“And I wasn’t a very good aviator anyway and a worse naval officer.”
“You don’t mind not being in the service?”
“They’re shooting at naval aviators these days,” he said. “Haven’t you heard?” I like that, Roberta Whatley decided. Not only is it exactly opposite from what Tom would say, but it’s honest. “And you like what you’re doing now?”
“It’s all right,” he said. “What exactly are you doing?”
“Research, in airfoil design for Boeing,” he said. “I don’t know what that means,” she said. “An airfoil is a wing,” he said, “As a wing approaches the speed of sound, strange things happen. We’re trying to find out exactly what and why. “You mean you’re a test pilot?”
“Rule One: The way to attract an attractive woman who is used to attention is to ignore her.
TEE SECRET WARRIORS M 13
“The only thing I fly is a slapstick,” Canidy said.
“Behind a desk.”
“Oh,” she said. “What happened between you and Tom?” Canidy asked.
“If you don’t mind my asking.”
“I don’t like to talk about it,” she said. “Excuse me,” he said. “He wasn’t at Great Lakes three weeks before he started running around,” she said. “That’s hard to believe,” Canidy said. “Why is it hard to believe?” Roberta asked. “Look in the mirror,” Canidy said. She blushed.
By the time the City of Birmingham landed at Cleveland, Canidy’ silver s flask was almost empty. They had a drink waiting for the plane to be refueled, and he was able to refill it at the bar in the airport terminal. Between Cleveland and Washington, she told him all about how Tom had been a rotten sonofabitch almost from the beginning. And he seemed to understand. He patted her hand comfortingly. When they got to Washington, he confessed that he didn’t know where he was going to stay, but that he would call her when he found a hotel room someplace.
She replied that he didn’t have any idea how hard it was to find a hotel room in Washington these days, and that should do was come with her to her apartment and use her what he phone to call around.
Otherwise, he might wind up sleeping on a park bench. While he was calling around to the hotels, she told him she certainly didn’t want him to get the wrong idea, but she absolutely had to have a shower and get into something comfortable. She was not surprised when he came into the bathroom and got into the shower with her. The only thing that surprised her was that she didn’t even pretend to be furious.
When she thought about it later, she decided it was all the Scotch she’d had on the airplane. Plus the fact that she had left Tom six months before, and she had the usual needs of a human being. Plus, in a flash of real honesty, she admitted that she had found it really exciting when she saw him naked.
THREE
The St. Regis Hotel New York City April 4, 1942
When the ten gentlemen-the group known as the Disciples-gathered to brief and be briefed by Colonel William Donovan, they found him in pain in bed in his suite at the hotel. He had a glass dark with Scotch in his hand, and there was a Scotch bottle on his bedside table. Though Colonel Donovan, a stocky, silver-haired, ruddy-faced Irishman, was not a professional soldier, neither was he a Kentucky colonel, nor the commanding officer of a National Guard regiment. He had earned both his silver eagle and the Medal of Honor for valor on the battlefields of France in World War I. Between wars, he had become a very successful-and, it logically followed, very wealthy-attorney in New York City, and a power behind the scenes in the Democratic Party, not only in New York but, even perhaps especially, in Washington. He was again in government employ, this time at an annual stipend of one dollar, as the Coordinator of Information, which meant he ran a relatively new government agency. Donovan reported directly to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Most people, to Donovan’s joy, believed the COI was the United States government’s answer to Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry. COI did, in fact, have an “information” function-in the propaganda sense-headed by the distinguished playwright Robert Sherwood.