“Stevens!” Stevens looked at him, then saluted.
“Good evening, Sir,” he said.
After the colonel returned the salute and shook hands, Stevens then offered his hand to the lieutenant colonel.
Hello, Bill,” he said,” how are you? “Awed by your car,” the lieutenant colonel said.
“And surprised to see you. They had been classmates at West Point, and they had served together at Forts Bliss and Riley. The last time the lieutenant colonel had seen Edmund T. Stevens, they had both been captains, and Stevens had been in the limbo of an officer who has submitted his resignation but has not yet been released from duty.
Stevens ignored the implied questions.
“Just checking in?” he asked. “Just turned away,” the full colonel said.
“This place is apparently reserved for VIPS.” His question was direct: “What are you doing here?”
“Dealing with a V.I.P,” Stevens said.
“There’s a hotel reserved for field-grade officers, the Cavendish, by St. James’s Square, if you need a place to stay. “So we have been informed,” the full colonel said.
“We were just wondering how we were going to get there.”
“No problem,” Stevens said. He turned and made a gesture with his hand to the driver of the Princess, who had just backed the limousine into one of the half-dozen reserved spots between the marquee and Park Lane.
She started the engine, drove up to them, got out of the car, and waited for orders. “Sergeant,” Stevens said, “would you run these officers over to the Cavendish and then come back?”
“I’m curious, Ed,” the lieutenant colonel said.
“What have they got you doing?” Stevens pointed to the SHAEF insignia on his shoulder and the General Staff Corps (GSC) insignia on his lapels.
“I am now a member of the palace guard,” he said. “Nice work, if you can get it,” the full colonel said. “It has its compensations,” Stevens admitted. “So we see,” the full colonel said.
“Well, I appreciate the ride, Stevens.”
“My pleasure, Sir,” Stevens said. The lieutenant colonel shook his hand.
Then he followed the colonel into the backseat of the Princess. As soon as they hit Park Lane, Stevens thought, they will begin to commiserate about the god damned injustice: a man who had resigned his captain’s commission winding up a light bird on the SHAEF staff with a chauffeur-driven limousine.
The story would quickly move along the West Point grapevine. He now knew the word for that: “disinformation.” It was far better having his former peers think of him as a chair-warming sonofabitch at SHAEF than to suspect that he was deputy chief of station for the OSS in London.
Lieutenant Colonel Edmund T. Stevens had already come to the not unpleasing conclusion that not only did he seem to perform well as a concierge to Bill Donovan’s spies, saboteurs, assassins, safe crackers, and other “specialists,” but that by doing so he could make a greater contribution to the war than he would in command of an artillery battalion. He and the chief of station had hit it off right away. The day he arrived, the chief of station told him that the less he heard of administrative problems the better he would like it. He went on to say that since Stevens had come to him with Donovan’s personal recommendation, he was granting Stevens full authority to act in his name in all matters. The next day, the chief of station had sent him over to Grosvenor Square, where Ike had his SHAEF headquarters. There General Walter Bedell Smith neatly solved virtually all of Stevens’s potential problems by giving him a letter stating that in the event SHAEF units were unable to comply with any request of the OSS, the reasons therefore were to be reported to him immediately. Stevens’s role, as he saw it, was to be as helpful as possible. He had no notion that he would ever become operationally involved. He would simply assume the administrative burdens r the people who were carrying out the OSS mission. He would be the billeting officer, the finance officer, the transportation officer, the communications officer, and quite probably, he thought after meeting some of the operational people, the VD-control officer too. He had, for instance, just spent two hours with a detective inspector from Scotland Yard, going over with him in boring detail the results of their investigation into the theft of a staff car from the motor pool and two and a half cases of mixed liquor from a storeroom.