Brotherhood Of War: The Lieutenants Part 21

There was an exception to that, Lowell had also learned.

The European Command provost marshal was Brigadier General H. Norman Schwartzkopf, formerly Colonel Schwartzkopf of the New Jersey State Police. Schwartzkopf had been the man who had caught the kidnapper of Colonel Charles A.

Lindbergh's baby, and was second in fame only to J. Edgar Hoover. The next provost marshal of the U. S. Army would be Schwartzkopf, and Fat Charley would be his replacement.

Only after Fat Charley had asked him for a ride to lunch did Lowell consider that as an officer he could no longer eat as a transient in the enlisted mess of the Signal Battalion, which was near the stables. And only a moment after that did he realize that Fat Charley had thought of that before he had and was helping him to ease the problem of transition.

Whether Fat Charley really had business at his office (a one and-a-half-story brown stone building that reminded Lowell of a gas station) or whether that had simply been an excuse to have Lowell accompany him, he was in the building no more than three minutes.

He came out and heaved himself into the jeep beside Lowell, leaning back on the seat, his right booted leg outside of the jeep body and resting on the horizontal rear portion of the fender.

"The Bayrischen Hof," Fat Charley began without preliminaries, "is one of three hotels for bachelor officers, most of them company grade. Most senior officers are both married and have their dependents here. At lunch, the dining room feeds the married men who don't want to go home for lunch. Some of them stop in the bar for a drink or two On the way home. Dinner, and the bar afterward, is generally for the bachelors and transients. Now that the ant fraternization ban has been lifted, you generally find frauleins, of all kinds, from the wholly respectable to the other end of the spectrum, in the dining room and bar." Lowell nodded. He didn't say anything, because he didn't know what to say.

"It seems to have been decided," Fat Charley went on, "that if young officers are going to get falling down drunk and make a.s.ses of themselves over girls who are available for a pound of coffee or a couple pairs of stockings, it's better to have them do it where they're out of sight of the troops." They were at the Bayrischen Hof by the time he'd made his little speech. Fat Charley pointed the way to the parking lot, and then led the way through the rear door of the four-story Victorian hotel to the dining room. He walked to a table occupied by a military police captain, who stood up at his approach.

"Have you room for a couple of old horse soldiers?" Fat Charley said, slipping into a chair. "Captain Winslow, Lieutenant Lowell." They shook hands. A German waitress immediately served coffee, and laid a mimeographed menu before them. Lowell saw, a little disappointed, that the food was the same food served in the enlisted mess. When Fat Charley left beside his plate thirty-five cents in the paper script they used for money, Lowell did likewise.

"Lowell," Fat Charley said, when they had finished eating, "if you want to make sure you're properly checked in, I'll have another cup of coffee with Captain Winslow."

"Thank you, sir," Lowell said. "Nice to have met you, Captain. "

"I'll see you tonight, probably," Captain Winslow said.

"I live here, too." As he walked across the dining room, he heard Fat Charley say to Winslow that he had "just arrived. Nice boy. Fine polo player." The sergeant at the desk went with him to his room, a pleasant, airy double room on the top floor. He told him how the laundry was handled, and advised him to make sure he locked up his cigarettes and other goodies, because the krauts would sure as h.e.l.l steal anything that wasn't nailed down.

Fat Charley was waiting in the lobby when he came down from his room.

(Three) The general showed up, with MacMillan, in a liaison aircraft precisely at 1430. His polo players were waiting for him, with the better ponies; and ten minutes after the general landed, the first chukker began.

At one point in the game, when the jeep horn sounded the end of the fourth chukker, Lowell found himself alone with General Waterford at the far end of the field. They walked their mounts back together.

"It's you, Fat Charley, and me," the general said. "Think it over, and then tell me who else we should play with." By G.o.d, Lowell thought, here I am, on my first day as a second lieutenant, and the general is already asking my advice.

When the game was over, there were c.o.c.ktails at the general's van, served by the general's orderlies and attended by such officer's ladies as happened to be in the area. He was introduced to Mrs. Fat Charley. She was very much like Mrs.

Waterford, Lowell thought.

