Once an Eagle (116 page)

She came back into the room to hear their hostess's booming, clarion voice: “—and Bart told her, ‘Maybe the Comte de Crémoire
used
to ride here but he doesn't anymore. You just take it up with SHAEF, lady.' And that was that. The most gorgeous horses! The Germans bred them to their own studs to break down the strain but they got some of them away, magnificent animals. Bart says they've been riding every minute they get the chance … ”

“Oh stop it!”

They all turned, shocked into silence. Marge was sitting on the central couch, her face streaming. “Do you think we care about that—
any
of that? Don't be such a hard-nosed bitch …”

Irene's eyes dilated in anger; then she smiled her flat, condescending smile. Calmly she walked over to Marge. “Perhaps you'd better run along home, sweety,” she said. “I'll have Arthur rustle you up a cab.
You've
had a little too much to drink, my girl.”

“All right, maybe she has,” Tommy Damon said fiercely. “And who's got a better right? Who wouldn't want to get swacked, surrounded by this—!”

Irene reared back. “Just what do you mean by that?”

“Just what I said—this disgusting God damn pirate's cave. Haven't you made a delicious thing out of it, though?”

“Tommy—” Emily said warningly, but Tommy was beyond listening.

“What fun it's all been, hasn't it? playing Lady Bountiful, smothered in the stolen treasures of dear old Europe.” She laughed harshly. “God rest you merry gentlemen, let nothing you dismay …”

“Now listen, Tommy—”

“And all under the sweet, sanctimonious banner of old-times' sake. Who the hell do you think you're fooling, anyhow?”

Emily touched her arm. “That's enough, Tommy.”

“I'll say that's enough … Who the hell are you to criticize what I do or don't do?” Irene stared at the flush, impassioned faces, the women she'd flouted and outmaneuvered for years; and Emily saw her mouth harden. Then her eyes came back to Tommy, the woman she hated more than all the others because Tommy was prettier and more charming, because she had always spoken up to her, and most of all because—Emily realized now with a little thrill of pleasure—Sam had never once given the sexy Reeny Keller a second glance.

Emily looked at Marge Krisler on the couch, weeping softly, her mouth drawn down with anguish, Irene's flushed and angry face, Tommy facing her defiantly; listening to the terse, angry voices that rose over the phonograph, which was now emitting a raucous swing version of “Jingle Bells.” She should end it now; she could—break this off, say their good-byes and go, the others would all follow her lead. Yet she hesitated, caught up in the fitness of the moment—and her own furtive delight in this unmasking and discomfiture of the Post Menace. After all these years …

“—simply a question of decency,” Tommy was saying tightly, “when people—”

“Decency! You dare to talk to me of decency?
You—?
”

“—when people everywhere have been making sacrifices—”

“Sacrifices!” Reeny Keller laughed her high, harsh laugh. “My dear, name a soul in this town who is doing without a single thing …”

“Not you, I know … Wouldn't it please Ben to see this room?—to know that he'd given his life so a Washington flat could be stuffed with gimcracks and plunder—”

“Tommy!” Emily said sharply. Marge had broken down completely now and she moved over to her.

“Ben!” Irene Keller cried all at once, and her great blue eyes glittered with malice. “Yes—Ben! Would you like to know something about him, my dears? Would you?”

“There is nothing you could tell me about Ben that would interest me,” Tommy said in a cold, stern tone. “Or anybody else here.”

“No?” Irene shrilled. “No? What would you think if I told you Ben didn't even have to die—what would you think of that? Or Sam get wounded, either … Yes, go ahead and comfort her, Emily, comfort them both for all you're worth—because
he
”—she pointed a long scarlet nail at Emily—“caused it! Yes, Court! Now what do you think of that—?”

Emily would always remember this moment: herself crouched above Marge's silent, huddled figure, gazing, speechless with consternation, at Irene and Tommy confronting each other, rigid and embattled before the frieze of shocked, still faces. Her dismay swept to deepest dread. It was true: every premonitory fiber of her being knew it was true. She tried to say something, could not.

