Brotherhood Of War: The Lieutenants Part 22

Pinks and greens, of course. Perhaps even the riding crop, or would that be a bit much? The pinks and greens, he decided.

No riding crop. At Jack and Charley's 21 Club. Bunky Stevens would still be a college boy, down from Cambridge. He would be an officer, returned from overseas.

Second Lieutenant Craig W. Lowell moved his beer gla.s.s on the bar in the officer's mess of the Bayrischen Hotel, making little circles, dreaming of home. "May I zit here?" the wh.o.r.e from the night before said timidly.

G.o.dd.a.m.n, the last person in the entire f.u.c.king world I want to see right now!

He looked at her, met her eyes. Jesus Christ, how can she be a wh.o.r.e? She's even better looking than Cush's little sister.

She's a G.o.dd.a.m.ned certified beauty, that's all there is to it.

"Yes, of course, you may zit dere," Craig Lowell said, getting to his feet. He immediately regretted mocking her English and was relieved that she hadn't seemed to notice.

"Zank you," the wh.o.r.e said.

"Well," Craig Lowell said.

"I vaited in duh park undil I see you come in."

"Would you be more comfortable in German?" Craig Lowell said, in German.

"Oh, yes," she said, and she looked at him, and there was grat.i.tude in her eyes. "I thought that you had spoken German last night, but I wasn't sure. I was so upset."

"May I offer you a drink?" he asked.

"A Goke-a-Gola, bitte schon," she said.

What do I say now? How did a nice girl like you wind up in a place like this? He ordered the Coca-Cola from the bartender, in German.

"jawohl, Herr Leutnant," the bartender said.

"Do you live here?" he asked. Do you like Radcliffe?

"1 used to live not far," she said. "Marburg. A very lovely little university city . You must see it before you go home." She sounds like the G.o.dd.a.m.ned Chamber of Commerce.

He looked at her and saw her naked in his bed, with the thumb-sized tuft of pubic hair. He closed his eyes.

"I vill go," she said. "I am you making uncomfortable."

"No!" the refusal burst out of him. "You will stay. You will have dinner with me." That seemed to scare her. He smiled.

"We agreed to speak German, don't you remember?"

"Yes," she said.

The oaf, the captain from the night before, sat across the dining room from them and sneered at Lowell's naivete. What kind of a wh.o.r.e was it that wouldn't give you a b.l.o.w. .j.o.b?

He asked her if she would like to go to the movies. She accepted. It was the same Humphrey Bogart movie. He sat beside her and once took her hand. It was limp and cold in his.

In the jeep, when he reached for the ignition switch, she stayed his hand.

"We must talk," she said.

"About what?"

"I will go with you," she said. "But not just for one night. You understand?"

"No."

"I must do what I must do," she said. "But not for one night."

"Why must you do it?"

"My father is missing," she said. "There is no work. The state has taken over my home."

"What about your home?"

"My home has been requisitioned," she said.

"Where's your mother?"

"My mother no longer lives," she said. "She did not want to live, the way things are now."

Lowell decided he didn't want to know what she meant by that.

"I must have money, and I cannot get a job," she went on.

"I have n.o.body. So I will do what I must do. But not for one night." He didn't answer. "After a while, perhaps, I will do what you like with my mouth."

"Oh, for Christ's sake!" Craig Lowell said. She was offering to blow him.

"But we must have an arrangement," she said.

"What kind of an arrangement?"

"You will give me one hundred dollars a month, and you will buy me things in the PX that I can sell on the black market," she said. She looked at him. "I will be good to you," she said.

He didn't reply.

"You have already given me $55," she said. "For only $45 more, and the things from the PX, you can have me for a month."

"You can keep the money I gave you," Craig Lowell said.

"And I'll take you home." This had gone far enough. He was getting in over his head in an impossible situation.

"I don't have anyplace to go," she said, and there was desperation, even something close to terror, in her voice.

"What. do you mean, you have no place to go? Where did you go last night?" Christ, if she's playing on my sympathies, she's doing one h.e.l.l of a good job of it. How can a gentleman, like myself, fail to respond to a homeless waif? And then he was ashamed of himself for mocking her.

"To the park," she said, matter-of-factly.

"You spent the night in the park?" She nodded, lowered her head. "If you want, I will do it with the mouth." It was total resignation, utter submission.

And he knew she was telling the truth about the park.