Afterward, Lowell drove to the Bayrischen Hof, and went to his room. He took a leisurely shower and then spent the hour and half until the bar opened reading the Stars & Stripes and listening to his radio., The other polo players, when they came in, acknowledged his presence in the bar with a nod or a word, but none joined him where he sat at the end of the bar, and he was not invited to join any of the groups at their tables. They're afraid of me, Lowe]l realized, or at least they don't know what to do with me. It is easier to stay away from me.

At six o'clock, after two beers, he went into the dining room and ate alone. Then he got in the jeep and drove across the park to the munic.i.p.al auditorium, which like most of the useful buildings in Bad Nauheim, had been requisitioned by the army. He bought a ticket for twenty-five cents, and sat in the officer's loge, and watched a Humphrey Bogart movie.

After he'd returned to the Bayrischen Hof, he intended to go right to his room; but Captain Winslow, to whom he had been introduced at lunch, saw him pa.s.sing through the lobby and called out to him. After Winslow had bought him a beer and he had bought Winslow a beer, Winslow offered the information that Fat Charley and the general and Winslow's father had been cla.s.smates at West Point.

Soon after that Lowell's eyes fell upon a tall, blond, dark eyed fur-line at a table with another fur-line and two officers.

The officer with her groped her, or tried to, under the table.

His reaction was ambivalent. He thought that his new status would give him opportunity to rent a little p.u.s.s.y himself, something as good looking as that, something he had been reluctant to do so far because he had nearly been nauseated by the technicolor VD movie he'd been shown on arrival in Germany.

Renting one of the fur-lines on the street for a box of Hershey chocolate bars or two boxes of Rinso was something a reasonable man just did not do. Renting one in an officer's hotel, however, might be some thing else again. Certainly, he reasoned, the army must take some measures" to insure that the officer corps in an official officer's billet-did not contact gonorrhea, syphilis, or even crabs.

He was also offended and angry that a nice-looking young girl like that should have to permit Herself to be pawed by a drunken oaf like the captain at the table.

Then he told himself that it was none of his business, and said good night to Captain Winslow, who seemed to be a decent sort, and went to bed.

At midnight, there were sounds of cras.h.i.+ng gla.s.s, and a feminine scream, and shouted male oaths, and of opening and slamming doors. He got out of bed and went to the door and stuck his head out.

The girl he had seen being groped in the bar was huddled against the wall at the end of the corridor, hurriedly fastening her clothes. Her blond hair, which she had worn in, a bun at her neck, was now hanging loose and mussed. It made her look very young; and her wide blue eyes showed terror. The oaf Lowell had seen pawing her in the bar, dressed in only his skivvies, was being urged back into his room by two other officers and the sergeant from the desk downstairs. As soon as they had the oaf inside his room, the room next to Lowell's, the sergeant turned to the girl and in broken German told her to get her hustling little a.s.s out of the hotel, right G.o.dd.a.m.n now, and don't come back.

She scurried like a frightened animal down the corridor, past Lowell. There was shame and anger and terror and helplessness all at once in her eyes. She was entirely too good looking, Lowell thought, to be a wh.o.r.e. Wh.o.r.es are $supposed to look lewd, lascivious, and tough. This one looked like somebody's kid sister. He thought about that. She looked like Cusbman c.u.ming's little sister. What the h.e.l.l was her name? The one he always misp.r.o.nounced: Penelope. He had once seen Pen-ell-oh-pee c.u.mings in her nightgown with her b.o.o.bs pus.h.i.+ng out in front.

He watched as the wh.o.r.e fled down the stairs beside the elevator.

Lowell closed his door. He could hear, but not completely understand, the drunken outrage of the oaf next door. For some reason, he was as excited as he had been when he had seen Cush's kid sister in her nightgown in Spring Lake. He had been ashamed when that had given him a hard-on, and he was embarra.s.sed now that what had just happened had also given him a hard-on.

He walked to the French windows and opened them, then looked out the window to the street below.

In a moment the fur-line came out of the hotel, walking, quickly. She stopped on the sidewalk, looked both ways, and then hurried across the street into the munic.i.p.al park. She disappeared into the shrubbery. She was probably taking a short cut through the park, Lowell thought. And then he saw that she had stopped twenty yards inside the park and was leaning on a tree.

