“Tell me,” the Duchess said.
“How would I get Lieutenant Colonel Peter Douglass, Jr.” on the telephone?”
“Doug’s a friend of yours?”
“Understatement,” Charity said.
“At least on my part.”
“The way we do that,” the Duchess said, “is I get on the telephone, and when I have Colonel Douglass on the line, I bring the phone in here to you.”
“Oh, nice!”
Two minutes later, the Duchess went back into the bathroom.
“Colonel Douglass is not available,” she said.
“He will not be available for the next thirty-six hours. I’m sorry.”
“Damn,” Charity said. She sat up abruptly, splashing water.
“That means he’s out spreading pollen.”
“I don’t think so,” the Duchess said.
“Oh, come on,” Charity said.
“He doesn’t know I’m here. And if you know him, you know he’s just like the others. I’m not complaining. If I was in his shoes, I’d probably be doing the same thing.
“Live today… ‘” “I would guess that he’s off somewhere getting drunk,” the Duchess said.
“Oddly enough, that would make me happy. Compared to what I really think he’s up to. Why do you say that?”
The Duchess hesitated.
“Oddly enough, it’s classified,” she said.
“Oddly enough,” Charity said, “I’m cleared for anything going on around here. Didn’t Jamison tell you?”
“No,”the Duchess said.
“Are you really?”
“Yes, I am,” Charity said.
“Does that mean you’re not?”
“I am accused,” the Duchess said, “of being the resident spy for the Imperial General Staff. There is a grain of truth in the accusation. But I know about this.”
“I really am cleared,” Charity said.
“Am I going to have to get Jamison up here to confirm that?”
“He’d love that, dressed as you are.” The Duchess chuckled.
“We’d better not” Charity Hoche was obviously telling the truth.
“Probably because of his father,” the Duchess said.
“Or maybe just because he’s Dick’s good buddy, and Dick just uses that for an excuse, whenever Doug goes off on a mission. Eighth Air Force tells us. And they tell us when he comes back. TWX to Berkeley Square with info copy here. He flew a mission today. He made it back, but his executive officer was killed. I saw the TWX just before you got here. Under the circumstances, I don’t think he’s out… how did you put it?… ‘spreading pollen.”” “Thank you,” Charity said, almost solemnly.
“You want the bubble bath?” the Duchess asked.
“What I would really like is a drink,” Charity said, suddenly standing up and reaching for the flexible-pipe showerhead to rinse herself off.
“I’ll save the bubble bath for sometime when it’ll be useful.”
“That I can offer,” the Duchess said.
“We have a nice bar here, and sometimes even a piano player.”
[THREE]
Lieutenant Ferenc “Freddy” Janos, the piano player, was a very large man.
Which was, he thought, the reason he had broken his ankle. If one was six feet four inches tall and weighed two hundred and thirty pounds, one could not expect to be lowered to the ground by parachute as gently as could someone who weighed, say, one hundred sixty pounds.
And it wasn’t really that bad. The doctor had, perhaps predictably, told him that it “could have been a lot worse.” It had hurt like hell on the drop zone, and while the medics, heaving with the exertion, had carried him to the ambulance.
But once they’d gotten a cast on it, there had been virtually no pain. A maddening itch under the cast, but no pain.
And the X rays had shown a simple fracture of one of the major bones; he’d been told that “knitting, for someone of your age and physical condition,” would be rapid. It was an inconvenience, nothing more. It had, of course, kept him from going operational. The bad landing and the resulting broken ankle had taken him off the team. He had been replaced by a lieutenant flown hastily from the United States.
Going operational would have to wait until they took the cast off–in three days; today was Tuesday, and the cast would come off on Friday–and probably for a couple of weeks after that; a week to become intimate with a new team, and however long it took after that to schedule and arrange for a mission.