The Memories of Milo Morai

II

Five persons accompanied Brigadier General Eustace Barstow back to the United States—Major Milo Moray, Captain Sam Jonas, First Lieutenant Karl Metz (Padre), First Lieutenant Eli Huber (Buck) and Second Lieutenant Elizabeth O’Daley (Betty). Arrived at their destination, Fort Holabird, Maryland, they stayed only a few days, the five of them restricted, under direct orders not to write anyone, telephone anyone, or try to leave the small post for any reason.

While the group were lounging in the officers’ club one early evening, Milo heard a nasal, vaguely familiar voice, let his gaze rove around the room and spotted a pasty, vaguely familiar, face of a captain who was both talking and assiduously gnawing on his nails. After a moment of thought, he placed the voice and the face and hung the proper name upon them. Without another word to his companions, he stood up, pulled his Ike jacket down and straight, then paced deliberately across the shiny floor.

He came to a halt directly in front of the nail-biting officer, clicked his heels together smartly and said, “Guten Abend, mein Herr Sturmbannfuhrer Jarvis. How is it that you’re still wandering around loose without a straitjacket? Remember me? I’m Milo Moray.”

The wan man became even paler, and his muddy-brown eyes widened and his jaw went slack, revealing to Milo that he looked to have not brushed his stained, crooked teeth since last they had met back at Fort Benning years before. His lips finally began to move, but no sounds came from him for a few moments.

Finally, he got wind behind his words.“ ... be impersonating an officer of the Army of the United States of America . You can’t be a real officer, simply cannot be! They promised me, swore to me, that you’d never, ever get a commission.”

“So,” growled Milo, “it was you, eh? You were the one who kept getting my promotion requests blocked.”

“Of course I did, Moray, I had to ... I just had to, and you know why, too. I thought it all out after you had had me reprimanded and demoted. I realized that I had been right about you from the start.”

The two officers at an adjoining table, to whom Jarvis had been talking, were clearly puzzled, so Milo stated, “Gentlemen, this man was a major in 1942—CID, I think—I was a Regular, first sergeant of a basic-training company. He waltzed in, found out that I speak a number of languages, and proceeded to accuse me of being some kind of Nazi spy or plant. He caused me a good deal of trouble, but I was proved innocent of his groundless charges and returned to duty; he was brought up on charges, and had it not been for the war and some well-placed friends he had, he would probably have been cashiered, let go for the good of the service. As it was, he was, as he just said, reprimanded and demoted to first lieutenant. This is the first time I’ve laid eyes on the lunatic since then.”

Turning back to Jarvis, he said, “Well, you tin-pot Torquemada, so you still think I’m a Nazi, eh?”

“Oh, no, Moray, not anymore, not for years now, not since I thought it all out. I know you for what you really are, now, you see. That was why I exacted certain promises from certain friends in high places, you see. I don’t know . ., I still don’t know just what you are. But I do know you’re not one of us, that you’re not a human being. That’s why I knew that I had to do all that I could to deny you power, deny you control over real people, human people, for as long as I could. I did it for humanity, to protect us all from you.”

Jarvis turned to the two other officers, tense, intent. “You see, Moray . . . this thing that calls itself Moray . . . it’s not really a man at all. It’s nonhuman. I know. I sensed it years ago, but now I know, / know. Now he ... it will probably kill me because I know, but when I die, you must know that it will be for you, for you and all the rest of real humanity. Can’t you see? Can’t any of you see? He’s inhuman . . . no, unhuman. I’ve seen him in my dreams—and just ask anybody who knows me, sooner or later my dreams all come true—I’ve seen him walking around in a world where almost all the real human beings are lying dead all around him. All of humanity lying cold and dead, with animals eating their bodies, and him, it, this thing that calls itself Moray, still alive. I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen it. You’ve got to see it! Can’t you see it, really?”

Milo admired the restraint and fast thinking of the older of the two officers. “Possibly, Captain Jarvis, if Bill and I were able to talk to this officer, and, uh, examine him outside, in a less noisy place for a while . . . ?” Arising, he said, “Major, would you please walk outside with us briefly?”