What she is going to do, Lowell decided, is wait for a GI or an officer to come down the street, and offer herself.

Strangely excited, he decided he would watch.

Two soldiers came down the sidewalk. The girl didn't move from her tree. Then an officer walking from another of the hotels to the Bayrischen Hof walked past her. She didn't approach him either.

There was a tightness in Lowell's chest, an excitement. He turned from the window, took his trousers from the chair where he'd laid them, and began to dress. He ran down the stairwell and walked past the knowing eyes of the sergeant on duty at the desk and into the street.

He entered the park. She wasn't leaning on the tree where he had last seen her, and for a moment he felt like a fool. Then he saw the edge of her dress behind the tree. She had seen him coming and was avoiding him.

"Guten Abend," Lowell said. She stepped from behind the tree, and stood clutching her purse against her chest. She smiled at him, a smile so forced it gave him a pain in the stomach.

He saw that she had combed her hair. It was now hanging down past her shoulders. d.a.m.n it, she did look like Cush's sister.

"Guten Abend," she said, softly, barely audibly.

"He was drunk," Lowell said. She said nothing. "Are you all right?" She said nothing. "Can I take you home?" Lowell asked.

"I am very expensive," she said"; after a moment's hesitation, in English, as if she was embarra.s.sed.

Lowell was suddenly enraged. He had meant what he said; it was not a euphemistic phrase for "Wanna f.u.c.k? How much?" He had been offering to take her home. Period. He reached in his pocket, took what paper script his hand found, and thrust it at her.

She took it, counted it, nodded, her head bent, and jammed the money into her leather purse. He found himself looking at the purse. It was an alligator purse, a good one. But it was a woman's purse, not a girl's. It was obviously not hers. He counted the money as she counted it. He had given her fifty five dollars, five or ten times the going rate.

She looked at him, met his eyes. There was defiance in them. Defiance and fear.

"Even for that much money," she said, in English, I will not do anything with the mouth." She spoke decent rather than GI English, he realized. The partially understood complaints of the oaf suddenly came into focus. He had wanted her to blow him; she had refused. He turned around and started to walk out of the park.

"Where do you go?" she asked.

"To get my jeep." he said. "To take you home."

"It would be better that we go to your room," she said.

He had been tom between wanting to screw her, wanting to help a young woman in distress, and wanting to confirm his own wisdom and righteousness by telling himself he wouldn't touch a syphed-up kraut s.l.u.t like that with a ten-foot pole.

Now he wanted to f.u.c.k her. He desperately wanted -to f.u.c.k her. To impale her. To f.u.c.k the a.s.s off her. Was it, he wondered, because she looked so much like Cush's practically certified virginal sister? That was a pretty disgusting thing to consider. Was he really, deep down, some sort of pervert, who wanted to mess around with little girls?

This was not a little girl, he rea.s.sured himself, no matter what she looked like. She might look about sixteen years old, with those blue eyes and that innocent little face, but she was as much a certified wh.o.r.e as Cush' s sister Penelope was a certified virgin.

He waited until she caught up with him, then took her arm and hustled her across the street and into the hotel. The sergeant at the desk looked up, recognized the girl, and started to say something.

"Stay out of this, Sergeant," Lowell heard himself say, surprised at his boldness.

"I don't want any more trouble in here tonight, Lieutenant," the sergeant said, backing down.

"There will be no trouble," Lowell said. He got the girl in the elevator, down the corridor past the oaf's door, and into his room.

She looked around the room. She looked at him, very intently. She went into the bathroom, and he heard the water running and the toilet flus.h.i.+ng, and when she came out, she was naked save for a pair of cheap cotton underpants. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s weren't very large, he saw, and he could hardly make out the nipples, but they stood out erectly in front of her. She was pale, and thin, but she had very feminine hips.

She walked to the bed, flipped the covers down, and lay down on it. He looked at her. She reached down and hooked her hands in her pants and raised her hips and slipped them down. The tuft of hair at her groin was no wider than his thumb. She met his eyes, and then turned her head to the side.

She just remembered to act modest and shy, Lowell decided.

