W.e.b. Griffin - The Corps II - CALL TO ARMS

That meant that the somewhat pale and hollow-eyed major was a bona fide hero. Either that or that he was a psychotic subway motorman who was enduring his forced retirement by vicariously experiencing the war-dressing up in a Marine officer's uniform and spending his days reading about the war in the public library.

Today, the Marine officer, with an armload of books, came directly to Carolyn Spencer Howell's position behind the counter.

"I wonder if you could just keep these handy?" he asked, "while I go have my lunch."

"Certainly," Carolyn said, and then she blurted, "I see you've seen service in the Pacific."

For the first time he looked at her, really looked at her as an individual, rather than as part of the furnishings.

"I was in the Pacific," he said, and then, "I'm surprised you know the ribbons. Few civilians do."

"I know them," Carolyn heard herself plunge on. "And you've been wounded twice. According to the ribbons."

"Correct," he said. "You have just won the cement bicycle. Would you care to try for an all-expense-paid trip to Coney Island?"

And then his smile vanished. He looked at her intently, then shook his head and started to laugh.

"What were you about to do?" he asked. "Call the military police?"

She felt like a fool, but she was swept along with the insanity.

"I was just a little curious how you could have served in the Pacific and be back already," she said.

"Would you believe a submarine?" he asked, chuckling. He reached in his pocket and took his identity card from his wallet and handed it to her.

It had a photograph of him on it, and his name: BANNING, EDWARD J. MAJOR USMC.

"Now will you guard my books for me while I have lunch?" he asked.

"I'm sorry," Carolyn Spencer Howell said, flushing. Then she lowered her head and spoke very softly.

There was no reply, and when she looked up, he was gone.

Carolyn Spencer Howell shook her head.

"Oh, damn!" she said so loudly that heads turned.

Fifteen minutes later, she walked into a luncheonette on East Forty-first Street and headed for an empty stool. A buxom Italian woman with her hair piled high on her head beat her to it, and Carolyn turned in frustration and found herself looking directly at Major Edward J. Banning, USMC, who was seated at a small table against the wall.

"You wouldn't be following me, would you?" he asked.

Carolyn flushed, and started to flee.

Banning stood up quickly and caught her arm.

"Now, I'm sorry," he said. "Please sit down. I'm about finished anyway."

She sat down.

"I have made an utter fool of myself," she said. "But I wasn't really following you. I often come here for lunch."

"I know," Banning said. "I've seen you. I hoped maybe you'd come here for lunch today."

She looked at him.

"I've been thinking," he said. "Under the circumstances, I would have thought I was suspicious, too."

"Would you settle for 'curious'?" Carolyn asked.

"You were suspicious," he said. "Why should that embarrass you?"

A waitress appeared, saving her from having to frame a reply. She ordered a sandwich and coffee, and the waitress turned to Banning.

"If the lady doesn't mind me sharing her table, I'll have some more coffee," he said.

"Please," Carolyn said quickly.

She looked at him. Their eyes met.

"You remember me asking for stuff on Nansen passports?" Banning asked. She nodded. "The reason I wanted to find out as much as I can is that my wife, whom I left behind in Shanghai, is traveling on a Nansen."

"I see," she said.

"I wanted that out in front," Banning said.

"Yes," Carolyn Spencer Howell said. And then she said, "I was married for fifteen years. My husband turned me in on a younger model. It cost him a good deal of money. I had to find a way to pass the time, so I went back to work in the library."

He nodded.

We both know, she thought. And he knew before I did. 1 wonder why that doesn't embarrass me? And what happens now?

They walked back to the library together. Just before she was to go off shift, he walked to the counter and asked her how she would respond to an invitation to have a drink before he got on the subway to go back to Brooklyn. She said she would meet him for a drink in the Biltmore Hotel. She would meet him under the clock… he couldn't miss the clock.

And so after work they had a drink, and then another. When the waiter appeared again, she said that she didn't want another just now. Then he asked her if she was free for dinner, and she told him she was, but she would have to stop by her apartment for a moment.

In the elevator, she looked at him.

"I can't remember one thing we talked about in the Biltmore," she said.

"We were just making noise," he said.

"I don't routinely do this sort of thing," Carolyn Spencer Howell said softly, as they moved closer together.

"I know," he said.

Afterward, she went to the Chinese restaurant on Third Avenue, and returned with two large bags full of small, white cardboard containers that Ed Banning said looked like they held goldfish.

Then she took off her clothes again, and they ate their dinner where she had left him, naked, in the bed.

(Two)

Bachelor Officers' Quarters

U.S. Navy Hospital

Brooklyn, New York

0930 Hours, 26 March 1942

The spartan impersonality of the bachelor officers' quarters struck Major Edward J. Banning the moment he pushed open the plate-glass door and walked into the lobby. It was in some ways like a small hotel.

There was a reception desk, usually manned by a petty officer third. But he wasn't there. And the lobby and the two corridors that ran off it were deserted.

The lobby held a chrome-and-plastic two-seater couch; a chrome-and-plastic coffee table in front of the couch; and two chrome-and-plastic chairs on the other side of the coffee table. There was a simple glass ashtray on the coffee table, and nothing else.

The floor was polished linoleum, bearing the geometric scars of a fresh waxing. There were no rugs. Two photographs were hanging on the walls, one of the Battleship Arizona, the other of a for-once-not-grinning-brightly Franklin Delano Roosevelt. There was a cork bulletin board, onto which had been thumbtacked an array of mimeographed notices for the inhabitants.

A concrete stairway led to the upper floors. Its railings were steel pipe, and its stair-tread edges were reinforced with steel.

Banning went to the desk and checked for messages by leaning over the counter for a look at the row of mailboxes where a message would be kept. There was no message, no letter. This was not surprising, for he expected none.

Banning went up the concrete stairs to the second floor. It was identical to the first, except there was no receptionist's desk. That space was occupied by a couch-and-chairs-and-table ensemble identical to the one in the lobby, which left the center of the second floor foyer empty. There was an identical photograph of President Roosevelt hanging on the wall, next to a photograph of two now-long-obsolete Navy biplane fighters in the clouds.

Halfway down the right corridor, his back to Banning, the petty officer who usually could be found at the reception desk was slowly swinging a large electric floor polisher across the linoleum. Banning walked down the left corridor to his room.

The reason he noticed the spartan simplicity of the BOQ, he realized, was that forty-five minutes earlier, he had walked down a carpeted corridor illuminated by crystal chandeliers to an elevator paneled in what for some strange reason he had recognized as fumed oak, and then across carpets laid on a marble floor past genuine antiques to a gleaming brass-and-glass revolving door spun by a doorman in what looked to be the uniform of an admiral in the Imperial Russian Navy.