“—You lie,”
Tommy gasped.

“Do I? Ask Don Grayson, then—Marv Farrier wrote him from Leyte—they were under attack and called for reinforcements and Court didn't send them any for days, let them get slaughtered like sheep!
Now
how about all your noble sacrifices!”

Emily moved then, but it was too late. With all the lithe violent grace of which she was capable Tommy stepped forward and struck Irene, a resounding, full-armed slap. Reeny was twice Tommy's size but the blow spun her almost completely around; she fell heavily against a table, her hand to her face. Then the women all moved at once and cut off Emily's view of them. Marge had her head in her hands, sobbing wildly, and Emily put her arm around her, saying, “It's all right, dear, it's all right now, don't you mind,” as much to quiet her own fears as to comfort Marge in her anguish.

But Irene had broken away from the others now, was watching them all again, her breasts heaving, her eyes cold and implacable; the side of her face was a deep red from the blow. “Well, I guess the party's over, girls,” she said. “Let's forget it. It wasn't such a hot idea, anyway, now that I think of it.” She turned and walked quickly into one of the bedrooms.

Outside it was cold and damp, with a light snow falling. Emily and Tommy walked on each side of Marge, who kept weeping and shaking her head.

“I'm sorry I broke down like that. Stupid. I know. He's been in danger for years, he's always up front. I've known that … I just can't seem to keep from crying all the time.”

“I know, honey,” Tommy was saying. “Don't you worry about it now …”

The snow continued to fall fitfully, melting as it touched the pavement. They finally found a cab that had only one passenger, an effeminate, rather nervous young man who insisted on getting up front with the driver. Marge fell silent for a while and Emily sat watching the lights flow past, yellow against the snowflakes. Another year of war ending, another one beginning, already soaked in blood. In the Islands, Poland, the Ardennes, the Apennines. People must love it or they wouldn't cling to it for so long.

“—If I could have
seen
him,” Marge was saying in a broken little voice. “Just once. Not since the summer of '42. The last time …”

“I know, dear.” He wouldn't do that, Emily told herself desperately; he's capable of cruel things, terrible things, I know: but he wouldn't do something like that. He couldn't. No one could.

“Battle after battle, campaign after campaign—there's just no end to it. It's not fair …”

Life is unfair, Emily thought. But she remained silent. If I'd only moved faster, she told herself; got them out of there. The effeminate young man was looking studiously out of the window. Three generals' wives on a toot in little old D.C.

“—It's not true,” Marge cried all at once. “How could she
say
that—? How could she say such a thing? … ”

“She's a bitch,” Tommy said tersely. “That's how. A total rotten lousy bitch on wheels.” The effeminate young man glanced back at them in alarm.

“It isn't true, is it? Is it, Tommy?” Marge pleaded. “It can't be true …”

“Of course not,” Tommy snapped. “She said the first nasty thing that came into her vicious little peanut brain.” Her eyes flashed once, met Emily's over Marge's bowed head; and Emily knew that true or false, confirmed or denied, aired or suppressed, the possibility would always be there, between them. Nothing would ever be the same again. Bravely she tried to smile, but Tommy's gaze was stark and remote. He couldn't, she thought again, with real fear. He couldn't—no one could do something like that: for any reason at all, for anything on this earth …

But if it were possible—

They slid on through the chill, wet night, Marge sobbing quietly and hopelessly between them.

