  "no."

  "But help yourself," he said, and then he said: "Sorry, Craig.

  I seem to be unable to remember this is your house."

  "Shit," Lowell said, and then he chuckled. "Sorry, Andre,

  I seem to be unable to remember one doesn't say shit' in polite company."

  Andre Pretier smiled and raised his snifter in salute.

  "May I make a suggestion?" Pretier asked.

  "Yes, of course."

  "You've had a bit of that," he said. "Are you all right to driver'

  The eyes turned icy again. But then Major Lowell said,

  "No, of course I'm not." He pushed a button, and in a moment, the butler reappeared.

  "Would you ask Thomas to go to the Pan American VIP lounge at LaGuardia," Andre Pretier ordered, "and pick up a...

  "Major Sanford T. Felter," Lowell supplied.

  "Yes, sir," the butler said.

  The butler returned to the bar forty minutes later.

  "Major Felter, Major Lowell," he announced.

  Felter, wearing a baggy, ill-fitting suit, walked into the room. Lowell jumped out of his chair, hesitated awkwardly, then gave in to the emotion. He went quickly to the slight man, wrapped his arms around him, and lifted him off the ground.

  "For God's sake, Craig!" Felter protested. Lowell set him down.

  "I'm glad to see you, you little shit," Lowell said. "I thought you were pushing up daisies."

  Andre Pretier got to his feet.

  "Mouse, this is my stepfather," Lowell said. "Andre Pretier.

  Andre, Sandy Felter."

  "A genuine pleasure, Major Felter," Pretier said.

  "How do you do, sir?" Felter said, shaking his hand.

  "What do you want to drink, Mouser' Lowell asked.

  "Have you got a Coke? Or ginger ale?"

  "Can you imagine this teetotaling little bastard jumping into

  Dien Bien Phu, Andre?"

  "For God's sake, Craig!" Felter protested again.

  "The Mouse is a spook, Andre," Lowell said. "He sees

  Russian spies hiding behind every set of drapes."

  "What are you celebrating?" Felter asked, coldly. He had seen that Lowell was drunk.

  "Craig was in Hartford," Andre Pretier said. "Visiting his mother."

  "How is she?" Felter asked.

  "Progressing nicely' is the phrase they used," Lowell said.

  "I'm glad to hear that," Felter said, politely.

  "What that means is that she hasn't gone any further over the edge," Lowell said. He looked at Andre Pretier. "I have no secrets from the Mouse, Andre," he said. "But if that was out of line, I'm sorry."

  "Not at all," Pretier said. "What we're doing for my wife, and Craig's mother, Major, is trying to get her the best help we can. It doesn't seem to be working as well as we had hoped."

  "I'm sorry," Felter said.

  "To get off that unpleasant subject, Mouse," Lowell said,

  "what brings you to Sodom on Hudson?"

  "I wanted to see you off," Felter said. "I wanted to thank you for going to see Sharon."

  "Shit," Lowell said. He smiled a little drunkenly at Andre

  Pretier. "There I go again, 01' Sewer Mouth."

  "Sharon told me what you did, Craig," Felter said.

  "Christ, I hope not. You mean she told you I proposed?"

  Felter shook his head resignedly.

  "When are you going?" he asked.

  "Half past ten," Lowell said. "Pan American has a sleeper flight to Paris. And then I'll catch the Main-Seiner to Frankfurt."

  "Then I'm glad I decided to come today," Felter said. "If

  I had waited until tomorrow, you would have gone without calling. Exactly as you left the house an hour before I got there."

  "Well, since you were still alive, I realized that Sharon wasn't going to marry me," Lowell said. "So there was no point in my staying for your great here I am home, straight from the mouth of deaths scene"

  "How did you find out, Craig?" Felter asked. "Sharon said you got there an hour after the notification team."

  "Actually, it was closer to two houm," Lowell said. "I had a little trouble finding an air-taxi."

  "And you're not going to tell me who told you?"

  "So you can turn him in for breaking security?" Lowell asked. "No way, Mouse."

  "OK, let it go," Felter said. "Tell me about flight school."

  "There I was, ten thousand feet up, with nothing between me and the earth but a thin blond..

  "How much have you had to drink?" Felter asked.

  "A bunch," Lowell said. "I wasn't prepared for Hartford."

  "I tried to tell him, Major, that she probably wouldn't recognize him," Andre Pretier said. "But he insisted on going."

