Sweet Reason (19 page)
“In police work, Captain, that’s a very crucial step. I’ve narrowed down the area where the typewriter could be.”
“Since you’ve searched the entire ship and haven’t found it, I’d say you narrowed it down to zero.”
“No sir, not quite. There are a few places I haven’t searched yet, and that’s where the typewriter will be. I’ll stake my reputation on it.”
“As far as I’m concerned, Proper, you’re risking nothing if you stake your reputation. Where is it you haven’t searched?”
Proper leaned toward the Captain and lowered his voice. “There are eight spaces that were locked when I went around the ship, Captain — places like the after paint locker and the ship’s store.”
“Why didn’t you open them?”
“Either the men who had the keys couldn’t be found, or the keys themselves were missing.”
“And so now you propose to search these spaces, eh?”
“Yes sir, that’s what I’d like to do, Captain,” Proper said. “The fatal typewriter is sure to be in one of them, and the
man who has access to the space is sure to be Sweet Reason.”
“All right Proper, I’ll give you one more shot at it,” Jones said. “After the shore fire exercise tomorrow morning, get the XO to give you Quinn’s key ring. You should be able to open the doors with that. And this time you’d better come up with something, eh?”
“Aye aye, Captain,” Proper said. As Jones turned to go Proper tugged at his sleeve. Jones looked down at his sleeve with a pained expression on his face. “Are you trying to attract my attention, Proper?”
“Beg pardon, Captain, no offense intended. I wanted to tell you one more thing.” Again Proper lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper and leaned toward Jones. “I got another prime suspect, Captain. I thought you might like to sound him out, sort of, the way you sounded out Ensign Joyce.”
“Who is it this time, Proper?”
“It’s …”
“Speak up, man, how do you expect me to hear something when you whisper like that?”
“It’s Cee-Dee, sir.”
“Who the hell is Cee-Dee?” Jones asked.
“Cee-Dee is Czerniakovski-Drpzdzynski, the ship’s barber, Captain. I suspect him for two reasons. One is I personally heard him talk about draft dodging in such a way as to indicate he approved of it.”
“And the second?”
“The second what, Captain?”
“Jesus Christ, Proper, the second reason.”
“Oh, that. The second reason is because he’s the least likely suspect on the entire ship, and in police work it’s very often the least likely suspect that committed the crime. This Czerniakovski-Drpzdzynski goes way out of his way to show how pro-American he is. He even has a — begging your pardon, Captain — ‘Fuck Communism’ sign up in his barber
shop. Now it seems to me that anybody who is really innocent wouldn’t have to go to all this trouble to appear innocent, if you get my drift.”
Jones nodded slowly. “What kind of a name is —”
“Czerniakovski-Drpzdzynski.”
“Czerniakovski-Drpzdzynski,” the Captain repeated. “What kind of name is that? He’s not colored, is he?”
“Oh no, sir, it’s nothing like that. Czerniakovski-Drpzdzynski’s a
foreign
name.”
“A foreign name, eh? All right, send him on up and I’ll see which way the wind is blowing.”
Cee-Dee Comes Through with Flying Colors
Cee-Dee turned up fifteen minutes later carrying a sheet and his barber utensils in his right hand and one of his sex magazines in the other. “Evening, Captain,” he said, offering the magazine to Jones. “Makes the time pass more quickly.” And before the Captain could say a word he plunked the magazine on his lap, draped the sheet over his shoulders and started in trimming the hair away from his right ear.
Jones was a split second away from yanking the sheet off and leaping out of the chair and giving Cee-Dee a piece of his mind when he remembered he needed a haircut and decided this was as good a time as any to get one. So he sat back and watched Cee-Dee, who was ducking and weaving around him, darting in with a clackety-clack-clack of the scissors, then leaning back and tilting his head to observe his handiwork. All the while Cee-Dee kept up a running conversation.
“Pleasure to give you a haircut … you know some of us
think you’re doing a bang-up job … big difference since you took over command … could you turn a little more toward me, that’s it … friggin’ Commies will rue the day the
Eugene Ebersole
turned up off their friggin’ coast … hear you been recommended for a silver star … bend your head forward, please … some shellackin’ we —”
“Tell me something,” Jones interrupted. “What do you think of this Sweet Reason character?”
Cee-Dee stopped cutting and stepped back from the chair and stared at the Captain in astonishment. “You asking me what
I
think of Sweet Reason?” he demanded, brandishing his scissors. Jones sank back into his chair, afraid that Cee-Dee was about to lunge at him.
“You don’t have to answer the question if it disturbs you,” he said in a thin voice. His lower lip was quivering and he put his hand against the side of his face to stop it.
“No offense intended, Captain, but this faggot who calls himself Sweet Reason should be boiled in friggin’ oil.”
“In oil, eh?” Jones said, and the quivering in his lower jaw stopped.
Cee-Dee went back to cutting hair. “There’s a rotten Commie apple in every barrel, Captain.”
Jones had regained his composure by now. “I’ll remember that, son,” he said. “You feel pretty strongly about Communism, don’t you, eh; what do they call you, Cee-Dee?”
Cee-Dee darted in and snipped away at the hair over the Captain’s collar. “I sure do, Captain sir. I got a poster in the barber shop that tells it like it is. It says — excuse the expression — ‘Fuck Communism.’ That’s how I feel about it. I’d like to fuck — beg your pardon, Captain — I’d like to have
sexual intercourse
with every one of those filthy, atheistic Commie sons of bitches, every man, woman and child. They’re all the same if you ask me. Scratch a Commie and you find a friggin’ bastard.”
