The Captains (11 page)

There was a similar establishment, Casa Mañana, owned by the family in Carmel, California. There was no rule that said that simply because you were an officer you had to raise your family in the really dreadful family housing found on most camps, posts, and stations. There was an unwritten law that you could live comfortably—in keeping with your means—and discreetly. Hence, no sign at the gate to the estate. Just the old plow, painted black.

“Turn in, General, at the old plow on the fence. The house is a quarter mile down the dirt road. We generally have a nip about seven, and eat around 2000.”

Bob Bellmon blew the horn as he approached the house. This annoyed Barbara greatly, but the kids liked it. He parked the Buick convertible beside Barbara's Ford station wagon and the jeep, and got out. He was surprised and pleased to see her, and the kids, a boy and a girl, waiting for him at the door.

Just like a Norman Rockwell cover on the
Saturday Evening Post
, he thought, and then was annoyed with himself for being a cynic.

“You and that damned horn,” Barbara said, as she gave him her cheek to kiss. He quickly squeezed her buttocks.

“I am ordered to take two days off,” he said.

“It's about time he saw how exhausted you were,” Barbara said, in reference to the general.

“I don't know if he did or not,” Bellmon said. “I asked for the time.”

“Well, either way,” she said.

They went into the house. He hung the tunic carefully on a hanger in the hall closet, and put the brimmed cap on the shelf above.

“Make me a very cold, very large martini,” he said. “While I change.”

“Drink now, change later?” she asked.

“No, change now, drink lots later,” he said.

“Is it going to be one of those days off?”

“And aren't you glad?” he said.

“Uh huh,” she said. “And guess who's going to choir practice?”

“God loves me,” Bellmon said, and went upstairs to change. What more could a man ask, he asked himself rhetorically, than for two days off, a cold martini, a wife who likes to fool around, and a priest of the Episcopal Church who schedules children's choir practice at precisely the right time.

When he came down, the kids and Barbara were gone. She had taken them early to choir practice, he realized, or had in some other manner gotten rid of them. He would have to make his own martini. That seemed a small enough price to pay.

Ten minutes later, he heard the crunch of automobile tires on the road and decided it was Barbara coming home. If he had planned ahead, he thought, he could have greeted her at the door starkers and played “Me Tarzan, You Jane” with her on the living room floor.

It was probably better this way, he thought. Drag it out a little.

The bell—a real, old-fashioned, hand-twisted door bell—rang.

“Christ!” he said. “Who the hell?”

He opened the door.

Craig W. Lowell stood outside his door. He wore gray flannel slacks, a white shirt, and a cravat, like an English duke in the country.

This was bound to happen, Bellmon thought. Something—something like Craig W. Lowell showing up out of nowhere—was bound to fuck up his fun.

“Hello, Craig,” he said, forcing himself to smile. “What brings you traipsing down my country lane?”

“I heard that beggars are offered booze,” he said.

“Come on in,” Bellmon said, putting his hand on his arm. He didn't like Craig W. Lowell. Barbara did. For reasons he couldn't begin to understand, Barbara automatically forgave Lowell for things that would have seen her terminate a lifelong friendship with somebody else. Barbara's father, General Waterford, and Lowell's father-in-law, just returned from Russian imprisonment in Siberia, had gone to Samur, the French cavalry school, together before War II.

Lowell's father-in-law, Colonel Count Peter-Paul von Greiffenberg, had also been the commandant of the POW camp where Bellmon had been confined. Von Greiffenberg and Bellmon had become friends, separately from the colonel's relationship with General Waterford.

Until von Greiffenberg had shown up alive in Marburg a month before, Bellmon had believed that he was dead. Bellmon was delighted that von Greiffenberg had survived, not only for himself, but for the colonel's daughter. Bellmon liked Ilse von Greiffenberg Lowell very much.

It was Craig W. Lowell that he disliked.

“What can I make you?” Bellmon asked.

“Scotch,” Lowell said. “Please. Barbara home?”

“Not at the moment,” Bellmon said, going behind the bar in the living room to make Lowell a drink. “How's the colonel making out?” he asked.

“He's taking the waters in Monte Carlo,” Lowell said, dryly, “while I work on his financial affairs.”

“When did you come back?”

“On the seventh,” Lowell said.

“And when are you going back to Europe?”

“I wish to hell I knew,” Lowell said. He took the scotch from Bellmon and raised the glass to him. “Mud in your eye, Herr Oberstleutnant,” he said.

“Who's here?” Barbara called from the front door.

“Come and see,” Bellmon called back.

Barbara took one look at Craig W. Lowell and squealed with pleasure. “You look like an advertisement for fairy cigarettes in
Town and Country
,” she said. She went to him and kissed him on the cheek. “I thought you'd be in the south of France.”

“Obviously, no,” Lowell said. “I have the strangest feeling that I walked in here in the middle of Bob's Day.”

You sonofabitch, Bellmon thought, furiously. How dare you say something like that to me in the middle of my living room?

Barbara collapsed in laughter, infuriating her husband even more.

“How could you tell?”

“He was pawing at the ground when he opened the door,” Lowell said. “And then he seemed even less joyous to see me than he usually does.”

Barbara laughed.

“What brings you way the hell out here?” she asked. “I'm delighted to see you, of course, and we insist you stay for dinner and the night…(Goddamnit, I knew she'd do that, her husband thought)…but I'm surprised.”