He had no way of knowing, of course, that she had just told herself that she was glad, now she was about to do it, that the first time she did it would be with a young man, and a good-looking young man, too, and not the captain who had wanted to commit a perversion with her, and had beaten her when she refused. Lowell stripped standing where he was, letting his clothes fall into a pile on the floor. When he was naked, he went to the bed and lay down beside her.

She would not look at him. He put his hand to her breast.

It was' as firm and warmed as it looked. By now, he thought, his hard-on should be tickling his chin. But it hadn't even started to thicken, much less stand up. He slid his hand down her body to her crotch. There was no response in her, either. He might as well be patting a dog.

He put his hand to her breast again. She rolled over on her back and spread her legs. He got between them. Nothing. He had a limp, useless d.i.c.k.

He rolled off her, out of the bed, went to the bathroom and pumped himself furiously. Nothing. He stayed in the bathroom five minutes, thinking lewd thoughts, manipulating himself, all to no avail.

What it was, he thought, was shame for thinking that way about Cush's sister. Jesus Christ, for his first wh.o.r.e, why did he have to pick one who looked like a nice girl, and made him feel like a s...o...b..ring pervert?

He didn't know what to say to her when he came out. When he finally did open the bathroom door, she was gone.

Humiliated, furious, he tried to go to sleep. He tossed and turned for forty-five minutes, got out of bed, went to the bathroom, and began to m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e. His p.e.n.i.s thickened instantly, and immediately afterward, he felt the birth of his o.r.g.a.s.m. He came allover the back of the toilet seat and the floor, and before he was able to go to bed, he had to get down on his hands and knees and wipe it all up with toilet paper.

(Four) The girl came into the bar of the Bayrischen Hof the next night, ten minutes after Lieutenant Lowell had come in. He had spent the afternoon being measured for pink-and-green uniforms, which would be made to order. ODs from the quartermaster officer's store would be altered to fit him perfectly.

He had bought additional items of uniform. A leather-brimmed, fur-felt officer's cap. A gabardine trench coat. Three pairs of pebble-grained chukka boots. Two pairs of tanker's boots.

After he had bought the jeep, he had been out of money. He'd wired home, asking for a thousand dollars. The reply, a telegraphic authorization to draw a thousand dollars from the American Express office, had come within forty-eight hours.

It had been in his pocket, uncased, during the hectic form-A pollo team days. He had taken it to be cashed that afternoon.

When he presented it, at first he thought something was wrong. The clerk had taken the telegram and gone into a rear office. The manager had come out, smiling.

"Forgive me," he said. "But this cable draft is to Private Lowell."

"I've just been commissioned," Lowell said. "I've got an ID card."

"That won't be necessary at all, Lieutenant Lowell," the manager said. "But there is something else." He handed him another telegram.

FRANKLIN POTTS GENERAL MANAGER AMERICAN EXPRESS ACTIVITY GERMANY.

INFO Copy AMEXCO BAD NAUHEIM IN RECEIPT GUARANTEE OF HONOR DRAFTS UP TO $1000.00 PER CALENDAR MONTH ISSUED BY PRIVATE CRAIG W. LOWELL HQ US CONSTABULARY BAD NAUHEIM AGAINST US, MORGAN GUARANTY NEWYORK OR CRAIG POWELL KENYON AND DAWES, NEWYORK. UNDERSTAND LOWELL IS GRANDSON OF GEOFFREY CRAIG, CHAIRMAN OF BOARD, CRAIG POWELL KENYON AND DAWES. TELETYPE CONSt.i.tUTES AUTHORITY TO DO SO.

ELL WORTH FELLOWS GENERAL MANAGER, AMEXCO, EUROPE, PARIS.

"If there is anything we can ever do for you, Lieutenant Lowell, please don't hesitate to ask."

"That's very kind of you," Lowell said.

"As I said, anything that we can do, anything at all." Lieutenant Craig Lowell smiled smugly to himself as he walked out of the AMEXCO office toward the PX. Grandpa was pa.s.sing out a thousand a month because he was under the impression Craig was being a well-behaved little private. Wait till the old man found out he was an officer.

That started him thinking of home. He thought there was six hours difference between Bad Nauheim and Cambridge.

