Pick dropped the handset back into the cradle. “No shit?”
“There wasn’t much. Just a bulletin, ‘The Navy Department has just announced the loss of the USS Atlanta…’ ”
“They say where?”
“Off Savo Island.”
“Shit,” Pickering said, then shrugged and picked up the telephone and asked for room service.
“I better change,” Dunn said. “Which bedroom is mine?”
“The larger one. I thought from the look on the lady’s face that you might be expecting an overnight guest.”
“Shall I ask if she has a friend?”
“It is a sacred rule of the gentle gender that when two or more of them gather together, none of them would dream of doing that sort of thing outside of holy matrimony. And besides, I’m tired.”
“Suit yourself,” Dunn said, and repeated, “I better change.”
About five minutes later, while Pickering was making himself a drink, there was a knock at the door. He went to open it, a little surprised at the quick service.
But it was not room service. It was Second Lieutenant Robert F. Easterbrook, USMCR… as surprised to see Pickering as Pickering was to see him.
“Easterbunny! I thought you were in Hollywood.”
“I thought this was Major Dillon’s room.”
“Actually, it was Veronica Wood’s, but when she and Dillon went to Los Angeles on business, Dunn and I moved in.”
“He’s in Hollywood?”
“That’s the story for public consumption. If you really have to talk to him, he left a telephone number. A friend of his-maybe of hers-has a place on the water outside of town.”
“I hate to bother him,” Easterbrook said.
“Then, if it’s not important, don’t.”
“Maybe later. Can I have a drink?”
Pick waved at the row of whiskey bottles on the bar. Easterbrook walked over to it and poured scotch in a glass.
“I found out that Sergeant Lomax’s widow lives here,” he said. “I want to give her the Leica.”
“What Leica?”
“Lomax had a Leica. When he got killed, I took it. Or Lieutenant Hale took it. And when he got killed, I took it from him. Now I want to give it back.”
“I wondered where that camera came from; I didn’t think it was issued.”
Dunn walked into the sitting room, tucking his shirt into his trousers.
Pickering spoke for Easterbrook, which was fortunate. For at that moment Lieutenant Easterbrook was incapable of speech-having swallowed all at once at least two ounces of scotch: “He found out that the widow of the sergeant who got killed lives here. He’s going to return the sergeant’s camera to her.”
“I don’t envy that job,” Dunn said.
Easterbrook smiled weakly at him.
The story he’d just related was not the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. About the only true part of it was that he had found out that Sergeant Lomax’s widow did live in Seattle.
But the real reason he was in Seattle was to tell Major Dillon that he wanted to resign his commission. He shouldn’t have been made an officer in the first place.
For Christ’s sake. I’m only nineteen years old! And they didn’t send me to OCS…. If they did, I probably would have flunked out…. They just pinned a gold bar on me and told me I was an officer.
He had suspected all along that the commission was a big mistake. But the first time he met the combat correspondents at Metro-Magnum Studios, he was goddamn certain it was.
They looked at me and smirked. “Who the fuck is this kid? He’s going to be our detachment commander? You’ve got to be kidding!” I could see it in their faces and the way they talked to me, like I was a goddamned joke. And I am, as an officer.
Pick and Dunn are officers. Maybe it’s because they ‘re older than I am and went to college, or maybe they were just born that way. But they can give people orders: there is something about them that says “officer,” and people do what they say. And I bet that when I’m not around, between themselves, they laugh at Second Lieutenant Easterbunny, too. Why not? I’m a fucking joke.
Those combat correspondents The Corps recruited are real journalists: they worked on real newspapers. The New York Times and the Louisville Courier-Journal, papers like those. There’s even one from The Kansas City Star. He knows about the Conner Courier, that it’s a shitty little weekly…. And what if he writes home and asks about me and finds out that I was nothing more than an after-school kid who helped out for sixty-five cents an hour?
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