«It’s rather difficult to get into a role without proper accoutrements, which naturally presumes accurate clothing—as in a uniform… Actually, as a general I outrank you, Colonel.»
«If you’re going to play that game, Mr. Actor, you’re playing a general; you were field-commissioned a major and I was given the rank of colonel. You lose, Sir Henry.»
«Damned impertinent civilians—»
«Where the hell are you, still in World War Two?»
«No, I’m an artist! The rest of you are civilians … and chemists.»
«Man, you and Hawkins got more in common than El Alamein. Then, most of the generals I’ve known were actors, too… Come on, let’s go. They expect us at twenty-two hundred.»
«Twenty-two hundred what?»
«Hours, Major, or General, if you prefer. It’s military for ten o’clock at night.»
«Never could figure those damned numbers—»
The «Nobel» committee’s three hotel suites were adjacent to one another, the middle rooms designated as the meeting ground for the august General MacKenzie Hawkins, Soldier of the Century, and the distinguished «visitors from Stockholm.» As negotiated by the general’s aide-de-camp, one Colonel Cyrus Marshall, U.S. Army, Retired, the conference was to be private, without press coverage or news releases. As the colonel explained, although the celebrated warrior was immensely honored by the award, he was currently in seclusion writing his memoirs, Peace Through Blood, and wished to know the extent of his travel and media commitments before rendering his decision to accept. The committee spokesman, Lars Olafer, reacted to the secret meeting with such enthusiasm that Colonel Cyrus added gas-spraying weapons to the already complete arsenal on his and Roman Z’s persons. A trap was to be reversed in the best tradition of subterranean rats and Cyrus knew exactly how to do it. Pull in the rodents, immobilize them, bring them to with bound hands and feet, then subject them to interrogation usually described as psychologically macabre but without physical harm. Like ice picks poised in front of their eyes.
«I’d be far more impressive in a uniform!» said Sutton angrily, walking down the hotel corridor in a pinstriped suit recruited from his Boston apartment. «These damn clothes were appropriate for Shaw’s The Millionairess, but not for the mission at hand.»
«Hey, you look terrific,» said Roman Z, pinching Sutton’s cheek to the astonishment of the actor. «You should only have perhaps a flower in your lapel, it would have a certain somzing.»
«Cut it out, Roman,» said Cyrus quietly. «He looks fine… Are you ready, General?»
«You’re talking to a professional, dear boy. The adrenaline flows as we approach the moment. Now, the magic begins!… Knock on the door, precede me, as is proper, and I shall make my entrance.»
«Remember, Pops,» admonished the mercenary in front of the door. «You’re one hell of an actor, I’ll give you that, but please don’t get carried away and scare the hell out of them. We want to learn everything we can before we make our move.»
«Now you’re a director, Colonel?… May I explain for your untutored frame of reference that there are three descending ts in the theater: talent, taste, and tenacity, and within the second category is contained Hamlet’s entire advice to the players. I remember one time in Poughkeepsie—»
«Tutor me some other time, Mr. Sutton. Right now, let’s just have the magic begin, okay?» Cyrus rapped on the door of the hotel suite, drawing himself up to his full military height and ramrod posture. The door was opened by a white-haired man with a salt and pepper chin beard, a pince-nez looped over his nose. «Colonel Marshall, sir,» continued Cyrus, introducing himself. «Chief aide-de-camp to General MacKenzie Hawkins.»
«Välkommen, Colonel,» said the ersatz elderly delegate supposedly from Sweden; he spoke in an extremely thick Scandinavian accent that made the traveled Cyrus wince. «Vee are vid extreme pleasure to meet zee grand gheneral.» The delegate, bowing obsequiously, stepped backward so as to admit the celebrated Soldier of the Century, who strode through the door like an animated Colossus of Rhodes with an agitated Roman Z shuffling rapidly behind him.
«I am deeply honored, gentlemen!» exclaimed the actor, his guttural bark extraordinarily close to that of MacKenzie Hawkins. «Not only honored but supremely humbled by your selection of this minor player in the major conflicts of our times. I have merely done my best, and as an old soldier tempered by battle, I can only say that we fill the wall up with our heroic dead, those brave souls surviving, pressing ahead to victory!»
Suddenly, a rush of voices, the accents diverse and having nothing to do with Sweden, burst forth.
«Christ, it’s him!»
«You forget your grammar, but by God, it is!»
«I don’t believe it! I thought he died years ago!»
«Never on stage, he didn’t! He never died on stage—he was always magnificent!»
«The finest character actor of our time! The Walter Abel of the seventies and eighties. Brilliance personified!»
«What the hell is going on?» shouted Colonel Cyrus, his naturally endowed but untrained voice no match for Ethelred Brokemichael’s clandestine unit of actors. «Will somebody tell me?» he yelled, trying to be heard above the din as the men of Suicidal Six crowded around «General MacKenzie Hawkins,» shaking his hand, patting him on the shoulders, one overwrought man kissing his Players Club ring. «Goddamn it! Will someone explain what this is all about?»
«Let me try!» said Dustin, breaking away from the others, his eyes dazzled. «You obviously were recruited late in this operation so you would have no way of knowing, but this isn’t that clown Hawkins, but one of the theater’s most outstanding artists! We all saw him when we were younger, studied his performances, followed him into Joe Allen’s—that’s an actors’ bar—and bombarded him with questions, trying to absorb whatever he could impart.»
«Impart what? What are you talking about?»
«This man is Henry Irving Sutton! The Sutton, Sir Henry—»
«Yes, I know,» interrupted Cyrus softly, in his voice the essence of abject defeat. «After a long-gone English actor named Irving, who had nothing to do with the bank or a tailor on First Avenue… Wait a minute!» yelled the mercenary suddenly. «Who the hell are you people?»
«Each of us gives only his name, rank, and serial number,» replied Marlon, overhearing Cyrus’s question and reluctantly turning away from the adulated Sutton, who was accepting the accolades of his peers with brilliant humility. «I say this in sadness, Colonel, for I once had a small role in a Sidney Poitier film, and he, too, was and is a marvelous artist.»
«Name, rank, and—what the hell are you talking about?»
«Just what I said, Colonel. Name, rank, and serial number, according to the laws of the Geneva Convention. Nothing more.»
«You’re soldiers?»
«Very accomplished ones,» answered Dustin, glancing over at his hero, namely Henry Irving Sutton, who was now holding his worshipers spellbound recounting past triumphs. «We accept the risks of combat without uniforms, but to date it’s never been a factor.»