"Miss Martha drove up from Houston," Jean-Jacques said. '"Got here just after you went to town. Must have gotten up in the middle of the night to start out."
He pointed at a Kraft paper bag in Clete's hand. "You want me to put that in your room for you? They're in the library, and I know he and Miss Martha have been peeking out the curtains looking for you."
"He" was Cletus Marcus Howell, master of the house, Chairman of the Board of Howell Petroleum, and Clete's grandfather.
"No, thanks, I want another look at it."
"Anything I can get for you?"
"No, thanks," Clete replied, and then changed his mind. "Yeah, there is. I just had a god-awful Sazerac, and I'd like a good one."
"My pleasure," Jean-Jacques said. "One Jean-Jacques Jouvier world-famous Sazerac coming right up."
Clete crossed the wide foyer and entered the library.
A tall, pale, slender, sharp-featured, silver-haired man glowered at him. He was wearing a superbly tailored dark blue, faintly pin-striped three-piece suit, with a golden watch chain looped across his stomach.
"Well, look what the cat dragged in," the Old Man said. "Ran out of rotgut in the Vieux Carre, did they?"
"Grandfather," Clete said, and walked to his aunt Martha, a tanned, stocky, short-haired blond woman, and kissed her cheek.
"He had no way of knowing I was coming," she said, defending him.
"What brings you here?" Clete asked.
"What do you think? I wanted to see you before you left" Martha said.
"I'm flattered," he said.
"You know Mr. Needham, I believe, Cletus?" the Old Man said.
"No, Sir, I don't believe I do."
Mr. Needham was a bald, nearly obese middle-aged man who had removed his jacket and rolled up his white shirtsleeves so that he could more easily practice his art.
He was standing before an oil portrait of Cletus Howell Frade in a Marine Officer's dress-blue uniform. He turned to look at Clete, smiled, wiped his hand on a rag, and extended it to Clete.
"I'm honored to meet you, Sir," he said. "A genuine privilege to meet one of our country's heroes."
Clete looked uncomfortable.
"How do you do?" he said, then: "I didn't know you could do that."
"Do what?" his grandfather asked.
"What's the word? 'Fix'? 'Change'? Go back and change one of those once it was done."
"Of course you can. That's an oil portrait, not a photograph," the Old Man said.
"I'm really glad you're here, Major," Mr. Needham said. "I want everything to be just right."
He pointed to Clete's dress-blue tunic, laid out, complete to Sam Browne belt and officer's saber, against the back of a red leather couch.
"I had Antoinette bring that down from your room," the Old Man said. "Mr. Needham had little difficulty changing your rank insignia to a major's. Your decorationsincluding that Navy Cross you somehow forget to tell me aboutposed more of a problem."
"It looks fine to me," Clete said after comparing the tunic with the nearly complete work on the portrait. "I'm really impressed with someone like you, Mr. Needham. I can't draw a straight line."
"How is it, Cletus," the Old Man pursued, "that I had to learn of your Navy Cross from Senator Brewer?"
"What's the name of that play? Much Ado About Nothing?"
"They don't hand out the Navy Cross for nothing," the Old Man said. "You can tell us about it now."
Jean-Jacques appeared with four Sazeracs in long-stemmed glasses on a silver tray.
"Saved by the Sazeracs," Clete said, taking one. "Thank you, Jean-Jacques."
"I don't recall asking for a Sazerac," the Old Man said.
"Not to worry, Jean-Jacques," Martha said. "If he doesn't want his, Mr. Needham, Cletus, and I will split it."
"I didn't say I didn't want it, I said I didn't remember asking for it," the Old Man said. "Thank you, Jean-Jacques."
Needham took his glass and raised it to Clete.
"To your very good health, Sir," he said.
"Thank you," Clete said.
"Hear, hear," the Old Man said.
Clete sipped his Sazerac, then set it down and opened the brown paper bag, taking from it a pair of binoculars.
"What have you got there?" the old man asked.
"A pair of Bausch and Lomb 8-by-57-mm binoculars," Clete replied. "I just bought them. I'm sure they're stolen."
"What in the world are you talking about?"
"You asked what I have here, and I'm telling you."
"If they're stolen, where did you get them?" Martha asked.
"In a pawnshop on Canal Street."
He saw that the stolen binoculars now had the Old Man's attention. With a little bit of luck, that would end the questioning about the Navy Cross.
"Why do you think they're stolen?" Martha pursued.
The moment Clete saw the binoculars in the pawnshop he knew they were stolen. For one thing, there was a burnished area (freshly painted over) by the adjustment screw where the Navy customarily engraved USN and the serial number. For another, the price was right, and finally the pawnshop proprietor was exceedingly reluctant to provide a bill of sale. He reduced the price even further on the condition that Clete take possession without paperwork.
Instead of a sense of outrage at the theft, Clete felt a certain admiration for the thief. It had been his experience as an officer of the Naval Service that the three most difficult things to steal from the Navy were pistols, binoculars, and aviator chronographs.
When he was in Washington, where he had spent most of the last six weeks, he would not have been at all surprised if some dedicated, and outraged, Marine Corps supply officer had shown up at Eighth and Eye ( Headquarters, USMC, is at Eighth and I Streets in Washington, D.C.)or for that matter, had burst into OSS Headquarters in the National Institutes of Health Buildingand demanded either the return of his Corps-issued Hamilton chronograph or payment therefore, since he was no longer in a flying billet.
The first time he was shot down, he parachuted into the waters off Tulagi and was rescued by a PT boat. As they roared back to the "Canal," her skipper suggested to him that if he put the Hamilton into his pocket, it might be considered "Lost In Combat."
Since a small gift of a government-issued chronograph to a fellow officer of the Naval Service whose vessel had plucked him from shark-infested waters seemed appropriate, Lieutenant Frade took that Hamilton off his wrist and gave it to him, together with his saltwater-soaked .45 Colt automatic and its holster.
He was, of course, issued another Hamilton chronograph and another .45, but only after a dedicated supply officer (literally during a Japanese strafing raid on Henderson Field) offered him the choice of either paying for both, or signing a two-page document swearing, under pain of perjurythe awesome punishments for which were spelled out in some detail on the formthat they had really and truly, Boy Scout's Honor, cross my heart and hope to die, been lost in combat.
He had paid. The Hamilton on his wrist now was still on some supply officer's books somewhere.
"Look here," Clete said. "You can see where someone ground off 'USN' and the serial number."
Martha looked, and then the Old Man looked.
"If you believed them to be stolen, why did you buy them?" the Old Man asked, incredulously.