«I’m damn sure there’s somethin’ in the Church that says we shouldn’t have done what we did, Petey!» cried a gray-haired Duffy brother as he was led to the rendezvous.
«But we did it thirty years ago, Bobby!»
«But they’re sisters, Petey. And we’re brothers—»
«They’re not our sisters, Bobby—»
«Still, brothers and sisters—I’m sure there’s somethin’, boyo!»
«Will you two shut yer faces!» ordered a leather-lined Harry Milligan, put in charge of the small brigade by the injured Billy Gilligan. «Yer too pissed for combat, so I’m orderin’ you to stand watch.»
«What are we watchin’?» asked a weaving Bobby Duffy, running his hand through the imagined hair on his bald head. «Where are the Krauts comin’ from?»
«Not Krauts, Bobbo! The dirty bastards who want to shoot the heart out of the great general!»
«What do they look like, Harry boy?» inquired a wide, red-eyed Peter Duffy, gripping the side-view mirror and, quite by the accident of his bulk, bending it out of shape—downward.
«How the hell do I know, Petey?» replied the CO of the Milligan-Gilligan brigade. «My guess is that they’ll be runnin’ like a Donegal wind out of there once we find ’em.»
«How will we do that, Harry boy?» asked Bobby Duffy, his words interspersed with one hiccup and two belches.
«Come to think of it, I’m not sure.» Milligan squinted, the leathered lines in his face like crevices on a rhino skin. «Gilligan never actually told me.»
«You got it wrong, Harry,» protested the erratically unstable Peter Duffy. «You yourself are Gilligan.»
«I’m not himself at all, you slotted asshole! I’m Milligan!»
«Very nice to make your acquaintance,» said Bobby Duffy, sinking down to the curb like an overripe, overdone baked potato punctured by a fork.
«M’ brother has been afflicted by the evil anti-Christ demons!» cried Peter, falling down against the car door, his leg over his brother’s face. «It’s the curse of the witch-sisters!»
«Good lad,» agreed Harry Milligan, kneeling and patting Petey’s head. «You stay here and ward off those terrible demons.» Harry rose to his feet and addressed the seven remaining troops of the Milligan-Gilligan brigade. «Come on now, boyos, we know what we have to do!»
«What exactly is that, lad?» asked a gaunt septuagenarian, wearing an ill-fitting World War II field jacket replete with a dozen patches representing duty in the European theater of operations.
«Billy Gilligan gave me the two names—the first, of course, the great General Hawkins and, the second, his employer, a gentleman of the law of which we’ve all heard of not unkindly. The Jewish fella who’s a big shillelagh in Boston and who has a number of fine Catholic lawyers in his firm.»
«Smart, they’re always so smart,» intoned an elderly unidentified voice in the magnificent seven. «They hire Micks, but how many of us hire the skullcaps? Smart.»
«So this is what we do, boyos. I myself will go to the front desk and make the inquiry. I’ll be tellin ’em I have to reach either the great general or his friend, the grand lawyer named Pinkus, because I got an urgent confidential message that concerns both of ’em, and the dear Lord knows I’m not lyin’ about that! Now, with such highfalutin fellas, they got no choice but to put me in touch with one or the other, right?»
A chorus of affirmatives followed, marred by the dissenting voice of the oldest combatant in the field jacket. «I dunno, Gilligan—»
«I’m Milligan!»
«Wish you were Gilligan, he was on the force, y’know.»
«I’m not … so what don’t you know, ya old fart?»
«Suppose you get a secretary on the telephone, what are you goin’ to say?… ‘My apologies, lass, but somebody or other is about to blow away the great general and his friend, the Jewish shillelagh.’ … Somehow, lad, I think they’d call for the boys who drive those little white trucks with thick rubber walls and bars in the windows.»
«I don’t hafta talk to nobody, you walkin’ object of a wake! Paddy Lafferty has told us all about the grand suit his employer keeps at the Four Asses, only we don’t know where it is. Now the clerks got to tell me on account of the urgent confidential message I’m carryin’, right?»
There was a chorus of affirmatives, again marred by the septuagenarian legionnaire. «Suppose they don’t believe you? I wouldn’t. You got shifty eyes, when a person can see ’em.»
There was now a brace of nodding heads as the combatants studied the flesh-encased eyes of Harry Milligan. «Oh, shut up!» cried Harry, shocking his troops back to the issue at hand. «They can believe me or not believe me, it don’t make no difference. They still got to give me a room number to call—then we’ll know where it is!»
«Then what?» asked the cautious disbeliever.
«Then we split up, and you, ya shriveled-up cadaver, you stay by the front entrance and if we flush the bastards out and they run into getaway automobiles, you damn well get the license plate numbers… Thank Christ you weren’t in my outfit, you’d be arguing with Ike himself!» Milligan pointed to three of the remaining unassigned six legionnaires. «You lads cover whatever other exits there are to the street—Lafferty was clear about that—»
«Where are they, Harry?» said a short, middle-aged man in a leather air corps jacket. «I was a tail gunner, so I’m not too familiar with ground tactics.»
«You gotta find ’em, boyo! Paddy said to pipe ’em up.»
«What does that mean, Harry?»
«Well … well, Paddy wasn’t too clear about that, but I figure he meant not to let anybody out who shouldn’t.»
«Like who?» asked a tall, slender man in his late sixties, his dress code in conflict with the mission, as he wore a loud Hawaiian shirt profuse with orange passion flowers, but nevertheless topped by a blue legionnaire’s cap.
«Harry awready told us!» cried an overweight member of medium height, a metal combat helmet framing his bubbled-out face. «Any bastards who are runnin’ outside to getaway cars.»
«Then we shoot ’em!» confirmed the slender gentleman in the Hawaiian shirt.
«In the legs, boyo!» clarified Harry Milligan. «Like we used to do with the Kraut scouts. We gotta save ’em for interrogation!»
«Right on, Harry,» the helmeted infantryman agreed. «Boy, do I remember! We’d capture ’em and all they did was cover their balls! ’Course I never had to shoot, but they got the message.»
«Lads, I suggest you take off your headgear. Kinda obvious, you know what I mean?» Harry then addressed the last three combatants from Post O’Brien. «You boys, you stay with me, properly behind and mixin’ with the people in the lobby, but keep your eyes on me. When I move, you move with me, got it, boyos?»
Once more, and now louder with determination, the chorus of consenting adults was heard. «We’ll go in first,» said the beefy ground soldier, clipping his helmet on to his combat belt beneath his bowling shirt, which proclaimed the virtues of O’Boyle’s meats. «Give us two minutes and we’ll find the exits and get stationed.»