A Man Called Milo Morai

VII

Tech Sergeant Milo Moray found Fort Holabird tiny, as posts went, located almost within the actual city limits of Baltimore. Security measures were tight and stringently enforced by a profusion of well-armed guards. Badges and cards bearing photos and fingerprints were de rigueur everywhere on the minuscule post, and without the proper combinations of badges and cards, no individual could even come within close proximity to many of the buildings.

Not that all that much of seeming importance appeared to be happening within those buildings which Milo possessed the proper credentials to enter. After tests had established that he owned a decent command of Swedish, he was set to work that was very reminiscent of what he had done for Dr. Osterreich in Chicago five years before. Day after day, he was presented with Swedish periodicals, newspapers and trade or technical journals for translation. There was no need for a public library, however, at Holabird, for their dictionaries and references were extensive, and, as was often pointed out to him and the others in his section, they were not expected to understand, just to translate for specialists who did not read Swedish.

Milo would have liked being paid by the word as he had been in Chicago, for even with his quarters and food being all provided by the Army, along with uniforms and medical care (something of which he strangely had no need, since he never succumbed to anything worse than an occasional mild cold), his salary was nothing to boast about, especially not in the midst of a civilian economy new-swollen with the high incomes of hordes of war-industry workers. His pay as a tech sergeant was eighty-four dollars per month with an additional thirty dollars per month for his status as a first class specialist, which addition brought his monthly stipend to one hundred and fourteen dollars, within twelve dollars of that of a master sergeant. Even so, his money did not go far, and it was but rarely that he could afford the cost of a bus or railway ticket to meet and carouse with Jethro Stiles at some place between Baltimore and Georgia, nor did he feel that he could or should accept the generous man’s frequent offers of money to allay these expenses.

Finally, one night, thinking of the thousand-odd he had left in the care of Pat O’Shea, he wrote to the old soldier. But the return letter came from Maggie.

There were four ten-dollar bills, a five and three ones in the package, and a silver medal on a flat-link neck-chain of silver. There was also a stiff document folder secured with a cloth tie, and in it were the stock certificates, a bill of sale, transfer documents and a receipt for something over a thousand dollars. * But a second, smaller package had come in the same mail call. This one, too, was postmarked Chicago, but there was no return address and the handwriting was large, bold and most obviously masculine.

Fingering it, Milo wondered just who it could be who had written him. Guiscarde was in New Jersey, Oster-reich was in Washington, Pat was dead, Rustung was probably interned or in a federal prison or deported long since. So who was there left whom he had known back there, back then? Sol Brettmann? Or could it be one of the other men of Sam Osterreich’s group? He tore the package open to find two envelopes. He opened the thinnest one first and read:

In the other, thicker envelope was the six hundred dollars. No old, wrinkled bills such as Maggie O’Shea had enclosed were these, but rather crisp, minty-new twenties, thirty of them, so stiff and fresh that Milo cut his thumb on the edge of one of them, winced and instinctively sucked at the hair-thin red line. But it had closed before he got it down from his lips. His rare razor cuts on cheeks or chin closed and healed very quickly too, and he had long since given up wondering about it and just gratefully accepted the fact that he was a quicker than average healer.

Until he could get an answer from Jethro, Milo found a lodgment for the stock certificates and most of the unexpected windfall of cash in the safe of his section commander.

The return letter from Stiles was short.

But, what with one delay and another on both ends, it was more than two months before Milo was able to rendezvous with his buddy in the spacious, sumptuously furnished lobby of a hotel in northwest Washington. Although the man he met was lean and hard and browned, the marks of worry and age were beginning to appear on the face and forehead and at the corners of the smiling eyes. The hair at Jethro’s temples was stippled thickly now with hairs as silvery as the oak leaves on the shoulders of his carefully tailored blouse.

Without conscious thought or effort, Milo snapped to and crisply saluted his old friend.