14

The press conference
was held in the reception room of the palace. The old Sultan of Palamangao, now deceased, had lived there with his twenty-three wives and concubines and children in an atmosphere of cockfights and feasts and fishing expeditions to Cagayan or Tubbataha. All that had vanished with the coming of the Japanese, and now his eldest son, a slender, dark man who had been hidden by the guerrillas, sat on the left side of the broad dais, wearing wrinkled khaki and looking bright-eyed and tubercular, and stared at nothing. The room was high-ceilinged and cool; a second-story verandah thrust out from it, Spanish-style, framed in a running filigree of carved bayong wood. Bougainvillea and cadeña de amor swarmed in lush profusion over the slender columns and hung from the eaves, and now and then a breeze blew through the sala, rustling papers on the long desk behind which Lieutenant General Massengale stood in a freshly starched khaki uniform, the ivory-tipped pointer in his right hand, and waited for the last correspondents to file in. His public relations officer, Colonel Sickles, sat beside the young Sultan with some of the Civil Affairs people. On the other side sat Generals Bannerman and Swanson and most of the Corps staff, their arms folded, looking attentive and cheerful. The whole atmosphere was one of happy expectancy. Standing below the dais with the crowd of correspondents and photographers, David Shifkin was reminded of high school graduation exercises, or awards day at summer camp.

“Hello, Shif,” Randall said, easing his way over to him. Like most of the correspondents he was wearing clean khaki, and he cocked an eyebrow and grinned at Shifkin's dirty, sweat-rimed fatigues. “You look pretty seedy, son. Pretty seedy.”

Shifkin gazed at him without expression. “Lost all my gear.”

“Pretty rough over there?” Meade asked him earnestly.

“Pretty rough, yes.”

Behind them the great mahogany doors banged shut and two GIs with sidearms swung in front of them with the somber professional austerity MPs always had. Technical Sergeant Hartje called: “No smoking, please—General's orders,” and walked over to the door at the far left side of the dais. Shifkin massaged his eyes and forehead, thinking, By the numbers. All by the numbers. And now the prizes and awards.

“… At the heart of the Japanese debacle lay the problem of a unified command,” Massengale was saying in his crisp, flawless voice. “Admiral Ochikubo seems to have been placed in charge of the over-all defense of the island. But General Yamashita at Imperial Headquarters on Luzon had given General Kolusai command of
all ground forces
on Palamangao—and we have only recently learned from captured Japanese documents that General Murasse considered
himself
to be in charge of the defense line around Fotgon and the airstrip. In addition to all this muddle was the fact that Kolusai and Murasse disliked and distrusted each other intensely—not exactly the most auspicious basis for the effective conduct of military operations on unfriendly soil. Not that we weren't grateful for such favors.”

He smiled, and there was a low, appreciative murmur. “So that when we struck at Dalomo, the Japanese were presented with the maddening dilemma commanders in a defensive position often face: which was the main assault force? Ochikubo had established fixed defenses to hold the airstrip at all cost. But Kolusai apparently sought a more fluid solution—he wanted to be able to withdraw on the axis Reina Blanca–Terauen–Nabolos if the heat got too great, possibly setting up a last-ditch defense line here.” He drew the pointer across the cockatoo's bony neck. “Murasse, on the other hand, was never fooled by the Dalomo landing: he believed the Babuyan assault was the main one, and he advocated large-scale attacks with all available forces against it, with the end in view of driving it into the sea …

“Then General Bannerman's lightning advance on Reina Blanca caught them all completely flatfooted. Kolusai decided—independently, it appears—to withdraw northeast along the Aguinaldo Highway to Nabolos anyway. Ochikubo very helpfully committed hara-kiri. Murasse, who had been cleverly containing the Babuyan beachhead, panicked and threw all the forces at his disposal in a series of headlong assaults on the Fanegayan-Umatoc line—but without notifying either Kolusai's or Ochikubo's headquarters, or making any effort to coordinate his attacks. He of course made some appreciable gains in real estate, but in the end succeeded only in shattering his forces hopelessly … It was the old sad story of Japanese inflexibility, rivalries carried to the point of insubordination, and failure of nerve in the crucial places. I sadly fear that what General MacArthur has often said is only too true: they simply aren't good enough to play in the big leagues.”

The laughter this time was fairly general. Shifkin looked around him. Most of the correspondents were writing rapidly, following the ivory-tipped pointer as it moved along the fine red and blue lines, gliding eastward now around the tightly scored whorls of the mountain chain.

