"My middle name is Coward, all right?" Clete said, and added, "You don't look old enough to be a captain yourself."
"I'm twenty-nine," Ashton replied, "which I know is considerably older than you. But let's get this personal history business out of the way. Tit for tat."
"Why not?" Clete said.
"I'm half Cuban and half American. Educated in the States. Choate and then MIT, where I took a degree in electrical engineering. Good schools, and people were very kind there to the poor mixed-blood kid from Cuba-"
"You don't have to tell me all this!"
"I think I do. I think it's important that we understand one another. Anyway, with the draft board breathing down my neck, I applied for a commission. I was working for Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, and that was good enough to get a captain's commission. I thought I would spend the war at Fort Monmouth, do-ing what I was doing at Bell Labs." The Army's Signal Corps Center was at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey.
"Which was?"
"Radar. You know what radar is?"
"Yeah, we had radar on Guadalcanal. It usually didn't work."
"The stuff you had in the Pacific was garbage, probably designed by the Limeys," Ashton said. "The stuff we have now is a hell of a lot better."
"That's encouraging," Clete said. "Presumably, you have one of the good ones with you?"
"Por favor, mi Mayor, don't interrupt me when I'm talking."
"I am overwhelmed with remorse for my bad manners."
"You should be," Ashton said. "As I was saying, two bad things happened to me at Fort Monmouth. The first was that my wife left me. She didn't want to live on what they pay captains. I really couldn't blame her."
""And the second bad thing?"
"A Navy guy came to see me. A lieutenant commander. A fellow Latino. By the name of Frederico Delojo."
"I know the gentleman," Clete said.
"I figured if you can't trust a fellow Latino, who the hell can you trust, right?"
"Right," Clete said.
The waiter delivered three large bottles of beer.
Ashton poured beer into their glasses.
"You can handle a beer, right? You're not going to start doing something heroic? And/or start making eyes at Consuelo?"
"I will do my best to control myself," Clete said.
"So Delojo hands me this line of bullshit, in Spanish, of course: His 'orga-nization.' about which he can't talk but which is in Washington, has been look-ing for someone just like me, an electrical engineer at the cutting edge of radar technology, who also speaks Spanish. I can make significant contributions to the war effort, et cetera, et cetera. So I volunteer, which was about the dumbest thing I have ever done."
"Why was that?"
"You know goddamn well why was that," Ashton said. "The next thing I know, I'm at the Country Club, where a bunch of crew-cutted gorillas got their rocks off throwing me over their shoulders and bouncing me off walls and teaching me all sorts of things I didn't want to know, like how to blow things up and stick knives in people. How the hell did you manage to escape going through the Country Club, by the way?"
"I'm a Marine. All Marines know how to stick knives in people and blow things up."
"The piece de resistance of all this was taking me up, not once, but five fucking times, and throwing me out of an airplane."
"You and Lieutenant Pelosi will have a lot to talk about," Clete said. "Be-fore he found a Se¤orita in Buenos Aires, that's how he got his rocks off, jump-ing out of airplanes."
"Or getting shot down in one, like he did with you, right?"