Catch-22 (12 page)

   What did come back, eventually, was a second C.I.D. man,
masquerading as a pilot. The men knew he was a C.I.D. man because he confided
to them he was and urged each of them not to reveal his true identity to any of
the other men to whom he had already confided that he was a C.I.D. man.

   ‘You’re the only one in the squadron who knows I’m a C.I.D.
man,’ he confided to Major Major, ‘and it’s absolutely essential that it remain
a secret so that my efficiency won’t be impaired. Do you understand?’

   ‘Sergeant Towser knows.’

   ‘Yes, I know. I had to tell him in order to get in to see
you. But I know he won’t tell a soul under any circumstances.’

   ‘He told me,’ said Major Major. ‘He told me there was a
C.I.D. man outside to see me.’

   ‘That bastard. I’ll have to throw a security check on him. I
wouldn’t leave any top-secret documents lying around here if I were you. At
least not until I make my report.’

   ‘I don’t get any top-secret documents,’ said Major Major.

   ‘That’s the kind I mean. Lock them in your cabinet where
Sergeant Towser can’t get his hands on them.’

   ‘Sergeant Towser has the only key to the cabinet.’

   ‘I’m afraid we’re wasting time,’ said the second C.I.D. man
rather stiffly. He was a brisk, pudgy, high-strung person whose movements were
swift and certain. He took a number of photostats out of a large red expansion
envelope he had been hiding conspicuously beneath a leather flight jacket
painted garishly with pictures of airplanes flying through orange bursts of
flak and with orderly rows of little bombs signifying fifty-five combat
missions flown. ‘Have you ever seen any of these?’ Major Major looked with a
blank expression at copies of personal correspondence from the hospital on
which the censoring officer had written ‘Washington Irving’ or ‘Irving
Washington.’

   ‘No.’

   ‘How about these?’ Major Major gazed next at copies of
official documents addressed to him to which he had been signing the same
signatures.

   ‘No.’

   ‘Is the man who signed these names in your squadron?’

   ‘Which one? There are two names here.’

   ‘Either one. We figure that Washington Irving and Irving
Washington are one man and that he’s using two names just to throw us off the
track. That’s done very often you know.’

   ‘I don’t think there’s a man with either of those names in my
squadron.’ A look of disappointment crossed the second C.I.D. man’s face. ‘He’s
a lot cleverer than we thought,’ he observed. ‘He’s using a third name and
posing as someone else. And I think… yes, I think I know what that third name is.’
With excitement and inspiration, he held another photostat out for Major Major
to study. ‘How about this?’ Major Major bent forward slightly and saw a copy of
the piece of V mail from which Yossarian had blacked out everything but the
name Mary and on which he had written, ‘I yearn for you tragically. R. O.
Shipman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.’ Major Major shook his head.

   ‘I’ve never seen it before.’

   ‘Do you know who R. O. Shipman is?’

   ‘He’s the group chaplain.’

   ‘That locks it up,’ said the second C.I.D. man. ‘Washington
Irving is the group chaplain.’ Major Major felt a twinge of alarm. ‘R. O.
Shipman is the group chaplain,’ he corrected.

   ‘Are you sure?’

   ‘Yes.’

   ‘Why should the group chaplain write this on a letter?’

   ‘Perhaps somebody else wrote it and forged his name.’

   ‘Why should somebody want to forge the group chaplain’s
name?’

   ‘To escape detection.’

   ‘You may be right,’ the second C.I.D. man decided after an
instant’s hesitation, and smacked his lips crisply. ‘Maybe we’re confronted
with a gang, with two men working together who just happen to have opposite
names. Yes, I’m sure that’s it. One of them here in the squadron, one of them
up at the hospital and one of them with the chaplain. That makes three men,
doesn’t it? Are you absolutely sure you never saw any of these official
documents before?’

   ‘I would have signed them if I had.’

   ‘With whose name?’ asked the second C.I.D. man cunningly.
‘Yours or Washington Irving’s?’

   ‘With my own name,’ Major Major told him. ‘I don’t even know
Washington Irving’s name.’ The second C.I.D. man broke into a smile.

   ‘Major, I’m glad you’re in the clear. It means we’ll be able
to work together, and I’m going to need every man I can get. Somewhere in the
European theater of operations is a man who’s getting his hands on
communications addressed to you. Have you any idea who it can be?’

