The Generals (17 page)

“If that’s my mother,” Geoff announced, “I’ll pour boiling oil on her.”

“You’re terrible,” she said, and jumped out of bed and went to the window, adjusted the Venetian blinds, and looked down.

Those boobs are absolutely perfect. And the tail ain’t half bad either, Geoff thought.

“It’s Mary and Luther,” Ursula announced.

“OK, pour boiling oil on Mary and Luther, whoever the hell they are.”

“They’ve brought us a present,” Ursula said. She opened the window a crack and bent over it, which Geoff thought to be a remarkably erotic act, and called, “Just a minute.”

She straightened and said, “
Ach, Gott
, we’re not dressed.”

“You noticed,” he said.

“Get a robe from Craig’s room,” she said. “He wouldn’t mind. Last room on the left.”

He was a little disturbed that Cousin Craig was indeed living here, and considerably surprised at what he found in Cousin Craig’s room. There was a large safe, a desk, a typewriter, dictating equipment, and three telephones.

In the closet were both uniforms and civilian clothing, and two filing cabinets. And of course, the robe Ursula had talked about.

He put on a silk dressing gown that looked like it had belonged to John Barrymore in Hollywood in 1930. Then he saw the monogram, and realized he hadn’t been far off. The initials were those of Craig Lowell’s father, who had died before Geoff was born.

Then he found slippers and went downstairs to meet Luther and Mary.

Luther and Mary had brought them a cake that looked to be one thousand calories to the bite and two bottles of white wine. Luther and Mary, he quickly found out, were the proprietors of Gasthaus Bavaria. They were, like Ursula, East Germans who had gotten out across the wall.

“Ven I zed, ‘Gasthaus Pomerania,’” Luther said, “people zed it zounded as if it vas for dogs.”

Mary had overheard Ursula speaking German at a vegetable stand and introduced herself. One thing led to another and Ursula became the hostess (and sometimes cashier) of Gasthaus Bavaria.

“So ven vee heard you vas over dere, and her brudder vas in Berlin, we sort of keep an eye on her, and den, like it says in duh Bible, casting bread on duh vater, ven Ursula tells de Herr Oberst dat duh landlort’s giffing us drubble about duh lease, duh Herr Oberst knows zumbody, and fixes it.”

The translation of that was that when the Herr Oberst, Mr. Colonel, Cousin Craig heard from Ursula that the people who had been so nice to her were having trouble with their landlord he had done something about it. Geoff didn’t think that it had posed many problems for Mr. Colonel. He was almost positive that the family (in other words, either Geoff’s father or Cousin Craig) owned that entire block of West Third Street. The Craig family had held large portions of that part of Manhattan Island since they had brought it from the Dutch. And the one unbent rule of the family was that once real estate was acquired it was never sold.

The next visitor (this place is like Grand Central Station, Geoff thought with annoyance) was a portly mustachioed man in a well-tailored suit smoking a foul-smelling pipe and carrying a briefcase.

“Major Brockhammer,” Ursula announced proudly, “this is my husband.”

“Welcome home, Lieutenant,” Brockhammer announced. “Colonel Lowell’s told me what a hell of a job you did over there.”

“May we offer you a drink, Major?” Geoff asked.

“I’d love one, but I can’t,” Brockhammer said. “I sneaked in here without a copilot, and that’s bad enough. I’ll just drop this off and head back to Benning.”

Without asking permission, he went upstairs, was gone three minutes, and came back without the briefcase.

“Ursula,” he said. “The alarm is on.”

“What alarm?” Geoff asked.

“I’ll tell you later,” Ursula said. “Just don’t go in Craig’s bedroom.”

“Nice to have met you, Lieutenant,” Brockhammer said, and was gone.

Herr Oberst arrived thirty minutes later, as Mary and Luther were finally leaving. He was wearing a flower-patterned sports coat and wide-brimmed straw hat. And carrying a briefcase.

There weren’t very many people who could get away with wearing the coat and the hat, Geoff thought, but Cousin Craig carried it off splendidly.

Geoff got a handshake, and then an impulsive hug.

“Since he’s wearing my robe,” Lowell said, “I gather Brockhammer has not yet arrived?”

“He was here,” Ursula said, “half an hour ago. The alarm is on.”

“What the hell is this alarm?” Geoff asked.