Jethro casually returned the salute, his smile broadening, then extended his hand to grip Milo’s warmly and strongly. “I am the guy who never was going to accept an offered commission, of course, Milo. Look at me now, huh? All that the bar will sell is beer or a very inferior selection of wines, I’m afraid. But don’t worry, we won’t go dry for long. I have some cognac in the boot of my car, and far more and better at our destination. Ready to go?”

Milo smiled in return, saying with only a bare touch of sarcasm, “The colonel’s wish must be my command, sir.”

“Can the shit, Milo, and let’s get in the fucking car before I remember who and what I now am and bring you up on charges of gross insubordination.” Jethro chuckled, leading the way out of the crowded lobby.

The Lincoln V-12 coupe was shiny and looked to be brand-new. Jethro was an accomplished driver, and he handled the long, heavy vehicle with ease. Nonetheless, before they had finally crossed the Potomac into the peaceful-looking Virginia countryside, Milo had concluded that his nation’s capital was never going to be an easy or safe place to drive large numbers of motor vehicles with any degree of rapidity; the circles and spokelike avenues leading off them had no doubt been elegant in an age of horse-drawn carriages, but they were fast becoming deathtraps with their burdens of far faster, far more numerous, far less biddable automobiles, taxis, trucks and the like, many of them apparently operated by suicidal or homicidal maniacs.

“How in the name of God can you get enough gas to drive this thing, Jethro?” demanded Milo. “I’ll bet that that engine drinks as much gas, mile for mile, as a deuce-and-a-half, at least. Or doesn’t rationing apply to field-grade officers?”

Jethro laughed. “Oh, yes, rationing applies to me, too, at least for my private vehicle when I’m not using it for Army business. But, my dear Milo, there is in this land of the free and home of the brave a thriving sub rosa market for such things as foods and liquors. These markets sell for only cash, no coupons necessary, just so long as the buyer is willing to pay substantially more than said items are actually worth. One also can buy any quantities of ration coupons from these same sources, and this is how I can continue to drive this fine, but always horrendously thirsty, automobile.”

“You, a high-ranking officer of the Army of the United States of America, are dealing on the black market? Buying gas-rationing coupons that in all likelihood are counterfeits?” said Milo in mock horror. “Colonel Stiles, sir, I am frankly appalled!”

The heavy car ate away at the miles, and they drove into Loudon County, passing a sterling-silver flask of a fine cognac back and forth between them. At a turnoff from the main road onto a narrower, graveled one, Jethro pulled off onto a grassy shoulder beneath the spreading branches of a stand of stately, massive old oaks. Beside the car, skirting the road shoulder ahead, was a freshly painted white wooden fence some five feet high, and beyond the section of it immediately to his right, away in the distance across acres of grassy meadow, Milo could barely discern a scattering of animals that looked to be horses or cattle.

After taking a long pull from the quart flask, Jethro said, “Milo, my good old friend, you are about to be made privy to a secret known by no one else with the sole exception of Colonel James Lewis. I’ll not ask for or expect any avowals that you’ll not betray my trust in you, for did I not trust you implicitly, you’d not be here this day.

“Milo, forgive me, please, but I have not been completely candid with you in the years since I first met you. I am married, Milo, and you are about to meet my wife, Martihe Stiles, as well as my two children, Per and Gabrielle.

“Before you ask the obvious, Milo, no, it has not been an easy life for her, but she understands me, my self-imposed exile and penance, she loves me deeply, and our children bind us one to the other despite my lengthy absences and necessarily brief returns. She is much younger than I am. I have known her for much of her life, you see, for she is the daughter of two old and very dear friends from my first days in Europe, years ago.

“I first bought this farm as a place for her to rear our children, before ever there were any to rear. It is fortunate that I happened to buy this particular farm, in this particular place, for now, with my necessary trips to Washington every so often, I am able to spend more time with her and them than ever before.” He chuckled. “So much so, that now it would appear that Martine will be bringing forth a new little brother or sister for them in about six months’ time.”