  "Tell me about Dien Bien Phu," Lowell said. "What the hell were you and Mac doing there in the first place?"

  "You know more than you should already, Craig," Felter said.

  "I want to hear about you and MacMillan running around in the jungle," Lowell insisted. "After bailing out of a gloriously aflame airplane."

  "I'm beginning to suspect who you talked to," Felter said.

  "What happened, for Christ's sake?"

  "Perhaps," Andre Pretier said, "it would be better if I excused myself."

  Felter looked at him a moment.

  "There's no need..

  "Excuse me," Andre Pretier said, and got up and walked out of the room.

  "I'm not supposed to talk about this," Felter said. "And you know it. And I feel badly about asking him to leave his own living room."

  "This is the bar," Lowell said, "not the living room. And it's mine, not his."

  "God, you're impossible. You know what I mean."

  "That's so much bullshit," Lowell said. "If you can't tell me, Mouse, who can you tell?"

  "Maybe I will have a drink," Felter said. "Can I trust you to keep your mouth shut?" He answered his own question.

  "No, of course, I can't," he said. "But every spook has to have one weakneds. You're mine."

  He related what had happened at Dien Bien Phu, painting a picture of himself as a rear echelon chair-warmer being led to safety through the Indo-China forest by a French Foreign

  Legion corporal, one of the Army's most decorated parachutists, and a nineteen-year-old sergeant with a sawed-off shotgun.

  Lowell automatically added Felter's role to their exploits.

  In his judgment, Major Sanford Felter was quite as accomplished a close combat warrior as MacMi
llan or anyone else

  Lowell had ever met in the service. He had seen Felter in action; in fact, he owed his life to Felter, who had blown away an officer who had stood in the way of a reinforcement column coming to Lowell's rescue during counterinsurgency operations in Greece.

  A mental picture came into Lowell's mind of Felter in Indo

  China in his tropical worsted uniform, the large.45 automatic he was never without held in front of him with both hands. He literally wasn't large enough, or his thin wrists strong enough, to fire the.45 with one hand. With two hands, firing slowly and deliberately, he seldom missed. He was literally a dead shot.

  "So, with appropriate pomp and ceremony," Felter concluded,

  "during a barrage of 105 mm fire, cannon and ammo courtesy of the First Cavalry, we were formally inducted as honorary members of the 3rd Regiment Parachutiste of the

  French Foreign Legion."

  "Christ," Lowell said, "I wish I had been there." He wondered if he really meant that. He knew that his saying so had pleased Felter, for Felter had long had the notion (Lowell considered it unfounded) that Lowell was a natural-born combat soldier.

  "They tried to give us the Croix de guerre," Felter said.

  "Naturally, since we weren't supposed to be there in the first place, there's no way we'll be allowed to accept it."

  "Christ, and what I've been doing, at enormous expense, is learning how to fly a whirlybird," Lowell said.

  "Tell me about it," Felter said.

  "Nothing to tell," Lowell said. "It's just as idiotic, having a major fly a helicopter, as I thought it would be. Like assigning a major as a jeep driver. I felt like a god damned fool, when, with the band playing and flags flying, they pinned our wings on us."

  "You don't believe that," Felter said, firmly.

  "I don't know if I do or not, Mouse," Lowell said, drunk- serious. "I have to be periodically rebrainwashed; my faith wavers."

  Felter glanced out the window and saw Andre Pretier walking on the wide lawn which stretched from the house down to the water's edge. He opened the French doors and walked out to him.

  "I seem to have run you out of your own house," he said.

  "But I'm through talking about what I shouldn't have talked about, if you'd like to come back in."

  "I understand," Pretier said. Felter led him back into the house.

  "What we're talking about now is the importance of aviation to the army," Felter said. "I'm afraid it's not all that interesting."

  "I don't even know what you're talking about," Andre Pretier said. "Craig, frankly, hasn't talked much about what he's been doing."

  "He's been becoming an army aviator," Felter said.

  "My ignorance is total," Pretier said. "I didn't know the army even had aviators."

  "When the air force became autonomous, Andre," Felter began, and Andre Pretier sensed that Felter was relieved to have found a safe subject for conversation, "they began to devote most of their effort toward bombers and high-speed fighters, and to rockets. The army needs light aircraft, right on the battlefield. Since the air force was unable to provide them, the army was given authority to develop its own air serviceŽarmy aviation. Craig is in on the ground floor."