   ‘No.’

   ‘Well, I have a pretty good idea,’ said the second C.I.D.
man, and leaned forward to whisper confidentially. ‘That bastard Towser. Why
else would he go around shooting his mouth off about me? Now, you keep your
eyes open and let me know the minute you hear anyone even talking about
Washington Irving. I’ll throw a security check on the chaplain and everyone
else around here.’ The moment he was gone, the first C.I.D. man jumped into
Major Major’s office through the window and wanted to know who the second
C.I.D. man was. Major Major barely recognized him.

   ‘He was a C.I.D. man,’ Major Major told him.

   ‘Like hell he was,’ said the first C.I.D. man. ‘I’m the
C.I.D. man around here.’ Major Major barely recognized him because he was
wearing a faded maroon corduroy bathrobe with open seams under both arms, linty
flannel pajamas, and worn house slippers with one flapping sole. This was
regulation hospital dress, Major Major recalled. The man had added about twenty
pounds and seemed bursting with good health.

   ‘I’m really a very sick man,’ he whined. ‘I caught cold in
the hospital from a fighter pilot and came down with a very serious case of
pneumonia.’

   ‘I’m very sorry,’ Major Major said.

   ‘A lot of good that does me,’ the C.I.D. man sniveled. ‘I
don’t want your sympathy. I just want you to know what I’m going through. I
came down to warn you that Washington Irving seems to have shifted his base of
operations from the hospital to your squadron. You haven’t heard anyone around
here talking about Washington Irving, have you?’

   ‘As a matter of fact, I have,’ Major Major answered. ‘That
man who was just in here. He was talking about Washington Irving.’

   ‘Was he really?’ the first C.I.D. man cried with delight.
‘This might be just what we needed to crack the case wide open! You keep him
under surveillance twenty-four hours a day while I rush back to the hospital
and write my superiors for further instructions.’ The C.I.D. man jumped out of
Major Major’s office through the window and was gone.

   A minute later, the flap separating Major Major’s office from
the orderly room flew open and the second C.I.D. man was back, puffing
frantically in haste. Gasping for breath, he shouted, ‘I just saw a man in red
pajamas jumping out of your window and go running up the road! Didn’t you see
him?’

   ‘He was here talking to me,’ Major Major answered.

   ‘I thought that looked mighty suspicious, a man jumping out the
window in red pajamas.’ The man paced about the small office in vigorous
circles. ‘At first I thought it was you, hightailing it for Mexico. But now I
see it wasn’t you. He didn’t say anything about Washington Irving, did he?’

   ‘As a matter of fact,’ said Major Major, ‘he did.’

   ‘He did?’ cried the second C.I.D. man. ‘That’s fine! This
might be just the break we needed to crack the case wide open. Do you know
where we can find him?’

   ‘At the hospital. He’s really a very sick man.’

   ‘That’s great!’ exclaimed the second C.I.D. man. ‘I’ll go
right up there after him. It would be best if I went incognito. I’ll go explain
the situation at the medical tent and have them send me there as a patient.’

   ‘They won’t send me to the hospital as a patient unless I’m
sick,’ he reported back to Major Major. ‘Actually, I am pretty sick. I’ve been
meaning to turn myself in for a checkup, and this will be a good opportunity.
I’ll go back to the medical tent and tell them I’m sick, and I’ll get sent to
the hospital that way.’

   ‘Look what they did to me,’ he reported back to Major Major
with purple gums. His distress was inconsolable. He carried his shoes and socks
in his hands, and his toes had been painted with gentian-violet solution, too.
‘Who ever heard of a C.I.D. man with purple gums?’ he moaned.

   He walked away from the orderly room with his head down and
tumbled into a slit trench and broke his nose. His temperature was still
normal, but Gus and Wes made an exception of him and sent him to the hospital
in an ambulance.

   Major Major had lied, and it was good. He was not really
surprised that it was good, for he had observed that people who did lie were,
on the whole, more resourceful and ambitious and successful than people who did
not lie. Had he told the truth to the second C.I.D. man, he would have found
himself in trouble. Instead he had lied and he was free to continue his work.

