But he had never expected to see Ellis as a chief, and certainly not in a billet where he was obviously some kind of a big wheel.
One of the typists came in with two cups of coffee, in nice cups and saucers, not mugs.
“There’s cream and sugar,” she said, smiling at Staley, “but Chief Ellis never uses what he calls ‘canned cow.”” “Black’s just fine, Ma’am,” Staley said.
When she left, curiosity got the better of him.
“What the hell is going on around here, Ellis?” he asked.
“I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell you that,” Ellis said.
“I guess the quickest way is the chain of command.”
“Huh?”
“Tell me about the chain of command.”
Staley looked at him in confusion. Ellis was obviously dead serious.
“Tell me,” Ellis repeated.
“Well,” Staley said, “I’m first class, and you’re a chief, so I report to you, and you report to some officer, and he reports to some senior officer, and it works its way to the top, all the way, I suppose, to the Chief of Naval Operations.”
“All the way to the President,” Ellis corrected him.
“The Chief of Naval Operations reports to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and he reports to the President, who is Commander-in-Chief.”
“So?” Staley said.
“The way it is here,” Ellis said, “is that you report to me, and I report to the Colonel… you met him, he was out to look things over in Virginia….”
“The guy with the Medal of Honor?”
“Colonel William J. Donovan,” Ellis said.
“I work for him, and he works for the President. I mean, directly. He gets his orders from the President. Nobody else can tell him what to do.”
Staley said, “No shit?”
“You’re going to have to learn to watch your language around here, Charley,” Ellis said, almost primly.
“Sorry,” Staley said.
“Where do I fit in around here?”
“You’re going to be the Colonel’s driver,” Ellis said.
“And don’t look down your nose at it. There’s more to it than driving a car.”
“Such as?”
“There’s a lot of people would like to see him dead, for one thing. Your first job is to see that don’t happen.”
“Like a bodyguard, you mean? Is that what all that crap in Virginia was for?”
Ellis nodded, but then explained.
“Baker got to the Colonel,” he said.
“Everybody who comes into the OSS gets run through that school. For a while, I thought they were going to make me go.”
“What exactly is this “OSS’?”
“It stands for “Office of Strategic Services,”” Ellis said.
“It’s sort of like the FBI and Office of Naval Intelligence put together, plus Errol Flynn in one of them war movies where he parachutes behind enemy lines and takes on the whole Jap army by himself.”
“Give me a for example,” Staley said.
“The school was supposed to teach you Rule One around here,” Ellis said.
“You don’t ask questions. If they figure you should know something, they’ll tell you. You ask the wrong questions around here, and you’ll wind up counting snowballs on Attu.”
“Can I ask what you do around here?” Staley asked.
“I’m on the books as “Special Assistant to the Director,”” Ellis said.
“What that means is that I do everything and anything that makes life easier for him, and keeps him from wasting his time. And what you’re going to do is help me do that.”
“Plus being a bodyguard, you said,” Staley said.
“We don’t talk about that,” Ellis said.
“He’s got bodyguards, mostly ex-FBI guys and ex-Secret Service guys. And he ducks away from them whenever he can. That’s when you cover him. Get the picture?”
Staley nodded.
“I get the feeling you get along pretty good with him.”
“I never met anybody smarter or nicer,” Ellis said flatly.
“Or who works harder.”
“How come I got this job?”
“The Colonel came in here about two weeks ago,” Ellis said, “and found me working about midnight. And he said, “I thought I told you to get some help.”
And he sounded like he meant it. So I asked myself, Do I want some FBI guy who looks down his nose at a sailor, and is going to be pissed when he has to take orders from me? And unless I could think of something else, that’s what was going to happen. So I called the Navy, BuPers, and told them to find me ex-China Sailors in the States.”