The Soldier Spies (Men at War 3)

“I don’t know,” Canidy confessed.

“Do you know her?”

“No,” Canidy said. “But I think Eric met her once.”

“Maybe he won’t even want to see her,” Stevens said. “Or vice versa.”

“Well—before he sees Stars & Stripes himself—he’ll have to be told that she’s here. In the meantime, you and me will pray that he doesn’t want to see her.”

Stevens nodded.

“Anything else?” Canidy asked.

Stevens shook his head. “Good luck, Dick,” he said.

Canidy picked up Stars & Stripes, folded it so that the front page was not visible, and left Stevens’s office.

He found Fulmar in Fine’s office. He was sitting at a table with Fine and Master Sergeant Ed Davis, the sergeant major.

“Ali Baba, I presume,” Canidy said,“and the two thieves.”

Master Sergeant Davis, a stocky, jowly man in his late thirties, was Regular Army. He had once been in a battery of Coast Artillery commanded by then Lieutenant Edmund T. Stevens. Stevens had bumped into him in the PX. Two days later, Davis had reported for duty at Berkeley Square.

Eric Fulmar, his jacket unbuttoned and his tie pulled down, stood up, smiled warmly at Canidy, then walked to him with his hand extended. But the intended handshake turned into an embrace.

“Has he been checked for clap and other social diseases, Davis?” Canidy asked.

“They wouldn’t let him out of Morocco before they checked on that, Major,” Davis said. Davis was privy to the fact—he was, among other things, the London station finance officer—that Canidy was not a major, but was in the employ of the United States government as a “Technical Consultant, Grade 14.”

Even so, he treated Canidy with the regard of a longtime professional noncom for an officer he respects.

“Then it’s okay to kiss him?” Canidy asked innocently.

“I wouldn’t go quite that far, Major,” Davis said.

“How’s the paperwork coming?” Canidy asked.

“Give me another ten minutes, and we’ll be finished,” Davis said.

Canidy nodded, sat down at the table.

He went through the stack of forms that seemed to be completed and picked up the Application for National Service Life Insurance. As the beneficiary of the $10,000 the government would pay on his death, Fulmar had put down “Rev. George Carter Canidy, D.D., St. Paul’s School, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.” In the relationship block he had entered “Friend.”

The Rev. Dr. Canidy was Canidy’s father. Canidy thought of Eldon Baker’s conviction that he and Eric were too close emotionally.

What was too close?

Finally, Davis was through.

“He’s got a bunch of dough coming, Major,” Davis said. “Both Army pay and OSS pay. Colonel Stevens said to pay him as a Technical Consultant, Grade 10, from the time of the first contact.”

That was, Canidy thought, a nice gesture on Stevens’s part.

“And you didn’t even know you’d enlisted, did you?” Canidy said.

“More than I’ve got in the safe,” Davis said. “I’ll have to go over to SHAEF finance and get the money.”

“Well, Captain Fine is rich,” Canidy said. “We’ll just sponge on him until you get it.”