   He became more circumspect in his work as a result of the
visit from the second C.I.D. man. He did all his signing with his left hand and
only while wearing the dark glasses and false mustache he had used
unsuccessfully to help him begin playing basketball again. As an additional
precaution, he made a happy switch from Washington Irving to John Milton. John
Milton was supple and concise. Like Washington Irving, he could be reversed
with good effect whenever he grew monotonous. Furthermore, he enabled Major
Major to double his output, for John Milton was so much shorter than either his
own name or Washington Irving’s and took so much less time to write. John
Milton proved fruitful in still one more respect. He was versatile, and Major
Major soon found himself incorporating the signature in fragments of imaginary
dialogues. Thus, typical endorsements on the official documents might read,
‘John Milton is a sadist’ or ‘Have you seen Milton, John?’ One signature of
which he was especially proud read, ‘Is anybody in the John, Milton?’ John
Milton threw open whole new vistas filled with charming, inexhaustible
possibilities that promised to ward off monotony forever. Major Major went back
to Washington Irving when John Milton grew monotonous.

   Major Major had bought the dark glasses and false mustache in
Rome in a final, futile attempt to save himself from the swampy degradation
into which he was steadily sinking. First there had been the awful humiliation
of the Great Loyalty Oath Crusade, when not one of the thirty or forty people
circulating competitive loyalty oaths would even allow him to sign. Then, just
when that was blowing over, there was the matter of Clevinger’s plane
disappearing so mysteriously in thin air with every member of the crew, and
blame for the strange mishap centering balefully on him because he had never
signed any of the loyalty oaths.

   The dark glasses had large magenta rims. The false black
mustache was a flamboyant organ-grinder’s, and he wore them both to the
basketball game one day when he felt he could endure his loneliness no longer.
He affected an air of jaunty familiarity as he sauntered to the court and
prayed silently that he would not be recognized. The others pretended not to
recognize him, and he began to have fun. Just as he finished congratulating
himself on his innocent ruse he was bumped hard by one of his opponents and
knocked to his knees. Soon he was bumped hard again, and it dawned on him that
they did recognize him and that they were using his disguise as a license to
elbow, trip and maul him. They did not want him at all. And just as he did
realize this, the players on his team fused instinctively with the players on
the other team into a single, howling, bloodthirsty mob that descended upon him
from all sides with foul curses and swinging fists. They knocked him to the
ground, kicked him while he was on the ground, attacked him again after he had
struggled blindly to his feet. He covered his face with his hands and could not
see. They swarmed all over each other in their frenzied compulsion to bludgeon
him, kick him, gouge him, trample him. He was pummeled spinning to the edge of
the ditch and sent slithering down on his head and shoulders. At the bottom he
found his footing, clambered up the other wall and staggered away beneath the
hail of hoots and stones with which they pelted him until he lurched into
shelter around a corner of the orderly room tent. His paramount concern
throughout the entire assault was to keep his dark glasses and false mustache
in place so that he might continue pretending he was somebody else and be
spared the dreaded necessity of having to confront them with his authority.

   Back in his office, he wept; and when he finished weeping he
washed the blood from his mouth and nose, scrubbed the dirt from the abrasions
on his cheek and forehead, and summoned Sergeant Towser.

   ‘From now on,’ he said, ‘I don’t want anyone to come in to
see me while I’m here. Is that clear?’

   ‘Yes, sir,’ said Sergeant Towser. ‘Does that include me?’

   ‘Yes.’

   ‘I see. Will that be all?’

   ‘Yes.’

   ‘What shall I say to the people who do come to see you while
you’re here?’

   ‘Tell them I’m in and ask them to wait.’

   ‘Yes, sir. For how long?’

   ‘Until I’ve left.’

   ‘And then what shall I do with them?’

   ‘I don’t care.’

   ‘May I send them in to see you after you’ve left?’

   ‘Yes.’

   ‘But you won’t be here then, will you?’

   ‘No.’

   ‘Yes, sir. Will that be all?’

   ‘Yes.’

   ‘Yes, sir.’

   ‘From now on,’ Major Major said to the middle-aged enlisted
man who took care of his trailer, ‘I don’t want you to come here while I’m here
to ask me if there’s anything you can do for me. Is that clear?’

   ‘Yes, sir,’ said the orderly. ‘When should I come here to
find out if there’s anything you want me to do for you?’