Greene agreed with that by saying nothing.
“So I’m to go to Munich to work for who?” Hammersmith asked.
“For DCI-Europe. Whose chief is Captain Cronley.”
“Jesus!”
“You’ve got something against Cronley?”
“I don’t like the idea of working for a twenty-one-, twenty-two-year-old captain.”
“Twenty-two.”
“Who may not even be a captain. Is he?”
“He is.”
“He was a second lieutenant in Marburg a couple of months ago. Or was he really a twenty-nine-year-old captain, who looks young, pretending to be a second lieutenant?”
“Jack, do you want to get your commission back?”
They locked eyes for a moment.
“You know I do, Homer. So I will go to Munich, smile, and salute the boy captain and do what I’m told.”
“He got his railroad tracks from President Truman. The bars and the Distinguished Service Medal.”
“For what?”
“That’s classified Top Secret–Presidential, and you don’t have the Need to Know.”
“Jesus!”
“What did Cronley do in Marburg to piss you off?”
Hammersmith didn’t reply for a moment, and then he said, “Nothing. I thought he was a nice kid. Smart. Not your typical second lieutenant. He speaks fluent German. And then he pissed off Connell, which I enjoyed.”
Major John Connell was the executive officer of the XXIInd CIC Detachment.
“How did he do that?” Greene asked, smiling and shaking his head.
“Connell put Cronley in a jeep to watch the MPs at a refugee checkpoint. I went out there one day with him. Connell chewed his ass because the kid was wearing a .45 in a holster slung cowboy style, and not the prescribed snub-nosed .38. So the next time Connell went out there, the kid—”
“Think ‘Captain Cronley,’ Jack,” General Greene interrupted.
“—is wearing triangles and cowboy boots and has the .45 hanging from the jeep windshield. Connell was so pissed that he just turned around and headed back to town. He said, ‘I’m going to burn him a new asshole.’”
“And did he?”
“Later that day, Cronley found the Kraut woman—”
“Think Frau von Wachtstein, Jack. Hitler hung her father and her father-in-law from butcher’s hooks. And she has friends in high places.”
“—Frau von Whateveryousaid. And the next thing we know he’s transferred to OSS Forward. The next time I saw him was when Mattingly caught him smuggling coffee and canned hams—”
/> “As I remember that incident,” Greene interrupted, “the CID intercepted packages of coffee and ham, and told us. Whereupon Bob Mattingly made sure everybody knew Cronley had been caught black-marketing.”
“You sound as if you don’t like Mattingly much.”