The Hunting Trip (25 page)

Insofar as the boarding schools were concerned, they were quite willing to forget the circumstances of his having left the schools, and consider him an alumni, as long as he was prepared to cut a check.

The alumni news magazines showed pictures of all the good things that could be done on campi providing of course that the generous alumni cut a check.

The
Troy State Alumni News
showed a picture of a blonde in short shorts holding a bow and arrow, and said that if the generous alumni cut a generous check, the Troy State Archery Range could be doubled in size.

Phil certainly had no intention of cutting a check, generous or miserly, to Troy State as he had never been on the campus or for that matter knew where in the
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
Alabama was and didn't much care. But there was something about the picture that held his attention besides the partially exposed buttocks of the blonde and he kept looking at it.

Then he knew.

If they have an archery range, he reasoned, archery is probably on the curriculum. When he checked the catalog, there it was. Not only was, but was sort of a big deal. In addition to Archery 101, there was
Intermediate Archery 102, Advanced Archery 201, and Master Class Archery 202.

The problem was a line that read: Archery is On-Campus Study only.

He thought about that, and decided all they could say was “Hell no,” and shipped off his certificates from the RKA&TA and asked that they be evaluated for credit.

The faculty apparently knew all about
/
because their reply was quickly forthcoming. He would not only get credit for four years of regularly scheduled physical training, but inasmuch as they would love to have a bona fide
/
on the faculty, they were enclosing for his consideration an application for employment as a junior assistant athletic coach (Archery) on his graduation.

None of this was on Phil's mind as he walked out of the George V just before midnight and walked down Rue Pierre Charron to the Champs-Élysées. What he wanted to do was see if he could be of any service to fellow Americans, especially female Americans in their twenties.

He had learned that America's institutions of higher learning provided their female students “a year of study abroad” to widen their knowledge of the world by letting them spend a carefully chaperoned year in La Belle France.

More to the point, he had learned that many of these young ladies, after having spent the day examining the Eiffel Tower and the treasures of the Louvre, would escape their chaperones and head for the Champs-Élysées looking for a little of the romance they had heard was so common in the City of Lights but had not been on display at
La Tour Eiffel
, as it was known in Paris, or the Louvre.

When Phil encountered such young women, who usually traveled in pairs or trios, he would approach them—not getting too close—
and smile and announce that he heard them talking, knew them to be Americans, and as an American himself who lived in Paris, wondered if he could be of any use whatever to them.

Once in two point three times, one of the young women would ask, usually dubiously, “You live in Paris?”

If that happened, Phil would reply, “Yes,
mam'selle
, I do.”

Once in two times, that would trigger the response, “Student, are you? At the Sorbonne, or possibly the École Superior Polytechnique?”

Phil's study of the opposite gender had taught him that females took pleasure in demonstrating their knowledge even if they didn't have much knowledge. In this case, this meant that the female who asked if he were possibly a student at the École Superior Polytechnique almost certainly didn't have the faintest idea what that was, although she knew both how to pronounce it, and that there was an accent aigu over the
É
in École.

Phil, with a slight smirk on his face, would then reply, “No,
mam'selle
, I am not a student at either the Sorbonne or the École Superior Polytechnique.”

If he got this far, the chances were 95 to 1 the next question to him would be, “Then what do you do here in Paris?”

To which he would reply, “I'm afraid,
mam'selle
, that I am not permitted to answer that question, even to patriotic fellow Americans, in public, but if you're really curious, there is a small café around the corner, Le Café Cricou, where I can show you something that may answer your understandable curiosity.”

This was the critical point in the confrontation. There were two possible next moves by the female side. One was that Phil would be told “forget it”—unless the young ladies were students at one of the ivy-covered female institutions, such as Wellesley or Sarah Lawrence, in which case he would be told to go
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
himself, and they would walk away.

If he got them into the Café Cricou, however, the battle was nearly over. The female patrons of the Café Cricou were primarily practitioners of the oldest profession and they practiced it on the Champs-Élysées. Many of them were friends of Phil's. He had on many occasions, during his every-other-week exercise with the Cadillac to keep its tires from going flat on the bottom, filled the Cadillac with Cricou girls and driven them out to the Bois de Boulogne for a picnic.