  "There are a few wild-eyed madmen around, Andre," Lowell said, wryly, "who envision entire divisions being airlifted by helicopters."

  "I see," Pretier said. "And you saw, or see, enough merit in this theory to leave tanks? As Guderian saw enough merit in the blitzloieg to change over to the German tank corps from signals as a colonel?"

  "Would that it were so," Lowell said. "The cold truth,

  Andre, is that my last efficiency report in Korea was so bad that I had the choice between going to army aviation or turning in my soldier suit."

  Pretier looked in surprise at Felter, saw the pained look on his face, and knew that Lowell was telling the truth.

  "It wasn't quite that bad, Craig,"ŽFelter said.

  "You know better than that, Mouse," Lowell said. "Cut the bullshit."

  "But you were decorated in Korea," Pretier said, genuinely surprised. "Several times decorated. And promoted."

  "That was before I fucked up," Lowell said, helping himself to more cognac.

  "What did you do?"

  "You are looking, Andre," Lowell said, making a mock bow, "at one of the few, perhaps the only, soldier in Korea who got into a sexual scandal with a white woman."

  "I am not surprised," Pretier said, trying to make a joke of it.

  "The establishment was almost as pissed about that as they were when I stood up in a court-martial and announced, under oath, that I could see a situation in combat where an officer has the duty to blow away another officer who is not doing his duty."

  Andre Pretier looked at Sanford Felter again, and again got confirmation from the pained look on his face that Lowell was telling the truth.

  "Who was the woman?" Pretier asked, choosing, he hoped, the least delicate of the two subjects.

  "Georgia Paige," Lowell said.

  "The actress?" Pretier asked. "The one who..."

  "Goes without a bra?" Lowell filled in for him. "Yes, indeed, that Georgia Paige."

  "And that is what you were doing in Los Angeles when you first came back?" Pretier asked.

  "It didn't take long," Lowell said, bitterly, "for it to become painfully apparent that Georgia and I, to coin a phrase, were simply ships that had passed in the night."

  "What happened, Craig?" Felter asked, and it was a demand for information from a friend that could not be denied.

  Lowell didn't reply immediately. Felter wondered if he was thinking over his reply, or deciding whether or not to reply at all.

  "We hit it off pretty good in Korea," Lowell said.

  "How did you arrange that? In Korea, I mean?" Felter asked.

  "I think she was carried away with the warrior image,"

  Lowell said. "I showed her my tank, and that seemed to excite her."

  "Come on!"

  "Scout's honor, Mouse. That's where it happened. Some of the immature judgment' my efficiency report talks about was taking her up to the line, to my old ouffit."

  "That was immature," Felter said. "Also stupid."

  "Be that as it may, it excited the lady," Lowell said. "And true and undying passion burst into flower. And I returned to the ZI full of youthful dreams. I would pick her up in L.A., and I would fly off to romantic Germany with her, where she would instantly form a fond attachment to my son. We would thereupon start !looking for a small house by the side of the road, where we could be friends to man and start making babies."

  "What happened?"

  "For one thing, she was making a movie and couldn't get away for six weeks, and then when the subject of Peter-Paul came up, she said, Oh, yeah. Your kid. I forgot about that."'

  "Oh," Sandy Felter said, sympathetically.

  "I began to wonder if she would really make the loving stepmother I believed she would," Lowell said. "Ah, shit, what's the difference?"

  "Did she know you're rich?" Felter asked.

  "We rich say well off,' Mouse," Lowell said.

  Felter decided he was onto something.

  "She wanted you to get out of the army, and you wouldn't do it?" he asked.

  "We didn't get that far," Lowell said.

  "But she knew you were well-off'?"

  "I don't really know. She knew, of course, that I had some clout out there in movieland. The firm, by an interesting coincidence, was financing her movie. If we hadn't been, I don't think I would have been allowed near her. Christ, I had to pull in all the clout I had to get in touch with her. But that wasn't it, one way or the other. What it was was that I was such a god damned fool that I mistook a marvelous piece of tail for love."

  "I'm sorry, Craig," Felter said.

  "I thought all my problems were over when Bellmon called me... oops, that slipped out, didn't it?... and told me you had gone to a hero's grave in far-off Indo-China. After a suitable period, as short as p
ossible, I would marry Sharon, and all of my problems would be solved."