It had a photograph of him on it, and his name: BANNING, EDWARD J. MAJOR USMC.
"Now will you guard my books for me while I have lunch?" he asked.
"I'm sorry," Carolyn Spencer Howell said, flushing. Then she lowered her head and spoke very softly.
There was no reply, and when she looked up, he was gone.
Carolyn Spencer Howell shook her head.
"Oh, damn!" she said so loudly that heads turned.
Fifteen minutes later, she walked into a luncheonette on East Forty-first Street and headed for an empty stool. A buxom Italian woman with her hair piled high on her head beat her to it, and Carolyn turned in frustration and found herself looking directly at Major Edward J. Banning, USMC, who was seated at a small table against the wall.
"You wouldn't be following me, would you?" he asked.
Carolyn flushed, and started to flee.
Banning stood up quickly and caught her arm.
"Now, I'm sorry," he said. "Please sit down. I'm about finished anyway."
She sat down.
"I have made an utter fool of myself," she said. "But I wasn't really following you. I often come here for lunch."
"I know," Banning said. "I've seen you. I hoped maybe you'd come here for lunch today."
She looked at him.
"I've been thinking," he said. "Under the circumstances, I would have thought I was suspicious, too."
"Would you settle for 'curious'?" Carolyn asked.
"You were suspicious," he said. "Why should that embarrass you?"
A waitress appeared, saving her from having to frame a reply. She ordered a sandwich and coffee, and the waitress turned to Banning.
"If the lady doesn't mind me sharing her table, I'll have some more coffee," he said.
"Please," Carolyn said quickly.
She looked at him. Their eyes met.
"You remember me asking for stuff on Nansen passports?" Banning asked. She nodded. "The reason I wanted to find out as much as I can is that my wife, whom I left behind in Shanghai, is traveling on a Nansen."
"I see," she said.
"I wanted that out in front," Banning said.
"Yes," Carolyn Spencer Howell said. And then she said, "I was married for fifteen years. My husband turned me in on a younger model. It cost him a good deal of money. I had to find a way to pass the time, so I went back to work in the library."
He nodded.
We both know, she thought. And he knew before I did. 1 wonder why that doesn't embarrass me? And what happens now?
They walked back to the library together. Just before she was to go off shift, he walked to the counter and asked her how she would respond to an invitation to have a drink before he got on the subway to go back to Brooklyn. She said she would meet him for a drink in the Biltmore Hotel. She would meet him under the clock… he couldn't miss the clock.
And so after work they had a drink, and then another. When the waiter appeared again, she said that she didn't want another just now. Then he asked her if she was free for dinner, and she told him she was, but she would have to stop by her apartment for a moment.
In the elevator, she looked at him.
"I can't remember one thing we talked about in the Biltmore," she said.
"We were just making noise," he said.
"I don't routinely do this sort of thing," Carolyn Spencer Howell said softly, as they moved closer together.
"I know," he said.
Afterward, she went to the Chinese restaurant on Third Avenue, and returned with two large bags full of small, white cardboard containers that Ed Banning said looked like they held goldfish.
Then she took off her clothes again, and they ate their dinner where she had left him, naked, in the bed.
(Two)
Bachelor Officers' Quarters
U.S. Navy Hospital
Brooklyn, New York
0930 Hours, 26 March 1942
The spartan impersonality of the bachelor officers' quarters struck Major Edward J. Banning the moment he pushed open the plate-glass door and walked into the lobby. It was in some ways like a small hotel.
There was a reception desk, usually manned by a petty officer third. But he wasn't there. And the lobby and the two corridors that ran off it were deserted.
The lobby held a chrome-and-plastic two-seater couch; a chrome-and-plastic coffee table in front of the couch; and two chrome-and-plastic chairs on the other side of the coffee table. There was a simple glass ashtray on the coffee table, and nothing else.
The floor was polished linoleum, bearing the geometric scars of a fresh waxing. There were no rugs. Two photographs were hanging on the walls, one of the Battleship Arizona, the other of a for-once-not-grinning-brightly Franklin Delano Roosevelt. There was a cork bulletin board, onto which had been thumbtacked an array of mimeographed notices for the inhabitants.
A concrete stairway led to the upper floors. Its railings were steel pipe, and its stair-tread edges were reinforced with steel.
Banning went to the desk and checked for messages by leaning over the counter for a look at the row of mailboxes where a message would be kept. There was no message, no letter. This was not surprising, for he expected none.
Banning went up the concrete stairs to the second floor. It was identical to the first, except there was no receptionist's desk. That space was occupied by a couch-and-chairs-and-table ensemble identical to the one in the lobby, which left the center of the second floor foyer empty. There was an identical photograph of President Roosevelt hanging on the wall, next to a photograph of two now-long-obsolete Navy biplane fighters in the clouds.
Halfway down the right corridor, his back to Banning, the petty officer who usually could be found at the reception desk was slowly swinging a large electric floor polisher across the linoleum. Banning walked down the left corridor to his room.
The reason he noticed the spartan simplicity of the BOQ, he realized, was that forty-five minutes earlier, he had walked down a carpeted corridor illuminated by crystal chandeliers to an elevator paneled in what for some strange reason he had recognized as fumed oak, and then across carpets laid on a marble floor past genuine antiques to a gleaming brass-and-glass revolving door spun by a doorman in what looked to be the uniform of an admiral in the Imperial Russian Navy.
"Good morning, Mrs. Howell," the doorman had politely greeted Carolyn. "It's a little nippy. Shall I call a cab?"
"No, thank you," Carolyn had said. "I'll walk."
The doorman's face had been expressionless. Or at least his eyebrows had not risen when he recognized Mrs. Carolyn Howell coming out of the building with a Marine. Nevertheless, Carolyn's face had colored, and Banning had seen that she was embarrassed.
She had quickly recovered, however, and almost defiantly took his arm before they walked down the street.
The sex had been precisely what the doctor had ordered. From me moment he had kissed her in the elevator on the way up, there had been no false modesty, no pushing him away, no questions about what kind of a woman did he think she was. She wanted him-or at least a man-just about as bad as he had wanted her-or at least a woman.
She had told him later, and he had believed her, that it had been the first time for her since the trouble with her husband.
"It is like riding a bicycle, isn't it?" she had asked, with a delightfully naughty-and pleased-smile as she forked a shrimp from one of the little cardboard Chinese take-out containers. "You don't forget how. Except that I feel, with you, like you've just won the Tour de France."
And it had been, aside from the sex, a very interesting (or perverse?) experience to lie naked in Carolyn's bed and tell her about Milla, while she, with genuine sympathy in her eyes, was kneeling naked beside him. To think that Milla would like Carolyn, and Carolyn would like Milla. And to wonder if he was really a sonofabitch for feeling that somehow Milla, if she knew about Carolyn, would not be all that hurt, or pissed off. That she might even be happy for him.
He reached his room, found the key, and pushed the gray metal door open.
The BOQ room was furnished with a bed; a straight-backed chair, a chest of drawers; a chrome-and-plastic armchair, a small wooden desk; and a framed photograph of a broadly smiling Franklin Delano Roosevelt.