The major problem that faced It. Ferenc “Freddy” Janos, as he saw it, was arranging to get laid between the time the cast came off and the time he went operational. That would require getting to London, and that was going to pose
a problem, for the OSS did not like its people going into London once they had been made privy to a certain level of classified operational information.
He had been made privy to that level of classified information two days before the bad landing. It had then been intended that the men on his team parachute into Yugoslavia three days later. They had been taught–and had committed to memory in case the drop had not gone as planned–several alternate means to establish contact with the guerrilla forces of Colonel Draza Mihajlovic.
This information was quite sensitive, and those in possession of it could not be trusted to go off and tie one on in London, or for that matter, anywhere off the Whithey House estate. FreddyJanos understood the reasoning, for lives were literally at stake, and he was perfectly willing to grant that liquor loosened tongues, especially his. But he thought it would be a truly unfortunate circumstance if he had to jump in Yugoslavia following a long period of enforced celibacy. God alone knew how he could get his ashes hauled in Yugoslavia.
It wasn’t that there were not a number of females here at Whithey House-including two leaning on the piano at that moment as he played–who could with relatively little effort be enticed into his room. But he had what he thought of as his standards. For one thing, he did not think officers should make the beast with two backs with enlisted women.
This belief had not come from The Officer’s Guide, which had euphemistically dealt with the subject, but from It. Janos’s own experience as an enlisted man. He had been enraged when he had suspected that his officers were dazzling enlisted women into their beds with their exalted position, and he was unwilling to enrage the enlisted men here by doing the same thing himself. He had even gone further than that. He had had a word with several officers about the matter; he had let them know their behavior displeased him, and that when he was displeased, he sometimes had trouble keeping his displeasure nonviolent.
There were three American female officers and one British at Whithey House, but the American WACs did not measure up to Freddy Janos’s standard for a bed partner, and the British officer, Captain the Duchess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Stanneld, WRAC, whom Freddy Janos would have loved to know much better, had proven to be the exception to the rule that upper-class women, when he looked at them with his large, sad, dark eyes, usually wished to comfort him with all the means at their disposal.
Freddy Janos had learned about the effect of his large, sad, dark eyes on women when he was fifteen. At fifteen, he was already nearly six feet tall and pushing one hundred eighty pounds. He had been accepted as a “protege” piano student at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City. He had still spoken with something of an accent then, his father having brought them from Budapest to accept an appointment as concertmaster of the Cleveland Symphony only four years before.
Arrangements had been made for him to stay with friends of the family in a large and comfortable apartment on Riverside Drive overlooking the Hudson River. The friends had also been Hungarians and musicians, and it was their custom to hold Sunday-afternoon musicales, in the European manner, sometimes trios, sometimes quartets, sometimes quintets; and he was naturally asked to play when a piano was required.
After one musicale, Mrs. Lizbeth Vernon, the lady in 6-B, one floor up, a tall, lithe woman of thirty-four, whom he had noticed smiling softly at him when he played, came to him and told him how much she had enjoyed his playing.
And she went on to say that sometime when he had a few minutes, she hoped he would drop by her apartment and see if her piano was in tune. She had just had it tuned, but it didn’t sound right, and she wanted a second opinion before she called Steinway & Sons and complained.