“I couldn't stay the night,” Lowell said. “Thank you just the same.”

“You tell me why not,” Barbara insisted, taking her husband's martini glass and sipping from it.

“That would put Bob in the awkward position of harboring a deserter,” Lowell said. They looked at him in confusion.

“If that's supposed to be funny, I missed the punch line,” Barbara said.

“It's not funny. I've deserted.”

“Deserted what?” Bellmon asked.

“I've been ordered to Benning,” Lowell said. “To go through some quickie course for reserve officers they're going to send to Korea to get slaughtered, and I've decided I'm not going.”

“You're serious, aren't you?” Barbara asked.

“You were recalled?” Bellmon asked.

“There was a telegram waiting for me at the house,” Lowell said.

“Ordering you to Benning?”

“Ordering me to Meade, where some pencil-pusher told me that I was now in the infantry.”

“There's a shortage of infantry officers,” Bellmon said.

“So I'm told.”

“You're not serious about not reporting, are you?” Bellmon asked.

Lowell took an airlines ticket folder from his pocket.

“Ten forty-five to London, with connections to Monte Carlo,” he said.

“They'll court-martial you, you realize?”

“Possibly.”

“What do you mean, ‘possibly'?” Bellmon snapped. “That's absence to avoid hazardous service. They can shoot you for that.”

“Come on, Bob,” Lowell said. “I'm not much of a soldier, I admit, but I know better than that. They haven't, at least officially, shot anybody since they blew away that Polack, Slovik.”

Lowell looked at Barbara, and handed her his glass.

“I could use another one of these,” he said.

“Sure,” she said. “I'm sorry you had to ask.”

“Why are you telling me all this, Craig?” Bellmon asked. “You don't think there's anything I can do to help you, do you?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact, since you ask, Colonel, I do,” Lowell said.

“And what would that be?”

“You could get on the telephone, and convene an ad hoc meeting of the West Point Protective Association, and find somebody to cancel that detail to infantry.”

“What makes you think I could do something like that, even if I wanted to?” Bellmon demanded angrily.

“Because otherwise, I'm gong to make a big stink.”

“That sounds like a threat,” Bellmon said.

“No threat. Statement of intentions.”

“I'm trying to control my temper,” Bellmon said. “I think you had better leave before I no longer am able to.”

“Hear him out,” Barbara said, her voice flat. She handed Lowell the drink he had asked for, and when her husband said nothing else, she went on: “What do you want from Bob, Craig?”

“I don't want to be sent to Korea as an infantry officer, and get myself killed.”

“The killing of officers comes with war, Lowell,” Bellmon said, icily.

“Killing and slaughter are two different things,” Lowell said.

“What kind of a stink are you going to cause?” Barbara asked, sounding as if she were idly curious.

“‘Craig W. Lowell, New York banker, charged with desertion,'” he said. “‘Decorated hero says he is will not go to Korea as untrained cannon fodder.'”

“You'd do that, too, wouldn't you, Lowell?” Bellmon asked, the contempt in his voice shocking even his wife.

“You bet your sweet ass I will,” Lowell said.

“I can't pretend to understand what you're thinking,” Bellmon said. “What made you think you should bring me into this.”

“It's not that hard to figure out,” Lowell said. “I figured it out between Fort Meade and Washington. I fucking near…sorry, Barbara, that just lipped out…”

“I've heard the word before,” Barbara Bellmon said.

“I was nearly killed in Greece, you will recall.”

“And returned a decorated hero,” Bellmon said.

“I shouldn't have been on the goddamned mountaintop, Robert,” Lowell said. “One of you professionals should have been there.”

“I grant the point, but so what?”

“So once is enough,” Lowell said. “I came through that. But I am not going to put myself in a position again where I am unqualified to lead untrained troops. And get my ass blown away at the same time.”

“I'm beginning to understand your warped thinking,” Bellmon said. “But you had better understand, Lowell, that the army is bigger than you, or me, and that individual desires have nothing to do with anything. You better get back in your car and proceed as ordered, to Benning.”

“You're not refusing to go to Korea, are you, Craig?”

“As an infantry officer, I am.”

“He's bluffing,” Bellmon decided, and announced, “He's desperate and bluffing. You're really despicable, Lowell.”

“Certainly desperate and probably despicable, but not bluffing,” Lowell said. He drained his glass and laid it on the bar. “Sorry you had to get involved in this, Barbara,” he said.

“Where are you going?” Barbara asked.

“I'll send you a postcard from the Riviera,” Lowell said.

Barbara pushed the lever on a flop-open telephone directory.

“What are you doing?” Bob Bellmon asked.

She dialed a number.

“Colonel Bellmon calling for General Davidson,” she said. She handed the telephone to her husband. “You can either tell him to send the MPs to Washigton National,” Barbara said, “to stop a deserting captain. Or that you found out that the system grabbed an armor officer who's badly needed in Korea and threw him into the infantry.”

He took the phone from her without thinking.

“I'll do nothing of the kind,” he said.

“Who's Davidson?” Lowell asked.

“Deputy Chief of Staff, Personnel. He was my brother's roommate at the Academy,” Barbara Bellmon said.

“General,” Lt. Col. Bellmon said to the telephone, “I really hate to bother you personally with this, but I don't know how else to handle it. And it's further made delicate because the officer involved is a close friend of my wife's. The point, sir, is that the net you threw out to snag infantry officers snagged an armor officer we really need.”