In the foyer, the lieutenant colonel sighed and shook his head sadly. “Poor Jarvis—he’s never been strung together very tightly, not as long as he’s been here, at any rate, and I would venture a layman’s opinion that he finally went over the edge this evening. You probably triggered it, Major Moray, but don’t feel too bad about it. As I say, it has clearly been coming for a long time.”

Milo nodded. “I was told by a psychiatrist who had interviewed Jarvis that the man was, even back in ’42, a mental basket case. But I can’t say that I’m sorry about bringing on his dissolution, this way. You both heard him say that he had twisted tails to keep me from being commissioned.”

“And you believe his babble, major?” asked the younger officer.

“I do, captain, simply because someone or something kept me a sergeant for most of the war, kept getting commission request after commission request bounced back marked ‘disapproved.’ The only thing that ever got me commissioned, finally, was combat attrition, and that, well after D-Day. And if those commission requests had not been disapproved, there is a chance that the best friend I ever had would still be alive today. So, no, I’m not in the least sorry if it was my presence, my words, that drove that bastard in there over the edge.

“But what do we do now, colonel?”

The older officer frowned. “Let me make a couple of calls, eh?”

When the captain at last ushered Jarvis out into the foyer, it was emptied of all its usual personnel and any members other than the two captains, the colonel and Milo. Milo’s wrists were secured with handcuffs and a brace of hard-eyed military policemen flanked him.

“What . . . ?“ began Jarvis.

“There is some reason to suspect that you may be right about this officer, Captain Jarvis,” said the colonel, “I want to take him over and let Major Tatian look him over. Maybe he can tell us whether or not he’s human. If a surgeon can’t, who can, say I. You’ll come with us, of course—since you rode the hunt for so long, I feel you should be there when the fox is driven to ground. Let’s go.”

At the post dispensary, the tired duty officer wasted no time and took no chances. Before Jarvis had stepped more than a few feet beyond the doorsill, there was a big, beefy medical corpsman on either side of him, gently but very firmly gripping his skinny arms with hands the size of hams.

But it did not prove to be that easy, after all. When the third corpsman, smiling and speaking soothing words, began to unbutton Jarvis’ uniform blouse and he saw a fourth approaching with a straitjacket, the slight man shrieked and began to resist with an unsuspected strength, flinging the big, strong men about the room like so many rag dolls. It devolved into a brief battle-royal, finally requiring the full efforts of five corpsmen, the surgeon and the two military policemen to immobilize the raving officer long enough to get the straitjacket on his arms and body and some thick webbing straps buckled around his ankles and legs.

After the patient had been borne off and strapped to a bed, someone at last thought to unlock Milo *s hand-cuffs. As he rubbed his wrists, Milo thought that the surgeon had come out of the fracas with the least amount of damage—he would have a hellacious black eye, but that was mild when compared to the injuries of his staff members and the two MPs, most of whom looked as if they had been knocked down and run over by a herd of maddened, stampeding horses.

“God be thanked that I thought to trick him into coming over here,” said the colonel with fervor. “Can you imagine what kind of shitstorm a donnybrook like that would’ve whistled up if it had happened in the O-Club? Thank you, Major Moray. You’re one of General Barstow’s staff, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” replied Milo.

The colonel nodded brusquely, “Yes, well, I’ll tell him about all this and mention just how much your cooperation helped us.”

Turning to the surgeon, who was just then preparing to set the apparently broken arm of one of the MPs, he asked, “Well, Eddie, what’ll you do with Jarvis now?”

The medical officer shrugged, then winced, and said, “Hell, we have no facilities for a case like his here, colonel, you know that. Ship him down to the N-P section at Walter Reed, I guess.”

Barstow left Holabird for a few days, and upon his return, he and the five officers he had brought from Germany, plus another lieutenant, three sergeants and four privates, departed Holabird in three Army sedans followed by a three-quarter-ton weapons carrier loaded with their duffel bags, B-bags and other luggage.

