[ONE]
Shepheard’s Hotel Cairo, Egypt 23 January 1943
Captain James M. B. Whittaker, U.S. Army Air Corps, was twenty-five years old.
He was tall, pale blond and slender, with leopard-like moves. He was wearing a superbly tailored pink-and-green uniform and half Wellington boots. The uniform and the boots had both come from Savile Row in London. The boots had cost just about as much money as the Air Corps paid Captain Whittaker each month, and the uniform had cost a little more than the boots.
Whittaker had never considered what the uniform and boots had cost, mostly because he really had no idea how much money he had. Whatever his civilian income was, it was more than he could spend. There was a lawyer in New York who looked after his affairs and saw to it that there was always a comfortable balance in his Hanover Trust checking account.
This is not to suggest that Whittaker was simply a rich young man who happened to be in uniform. There were silver pilot’s wings on the breast of his green blouse. He was checked out (qualified to fly) in fighter, bomber, and transport aircraft. Beneath the wings were ribbons representing the award of the Silver Star, the Distinguished Flying Cross, several lesser awards for valor, and brightly colored ribbons indicating that he had had overseas service in both the European and Pacific Theaters of Operation.
At the moment, Captain James M. B. Whittaker, Harvard University ’39, was solemnly considering what he believed to be irrefutable evidence that he was a miserable, amoral, good-for-nothing sonofabitch.
This solemn consideration sometimes came upon him when he’d taken a drink or two more than he should have. When he had a load on (and he had been drinking, more or less steadily, for the last three days), truth raised its ugly head, and he could see things with a painful clarity.
He had started drinking before he’d boarded the MATS (Military Air Transport Service) C-54 at London’s Croydon Airfield.
Taking leave of Liz Stanfield had been very painful. He loved Liz and she loved him, and there were certain problems with that. For one thing, Captain Elizabeth Alexandra Mary the Duchess Stanfield, WRAC (Women’s Royal Army
Corps), a pale-skinned, splendidly bosomed, lithe woman in her middle thirties, was not really free to love him. There was a husband, Wing Commander the Duke Stanneld, R.A.F He was down somewhere, “missing in action,” the poor sonofabitch.
Only a miserable, amoral, good-for-nothing sonofabitch, such as himself, Capt. Whittaker reasoned, would carry on the way he had with a married woman whose husband was missing in action, and a fellow airman to boot. That was really low and rotten.
And it wasn’t as if he was free, either. He was in love himself. Her name was Cynthia Chenowith, and he had loved her from the time he was thirteen and she was eighteen, and he had gotten a look at her naked breast as she hauled herself out of his uncle Chesty’s swimming pool at the winter place in Palm Beach.
It didn’t matter that Cynthia professed not to love him (that was the age difference, he had concluded): He loved her. And a man who loves a woman with his entire soul, who wants to spend the rest of his life with her, caring for her, making babies, is not supposed to go around fucking married women. Unless, of course, he is a miserable good-for-nothing sonofabitch.
Capt. Whittaker had had the foresight to bring with him on the MATS C-54 three quart bottles of single-malt Scotch whiskey. Half of one had gotten him to Casablanca, and the other half had sustained him from Casablanca to Cairo.
Since he had been in Cairo, he’d worked his way through all of the second bottle and one quarter of the third. The airplane was broken. The pilot had told Capt. Whittaker, as a courtesy to a fellow flyer, that he’d lost oil pressure on Number Three and had no intention of taking off again until they had replaced–rather than repaired–the faulty pump. One was being flown in from England. When it had been installed, they would continue on their flight, which would ultimately terminate in Brisbane, Australia.