"Uh-huh, "he said.
"We're not supposed to be talking about our private lives, you know," she said.
"I know," he said, "and I also know you know Stan."
Then he'd looked at his watch, and the five-minute break was over, and he'd jumped to his feet and blown his whistle, and they'd resumed the ten mile run. That night, at supper, he had sat down beside her and resumed the conversation where he'd broken it off.
"Over a steak, which Bell Labs was paying for, I was explaining to Stanley why it was going to cost Continental Studios a bunch of money more than they expected to get what they wanted, when this fat little bald-headed man walked up to the table and said, in an accent you could cut with a knife, "So tell me, Stanley, who's your friend? And vy I haven't zeen any film?"" "Max Liebermann," Cynthia said, laughing at Hammersmith's apt mimicry of the founder and chairman of the board of Continental Studios.
"Right," Hammersmith said.
"But I didn't know who he was. So Stanley said, "Uncle Max, he's the engineer from Bell Telephone."" "
"What I want to know is can he ride a horz?" Max said," Hammersmith went on. '"If he can ride a horz, I tink he's Major Porter. We god a hell uf a problem wit dat, Stanley, if I god to tell you."" By then, Cynthia was giggling at the mimicry.
"It didn't take much to corrupt me," Hammersmith had gone on.
"All it took to get me before the cameras was as much by the week, on a year's contract, as Bell Labs was paying me by the month. And luckily, I could ride a 'horz."" "I saw Calvary Raid," Cynthia said.
"You were very good."
"That's because my only lines were "Yes, Sir," and "Sound the Charge!"" Hammersmith said.
"Anyway, Stan and I became pals. And he got me into this, and he wrote me a letter saying if I got to Washington and desperately needed a place to stay, I should call a Miss Cynthia Chenowith and say I was a friend of his. Unless there is another Cynthia Chenowith?"
Horace G. Hammersmith had not so much as touched her hand, except in the line of duty. But neither had he for long taken his eyes off her whenever they were around each other.
And now he was going. He was going operational. She wondered where, and doing what. And she just wasn't up to spending his last night here with him. In the morning, she would have breakfast with him, and maybe even go to the station wagon with him, and kiss his cheek.
But she didn't want to see him tonight. Tonight, there would be just too much of a temptation to give him what he wanted, even if he didn't ask for it.
She didn't want him to go operational with her on his mind. She didn't love him, but she really liked him, and she was almost sure he thought he was falling in love with her. Whatever they were going to have him doing, the one thing he didn't need was her on his mind any more than she already was.
The bathtub was full. So when Cynthia sensed the water was cooling, she had to let water out before filling it again with hot water. She bent her left leg, in order to get a good look at her foot, then vigorously rubbed away a layer or two on the calluses. Then she repeated the operation on the right foot.
And finally she stepped out of the tub and toweled herself dry. Then she took the towel and wiped the condensation from the full-length mirror on the door and examined herself in it.
She "made muscles," as she had seen men do, and was surprised--and not sure whether she was pleased or disappointed--that she could see no development in her biceps. With all the push-ups and pull-ups she'd done, she had expected some.
She had bruised, ugly blue areas in several places. The largest area was in her right shoulder, from the recoil of the Springfield rifle, and the Garand rifle, and the Winchester shotgun, and the Thompson submachine gun she had fired on the range. She had fallen twice on the obstacle course. There was a bruised area on her lower stomach, a souvenir of an encounter with a peeled log when she had tripped running up an obstacle, and another on her right leg, just above her knee. She had earned that battle stripe just by stumbling, exhausted, and landing on the goddamned Springfield.
Finally, there was a raw spot on the web of her right hand, where the Colt45 automatic pistol had "bitten" her.
She dried that spot very carefully with a wad of toilet tissue and then applied Merthiolate and a Band-Aid. And then she took a large economy-size tube of Ben-Gay and applied it liberally to all the bruised areas.
If Greg should come up here, she thought, / will smell like the men's locker room, and maybe that will dampen his ardor.
Still naked, she washed and dried her hair, wrapped her head in a towel, and then finally put on what she considered a grossly unfeminine set of pajamas.
They were from the PX, too. Flannel, with a particularly ugly red and brown pattern. She put a bathrobe over the pajamas, examined herself a final time in the mirror, stuck her tongue out at herself, and then went into her bedroom.
She sat down at a government-issue gray metal desk, which was conspicuously ugly in comparison to the rest of the furniture, turned on the desk lamp, and took a brown-paper-bound book from a rack. The book was titled, U.S.
Field Manual, FM 21-10: The Law of Land Warfare.
There would be a written examination to make sure the trainees knew what the Hague and Geneva Conventions had had to say about where the line was between a soldier, who was entitled to treatment as a prisoner of war, a partisan, and a spy. Under the law of land warfare, partisans and spies could be shot.
Cynthia had serious doubts that either the Germans or the Japanese were going to pay much attention to the fine print, but the course was a part of the curriculum, and she had to pass it to graduate. And she was determined to graduate.