That meant it was eight o'clock in the morning in Cambridge.

His peers, his chums from St. Mark's, his new friends from Harvard-those the provost had decided were Harvard material "worth salvaging," unlike those like himself who were nowhere at that very moment lined up in their ROTC uniforms on the gra.s.s about to do a little close-order drill. If he should somehow manage to have himself miraculously transported to Cambridge, they would have to come to attention, salute, and call him "sir." How amusing.

He decided he would have a photograph taken and send it to someone, Bunky Stevens, probably. "Having lovely time, wish you were here." As he was fitted for his pinks and greens, and waited for change to be made after paying the bill, he daydreamed of home. He had not allowed himself to dwell on that subject very often. The cold truth of the matter was, he had been quite terrified of the army. The power of the corporals in basic training over him had been the most frightening thing to happen to him in his entire life, including the death of his father. From the moment he had. raised his hand in the induction center, the previous February, five months ago, he had ceased being who he was, a Lowell, and had become, as indeed the corporal had lost no time at all in telling him, a miserable p.i.s.sant. He had been advised to give his soul to Jesus, because his a.s.s' now belonged to the army.

He had been so terrified of basic training that for the first time in his life he had made a conscious, consistent effort to behave and to deliver what was expected of him. He had become, if not a model soldier, then the next best thing, a nearly invisible one. He had not called attention to himself. He had neither talked back nor whined. On the rifle range, at the last moment, he had remembered to miss. If he shot High Expert, of which he was perfectly capable, he knew that he would have been taken out of the pipeline at the end of training and made into a marksmans.h.i.+p instructor.

Eight hours a day of Garand rifles going off in one's ear for the indeterminate future would be an awful way to pa.s.s one's penal servitude. He had been terrified on receipt of orders to proceed to Camp Kilmer for further s.h.i.+pment to Germany, and had spent his entire seven days' delay-en-route leave at Broadlawns on Long Island, half drunk, refusing to think about the future.

The troops.h.i.+p to Bremerhaven had been a floating Dante's inferno, a two-week horror. Only when he had arrived in Bad Nauheim and been a.s.signed to the Constab as a clerk-typist had life begun to resemble at all the life he had known, and that similarity was limited to having sheets on the bunk, a place to take a bath, and food served on plates.

He had been in Germany only a week, and at the Constab only two days, when he came to understand that the venereal disease rate among the troops seemed to be the constant preoccupation of the Army of Occupation. Even the army radio station had commercials.

A GI solemnly p.r.o.nounced: "Six fifteen hours, Central European Time. Remember, soldier! VD walks the streets tonight! And penicillin fails once in seven times!" The army's solution to the problem was clean and wholesome sports, apparently in the theory that the troops would be exhausted to the point where they would not be interested in fornicating with frauleins. Every sport known to Western civilization was played, on command. Including, to his surprise, golf.

He had gone out for golf. At home, on the lawns of Broadlawns, which connected with the fairways of Turtle Creek Country Club, he had been whacking the ball around since he learned how to walk. The first time he played the Constab links, with some really awful clubs, he'd gone around the nine hole course in 35, one under par. He had been posted to the golf team, and eventually named caddy master. That was the turning point. He had moved out of the barracks into the golf course clubhouse. Slightly more civilized living.

And then the polo came along. And now he was an officer and a gentleman. He was a little annoyed with himself for his fear and concern. There was no reason why things should be different in the army,it was, after all, nothing more than a reflection of the society it served. He was what he was a Lowell, and eventually he would come out on top.

Other people might have to spend their time was.h.i.+ng tanks, or digging holes, or whatever; other people might have to wait, as the sign in the American Express office said in large letters, for a THREE WEEK OR MORE DELAY TO CASH PERSONAL CHECKS.

He would spend his time playing golf and polo, as an officer, and would have his bank drafts honored at sight.

And soon it would be over, and he could go home. Certainly, as an officer, there would be a cabin on the returning troop s.h.i.+p, not a sheet of canvas between pipes in a hold thirty feet beneath the waterline.

He would, of course, wear his uniform when he got home.

For a couple of days, until his civvies caught up with him.