The strikingly beautiful women of the Bois de Boulogne, who in fact stood in order to take a leak, deserted the Bois in daylight hours, leaving its tree-shaded grassy expanses free for picnics and other such innocent activities. Phil furnished the Cadillac and the occasional bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon and the Cricou girls furnished the Camembert, the baguettes, the oysters, the fried chicken, et cetera, and a good time was had by all.

The result of this was whenever Phil went into the Café Cricou, at least four, and often more, Cricou girls, who wore skirts slit nearly to their waists and ten-inch stiletto high heels, would walk over to his table and give him a little kiss.

Additionally, the Edith Piaf impersonator at the piano would, when she saw Phil come in, segue into her (actually Miss Piaf's) signature song,
“Je ne regrette rien”
which means, roughly, “I ain't sorry 'bout a
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
thing,” and blow him a little kiss.

All of this of course impressed the young American ladies Phil had talked into going with him into the Café Cricou. And then he topped this by showing them his CIC credentials and badge. This visibly dazzled them as, truth to tell, he knew damned well it would.

But at this point, instead of draping a friendly arm around one of their shoulders or under the table bumping his knee, or knees, against the knee, or knees, of one or more of them as all expected, some with happy expectations, him to do, he continued to ignore them as he had from the moment he had led them into the Café Cricou.

His extensive knowledge of women in sexual matters had taught him—or perhaps exposed to him—the greatest and most successful con job in recorded—and probably prerecorded as well—history.

He had come by this knowledge intellectually, as opposed to physically, as the number of his actual physical sexual encounters with the gentle sex could still be counted on his fingers and toes with both thumbs and a pinkie left over.

He had come by it professionally, that is to say when he had in his official capacity as editor in chief of the German-American Gospel Tract Foundation been charged with detecting ambiguities, grammatical errors, and strikeovers in reports filed by CIC agents regarding the alleged sexual misconduct of officers in the grade of major and above and their dependents.

He most often had to read these reports several times, for several reasons, including the fact that the CIC agents preparing these reports seemed to make about twice as many strikeovers, and make two or three times as many grammatical errors, and be as blind to that many ambiguities as they did when making a report on, say, a Bulgarian Plan to Blow Up the Statue of Liberty.

And then, when he had finally stripped the reports of all the strikeovers
und so weiter
and excess verbiage, he had to personally go through each and every one of them to extract what Pastor-in-Chief Caldwell referred to as the more pertinent passages.

He told Phil that Mrs. Caldwell had a natural interest in that sort of thing because she had taken Elementary Sexual Deviation 101 at Wellesley and wished to keep up to date on the subject.

“Now I understand this, Phil, but I don't think others—in particular those
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
West Pointers we're surrounded by—would. So, to keep this between you, me, the lamp pole, and Victoria, what I want you to do is start a new file called ‘Daily Notes of Administrator P. W. Williams.' In it you will record the more pertinent,
in a lurid sense, of the sexual foibles of the majors and above and their dependents detected by the CIC agents investigating. Just the good stuff. Leave out kissing, public exposure, simple adultery, and that sort of thing. Think lurid. Got it, my boy?”

“I'll do my best, sir.”

The Daily Notes of CIC Administrator P. W. Williams ultimately consisted of 722 single-spaced pages, which Phil mounted in three three-ring binders. He had kept them, as he thought Pastor-in-Chief Caldwell, now the Honorable Ralph Peters, might still be interested in them for historical, literary, or some other purpose, and ask for them.

After he moved into the George V, he read through the whole 722-page file again, this time very carefully. And it confirmed what he had first suspected in Berlin.

Women, not men, were the most determined sexual aggressors. Furthermore, they had managed to convince men of quite the opposite. Women encouraged men to think men were the pursuers of women, sexually speaking, when the reverse is true.

Women didn't ply men with flowers, champagne, diamonds, et cetera, to get them on the mattress for hanky-panky when they wanted a little, or a lot, of hanky-panky. They had learned that all they had to do was lower their eyes, blush, and show a little skin, and men would instantly start fighting with other men for the privilege of showering women with flowers, champagne, diamonds, et cetera, in the hope their philanthropy would entice the women to bestow upon them the hanky-panky the women wanted the men to provide in the first place.