Griffin W.E.B.: Honor Bound 02 - Blood and Honor

"Paragraph seven authorizes me to wear civvies," he said.

The SP found Paragraph 7, read it, and then showed the orders to the SP standing behind him and stuck out his lower lip, registering surprise.

"I never saw orders like that, Sir," the SP said. "But I guess it's all right. Sorry to have troubled you, Sir."

Clete smiled and nodded, and put the orders back in his pocket. Then he turned back to the bar as his Sazerac was served.

He laid a five-dollar bill on the bar, then picked up his Sazerac and took a sip. It was a lousy Sazerac, as he was afraid it would be. When he was a student at Tulane he'd had enough of them to become a judge. And had painfully learned that the second would taste better than the first, the third better than the second, and the fourth would strike one treacherously in the back of the head, causing one so stupid as to drink that many to lose not only inhibitions but often consciousness and all memory of what happened subsequently.

Sazerac drinking had another facet, he thought, as he took a second sip. When fed to a well-bred young woman, taking care to administer the proper dosage—an overdose usually produced a number of unpleasant side effects, ranging from nausea to unconsciousness—quite often produced both a diminishment of inhibitions and a concomitant urge to couple.

Get thee behind me, Satan!he thought, when he realized the direction his mental processes were taking him. That sort of thing is in your past. You are no longer free to nail any female you can entice into a horizontal position. Your watchword, like that of the goddamn U.S. Marine Crotch itself is now Semper Fidelis, always faithful.

He drained his glass, and felt the alcohol warm his veins. He picked up his change, shouldered his way back out of the Cafe Lafitte onto Bourbon Street, and headed toward Canal Street, where, he thought, with a little bit of luck he would find a taxi.

[TWO]

3470 St. Charles Avenue

New Orleans, Louisiana

1905 5 April 1943

The taxi dropped Major Cletus Howell Frade off at the curb before a very large, very white, turn-of-the-century ornate, three-story frame mansion on St. Charles Avenue, the tree-lined main boundary of the section of New Orleans known as the Garden District.

He crossed the sidewalk, opened a gate in the cast-iron fence that separated an immaculate lawn from the street, and walked up the brick path onto the porch, fishing for keys in his pocket. Before he could put them in the lock, the leaded-window door swung inward.

A silver-haired, very light-skinned Negro butler wearing a gray linen jacket smiled at him.

"What were you doing, Jean-Jacques? Peeking through the curtains, waiting for me?"

"I just happened to be looking out the window, Mr. Cletus," Jean-Jacques replied. "Miss Martha's here, Mr. Cletus."

"Miss Martha," the former Martha Reed Williamson, was Clete's aunt and the widow of the late James Fitzhugh Howell. Her husband had died instantaneously of a cerebral hemorrhage en route from the bar to the men's room of the Midland Petroleum Club shortly after Clete had flown his Wildcat off the escort carrier USS Long Island onto Guadalcanal's Henderson Field.

"She is?" Clete asked, surprised. He had said goodbye to Martha in Midland three days before. "The girls?"

The girls were his cousins, Elizabeth (Beth), who was twenty-one and about to graduate from Rice, and Marjorie, who was nineteen and in her sophomore year at that institution. Miss Martha became pregnant with Beth shortly after she took into her bride's home the two-year old-son of her husband's sister, Eleanor Patricia Frade, deceased. She raised Clete as her own, and her daughters and her nephew always thought of themselves as brother and sisters.

Jean-Jacques shook his head, "no." Clete was disappointed. Marjorie and Beth seemed to be less a royal pain in the ass recently than earlier on.

"Miss Martha drove up from Houston," Jean-Jacques said. '"Got here just after you went to town. Must have gotten up in the middle of the night to start out."

He pointed at a Kraft paper bag in Clete's hand. "You want me to put that in your room for you? They're in the library, and I know he and Miss Martha have been peeking out the curtains looking for you."

"He" was Cletus Marcus Howell, master of the house, Chairman of the Board of Howell Petroleum, and Clete's grandfather.

"No, thanks, I want another look at it."

"Anything I can get for you?"

"No, thanks," Clete replied, and then changed his mind. "Yeah, there is. I just had a god-awful Sazerac, and I'd like a good one."

"My pleasure," Jean-Jacques said. "One Jean-Jacques Jouvier world-famous Sazerac coming right up."

Clete crossed the wide foyer and entered the library.

A tall, pale, slender, sharp-featured, silver-haired man glowered at him. He was wearing a superbly tailored dark blue, faintly pin-striped three-piece suit, with a golden watch chain looped across his stomach.

"Well, look what the cat dragged in," the Old Man said. "Ran out of rotgut in the Vieux Carre, did they?"

"Grandfather," Clete said, and walked to his aunt Martha, a tanned, stocky, short-haired blond woman, and kissed her cheek.

"He had no way of knowing I was coming," she said, defending him.

"What brings you here?" Clete asked.

"What do you think? I wanted to see you before you left" Martha said.

"I'm flattered," he said.

"You know Mr. Needham, I believe, Cletus?" the Old Man said.

"No, Sir, I don't believe I do."

Mr. Needham was a bald, nearly obese middle-aged man who had removed his jacket and rolled up his white shirtsleeves so that he could more easily practice his art.

He was standing before an oil portrait of Cletus Howell Frade in a Marine Officer's dress-blue uniform. He turned to look at Clete, smiled, wiped his hand on a rag, and extended it to Clete.

"I'm honored to meet you, Sir," he said. "A genuine privilege to meet one of our country's heroes."

Clete looked uncomfortable.

"How do you do?" he said, then: "I didn't know you could do that."

"Do what?" his grandfather asked.

"What's the word? 'Fix'? 'Change'? Go back and change one of those once it was done."

"Of course you can. That's an oil portrait, not a photograph," the Old Man said.

"I'm really glad you're here, Major," Mr. Needham said. "I want everything to be just right."

He pointed to Clete's dress-blue tunic, laid out, complete to Sam Browne belt and officer's saber, against the back of a red leather couch.

"I had Antoinette bring that down from your room," the Old Man said. "Mr. Needham had little difficulty changing your rank insignia to a major's. Your decorations—including that Navy Cross you somehow forget to tell me about—posed more of a problem."

"It looks fine to me," Clete said after comparing the tunic with the nearly complete work on the portrait. "I'm really impressed with someone like you, Mr. Needham. I can't draw a straight line."

"How is it, Cletus," the Old Man pursued, "that I had to learn of your Navy Cross from Senator Brewer?"

"What's the name of that play? Much Ado About Nothing?"

"They don't hand out the Navy Cross for nothing," the Old Man said. "You can tell us about it now."

Jean-Jacques appeared with four Sazeracs in long-stemmed glasses on a silver tray.

"Saved by the Sazeracs," Clete said, taking one. "Thank you, Jean-Jacques."

"I don't recall asking for a Sazerac," the Old Man said.

"Not to worry, Jean-Jacques," Martha said. "If he doesn't want his, Mr. Needham, Cletus, and I will split it."

"I didn't say I didn't want it, I said I didn't remember asking for it," the Old Man said. "Thank you, Jean-Jacques."

Needham took his glass and raised it to Clete.

"To your very good health, Sir," he said.