Milo had, for some reason, assumed that their destination was either the District of Columbia or the area of Virginia just south of the capital, but he was proved wrong. The small convoy slowly threaded its way through the congested traffic of Washington, crossed the Fourteenth Street Bridge and headed south on Route 1.

In addition to the driver, one of the newcome privates, Milo shared the sedan with Lieutenant Eli Huber and the new officer, Lieutenant Vasili Obrenovich. To the new officer, he said, “You know the lay of the land now better than we do. Where do you think we might be going?Belvoir, maybe? We’re well past Fort Myer.”

“We’re now past where we should’ve turned off this highway for Fort Belvoir, too, sir. I dunno, really. Let’s see now. South of here is Camp Hill, but I doubt we’d be going there. The next real post south after that would be Camp Lee. Sorry I can’t be more help, sir.”

All following the lead automobile, General Barstow’s conveyance, the convoyette proceeded on south on Route 1 in the crisp, late-autumn weather, through northern Virginia. Woodbridge fell behind them, then Dumfries, Quantico and Stafford. They passed through Fredericksburg, Thornburg, Ladysmith, Cedar Forks and Doswell. In the sleepy college town of Ashland, the lead vehicle was seen to pull off the road, and the other four faithfully followed.

After a brief consultation with Barstow, Captain Sam Jonas handed the driver of each of the vehicles a five-dollar bill and ordered them to have their vehicles gassed and serviced at the Shell station across the road, then return, park them and join the rest of the party in the restaurant.

“That’s damned funny,” remarked Lieutenant Obrenovich, with a look of puzzlement.

“What is?” asked Milo.

“The money the captain gave the drivers, sir,” Obrenovich replied. “Every movement I’ve been on, if civilian POL facilities had to be used, they were paid in Army scrip, not in cash. This must be some kind of really hush-hush operation that nobody wants any records of.”

Neither he nor any of the others then could have known just how rightwas his surmise . But they would all live to learn.

All fed and refueled, they headed out south once more. In the city of Richmond, they changed routes and direction, east on Route 60, through Sandston, Roxbury, Providence Forge, Lanexa, Toano, Norge, Lightfoot and on toward Williamsburg.

“Any ideas yet, lieutenant?” asked Milo tiredly.

“Oh, yes sir,” was the quick reply. “There’s only three places down here we could be going—Camp Eustis is just the other side of Williamsburg, then the Army Air Corps has an airfield called Langley near a town called Newport News, and of course there’s Fortress Monroe, in Hampton. I hope it’s Monroe—I’ve heard that that’s a good-duty post.”

They pulled off the highway and onto the road to Camp Eustis, but once waved through the main gate, they drove directly to the main motor pool, where all—officers and enlisted, male and female—with the sole exception of Barstow were loaded aboard a deuce-and-a-half truck. Then the tailgate was raised and secured and a thick canvas curtain was lashed tightly across the back opening. They sat on the hard wooden seats, crowded closely with their bags and cases piled on the steel bed between the two benches.

Once they were underway, Captain Sam Jonas said, half shouting in order to be heard above the noise of the big engine, “This is orders. It’s felt that we’ll be better off not knowing just where we’re going, how to get there even. The only one who’ll know that, for a while, will be the general; he’s in the cab of this truck. No, don’t bother to ask me any questions—I don’t know any more answers than whatall I’ve just told you.”

As they dismounted after a long, bumpy, exceedingly uncomfortable truck ride, they were given no time to look around, but were ushered into the first floor of a building that looked to Milo’s experienced eyes like a wooden barrack with all its windows covered by sheets of tar paper. Inside were a score of folding chairs, a few one-gallon butt cans and one thirty-gallon GI can.

Barstow stood beside a rack of brand-new mops and brooms, facing the door by which they all entered. “Sit down,” he ordered brusquely, adding, “This won’t take long, then you can start getting situated in the quarters you’ll occupy while we’re here. Smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em.”