“I’ll have to leave this overnight,” Lowell said, gesturing with the briefcase. “I don’t know what else to do with it. And I’ll have to come back early in the morning, I’m afraid.”

“Come back from where?” Ursula asked.

“If all else fails, I can stay at his father’s apartment,” Lowell said.

“Why?” she asked. “Don’t be silly.”

He’s not being silly, Geoff thought. He is being a perfect gentleman.

“How thick are the walls?” Craig Lowell said, immediately disabusing the perfect gentleman notion.

Ursula blushed. “Thick enough,” she said, softly.

“Don’t be silly,” Geoff heard himself saying. “Stay here.”

“I thought you might never ask,” Craig Lowell said. “I accept. I will plug my ears if that would make you more comfortable. But I really have work to do, and you weren’t expected until tomorrow.”

“You knew I was coming?” Geoff asked. Lowell nodded.

“You didn’t say anything to me,” Ursula accused.

“He wanted to surprise you,” Lowell said.

“He surprised me all right,” Ursula said. “He walked in the Gasthaus and said a dirty word at the top of his lungs.”

“Did you really?” Lowell asked, amused.

“What’s with the alarm?” Geoff asked. “I keep asking and you keep ignoring me.”

“There’s some classified material, from time to time, in a safe upstairs. The room and the safe are wired to a burglar alarm. I set off the room alarm by mistake one time, and there were three cops here with sirens screaming in two minutes. I’ve been tempted to set off the safe alarm, just to see what would happen. We’d probably get the National Guard.”

“What kind of classified material?” Geoff asked.

Lowell looked at him for a moment before replying.

“Right now, the plans for an air assault division,” he said.

“A
division?
” Geoff asked.

Lowell nodded.

“That is classified, obviously, Lieutenant Craig,” Lowell said. “And I didn’t tell you.”

“What’s it doing here?”

“For four days a week, I am a devoted student of Basket-weaving I, Organized Grab Ass II, and other such subjects. On Thursday night, I fly down here from Vermont and work, on the QT, for the Army. Sunday night, I take it to Washington, and turn it over to somebody who carries it to Benning.”

“Before Major Parker went down,” Geoff said, “he told me what they were doing to you. Why don’t you just tell them to go fuck themselves?”

“Geoff!” Ursula protested the language.

Lowell met Geoff’s eyes. “And do what, Geoff? Go to work with your father?”

“Why not? Just as soon as I can resign, that’s what I’m going to do.”

“I think you will find as many horse’s asses in the employ of Craig, Powell, Kenyon and Dawes as you have found in the Army,” Lowell said.

“The pay will be a little better,” Geoff snapped.

“That argument won’t wash for you, Geoff,” Lowell said. “You can’t spend the money you already have. And you don’t even have all of it yet.”

“People won’t be shooting at me on Wall Street,” Geoff went on, sensing he was losing the argument.

“You may wish that somebody was,” Lowell said. “When the great excitement of the day is deciding whether to eat the Dover sole at the Luncheon Club, the Executive Dining Room, or Fraunces Tavern.”

“Dover sole is a hell of a better meal than what I have been eating for a year,” Geoff said.

“Touché,” Lowell said. “I turn over my king, sir.”

He was not turning over his king at all, Geoff thought, with mingled anger and embarrassment. Cousin Craig had decided not to fight with him, either because he didn’t want the argument to get out of hand, or because he had decided there was no point in arguing with a fool.

“I will now put on my Dutch uncle hat,” Lowell said. “You will have to restrain your lust for several hours. Your father is too much of a gentleman to come busting in here without an invitation, and whatever it costs him, he will restrain your mother from doing the same. You can’t do that to him, Geoff. Get on the phone and take your father and mother to dinner. Take them to the Harvard Club, why don’t you? Let your father show you and your medals off. He’s entitled.”

“I don’t belong to the Harvard Club,” Geoff said.

“I do,” Lowell said. “I’ll call and make reservations.”

“You’ll come with us,” Ursula said, deciding the argument.

“No, thank you,” Lowell said. “For one thing, I shouldn’t be there, and for another, I fortunately have the argument presented by this briefcase and the one in the safe for an excuse.”

(Three)

Geoff’s body cloak was out of synch. He had come halfway around the world in just a few hours. So he was wide awake at five-thirty. He raised himself on his elbow and examined his wife in the faint light of the bedside clock-radio. He debated and decided against seeing if he could wake her up. She was sleeping like a child.