Jethro’s pretty young wife was not the only surprise awaiting him in the rambling, gracious brick house nestled among its bounteous gardens fringed by a profusion of outbuildings with rolling meadows stretching out on every hand.

While a servant drove the Lincoln away, the petite blond woman first greeted her husband with an embrace and unabashed kisses. Even after bearing two children, so slender and fine-boned was she that her three-month pregnancy was already obvious, but her face radiated her soul-deep happiness and her blue eyes glowed with love each time she looked at the graying officer.

She welcomed Milo in a cultured French tinged with both Parisian and the Swiss dialect, beckoned over another servant to take his bag, then herself ushered him into her home. There, in the comfortably furnished and lavishly decorated parlor to the left of the entrance foyer, four wing chairs faced a huge hearth on which a log fire was laid but not yet lit behind a pierced-brass screen. Two of these chairs were occupied.

Rank and increased responsibilities had not made an easily obvious change in one line or hair of James Lewis’ appearance. His new pinks and blouse fitted him like a glove, as his uniform always had for as long as Milo had known the man; the silver eagles on his shoulders did not look at all out of place on the sometime first sergeant, and the row of campaign and award ribbons affixed over the breast pocket of that selfsame blouse told at a casual glance that here stood not just another new-made civilian-soldier. But even as he pumped Lewis’ big, hard hand, Milo was reeling numbly in shock at sight of the other guest in Jethro’s home.

Dr. Sam Osterreich’s uniform was the dark blue of the Navy, the sleeves of his blouse encircled with the four wide, gold stripes indicating the rank of Navy captain, the full equivalent of James Lewis’ rank.

Later, as the four men sipped wine and talked, the story came out. “You see, Milo,” said Lewis, “back when I was twistin’ tails to get that pissant shithead Jarvis from off of your ass, I come to find out you had been in a hospital in Chicago back in the late thirties and the doctor what had done first took care of you was just then a major at Dix, up in Jersey. When I got in touch with him, he said he’d do all he could for you because he knowed fuckin’ well you wasn’t no Nazi because of how you’d got in a lot of trouble when you got on the shitlist of some Nazi Bund priest in Chicago and that that was how you come to join the Army to start out with.

“But, besides that, he put me in touch with Sam here, who’s still at Bethesda like he was then, and has some kinda pull—believe you me he has!—more’n you can shake a fuckin’ stick at, too. It was him, almos’ all him, what got your balls outen that crack, Milo, and give that dumb shitface Jarvis a comeuppance he had just been a-beggin’ for for a fuckin’ long time. Afore it was done, some first-class, fuckin’ remain’s had been done on him, too, a coupla fuckin’ new assholes worth, I tell you. ‘Cause of you and whatall he was tryin’ to do to railroad you, Doc Sam, here, he not only was able to get you bailed outen the shit, but he got poor Schrader and two, three other guys from our division off the fuckin’ hook, too. Like old maids sees burglars under ever’ bed and in ever’ closet, thishere fuckin’ scabsucker Jarvis was seein’ fuckin’ Nazis ever’ place he come to look; if a soldier could talk German good, to that fuckin’ Jarvis, it meant he was a Nazi spy. The brass-balled fucker even had the gumption to ask me, flat out, if the real reason I was stickin’ up for you wasn’t because my mama’s maiden name was Gertrude Bauer. And he damned fuckin’ near got hisself busted down a whole helluva lot further than he did, too, when he asked Colonel Kessler if he’d been borned in this country and how long ago was the last time he was in Europe. Milo, that fuckin’ li’l bastard’s mouth’s gonna dig him a fuckin’ grave!”

Osterreich, looking chubbier than Milo remembered him, holding his crystal wineglass delicately by its stem, shook his head sadly. “The former Major, now Lieutenant, Jarfis is a sad case, misplaced to .begin, then terribly overworked. He is not possessed of either emotional or of physical strength or endurance, unfortunately. He is seriously crippled by some rather sefere phobias and a most irrational belief he has in his intuitife powers.