With everyone occupying one of the less than comfortable chairs, Barstow, still standing, said, “First off: where you are; you don’t know, you don’t need to know and most of you aren’t going to know, so don’t try to find out. There are no public telephones here, and the few outside lines are and will stay under lock and key. Keep away from them or your ass will be grass. Understand? You may write all the letters you want with the understanding that they’ll be thor-oughly censored before they go to the place from which they’ll be mailed; you’ll all be given an address to use for return mail.

“Second point.” He ticked off another finger. “And listen damned tight to this—your life could depend on your comprehension of what I’m about to say. You are all restricted to the confines of this cantonment area, no ifs, ands or buts, no exceptions of anybody at any time or for any purpose whatsoever! When you get out of this building, you’ll see that there is a twelve-foot chain-link fence topped with triple strands of barbed wire completely surrounding mis post. Keep away from it—it’s electrified with enough juice to fry you crisp. Eight feet beyond the inner fence is an outer one, and the space in between them is filled with barbed-wire concertinas three feet deep. The gates are as high as the fences and fitted with tamperproof alarms. There are guard towers, manned on a twenty-four-hour basis, with searchlights and machine guns and men who are under orders to use them against any human being who tries to get over those fences—coming or going—or through those gates without authorization, and there are walking sentries and jeep patrols, as well as other safeguards that, although you can’t see them, are no whit less deadly.”

“Arbeit macht frei,” said Padre bitterly, to no one in particular. Then, to Barstow, “And just how long have you sentenced us all to your private little—most likely, highly illegal—concentration camp, general?”

Barstow merely shrugged. “Call it what you wish, Lieutenant Metz. It wasn’t my idea . . . well, at least not all of it, anyway. Very tight security is needed for this relatively short but urgently vital operation, and this is the only way of which we know to maintain such a state of full security at all times.”

“Security?

Security from who, from what, general?” Padre yelped. “Japanhas surrendered now, the Nazis were finished last May, so just who is there any longer to keep secrets from? Or do I really need to ask that of a quasi-Fascist reactionary like you?”

Barstow sighed and shook his head. “I’d think that even a mind as dense as yours would have by now absorbed the fact that you can’t anger me with your radicalism and holier-than-thou condescension, Padre. Why do you keep trying, huh? The security measures are, of course, to protect this operation from Uncle Joe Stalin’s Russians, the people we’ll have to fight in the next war.

“That’s enough, Padre, no more of your questions, if that’s what they really are. We’ve had a long, hard trip today, and most of us would like to chow down and get in some sack time—I know I would—and we won’t do either until this briefing is done.

“As of work call tomorrow morning, the only people on post who will be wearing uniforms will be me, Sergeant Baker and Privates Hayes and Lyman, plus the cooks, medical personnel and suchlike who will be keeping us reasonably comfortable and this post operating. The rest of you will all be wearing civvies. Those of you who came from Europe with me are accustomed to this drill, the rest of you now know why you were issued civvies back up at Holabird. And no nonuniformed person will ever be addressed by rank or last name here—those of you who want to choose a name other than your own given name or use a nick-name should give that name to Private Hayes before you leave this building.

“As regards quarters, we have plenty of space allotted us, so you can all have private rooms if you wish, or you may double- or triple- or quadruple-bunk, it’s entirely up to you. Of course, some more personnel will be joining us shortly, and we may have to give you all roommates when they arrive.” He grinned. “War is hell, they say. By the way, Betty, at least two of the incomings will be female, so you’ll be assured of someone to go to the loo with you.

“You’ll assemble back here after work call tomorrow morning and we’ll take a walking tour of our projected areas of activity, then return for more briefing, in-depth briefing.

“Chow tonight will be C-rations.”

There was a concerted groan from his audience.

“They won’t kill you, this once.” Barstow grinned maliciously. “At least they’ll be hot, and there’s loaf bread and real coffee to go with them, cold milk, too. The cooks won’t get here until tonight, but that means you’ll have an A-ration breakfast. And you’ll all be pleased to know that these cooks of ours are going to be top-notch, every one of them, hand-picked. You’ll also be pleased to know, I’m certain, that as we will have no ranks here, everyone will be considered an officer and will be able to receive a liquor ration.