Jesus, I love her!

He crawled with infinite care out of bed so as not to wake her and walked on tiptoe out of their bedroom, and then downstairs. There was a light on in the kitchen. Craig Lowell was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, two thick folders stamped
SECRET
and
TOP SECRET
on the table before him.

“Christ, what are you doing up? I heard your typewriter going at half past one.”

“I get a lot of sleep in Vermont,” Lowell said dryly. “And I wanted to get this done as quickly as I can. I’m just about finished, as a matter of fact.”

Geoff helped himself to a cup of coffee and sat down.

“There was one argument I didn’t use last night,” he said.

“Which is?”

“That I am a married man and want to start a family. Soldiers get killed, and that wouldn’t be fair to Ursula.”

“I won’t argue the point,” Lowell said, but then argued it: “Death is inevitable. You can get mugged on Washington Mews as well as shot in the service. When your number is up, it’s up. And my experience has been that if you’re going to get blown away, it happens in the first thirty days of combat. If you get through that first month, it has been my experience, you’ll get through it all.”

“The counterargument to that is that you can stick your neck out only so many times before getting it cut off,” Geoff said. “And then I think of Parker. Christ, I don’t want that to happen to me. Jesus, what it would do to Ursula.”

“It would be tough on her,” Lowell said. “I see Phil’s wife—”

“She’s a doctor, isn’t she?” Geoff interrupted.

“Yeah,” Lowell said. “The last time I saw her, she told me that she’d been offered a professorship at Harvard Medical…now that would drive your old man up the wall, a black woman in the Harvard Club.”

Geoff chuckled.

“But, as much as she wanted to take it, she didn’t think she could. It would be tantamount to admitting that she thinks Phil won’t come back.”

“Will he?”

“He’s alive. We know that. Felter found out. But that’s no guarantee that he’ll come through it all right.”

“Where is she?”

“Bragg. She wants to talk to you.”

“Why?”

“I told her you checked out the site for me.”

“I can’t tell her anything I didn’t tell you. Did you tell her what I told you?”

“Yes, of course. I don’t think Toni expects anything new. It’s just that you saw him over there, and just before he went down.”

“He was in high spirits,” Geoff said. “He had just heard what they had done to you.”

“Phil and I were in Basic Officer’s Course at Knox together. My son was born there. Phil and his father are his godparents. I had to go tell the colonel that Phil was down. That was tough. You make your point about what happens to a soldier being tough on his people. But I suppose that it’s just as tough when your husband gets run over by a bus.”

“Being dead is better than being in the Hanoi Hilton,” Geoff said. “The day they made me a second john, my boss got carried off. A rough old Russian, a master sergeant named Petrofski. I think about him a lot.”

“You were the only one left, is that right?”

“Only one left on my feet,” Geoff said.

“Mennen was very impressed,” Lowell said. “He’s not big on battlefield commissions.”

“Mennen said I could resign when I came home,” Geoff said.

“Go to Bragg you mean?” Lowell asked. “When are you going?”

“I was hoping I could do it by mail,” Geoff said.

“No, they’ll want you there for a physical and the paperwork. Would you like to go today?”

“
Today?
”

“I’m going to Benning in the Commander to drop off the briefcases. Bragg’s on the way. It might be fun to return in triumph where you once arrived such a fuckup.”

“I’ll ask Ursula,” Geoff said. “The Village is not my idea of a romantic setting. We could rent a car and drive over to Hilton Head…that should be nice this time of year.”

(Four)
Office of the Commanding General
U.S. Army Special Warfare Center and School
Fort Bragg, North Carolina
1440 Hours, 22 August 1963

“In the worst possible scenario for this situation,” said Brigadier General Paul Hanrahan, “you would be here with Lieutenant Craig, Craig. You have a tendency not only to say dirty words when crossed, but to go off half-cocked and do and say things that should not be done or said.”

“I think you better explain that, General,” Lowell said.

“I am in receipt of instructions,” General Hanrahan said, “which state that applications for resignation from Special Forces by qualified officers will be approved in only one of two circumstances. When a request for their services after separation has been made by the Central Intelligence Agency, or for compassionate reasons
—after
DCSPERS has considered the circumstances of the officer’s personal troubles.”