"Shut up, G.o.dd.a.m.nit!" he said. He started the jeep and turned it around furiously. "I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to let you spend the night with me. Nothing will happen between us. I'll give you some more money. Tomorrow, you find someplace to stay. And I will see what I can do about getting you a job." She wept silently, wiping her eyes.

When they came close to the Bayrischen Hof, she told him to stop the jeep. She jumped out and ran into the park. He waited, sure somehow that she was coming, unable to do what his logic told him to do, unable to put the f.u.c.king jeep in gear and get out of here.

She came back with a suitcase. Like her purse, it was a quality piece of goods. It was old, but it was good leather, and there was even the vestiges of gold initials.

"1 had it hung in a tree," she said.

Craig Lowell had never felt before the humiliation he felt marching through the lobby of the Bayrischen Hof with his furline and her worn-out pigskin suitcase, before the eyes of the officers, before the eyes of the desk clerk sergeant who had thrown her out the night before.

In the room, she asked if she might take a bath. He nodded.

The p.r.i.c.k in him, as he thought of it, came out when he had a mental image of her naked in his bathtub. He was paying for it; G.o.dd.a.m.nit, he had the right to see her in her bathtub.

He had the right to do anything he G.o.dd.a.m.ned pleased with her. She had even offered to blow him He did not enter the bathroom.

He put on clean underwear (he usually slept naked) and a cotton bathrobe. He waited until she came out, in a nightgown that went down to her ankles.

He went to his trousers and gave her five twenty-dollar script certificates.

"Tomorrow, you will find someplace to live," he said. "And this will carry you through until you've straightened yourself out." Tears ran down her cheeks. She took the money.

"Zank you very much," she said. "G.o.d bless you!"

Oh, s.h.i.+t! That's all I had to hear!

They got in bed. They both faced outward, their backs to each other. After a long time, he went to sleep. He was not going to screw her. For one thing, she probably had syphilis, gonorrhea, an army of crabs, and G.o.d alone knows what else.

For another, he was a Lowell, and a gentleman, and gentlemen did not take advantage of women in distress.

He woke up slowly, halfway into a wet dream. He had been touching Marjorie Carter's magnificent b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and suddenly he was awake and in bed with a real woman.

Her. He was really awake now, and excited. Her nightgown had ridden up-over her hips. He had wrapped his arm around her in his sleep. His hand was resting against her stomach. He had the World's Prize-Winning Number One Hard-On.

He very carefully lifted his arm and withdrew it.

"I'm awake," she said, softly, in German.

"Huh?" Craig Lowell said.

She rolled onto her back.

"I said I'm awake," she said. She looked up at him, and spread her legs.

He crawled between her legs. This time it didn't go down.

This time it was ready. But it wouldn't go in. Where the h.e.l.l was her hole? He spit on his fingers, rubbed it on the head, used it as a probe, felt it slip in. ;He gave a ma.s.sive thrust. It went all the way in. She yelped, softly, her hand in her mouth, biting her knuckle. It was easier now. It went in and out, in and out. She was making grunting sounds in her throat, half groans, half whimpers. Her midsection began to respond to him. She took her hand from her mouth and locked her arm around his neck, nearly choking him. She thrashed under him, calling upon Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

He came.

He rolled off her and ran into the bathroom and washed himself, as he had been instructed to do in the technicolor VD movies. Now he was going to have clap and syphylis and crabs and Christ knows what else.

When he went back in the bedroom, she was curled up in a fetal position, not looking at him. When he got in bed, she got out, and he heard her doing whatever it is women do in the bathroom afterward. Then she came back and very quietly got into bed.

At first light, it happened again. Same G.o.dd.a.m.n thing. He woke up with his thing as rampant as it had ever been, pressed up against the crack of her a.s.s. The second time, he found the hole without much trouble, and she moved against him even more frenziedly, and she didn't make those yelping noises. And the second time, he told himself, what the f.u.c.k, I've already caught it. He didn't jump off her and go and wash his privates.

She said, when she had stopped breathing hard, "What is your name?"

"Craig," he said.

"I am IIse," she said. "lIse Berg." When she had gone to the Civilian Personnel (Indiginent Personnel) Office of the U.S. Constabulary to seek a job as a translator, the American had asked her name, and she had told him Greiffenberg. He had asked her to spell it, and he couldn't understand her p.r.o.nunciation, so finally he said, "f.u.c.k it. From now on, fraulein, your name is Berg." He wrote Berg down on her application, and she was afraid to correct him. Maybe he would, as he said, let her know in a month or two about a job. It didn't matter what her name was anymore.