“The unfortunate man is skirting perilously close to a nervous collapse at the best of times and I therefore made a recommendation that he be hospitalized or separated for the good of the Army. But he apparently possessed of some influential friends is and he only was reduced in rank, reprimanded and then sent on his way to continue, one supposes, to ferret out Nazi sympathizers and spies.

“And the saddest of all about him is that he most likely a real Nazi would not know. A real spy would easily hoodwink such a man as him, for he is far from truly intelligent and the most of his boasted intuition mainly is self-delusion.

“I know Nazis, gentlemen, I attended several meetings of the fledgling National Socialist German Workers’ Party in the nineteen hundred and twenties, and in those early days of the party I was honored and welcomed and made much of as a former cavalry officer of the Imperial Austrian Army. All of this was, of course, before the fact of my Jewishness became all-important to them. I impart to you all no secret, here. It all is well known to any who wish to learn of it, for it was not only the National Socialists’ meeting I attended now and then, but the Communists’, the Monarchists’, the Anarchists’ and many another group, all of whom I found to be basically the same—a cadre of wild-eyed but cunning fanatics attempting to form hordes of troubled, desperate, demoralized German men and women into a political power base.

“The man Jarfis knows nothing about the Nazis, although had he been a German in Germany, he would no doubt have made them a good recruit, though he is too unstable to have been able to rise very far in their ranks. His ideas of Nazism are terribly skewed and twisted and distorted. I feel very sorry for him, for he truly is suffering, but there is nothing I can do for him. Under present circumstances, he is the responsibility and the very great problem of the Army, not the Navy.”

Martine Stiles and Milo got along every bit as well from the start as had he and her husband. Throughout the courses of the sumptuous dinner served that Friday night, she chatted gaily with Milo and the others, slipping effortlessly from English to French, Danish, German, Italian and Spanish, though she carefully limited all general conversation to her British-accented English for the benefit of James Lewis, who was not a linguist.

The meal itself was a palate-pleasing blending of haute cuisine and Southern country cooking—terrapin soup, broiled fillets of shad, capon Provençal, a profusion of garden vegetables, a hot apple pudding topped with melted cheese and sprinkled with crushed walnuts, all accompanied by the best that the extensive wine cellar had to offer and capped at last with steaming coffee and an 1854 cognac, pale, smooth and very powerful.

Martine had grimaced in self-deprecation upon the serving of the capon, remarking, “This wretched war, gentlemen, please to accept my sincere apologies, but although almost all of the food is raised here, upon the farm, one still feels guilty to serve meat too often.” Then, smiling, she added, “But never to fear, tomorrow night there will be a roast of veal.”

Milo did not meet the Stiles children until the following morning. Almost four, Per was a grave, formal, quiet little boy, who sat and handled the reins of his Welsh pony with as much ease and authority as did his father and mother sit and control their thoroughbreds. Gabrielle was a tiny, chubby near-duplicate of her mother. Riding in a trap driven by the children’s nurse, she bounced and chattered gaily, smiling and laughing throatily.

Earlier, in the stableyard, Osterreich, forking a frisky red-bay filly, had watched Milo mount and quickly take control of a mettlesome dark-mahogany-hued gelding. Kneeing his mount over, the doctor had spoken in a low voice in Russian—a tongue not thus far used in this multilingual household, but which he knew they both knew.

“Milo, old friend, now I know that I was right about you, years ago. I was right, and that old soldier Patrick O’Shea was right, also. Lieutenant Jarvis’ vaunted intuition may well be accurate to the extent that even I am certain that you are not really an American. At least, if you truly are, you did not learn your horsemanship in America or in England, even.

“The way that you just mounted, the way that you sit your beast, the way that you hold the reins, these are all classic European military ways, Milo. I, too, was taught just so, in the Imperial Hussars, before the Great War, and I helped to teach them as a Fahnrich of cavalry.”