“This room we’re now in will be fitted up as a club, with a bar; upstairs will be the closest thing to a PX—smokes, candy, toiletries, items of civilian clothing, radios, that sort of thing, but no money; you can draw scrip against your pay.

“Now, let’s go get moved in. At 1800 hours, come to the mess hall, it’s the fourth building to your right from this one. Then I would suggest that we all sack in—although reveille here won’t be until oh six hundred, hours, we’ve got a lot to do and not too awfully much time to do it in.”

At his nod to Sam Jonas, standing in the rear, that officer half-shouted, “Atten-HUT!”

With a scraping and rattling of the folding chairs, the group arose and were dismissed.

Everyone opted for a private room; privacy for many of them had been rare and precious during the war years. There were three rooms owning private toilets, lavatories and sheet-steel shower stalls, and one was awarded to Betty, the largest already was piled with General Barstow’s gear, and they drew high-card for the third;Milo won with the ace of clubs.

He was unpacking his bags into wall and foot lockers when there was a knock on his door. Not even slowing down, he said simply, “Come.”

Second Lieutenant Elizabeth O’Daley, WAAC, strode into the room, came to a halt and seemed on the verge of snapping to and saluting before she remembered the reasserted rules of Barstow and forced herself back into an appearance of informality. Betty had come over from the States to Munich by way of England and Paris with then-Colonel Barstow when first he had set up his DP-screening operation there. She was a translator of Slavic languages and looked Slavic, despite her Irish name—big-boned and -breasted, dark-blond with fair, big-pored skin and eyes of a faded blue over wide-spreading cheekbones. She had been a WAAC corporal back then, and Barstow had been bumping her rank up ever since that time.

Holding out a broad, thick hand on the palm of which rested a package of Lucky Strikes, she said, “Milo, I prefer Old Golds, and my ration was these. Would you like to trade?”

Milo smiled and nodded toward the small table, on the top of which reposed the package of C-ration cigarettes, matches, field toilet paper and chewing gum.“Sure, Betty. I have no particular preference in smokes. Cigarettes are cigarettes, so far as I’m concerned.”

Sighing deeply, her big, heavy breasts rising and falling, she picked up the Old Golds and laid the package of Luckies in their place.“Gott sie dankt! You and I are the only two who didn’t get Camels, you know, and I can’t abide those so-called cigarettes; I’ve heard that the company makes them of what they sweep up off the cigarette-factory floor at the end of the day . . . and I can believe it. When I buy them, I get Fatimas, but they don’t pack those in C-rations, not ever.”

He shrugged. “Betty, I learned to smoke whatever came my way a long time ago. But move those things off the chair and sit down for a minute.”

When he had lit her cigarette and his own with his Zippo, he took a puff, then said, “You rode down from Holabird with Barstow, didn’t you? Yes, so tell me, do you have any idea why we’re here, wherever we are?Any idea just what we’re going to be doing?”

After exhaling twin streams of bluish smoke from her nostrils, Betty shook her head. “No, not really, Milo . The general is a very private man, you know, when he wants to be. All that I can say is that what-ever it is, he considers it to be damned important, to him, to the Army and to the country. On the basis of my knowledge of the man—and I’ve worked under his command for almost three years, now, ever since the Army found out I could speak and read and write four languages, plus English—I’d say that his attitude means that whatever we’re going to be doing will be of vital importance.”

“And that’s all you know, huh?” probed Milo. “You didn’t hear anything the whole trip?”

“Well . . . now that you mention it, Milo. See, I was in the back seat beside the general with Padre up front with the driver until we stopped for lunch, and almost the entire morning was devoted to one of their endless debates. The driver was a Volga German who had, he told me at lunch, lost numerous relatives in the Revolution and the various purges since, and I thought on several occasions he was going to just run that damned Cadillac off the road when Padre came out with certain of his incredibly naive stupidities. You know, Milo, I think that that priest honestly and truly believes that Premier Josef Stalin and Pope Pius XII are just alike.”