Now Cee-Dee started in on the sideburns, raising first one
side, then the other, then the first side again, then back to the other until there was nothing resembling sideburns left on the Captain’s face. With a flourish he reserved for officers Cee-Dee whisked the sheet off the Captain’s shoulders, and Jones promptly began fishing with two fingers under his shirt collar for loose hair. “Let me ask you one more thing, Cee-Dee. Someone — I won’t say who — someone mentioned to me that you made some remarks about draft dodging in which you more or less indicated your approval —”
“Draft dodgers are scum of the earth in my book, Captain,” Cee-Dee interrupted. “I don’t hold with no friggin’ draft dodging.”
“So irregardless of what he thought he heard, whoever heard you must have been mistaken, eh?”
“Captain, the only thing I know about draft dodging is what I heard from this sailor in Naples. Like I say, this sailor has an Eye-talian cousin, see, who was drafted into the Eye-talian army. Well, it seems there’s a law in Italy that mutilated soldiers from the war are entitled to the permanent company of an enlisted man, so this guy that was drafted, his father, who runs a brassiere factory, he
hires
the mutilated veteran and puts him on the payroll and this mutilated guy, see,
he
puts in for the kid to accompany him all the time. So then the kid is drafted and first thing you know he’s ordered back home to keep this old man company. Some deal, huh?”
“And the government let him get away with this?”
“The government didn’t do nothing to stop him, yeah.”
“Well, if you ask me,” Jones said, “it’s still draft dodging.”
“With all respect,” said Cee-Dee, “it ain’t draft dodging, it’s just Italy.”
Captain Jones Gets a Glimpse of Something Larger than Himself
It was evening penumbra — that space of time when the sun has set but not yet extracted all the light from the day. At sea this is star time — the few moments when the navigator measures the angle between the horizon and the celestial bodies. Any earlier and the stars would not be visible; any later, the horizon would be lost in blackness.
Sextant in hand, the XO was waiting for the first stars to appear in the sky — Alioth or Dubhe in the Big Dipper; Polaris, the Pole Star, in the Little Dipper; Schedar or Caph in Cassiopeia; Sirius in Canis Major; Procyon in Canis Minor.
“Nothing yet, eh?”
“Nothing yet, Skipper.”
“That was pretty handsome, what he said before the chopper lifted him off, eh?”
“Goddamn handsome, Captain,” the XO said. “Sounded like he meant every word of it too.”
“Sure doesn’t hurt a man’s career to have someone like that put in a good word with the Admiral, does it?”
“Worth its weight in gold,” the XO agreed.
“See anything yet?”
Searching the sky as if he were looking for rain, the XO shook his head. “Few minutes more,” he said.
“What do you think he meant by ‘give credit where credit is due’?” Jones asked. He reached under his shirt collar and rubbed his neck. “Do you think he meant us in particular or the navy in general or what?”
“Hard to say, Captain. He’s a smart cookie, the Congressman. Hard to say exactly what he meant. But he was pleased, that’s for sure. Even Filmore was tickled pink. Did
you see his face when they lifted off the cans of film? If one of them had fallen into the drink he would have dived in after it.”
“Filmore said he’d get at least twenty seconds on Huntley-Brinkley and Cronkite with the stuff he had.”
Captain Jones took off his baseball cap and threaded his fingers through his hair. As usual after one of Cee-Dee’s haircuts, it felt as if there was none left. “Do you suppose he heard about, well, about our little problem?” he asked the XO.
“How could he have, Skipper? One of us was with him almost every moment. I’ll lay a month’s wages he never got a whiff of Sweet Reason on the
Ebersole.”
“I hope you’re right, XO, that’s all I can say. I hope you’re right.”
Both men were lost in thought for a few minutes.
Then the XO laughed out loud.
“What?” the Captain asked.
“No, I was just thinking what would have happened if the Congressman had been wounded. Christ, we’re lucky, Captain.”
“Filmore said he wouldn’t have minded a scratch or two. Good for a few minutes of conversation at one of those Washington cocktail parties, eh?” And he and the XO laughed knowingly.
“Goddamn shame about McTigue, huh, Captain?” the XO said.
“Goddamn shame is right,” agreed Jones. “Which one was he?”
“Lustig’s chief — tall, tough, regular navy. Looked like one of those actors you see all the time in those old westerns. He ran Mount Fifty-one. Lustig says he heard the jets spotted the helicopter outside of the town. It was a burnt-out wreck.”
“McTigue,” Jones said thoughtfully. “I remember him
now. He’s the one who came back from the dentist with all the gaps between his teeth.”
“That’s him, Skipper. Lustig talked him into taking all the tartar out.”
“Do I write his next of kin now?” Jones asked. “Christ Almighty, how I hate this drill.”
“I got some missing-in-action forms in a BuPers pamphlet somewheres,” the XO said. “It’s got a lot of great phrases in it about how you knew the guy personally and respected him and stuff like that. With your permission, Captain, I’ll work up a draft for your signature.”
“Thanks, XO, you’re a lifesaver. Hey, there, there, over there, see it — the first star, eh?”
The XO raised his sextant to his eye and, through a system of mirrors, brought the light of the star down so that it rested on the horizon. “Mark,” he called, and read off the angle to the yeoman who was standing, stopwatch in hand, in the pilot house door.
The star was Betelgeuse, a giant red that is so vast you could fit the sun, Mercury, Venus, the Earth, Mars and all the space between them into it and still have room to spare.
Proper Hears an Ominous Echo