The doctor smiled and patted Milo’s bridle arm reassuringly. “This is no accusation, my old friend and comrade. I, of all people, know that you simply do not, cannot remember anything of more than five years ago … not on a conscious level. But your body and your unconscious, they remember, you see.”

After that early morning, Milo was convinced that the doctor might well be right about him. He had ridden a few times in the recent past, for exercise—on rented horses in Chicago with Irunn Thorsdottar, now and again with Jethro on post and off—but those had always been on bridle trails. The morning at Jethro’s farm was crosscountry on spirited, well-bred horses kept in the peak of condition by experienced handlers who had no other function and were never lacking for anything necessary to the well-being of their charges.

Jethro and Martine on their big Irish hunters led a fast, hell-for-leather pace across meadows, through little rills, over fences and hedges, ditches and the occasional mossy bole of a fallen tree. Through it all, for the length of that morning hell-ride, Milo’s body reacted without his conscious urgings or instructions, making of him and his mount one single smoothly operating device for a safe,, easy-looking transit of the rough, dangerous, but exhilarating course.

Nonetheless, the sudden, strenuous, rarely practiced spate of exercise left Milo disinclined to ride out that afternoon with Jethro, James Lewis and Sam Osterreich to look over the working parts of the farm. He found the library and, with a book and a bottle of sherry, whiled away the best part of the first two hours after luncheon. Then he was joined by Martine.

When she had selected and filled for herself a slender goblet of the straw-colored wine, she drew up a chair to face him and seated herself.

“Milo Moray,” she said, using her British English on this occasion, “since first I set my eyes upon you yesterday, getting from out the automobile, I knew that we two have been … or, perhaps, will be … very close persons, soulmates, possibly even lovers. Do you, too, feel this … this unseen bond between us, Milo Moray?”

What Milo felt just then was a cold chill along the whole length of his spine, a prickling of his nape hairs and a rush of adrenaline similar to that he had felt when he had, once on bivouac, found a timber rattler coiled between his blankets.

Slowly closing the book, he said gravely, “Mrs. Stiles, your husband is my best friend, and I—”

Tilting her head back, she trilled a silvery peal of laughter, but then she looked him in the eye and stated, “Milo Moray, you misunderstood. Perhaps I said the improper words. English is not, after all, my native language.

“No, I very much love and respect my fine husband. I have loved him for the most of my remembered life and wanted to be nothing else than that which now I am—his wife and the mother of his children. Never would I even to consider betraying him or dishonoring my marriage vows with another man … not even with you.

“But still, I feel this strong feeling that we have been or we will someday be of a much and personal closeness. I cannot shake away this feeling, and I but wondered if you, too, had had this experience when you met me.”

“No,” said Milo simply. “No, I have had no such feelings, Mrs. Stiles. If this disappoints you, I am sorry. I but tell you the truth.”

“No, no, I feel no disappointment, Milo Moray. Why should I feel such? If anything, I feel great joy that you have here proved to me just how good a friend to my husband you truly are. He chose well, I think, when he chose you as his—what is the word? buddy?—he chose well, indeed. You are a gentleman of the old mode, and you always will be most welcome in this house.

“But I want your solemn vow, Milo Moray. I want your firm promise that you will care for our Jethro, do all that the good God allows to keep him safe in the dangers that lie ahead. Will you so vow?” There could be, this time around, no mistaking her meaning or her deadly seriousness.

Milo was puzzled. “Mrs. Stiles, Jethro is in more real danger driving through the city of Washington than he could face down South, doing staff work in a training unit. Of course, I will do anything I can to protect him from whatever, but I’m based in Baltimore, over eight hundred miles away from his post. No two ways about it, I’d like to be back with him in the old unit, but the Army seems to feel I’m of more use to them up at Holabird.”

“Our Jethro, gallant soul that he is, still abrim with a senseless guilt for something long ago that was not really his fault, has persuaded certain persons to give him a combat command, a battalion of infantry. He soon will leave for his new posting. Can you not find a way to join him again, there, Milo Moray?”