He shrugged again, tamping out his cigarette against the side of the butt can. “They may well be, from all I’ve heard, Betty. You must remember, both of them played footsie with Schickelgruber and Company until he fucked them over. Uh, sorry about that, but . . .”

She just grinned. “Don’t worry, Milo. WAACs use it too—it’s the most-used word in the Army, I think. But do you really think that? Do you really think the Pope and Stalin are conspiring to take over the world, like Padre says? I’ve just always thought he had a few screws loose, myself .”

Milo grunted. “I’m quite certain he does, Betty, and considerably more than just a few. I know a little more about that man than you possibly do. I knew him back before the war, in Chicago, and he was as good as a Nazi then, tied in with the Bund. He and an older priest, one Father Rustung, caused me a lot of trouble because I refused to get myself tricked into a marriage to a Norwegian-American woman who finally admitted that she was after the couple of thousand dollars I then had, not me. Even so, faced with the facts, finally, those damned priests gave me the bitter and unfair choice of marrying the conniving bitch or being jailed for fornication; that was when and why I left Chicago and enlisted in the Army.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Betty. “I’d never have guessed you for a fellow Midwesterner. You sure as hell don’t talk like one. Chicago is where my family settled, too, you know.”

“Yes.” He nodded. “I knew a lot of Irish in Chicago, lived with an Irish family, in fact.”

“Oh, I’m not Irish, Milo, not by birth. O’Daley was my husband’s name. My maiden name was Elizaveta Petrovna Dzerzhinski.”

“That explains it,” said Milo. “You don’t look at all to be racially Irish—I’d thought you were some kind of Slav, all along. So you’re Russian, eh?”

Pursing her lips, she nodded. “In a manner of speaking, though if my father ever heard me say it, I’d be in danger of getting knocked the length of a room. He’s a Rostov Cossack and inordinately proud of the fact. He was badly wounded in the Great War, but despite being crippled, he still raised a regiment to fight against the Reds and he led them until there was nothing left to fight with or to lead, then he got himself and my mother and my older brother, Piotr, out of Russia and into Rumania, where I was born just before we all came to this country. My two younger brothers and our baby sister, Astrita, are all American-born.”

Hesitantly, Milo asked, “You said that your husband’s name was O’Daley. Are you a widow, then, or divorced?”

She sighed and sadly answered, “James was a Fleet Marine. We were married on the sixth of December, 1941, the day after my twenty-first birthday and his twenty-fourth. We had not been married even six months when he was killed, went down with his torpedoed ship. I mourned him for about a month, then I enlisted in the WAACs to free a man from Stateside duty to go over and avenge James O’Daley for me.” She sighed again and went on. “Papa tried to get into the Army, the Marines, the Navy and even the Coast Guard, but of course he was far too old and crippled, too. Piotr was exempted from the draft because he was felt to be more use to the country helping Papa to run our factory in Gary, Indiana, which was working on defense-industry contracts. Poor little Ivan died at Tarawa, and Sergei lost the foot and lower half of his leg after being wounded in Le Muy, in southern France.”

“You’ve had a rough go of it, haven’t you, Betty,” Milo stated with patent feeling.

“No, not really, Milo, not as bad as some, my in-laws, for an example. They lost five out of seven children in the war, all sons, all Marines. And the one son who did survive it was, I’m told, so savagely beaten by the goddamn Japs in prison camps that he’ll be crippled for life in both body and mind, and never able to come home or even leave the hospital.

“Mr. and Mrs. O’Daley have never stopped mourning any of their boys, and I don’t think they ever will until the day they die. But me, I learned to handle my grief for James and Ivan and my brothers-in-law; yes, they’re dead and I miss them terribly, but I’m still alive and I must try to make a good life for myself in a world without any of them, and I’m not at all inclined to handle my losses the way that my sister-in-law, Moira O’Daley, did—Holy Orders don’t have any appeal for me.”