She put out her hand to Craig, in the European manner, and shook his. She told herself that she had really been lucky. She had found an Ami who was kind and gentle. He was a nice person, she thought, and she thought that he acted a lot younger than be really was. He acted as if he was no more than eighteen or nineteen, and he must be older than that, for he was an officer. She promised herself that for as long as he kept her, she would do her best to live up to her end of the bargain.

It was preposterous, of course, to think that anything could come between them.

When he came back from the polo field that afternoon, she was waiting across the street from the Bayrischen Hof for him.

When he stopped, she came gaily tripping across the street and got in the jeep and directed him three miles out of Bad Nauheim to a farm. She had rented a tiny two-room apartment. There was a tiny table. Somewhere she had found a rose, and put it in a small vase. There was a bed. She showed it to him proudly, and then turned. They looked at each other for a moment, and then, without a word, they started taking off their clothes.

(Five) Baden-Baden Zone Francaise de L'Armee de L'Occupation d'Allemagne 4 July 1946 The polo field was in sight of the Grand Hotel, and it was, one of the oldest polo fields on the Continent, built to accommodate the English aristocracy whom had brought the game from India and then taken it with them to the Continent. It had been turned into a vegetable garden during the war, and the gra.s.s wasn't anything like either General Waterford or General Paul-Marie Antoine Quillier, his French counterpart, remembered from before the war, but it was, Waterford realized, a much better field than the field at Bad Nauheim.

The French, of course, had tried to get them drunk the night before at a dinner in the hotel, and afterward at a bar; but Waterford had seen that coming, and the only one who had defied his edict to stay sober was young Lowell.

He had decided to forgive Lowell. For one thing, Lowell was young; and there really wasn't much else for him to do with-his elders around but drink. Primarily he was forgiving Lowell because the boy was playing better with what certainly must be a cla.s.sic hangover than the others were playing in their physical prime.

They were five goals up on the French in the fourth chukker, when the French number three, with an offside neck shot, sent the ball toward the American goal. A good shot, twenty yards in the air, bouncing along the field for another ten yards and then picked up by the French number one, General Quillier, with an offside foreshot, which drove it another forty yards toward the American goal.

The players galloped past the spectators, past the band of the V.S. Constabulary in their chrome-plated helmets-its three trumpeters on their feet with instruments near their mouths-past the band of the Deuxieme Division Mecanique of the French-with its ba.s.s drums draped in leopard skins, its Algerian mountain goats with gilded horns-past the tents set up to serve lunch and champagne, past the limousines of the generals, the staff cars, the personal automobiles, toward the American goal, behind which sat the L-5 Stinsons.

The American number four, Fat Charley, galloped up behind General Quillier. Leaning forward, standing in his stirrups, he pa.s.sed him, raised his mallet over his head and swung it in a wide arc, a beautiful backhand that stopped the bouncing ball and sent it shooting in the other direction.

The American number three, Lieutenant Lowell, spun around in his headlong charge, changed direction, and galloped at the bouncing willow ball. He raised his mallet, then swept it down in a vicious arc so swift the whistling sound of the mallet was audible over the clatter of the pounding hooves. He drove the ball toward the French goal.

There was a muted round of applause from the ladies and gentlemen.

The three trumpeters of the V. S. Constabulary band, their eyes on their general, sounded the charge.

The American number one, Major General Peterson K. Waterford, coming from across the field at a gallop, misjudged the speed of the bouncing ball. He almost overrode it, but saved his shot by making an offside tail stroke, his mallet coming from the far side of his mount under the tail, as he galloped past it. The ball Was twenty yards. ahead of him almost immediately, just time for him to raise his mallet for an offside foreshot. It was a clean blow. The ball went ahead of him in a straight line, hit the gra.s.s, rolled, stopped.

He raised his mallet again, urged his mount to go even faster. The trumpeters sounded the charge again. His mallet came down again in a swift arc. The crack of the maple head of his mallet on the willow ball was clear and crisp.

He watched the trajectory of the ball, then looked over his shoulder. In perfect position to back him up, in case he missed, was his number three, at a gallop, his mallet resting casually over his shoulder. He wasn't going to miss the son of a b.i.t.c.h.