“As a consequence, the enemy garrison is now eliminated as an effective fighting force. Advance elements of the Forty-ninth Division are within six miles of Nabolos and seventeen of North Cape, here”—the pointer tapped the cockatoo's screaming head—“and the Eighteenth is swinging around the southern road, below Mount Limpon. First-light reports today placed elements of the Five ninety-eighth Regiment about ten miles from Kalao, encountering only sporadic and very disorganized resistance.” Massengale straightened and faced his audience. “The campaign is over—a good sixteen days ahead of the timetable. Mere mopping up remains. The latest count of enemy dead has reached 43,461. Is that correct, Sherwin?”

“Yes, sir,” Colonel Fowler answered, starting. “That is correct.”

“I believe that's all I have to say. In conclusion, I'd like to read a radio General Ryetower just handed me before this conference.” He pulled a slip of paper from his pocket. “
Please accept for yourself and extend to all officers and men involved my heartiest commendation for your brilliant execution of the Palamangao Campaign. It is nothing less than a model of what an imaginative and aggressive command can accomplish in rapid exploitation. It can serve as an inspiration to all commands, and has brought us all hearteningly nearer that longed-for day.
It is signed:
Douglas MacArthur.
”

There was a quick spatter of applause from the press. Massengale nodded and said: “Thank you, gentlemen, on behalf of Twenty-ninth Corps. PALLADIUM, I think we can say, without fear or favor, has been a success, to put it mildly. Now are there any questions?”

Randall called: “How does it feel to enter a city in style, General?”

Massengale smiled but his eyes, fixed on the gardens and the distant sea, were serious. “It was—very stirring. The populace, as some of you who were with me know, were out in force, and touchingly happy to be free again after so much privation. We were thoroughly pelted with flowers—which was a welcome change from missiles of the denser variety, I can assure you.” The staff officers joined in the laughter this time. “Representatives from the two guerrilla forces, Colonel Herrera and Captain Tomás, were on hand, and we were delighted to greet them—some of you were there for that, I remember. We have, as you know, relied on much of their information during the campaign. There will be a ceremony in a few days in which I shall personally decorate these very brave men.”

Shifkin glanced at Randall, who was grinning, his eyes glinting happily behind his glasses, and murmured: “A popular win at the Garden.”

Randall frowned. “Come off it, Shif. It's a big day.”

“I see we're not talking about the Double Five.”

Randall shrugged and Meade said, “Why? What's there to say?”

“Plenty,” he answered. “Plenty … ” He listened with rising exasperation to the queries and answers, the random conviviality in the fine, tiled room. The contrasts: he could never get used to them. The abrupt shift from that land of heart-quaking, dry-mouthed fear and mud and high explosive to places like this where no one was anxious or desperate or remorseful or raging, where the game of talk pattered through the soft, light air, never failed to shock him, anger him. He could listen to the AP man Yortney asking about the condition of the harbor at Kalao, but he could see only the look on a Negro stretcher-bearer's face when he learned that the man he had just brought in was dead, or the buck sergeant with the big red beard laughing and firing into the jungle. He knew a good deal about discomfort, and toil, and fear; he had not been prepared for the confusion, the disintegration of orderly units and lines, the shattering of all communications and supply—and the absolutely astonishing iron nerve of one man in the face of it. At dawn that second day, when he could tell from the way men moved and dug and urinated that things were perilous beyond conjecture and even the calmest souls began to act tight-lipped and abrupt, he remembered Damon saying cheerfully to a shaken captain, “Why go to them when you can get them to come to you? At least we're not having to dig them out of the ground,” and some time later—or was it earlier?—calling to a mortar platoon: “Cheer up, boys—we're sucking 'em into slingshot range … ”

Long before then Shifkin had stopped asking questions, had given up all thought of remaining an observer and found himself staggering along at one end of a stretcher, panting and straining, his shoulders feeling as if they were being pried bluntly out of their sockets. Back and forth along a trail where things of immeasurable menace crashed and howled and whined and now and then blew him off his feet. You went down with wounded and came back up with ammunition and grenades and water. Hour after hour, until men fell where they walked, half-naked, and slept the iron sleep of the desperately weary; and when at last it was over and he came up to the haggard, bearded men he'd served, hastily cleaning weapons and stringing wire, he shared a quick, fierce affection he'd never known anywhere in his life before.

