He shook her awake and whispered into her ear, “There’s someone at the door. When I turn on the light you grab your things and hotfoot it into the bathroom and close the door . . . but quietly. Hear me?”
He felt her nod in the darkness, then swung his legs out of bed with a somewhat louder curse as his bare soles came into contact with the ice-cold linoleum. Passing his extended arm back and forth in the stygian room, he finally found the chain, pulled it, and the bare bulb set in the ceiling blazed into life.
While Betty bundled her clothing and shoes into her arms and scurried into the private bath, Milo said just loudly enough for a person on the other side of the door to hear, “Hang on, let me get into my skivvies, at least. Who is it, anyway?”
An equally low-pitched voice came from the corridor. “It’s Barstow, Milo. Take your time, get decent, but I’ve got to speak to you before oh six hundred.”
When the bathroom door was shut, he padded over to the door, removed the chair from under the knob as quietly as possible, then unlocked and opened it to face a fully dressed General Barstow, who came in and said, “Shut it and lock it again, please.”
Spying the bottle and the canteen cup on the floor beside the bunk, he strode over, picked up them both and helped himself to a measure of the pale liquor. “Whew! Thank you, Milo. I needed that. Sam Jonas and I worked until after midnight trying to get the office and umpteen cases of files and records in some semblance of order. And no sooner did I get into my room here and start to unpack enough to go to bed than Padre came knocking on my door with some yarn about how you were a wanted felon from Chicago and he had caught you petting with Betty.”
Milo sighed, then said, “General, I was accused of fornication—which is a felony, they said, in Chicago—back well before the war. There was no trial; I left town. Yes, I had coupled with a woman who was well above the age of consent and knew exactly what she was doing. No, Betty and I were not petting when Padre came in here. We were sitting, sharing cigarettes and talking. That man has a very dirty mind, not to mention a big mouth.”
Barstow dragged over the chair and straddled it, resting his arms on its back, the canteen cup still in one hand, an unlit cigar in the other. Dipping the mouth end of the cigar into the contents of the cup, he swirled it around for a moment, then jammed it between his big teeth.
“Look, Milo, I don’t give a damn what my people do during their off-duty hours—drink, screw, read dirty books, write them, smoke hashish or opium, bugger little boys or pull the wings off flies—just so long as a good job of work is done for me and Uncle Sam during duty hours, see. I don’t like Padre, I never have and I doubt I ever will. I only keep the pinko faggot around to keep an eye on him, make certain he doesn’t get a promotion or any real power over normal people and because I enjoy verbally abusing him whenever I’m bored.
“I know that you and Betty spent the night together, so don’t bother trying to tell me a gentlemanly lie, huh? She’s not in her room and she’s not in the main latrine, either, she’s in your bath, Milo. I’m very glad that you thought enough of her to try to protect her, but there’s no need, never was, I approve. You both have had a damned hard war these last few years, and you’ll probably be good for each other for a while, even if this relationship never goes any farther than the occasional boff.
“But just thank your lucky stars, the both of you, that this has happened when and where it has—on a very small post, with a post commander who thinks a majority of the Army regs were drawn up by morons for cretins. You’ll likely get more flak from Padre and some measure of ribbing from the others, too; how you handle that is up to you, unless physical violence arises out of it, and then I’ll have to come down on you, so be warned. You and Betty are welcome to terrify Padre all you wish—and it won’t be hard, he scares easily—you can even hurt him a little, just so long as what you do to him leaves no marks and you don’t do it before witnesses.”
Removing the cigar from his mouth, he drained the cup and tossed it onto the rumpled bunk. After re-placing the cigar, he stood up and stepped over to the door. He unlocked it and then, with his hand on the knob, said, “One last thing, Milo. For Pete’s sake, don’t either of you make the cardinal error of screwing up a good love affair by getting married. I made that mistake once and I’ve regretted it ever since. If you don’t marry, you’ll both have good, warm memories of each other as long as you live; if you do, you’ll spend the rest of your lives trying to get the bad taste out of your mouths.”
Within the succeeding two weeks, a few more personnel were added to their thin ranks. The first three were clearly real civilians, all older men, who kept mostly to themselves, chatting in German in a way that suggested practice of a language for long unused. Then came a man that Milo had not seen since his days at Benning. Emil Schrader looked far older than Milo recalled him. He had a silver bar on each shoulder, a slight limp, and some very impressive ribbons and badges on his chest—Combat Infantry-man Badge, Airborne Wings, Purple Heart with no less than three oak-leaf clusters, Bronze Star, Silver Star and a Presidential Unit Citation.
As soon as the two were done pumping each other’s hands and back-slapping, Milo stood back and pointed at the collection. “What the hell, Emil, did you try to win the fucking war single-handed or something? No wonder they were so long giving me anything for a fucking souvenir of my fun-filled tour of Europe Beautiful—the bastards had given all of the available supply to you!
“But how in God’s name did you wind up here, Emil? Or am I allowed to know?”
It was not until Schrader smiled that Milo realized that one of the younger man’s eyes was not his—a very good color match for the real, remaining one, but a prosthetic, nonetheless—and when he noticed that, he then noticed the faint, well-sanded facial scars, too. The poor little fucker had really had the course, it would seem.
“You’re one of the principal reasons I’m here, you know, Milo. After I was released from the hospital three months back, I was given orders to report to Fort Holabird immediately, not even given time for a convalescent leave to go back home to Kansas. When I got there, who should be waiting but that same son of a bitch tried to have me railroaded at Benning, Jay Jarvis. The fucker got me into his office and told me he was going to put me into a tedious, boring, dead-end job there and keep me at it forever, that I’d stay there until I had a long white beard unless I gave him, in writing, a confession that I’d been a Nazi sympathizer before the war and a Nazi agent during the war. He said that he could keep me from getting anything worse than a dishonorable discharge, but that he had to have that statement and that I wouldn’t get a dis-charge of any kind until I’d given him what he wanted.
“Well, hell, Milo, you know damned good and well that I’m just as stubborn as any other fucker and I would’ve seen hell freeze over solid before I’d’ve knuckled under to that peckerhead cocksucker. So I’ve just been sitting up there, marking time, counting paperclips and suchlike with Jarvis harassing me till he was blue in the face, and then you came along.
“So, after they’d shipped Jarvis off to the funny farm to do his OJT in paper-doll production, somebody went through his office files, found out I was there on post doing little or nothing and started looking for a slot for me to fill. They must’ve looked in my 201 and decided to make a translator or something like that of me, ’cause I was questioned at some length in German—Hochdeutsch, Plattdeutsch, Schweizer-deutsch, the works. A couple days later, they cut orders on me to come to something called Operation Newhaven. And I guess this hash up must be it, huh?”