“Yes, you’ve made a good adjustment, Betty, even I can see that.” Milo nodded. “I know just how hard it is, too, to make that kind of adjustment, for I lost a hell of a lot of friends in the war, too. And right at the very tag end of it all, the best and oldest pal I had died in my arms on the street of a small town in Germany, shot by a little kid who couldn’t have been as much as fourteen years old, a fucking Hitler Jugend. And my buddy was only there because he had driven out of his way to see me and spend a few minutes with me.” The last words contained’ ill-concealed bitterness.

Betty arose and walked the few steps to reseatherself beside him on the clothes-littered bunk. Laying a hand upon his, she said, “Oh, Milo, that must have been especially crushing for you. But you must not blame yourself for his death. Such cruel things happen in any war. Why, my papa . . .”

Through the wide-opened door came Padre. “Well,” he smirked nastily, “you work fast, don’t you, Major Moray? I wonder just what our Fascist General Barstow will have to say about this. Let me warn you, Lieutenant O’Daley, this man is an infamous libertine, a seducer of innocent young womanhood, who still is wanted, I would assume, in the State of Illinois, for the felonious crime of fornication! Even being in close proximity and alone with such a man could imperil your immortal soul, I warn you as a priest of God.”

Betty looked at the officious man as if he had but just crawled from beneath a rock. “Padre, please credit both Milo and me with a little intelligence. Had either of us intended to copulate here and now, don’t you think we would at least have closed the door, if not locked it? And contrary to what you seemingly have believed for as long as you’ve served under Barstow, he and I are not and have never been lovers, only friends and companions who share many of the same likes, dislikes and viewpoints.”

“Soyou say.” The priest sneered. “But I wonder what Barstow will say when I tell him ... if I tell him.”

“Probably,” said Milo in a tightly controlled voice, “to keep your sewer mouth shut and your gutter thoughts to yourself, and to mind your own fucking business, knowing him.

“Now, what I am telling you is this. You entered my room without leave, Lieutenant Metz. You have just slandered me and cast aspersions upon the virtue of Lieutenant O’Daley here, and the bald fact that if you stir shit it stinks worse than if you don’t is the one and only reason that I don’t take all this to the general and see if he won’t have you court-martialed. I think I should, but I won’t.

“However, ranks and insubordination aside”—he stood up, and Padre flinched and took a step backward—“if you are not out of this room and into your own by the time I reach that door . . .“ He took but one step forward, glowering, his fists clenched at his sides. And the priest turned and scuttled out of the room and down the length of the corridor like a frightened rat. Milo waited until he saw and heard the priest’s door close and lock, then he closed his own and leaned against it, mopping his brow with the sleeve of his shirt.

“I’m glad as hell that bastard skedaddled like that. Mad as I was, I might’ve killed the little fucker.”

She shook out another cigarette and lit it with his Zippo. “Well, no one ever would’ve known it, Milo. You gave every appearance of being completely cool, calm and collected, so far as I could see. But you know that Padre’s not going to keep his mouth shut, don’t you? By noon tomorrow, if not before, all of the rest will have had a chance to hear his version of our public orgy in here tonight. Do you have anything to drink, by chance?”

He nodded. “Sure I do, Betty. Sorry, I should’ve offered before all of this.” He delved into the depths of his B-bag and drew out a bottle.“Cognac okay?”

She smiled. “Cognac will be marvelous, Milo—anything but that godawful so-called schnapps we used to get in München. I had to stop drinking jt, you know.”

Straightening up with the only cup he had been able to find, a canteen cup, he inquired, “Oh, really? Why? Did it really make you that sick?”

Betty laughed throatily. “No, not at all—it was just that I was starting to grow hair on my chest.”

He drew the cork, splashed a generous measure into the cup and passed it to her. After a long draft, she lowered the cup, her blue eyes tearing a little.

“Milo,” she said huskily, “lock the door and wedge the chairback under the knob, huh?” To his look of astonishment, she added, “If we’re going to have the name—and we are when that Padre gets done lying and exaggerating—we might as well have the game. So please lock the door and cut out the light and then please, please make love to me.”