“What you say, Shif,” they called, although he was old enough to be father to most of them, and grabbed his arm or clapped him on the back. “Hey, you made out okay!… Hey, the shit really hit the old fan there for a while, didn't it? I mean … Christ, the Old Man was the glue … Old Sad Sam stopped the sons of bitches …”

“The Old Man got it,” he told them.

“Oh no …” They stared at him in consternation, in anger, in fear and grief; their eyes filled. “No—not the Old Man … Where? Where did he get it?”

“The trail block, at Ilig.”

“No, for-Christ-sake—where was he
hit!
”

“Oh. In the chest and shoulder and arm.”

“Then he's alive?—he's still alive?”

“I think so.”

And then—unbelievably—they rejoiced, masking their relief in a torrent of obscenity. “He'll be back … Listen, Shif—you don't know the Old Man, he's a fucking ring-tailed tiger … Hell, if he had an arm blown off he'd stick it back on with concertina wire and smear it with oil and the fucker better work, I'm telling you!… He'll be back.”

“I hope so.”

“No hope-so about it. You wait and see.”

Shifkin hadn't approached Damon before they'd loaded for the operation. He'd been mildly astonished at the odd currents of fate—he'd been transferred from the European Theater after the liberation of Paris—that had dropped him in such close proximity to the father of the boy his daughter had so very nearly married. Grotesque, he had thought, back on Désespoir, watching Damon talk to a group of junior officers; grotesque, to be related—even by marriage—to a general, a Regular Army man at that. Fantastic. He had risked it nevertheless aboard ship, a brief opportunity just after evening chow when he'd found Damon standing by himself, leaning against the rail.

“General, I'm David Shifkin. One of the correspondents attached to the Double Five.”

“How are you.” They had shaken hands rather formally although Lawrence the Press Officer had introduced them several weeks before; the General had smiled, though the correspondent knew Damon's eyes were measuring him carefully.

He paused, and then said: “I'm Marion's father.”

The General's eyes had widened a trifle. “Oh, yes. I wondered if you might be—Donny once mentioned you were a correspondent. I ought to know more about such things. There never seems to be enough time in this business to attend to half the things you should.”

There was a brief silence then, while they both watched the emerald water boiling astern and the sedate little ships of clouds turning rose and lavender on their hulls. Damon seemed to have nothing more to offer; but Shifkin felt he couldn't leave it there.

“General, I wanted to say how very sorry I was to learn about—your son.” He felt suddenly to use the boy's name would sound presumptuous, the more so since he had seen him more recently than Damon. “It must have been a terrible loss for you.”

“Thank you.” The General's voice was gracious but his face was unapproachable and stern. “Yes. It was. I imagine it was very hard on Marion. I wrote her.”

Shifkin had looked down, and gripped the rough iron with his fingers. Jesus, what a cold fish. Most of them were like that, basically—cold, inexorable beings marching along just outside the human race, bound up in sports and weapons and that harsh litany of punishment and punctilio. Probably they had to be. Why should they blanch or blubber at death, any more than a surgeon's hand should falter as it laid open the layers of fat and flesh and muscle, clamped off the blood vessels? Yet the men were for him—they liked and respected him more than any other divisional commander he'd seen, except perhaps Middleton or Terry Allen.

The Army: that hard, alien world he'd always feared and distrusted so deeply. The boy himself had been so different—he'd seen him for part of an evening in New York between assignments: quick and lively and reflective. The mother, probably. How strange life was! Here he was on this ship of war, heading for an island swarming with death and destruction, one more step in a long and sanguinary parade he wanted with all his heart and guts and soul to forsake as soon as possible—and for this man standing beside him it was his life, his
trade—